What is today’s leftism if not the application of the principles of laissez-faire and markets in everything to our identities, bodies, sex lives, relationships, and emotional lives?

A rich man can buy himself the title of “the woman of the year” because he can afford to purchase many surgeries and cosmetic procedures.

An academic who claims to be very anti-neoliberal thinks that the most important goal is to “create a proliferation of genders.” Everybody needs a boutique gender identity to be able to live their own truth. Because even truth is privatized.

I can give a trillion more examples but is it necessary? UBI, defund the police, mass migration – it’s all laissez-faire and markets in everything.

The moment you abandon the strictly economic definition of neoliberalism and realize that it has spread to every area of life, it becomes self-evident that the most cherished principles of the Left are neoliberal. I mean, choice feminism, anybody? Can it possibly be any more in your face?

That neoliberalism has conquered all areas of life, by the way, is not my invention. It’s been a commonplace in the Humanities for 30 years.

Michael Tracey writes on X:

So now [Tulsi Gabbard] randomly dumps this trove of 2016 “Russian interference” documents to Fox News, in a clumsily-concocted PR scheme — then she jumps on Hannity to accuse Obama of “treason” (laughable), and pretends Obama could face criminal prosecution. In other words, she takes everyone to be an absolute idiot, as she desperately implements her bogus little political diversion tactic at the behest of Trump…

But it’s just not factually accurate that Obama himself ever claimed voting systems were tampered with, or that he “suppressed intelligence” to that effect. Could it be argued that Obama should’ve been *more* proactive in tamping down on the insane proliferation of Dem conspiracies? Sure. There are plenty of legitimate critiques to be made of Obama, on the “2016 election interference” issue, or any number of other issues.

But that’s not what Tulsi Gabbard is doing. She’s doing another simpering political shtick — to appease Trump and promulgate bullshit. That’s her clear MO so far as Director of National Intelligence.

First off, two things:

1. I don’t like Michael Tracey.
2. I was saying that Russia collusion is a hoax from the first moments it was inflicted on the public notice back in 2016. I was very anti-Trump back then but, as blog long-timers will confirm, I was always adamant that Russia collusion was stupid and fake.

I do, however, agree with this analysis by Michael Tracey. The problem with Tulsi Gabbard is not that she’s a Russian agent. The obsession with Russian agents is like a disease. People need to get over it. Gabbard’s problem is that, at heart, she’s a hippie lefty bimbo. This conspiracy stuff she’s peddling is typical Boomer lefty stuff. She’s weak, that’s her main problem. And that’s Trump’s problem, too. Granted, he’s been less weak in the second term than in his extremely impotent first one. But we’ve seen some slippage into weakness recently, and that’s disturbing.

Of course, Tulsi is only doing what Trump is telling her. And so is Pam Bondi. These weak, embarrassing threats to publicize, reveal, and arrest that never get anywhere all come from the same source.

On the positive side, it’s heartening that conservatives are a lot less gullible than liberals. Leftists ate the Russia collusion hoax (and every other hoax) right up. There are, of course, stupid, low-information people on the Right. But there’s nothing like the Left’s gullibility where every outré hoax gets happily picked up and eagerly repeated. Rightist influencers bash Trump all day while I can’t think of any leftist opinion-maker who would dare to peep anything against Kamala.

Grok started to translate non-English comments in my feed without me having asked for it. Several times today I thought, “how come he’s suddenly an English-speaker?” only to notice the Grok notification.

It’s weird.

In what concerns the protests in Ukraine, they are a way to let people have a good night’s sleep for the first time in months. Russians don’t bomb during protests because they believe their own propaganda that the protests favor them. Ukrainians report having finally slept through the night.

But the original reason for the protests is very good. An effort has begun to dismantle the most corrupt institutions in the country. I think it’s done to ingratiate Trump but whatever the reason, it’s a great thing to do.

Nobody can understand what is happening in another country without either living there for many years or making it an object of deliberate and consistent study.

This is why there should be a significant gap between arrival and citizenship. People simply don’t have a bloody clue. I didn’t have a bloody clue for many years.

