Opinions, art, debate
Wait, what? Another assassination attempt on Trump?
I’ve had an intensely relaxing family weekend and avoided all US news. What exactly did I miss?
Seriously, one can’t turn away for three minutes around here. The news cycle goes faster than the washer drum.
These were grown outdoors in Kharkiv, which has the same climate as Montreal, Canada. It took 15 years to adapt these figs to Ukrainian climate.
I love figs with an uncommon passion but they’re expensive around here.
Everybody is crapping on the article because of the title but if you read it, it offers good insights. The author relays her conversations with a bunch of people who definitely shouldn’t be procreating. These are very messed up, unhappy people. Almost all are children of immigrants. Nobody talks about the trauma of the people dragged around in childhood and thrust into a society where they can’t begin to figure out who they are but this article puts it on full display. All of the stories in the article taken together show that equating “a better life” with “buying a better car” is a fallacy.
When a young person says, “I don’t want to have children”, it’s a way of saying “my parents hurt me badly.” Most of the people featured in the article will grow up and have children. We should all hope that their pain weakens by that time.
I loved Matt Walsh’s movie Am I Racist? It depicts how the most unpleasant thing I’ve been subjected to at work is a scam. It feels very enjoyable to see the abuse inflicted to me regularly exposed and mocked.
If people at work were forced to watch this movie against their will, I’d be completely opposed. I’m a conservative but I have enormously more respect for individual choice than liberals who think it’s fine to make people read, watch and say things they don’t support or believe.
The movie dramatically abbreviated the time it usually takes us to go from “this is a tiny, insignificant thing that only happens on campuses” to “God, this is terrible, how did we get here?” Usually, people pretend nothing is happening until it’s too late to reverse it.
This is a famous quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
He was a great reporter of the facts he observed but not a profound thinker. But this quote is great illustration of the Russian paganism we discussed recently. “There is no rain, I must have done something wrong”, “I’m sick, I must have done something wrong” – these are some of the earliest manifestations of the humanity trying to understand its condition and gain a measure of control over a confusing, terrifying world.
Contrast this with the Christian worldview in its daring departure from the childish narcissism of “I triggered the hurricane because I misbehaved.” There’s an acceptance that terrible things will happen even to wonderful people and we’ll never understand why beyond knowing that this is what human life is supposed to be. Living in the world that is bigger than superstition, infantile bargaining, or the narcissism of looking for answers to anything in your ever-precious self requires more strength and gives more freedom. It’s a great gift but also a great limitation for the reach of the insatiable human hubris.
“Thy will be done” is a terrifying proposition for people who haven’t evolved to accepting that they don’t control God. To those who can relinquish the superstitious illusion of control, it’s a path into true freedom and great calmness.
I won’t link to it here because my nervous system can’t handle having this garbage anywhere around me but I just saw Kamala’s ad about Ukraine. That absolute monster is using the tragedy and the devastation of my country as a backdrop for her silly political sloganeering.
The ad literally shows buildings exploding in the background as some stupid talking point about Trump is being delivered. We are a prop for her.
The sheer callousness and inhumanity of this are really getting to me. I wish I’d never seen it.
That’s how our university administrators speak. Long, confusing sentences that mean absolutely nothing. Then we get crushing budget cuts and dramatically worse work conditions.
The reason why they all do that is because if we hear the truth about their plans, we will not let them put these plans in action.
At least, Biden had dementia as an excuse. What’s Harris’s story?
Whenever one shares such horrific news, the response one gets is, “citizens commit such crimes, too.” Which is absolutely true and constitutes an additional argument for not allowing people without visas and green cards to be on the territory of the US.
Citizens commit crime, too, yes. And a lot. We have higher crime rates than many developed countries. In view of that fact, why would we want to add to the crime we already have? This is the most bizarre way of arguing in support of mass migration. “We already have criminals, so why not add more?” Well, precisely because we already have them, we shouldn’t bring in additional ones.
