I’m so tired of working at a place where nobody cares about achievement that the words “ruthless workplace” make me feel dreamy. All we ever do is complain about his every measure of measuring our work – from student evaluations of teaching to publication and citation number – are unfair and discriminatory. We get together in groups and compare victimhood status.
Month: August 2024
The Poodle Still Yelps
I remember how some very, very progressive people would come here and throw tantrums when I said Snowden was Putin’s little poodle. No, they claimed. He was only fellating Putin out of necessity, not love. These were very, very progressive people who used “conservative” as an insult.
I wonder if they received new talking points since then.
My un-American Beliefs
No, I’ll never feel fully American:
The basic principle of American life – which is that large numbers of people should stoically accept all sorts of hassle and inconvenience to accommodate one unusual person – is incomprehensible to me. I’d say one unusual person should accommodate a crowd but that makes me un-American.
Self-referential Humans
For a religious person, the #1 task is understanding the will of God and serving God’s purpose.
Neoliberal subjects see themselves as God. So their main goal is to figure out what their “true self” is and how to serve the whims of that true self all the more faithfully.
At the same time, they have convinced themselves that a stable identity core is impossible or at least undesirable because it prevents constant growth. So the “true self” can never be fully known. Because it doesn’t exist. The result is constant striving, constant fussing, rearranging, seeking, medicating, microdosing and manifesting in order to coal out something that isn’t there to begin with.
When a human being becomes completely self-referential, bad things happen. You can’t be the measure of good and ill. No self is big enough for this task.
Fluid Elites
At first, the constant them-theying of a small boy in Miranda July’s All Fours is grating but it actually plays an important role in the narrative. The main character “doesn’t believe” in the sex binary but the sex binary doesn’t care. It comes for her in all its physiological glory.
The novel presents the best portrayal I’ve ever seen of the egotistical, irresponsible, self-aggrandizing, fluid and self-righteous cultural and political elites of the Western world. It’s scary because they are scary but the novel answers the question of what kind of people it takes to dismantle national borders, defund police, promote racial hatred, and conduct bizarre experiments on small children.
Book Notes: Miranda July’s All Fours
The main character of Miranda July’s novel All Fours is a very woke 45-year-old woman who refers to her own 7-year-old son as “they.” Who could imagine that I’d enjoy reading about her circle of gender-non-conforming, fluid, drug-addled, “experimenting soul” fru-fru ladies who don’t need to work for a living and who perish of boredom in their $2-million LA mansions?
But I did because All Fours explores the subject of a middle-aged female sexual transformation that nobody else wants to talk about. I tried to discuss it here on the blog a couple of years ago but younger female readers got sore over the possibility that there might be something they hadn’t learned about sex by age 16, and I had to quit the discussion before people received unbearable psychic wounds.
The protagonist of July’s novel stops at a motel on a drive from LA to NYC, and all of a sudden it happens. It’s an instantaneous transformation. All of a sudden, she understands the entire history of art that always seemed unnecessarily filled with naked bodies. She understands men in a way she never did before. But it’s too late to do anything about it. When she finally receives the full force of human sexuality, her fertility is gone, beauty is gone, and the capacity to refashion her life in any meaningful way is also gone. The realization that this gift is given to her exactly when it’s of no use strikes July’s character with how exquisitely cruel and unfair the laws of biology are. She has spent her whole life trying to make a mockery of biology. She is even planning to trans her small son. But nature comes back with the inevitability of a hired assassin and hits her with a wave of regret over her entire life before and after this moment.
July’s character is a frivolous, spoilt brat of a woman. She is also one of those eternally immature women who try to use symbiotic relationships to make up for their stunted growth. As a result, she responds to this great crisis in the most bizarre and entertaining ways imaginable.
None of us here are rich, coddled princesses who can sit in our butts all day and prattle about our hormone levels with our equally stunted girlfriends. But we do need to remember that what happened to this character is likely (but not guaranteed because we aren’t factory produced) to happen to us. In the absence of wealth and unlimited leisure, we need a life strategy that takes into the account that in middle age the hereto divergent paths of male and female sexuality suddenly reverse course and approach each other like never before. If people are not prepared, it messes with their heads. I mean, even if they are very prepared, it still messes with their heads but at least knowing about this is a good idea.
The female sexual crisis of middle age has been described in literature a lot but it’s usually done obliquely. The female character in its grip is portrayed as suddenly developing a desire to be an artist or realizing that her husband is uncaring. July’s big achievement is that she speaks of it bluntly and almost clinically, and nobody can pretend they don’t understand what she’s on about.
I can’t recommend this novel to everybody because the many pornographic parts soon become tedious and the protagonist’s intellectual limitations lose their entertainment potential about halfway into the book. The subject, however, is important, and we can see how many women are grateful it’s been raised in the number of positive reviews of the novel.
Chasing the Voting High
Trump and Harris are identical in their campaign strategy. Both propose gimmicky things that failed a trillion times before. Harris comes out with price controls that failed every single time in every single country that attempted them. Trump proposes death penalty for sex crimes which led to rapists murdering their victims dramatically more than before everywhere it was tried.
Both policies are stupid and probably not even meant to be introduced. The only goal is to inflame the voters’ emotions because no other sensibility but the affect participates in voting decisions these days. People interpret “self-interest” as “whatever gives me a high at whatever cost.”
Of particular interest are people who say, “if Kamala could solve all these problems, why isn’t she doing it now?” while not asking why Trump failed to deport massively or build the wall or stop the war in Ukraine or do any of what he keeps promising during his first term.
It won’t get better until we demand that it get better. We are allowing these candidates to piss on us and they happily oblige while we wallow in imaginary moral superiority that they peddle.
Political Dynamics
Trump is promising to outlaw non-consensual gender surgeries on children. These surgeries are all consensual, so what he really says is that he’ll do absolutely nothing about this issue. Just like he did absolutely nothing about it in his first term. And the voters are so desperate for a savior, they choose not to notice.
It’s the exact same dynamic on the Dem side, so nobody should preen over how much better their candidate is doing.
They are all pissing on us while we smile and say “thank you.” It won’t get better until we grow up and start holding our politicians to account instead of reacting to them like emotional children.
Do Not Forget
The greatest crime of the 21st century:
It’s still happening.
Do not forget.
A Good Day
Clarissa's Blog 