Here are some Q&As that have been languishing unattended:

Never heard of it but I looked it up and I’m very interested. Thanks for the recommendation!

You can get a very precise answer from doctors these day. They’ll tell you exactly how many eggs you’ve got left and what your prospects are. It varies from woman to woman pretty dramatically. If you are past 30, I suggest finding out ASAP because “I know somebody who gave birth at 43” might be completely irrelevant in your case. But until you lose the eggs, you are not too old.

If you are male and there’s a woman in your life who’s offering, go for it.

It’s propaganda, so I’m not interested. Russians are not gang raping toddlers and torturing 80-year-olds because they want “security guarantees.” I highly recommend saying something like this about any rapist (“he only raped these 16 women because he felt unsafe”) and observing the reaction. Only concerning the torture, rape and murder of Ukrainians is it acceptable to say things of such unconscionable idiocy.

Nation-states need history, tradition, roots. Even if they are completely invented, they are crucial. The British monarchy offers actual traditions and roots. People come together over the royal weddings, births, scandals. The royals are very cheap at the price for the value they provide. Even when people hate them and roll their eyes at them, they do it together.

The Spanish royals were interrupted by the long time stretch from 1927 to 1975, and they are unable to do as much heavy lifting as the British. If you are British, thank your lucky stars that you have this bunch of inbreds holding you together when other nations are scrambling to find at least something to do play this role. Usually, shared victimhood is an easy substitute. Let’s agree that is worse than the entertaining, funny royals.

There is a male character in Claudia Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies. He is Javier, the husband of the school psychologist who enjoys transing children. We see him doing the dishes, feeding the baby, changing the baby, comforting the baby, cleaning. He’s always sweet, smiling, always completely supportive in a quiet, self-effacing manner.

Does this remind you of anything?

Yes, Javier is the “angel in the house”, a subservient, patriarchal woman.

For all of Piñeiro’s dedication to destroying the gender binary, she ends up recreating it. Her women are men and her men are women. They aren’t interesting, nuanced personalities but collections of the hoariest gender stereotypes.

So what was the point of all this if the result is the re-creation of the same gender binary but with the biological sexes switched?

In the novel, everybody envies Javier’s wife for snagging such an excellent husband but in reality this type of man isn’t deeply popular.

We found persimmons growing in the wild, and this seems very bizarre. Should there even be persimmons in Illinois?

They are smallish but extremely sweet.

Speaking of movies, Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist? is opening in theaters next weekend. It’s a very big deal that it’s going on the big screen first. There needs to be a thriving movie-going culture and there need to be watchable movies. Plus, it’s crucial that normies find out what the “anti-racist” racists actually believe. They don’t know and when they find out, it will be too late as usual.

Walsh’s movie will be one of two conservative movies in theaters currently, which is unusual. Reagan with Dennis Quaid is doing unexpectedly well at the box office. Critics hate it with a passion but viewers are flocking to the low-budget movie.

I will be at the very first showing of Am I Racist? in my town, a matinee. It has to be an early showing because what would we do with Klara if we wanted to go in an evening?

I’ll post my impressions after I watch, and I hope many people go and we can discuss it after.

Gen Z want less sex in movies, according to a new study.

A new study of 10 – 24 year olds found that 47% said sex “isn’t needed” for most TV shows & movies while 44% believe romance is “overused”

(Source: https://t.co/P5OzBNG0wg) pic.twitter.com/XGo5DisqRg

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) August 26, 2024

I’m clearly not Gen-Z but I never understood why sex scenes need to be in movies either. If one wants pornography, it’s easy to find and consume in ways that brings physiological relief. If you aren’t seeking this kind of relief, then I don’t understand why it’s interesting to stare at naked people.

The amount of pornography currently available is such that it’s puzzling what value anybody thinks yet another sex scene can bring to a movie.

Twenty minutes after writing the previous post, I stumbled on the suggestion, in chapter 8 of Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies, that women get heavier prison sentences than men for the same crimes. This is so divorced from reality that it’s kind of scary.

It’s clear why this brand of feminism eagerly embraced the idea that men make better women than women. For Solnits and Piñeiros, women are profoundly inferior. Women are always victims. There’s nothing a woman can do to not be a victim. Women have absolutely no agency. It stands to reason that one would harbor secret contempt for such weak, pathetic creatures and want men, whom Solnit and Co imagine as all-powerful and godlike, to substitute them.

Here’s what I said 3 years ago about the novel Tuya (All Yours) by the Argentinean writer Claudia Piñeiro:

Tuya is a parody of the “resufrida mujer latina” or “the long-suffering Latin American woman” trope but I can just imagine some dour, humorless academic taking it completely seriously and providing a “feminist reading” of the novel. God, I hope the colleague who bought Piñeiro’s books isn’t planning to do that or isn’t reading this post.

Book Notes: Claudia Piñeiro’s Tuya

All Yours is an excellent novel. It’s about the wife of a perennially cheating husband but she’s such an insufferable, self-aggrandizing victim that it’s impossible to feel bad for her. A very funny novel, hugely entertaining but guess what? No dour harpy needed to explain the novel from a tediously politicized point of view. Piñeiro did that herself.

In the recently released sequel to All Yours, titled The Time of the Flies, Piñeiro explains how we are supposed to perceive All Yours, providing an actual bibliography consisting of books by Rebecca Solnit (the creator of mansplaining) and similar characters. There’s even a screed on “transwomen are also women or even better women than the primitive basic women because their womaning is so much more womanly.” And slogans about the importance of “inclusive language.” And other similarly aggravating stuff.

Of course, it was obvious this entire time that Piñeiro is very left-wing. She’s Argentinean, so what else can she be? But she’s talented. How could it possibly occur to her to quote the cognitively unwell Solnit or provide explanations of her own writing? Both things are beyond tacky.

I plan to still try to finish the novel but I’m majorly discouraged. Maybe I can simply skip the woke indoctrination chapters, even though skipping anything is almost physically painful to a literary critic.

All Yours is still very recommended, though. It’s very funny even though it’s become clear that the author didn’t mean it to be.

Brought to us courtesy of the Biden/Harris administration and its 4-year efforts to coddle Iran and protect Russia:

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1832318919765320183?t=O2hE0uKu6JFi-iVEdetddA&s=19

The endless expressions of alarm, concern and preoccupation from the Biden/Harris administration have become an international joke. The administration issues these statements about being alarmed almost daily regarding a wide variety of issues. You wouldn’t know it if you don’t specifically follow foreign policy but there are actual stand-up comedy routines about how the Biden/Harris WH engineers bizarre situations and then expresses alarm over them.

We deserve better even if it’s not on offer.

Only a small minority of adults (20% or less) know the meaning of words such as audacious, ominous, tirade, encumber, plagiarize, impale, travesty.

Worth bearing in mind. Many people cannot reason very well due to low intelligence. pic.twitter.com/BsKbgUgKuQ

— Whyvert (@whyvert) September 3, 2024

My 8-year-old doesn’t know “encumber, impale and tirade” but she knows the rest. Plus, “surreptitiously” and “preposterous.” She wouldn’t mix up “incidentally” and “accidentally.” Or “sarcastically” and “ironically.”

Because I actually speak like that.

I’m so weird.