Another sentimental favorite is, “immigrants commit less crime than natives.” True, but so what? Are you proposing to deport the natives who commit felonies and bring in less violent people instead? If so, please look at the stats of which group in the US gets most often incarcerated for violent offences in proportion to group size, and ask yourself whether you have truly thought through what you are suggesting. If you aren’t suggesting mass deportations of African Americans, good. Because that would be a terrible thing to insinuate. But then what is your argument?
“Honey, the living room is trashed! What should we do?”
“Trash the bathroom, too, of course, because it’s smaller!”
None of this makes sense.
The reason why illegal migrants are brought up in connection with crime isn’t that they commit more of it than the natives. It’s that they don’t have to be here at all. It’s one thing if your cat pisses on the floor of your bedroom and quite another if a neighbor’s pet routinely wanders in to piss on your furniture. Even the most oblivious homeowner would start locking the door at this point instead of arguing that, well, if my cat does it, then I should just fling the door open completely. Forget cats. Let’s turn the whole place into a public toilet for every passerby.
My mom broke a vase I loved. She’s my mom, so I got over it. But if every retiree on the block comes by to break my crockery, I’m sorry but I have to draw the line, even if they do it much less frequently than my mom.
See the previous post for what it means when people lose the capacity to understand what the nation means as a shared project.
There’s no clearer evidence of the differences between the nation-state and the neoliberal state than stories like this one:
You are mistaken if you think that high-ranking officials do not volunteer for the front. Meet Ivan Mishchenko. Not only is he a judge of the Supreme Court, but he also heads the body that selects members of the High Qualification Commission of Judges of Ukraine.
In 2022, Ivan Serhiiovych, whom not every employee dared to speak to in the corridors of the Supreme Court, became one of the fellows in the trenches, where guys sometimes curse.
Supreme Court justices, owners of multimillion-dollar businesses, movie stars, famous opera singers, and college professors are fighting on Ukraine’s side. They are fighting for their country. On Russia’s side, the lumpenized masses fight for a chance to pay out their high-interest loans.
It’s impossible to explain to a fully neoliberalized person why a very successful person who isn’t struggling to make a living would swap a high-ranking civilian position for life in the trenches. The belief in “we, the people” whom you never met but who are worth fighting for is a nation-state thing. In neoliberalism, there’s no we. Everybody exists in the intersection of many different identities and quirks that make the “we” impossible.
Most people lose at the neoliberal game. The state can then use them for medical experiments or military adventures. And they’ll agree because they don’t have a choice.
When we talk about mass migration, housing prices, COVID lockdowns, the ongoing military conflicts, freedom of speech crackdowns, etc, we are palpating one large elephant from different sides. We see our tiny little patch of the animal but the beast itself remains obscured from view.
Thank you, reader Avi, for the link.
This is an excellent question that goes to the core of neoliberalism.
Self-expression, be yourself, I need to find out who I am, be your most authentic self – these are the manifestations of the very heart of the neoliberal subjectivity.
Here’s how it works.
You are a business. And you are also the manager of that business. It’s your duty to manage the business that is yourself in the best, most rational manner. You must control each aspect of your business and manage it successfully.
In the above statement we already see the seeds of an unsolvable problem. How can you be both the subject and the object of that subject’s actions? If the self is the business, then who manages it? Another self? Or the same one? As we optimize our productivity techniques, track our time to improve output, manage our sleep, extract all the potential we can from our intellectual and psychological resources while working to replenish them as we go, the split deepens between “I as the manager who is perennially unhappy with the underperforming worker” and “I as the underperforming worker who perennially fails to satisfy the demanding manager.”
The more successful one is at the neoliberal game, the deeper the rift. What am I, the business or its manager? The punisher or the punished? The owner or the resource?
The endless prattle about the true self and the need to express this true self is a manifestation of the efforts to heal that rift. They will always fail but they do bring temporary relief.
Brilliant question, thank you!
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