I got US citizenship 13 years after arrival, and it was right about then that I actually started figuring things out. But I’m unusual in that I read voraciously and made enormous efforts to learn about US history and culture.

Remember how some years ago we played a game on the blog where people asked me about meaningful American phrases like flower power and Underground Railway to see if I knew them? It takes a very long time to migrate culturally, as opposed to geographically. And that’s why there is a deep breach between immigrant parents and native-born children. They almost always belong to completely different cultures.

This single tweet explained to me why I’ve suffered at the Chairs’ and Directors’ Council for 5 years:

I thought these meetings were epistemic. I thought we were there to get things done and debate issues.

But everybody else was there for attunement. They didn’t want to establish what’s right. They wanted to feel a warm and fuzzy togetherness.

I can do warm and fuzzy togetherness like it’s no one’s business. Really, I can. It’s completely fake but people love fake. But nobody warned me that was the purpose of the meetings. They kept giving me agendas and spreadsheets.

I’ve been completely misled.

Yes, and it’s more than that. You inherit these unprocessed situations. If your mother didn’t solve it because her mother didn’t because her mother didn’t, etc, you’ll either have to solve it yourself or your children will.

For instance, my aunts inherited from their mother the need to marry a physically abusive drunk. But my mother managed to overcome that generational need. As a result, her daughters never had violent alcoholics (or any sort of alcoholics) anywhere on the horizon.

The most mind-blowing part is that you don’t have to know about these situations in order to inherit them.

So if you wonder why you keep ending up in the same situation, please know that it’s the most normal thing imaginable. Everybody does it. And some people overcome the problem and exit the pattern. That’s where real freedom lies.

In my profession, we spend years learning and discussing how bad Franco was. And OK, fine. But I’m reading the novel titled Los asquerosos by the author Santiago Lorenzo, and I can’t figure out how what he’s describing is better than Franco.

It’s not this one novel, of course. It’s the reality that pretty much all of contemporary Spanish literature describes. The main character, Manuel, is a hard-working, intelligent young man who’s doomed to go from one precarious, part-time gig to another. He’s superfluous, unnecessary in his own country. Manuel manages to eke out a very modest living but there’s no hope he’ll ever have enough money and time to start a family. Owning his own housing is not remotely realistic.

Manuel ends up in one of those thousands of abandoned villages that litter the peninsula. It’s empty, dead but you can still see what the village looked back when there was life in it. That was back in the Franco era. Which was wildly imperfect but at least it wasn’t this slow-motion death of a nation.

I’ve seen those abandoned villages many times. It’s painful even for somebody who is not from there.

I think we should pipe down with the criticisms of Franco, is what I’m saying. The democratic regime we support created these empty villages and the birth rate of 1.16. And a government that screeches tirelessly about Palestine and the imaginary right-wing menace while millions of dispossessed Manuels lose any hope of ever starting a family.

This is the central problem with higher education in the age of AI.

We can’t require students to do take-home writing assignments (e.g. term papers) any more, because most will cheat and have ChatGPT or Claude or Grok do the writing.

But we can’t teach critical thinking, rationality, perseverance, & scholarship without requiring writing assignments that they work on — researching, drafting, editing, revising, polishing — over a period of days or weeks.

The result may be a whole generation of students who can’t really write, or think, or articulate what they really believe and value, and why.

https://x.com/primalpoly/status/1947431531997176067?t=nMFZS6p3zfXMYxeWZrxBag&s=19

This would be concerning if we hadn’t quit teaching critical thinking and rationality several decades ago. All we’ve been teaching is how to ape the professor’s boutique left-wing beliefs most convincingly. Anybody who tried to figure out what they believe as opposed to what the professor believes would be an academic loser.

So what does it matter if the AI and not the actual students parrot the leftist slop? No thinking gets done in either case.

I asked AI for how long to bake a branzino (my favorite fish of all time with which I am comically obsessed), but the spellcheck changed branzino to Brandon.

The AI bot informed me that baking a person called Brandon “would be dangerous and illegal” (in that order).

I can envision a time when a mistake like this would bring police knocking on one’s door.