I’m 37, talking to my 8 year old. I found out she sits and reads at recess. I have a look of absolute disgust on my face. I balled out at recess. NEVER sat and read, that would be punishment.
I asked “Why not go play with your friends? Why not play soccer or go on the park?”
She said “when I read, I can make a movie in my head.”
I just realized, I don’t know how to read.
This is so beautiful.
Reading is a healthy, socially valued form of hallucinating. It’s interesting that a hallucination that occurs when you interact with a product of someone else’s brain is healthy and wonderful. Yet a hallucination that happens without such an interaction can be a sign of schizophrenia.
The same thing is healthy when it creates a channel between you and the world and unhealthy when it connects you with more of you.
An excess of self produces monstrosity.
Clarissa's Blog 
Sometimes. Just finished reading The Road to Wigan Pier, and that’s more like having a frustrating argument with somebody who isn’t there.
-ethyl
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LOL, well, Orwell was raised middle class and the working class life obviously shocked him in The Road to Wigan Pier. His subsequent experiences of trade unionism, socialism, and communism, Homage to Catalonia, during the Spanish Civil War, clearly helped to create his marvelous insights in Animal Farm and 1984. If you are interested in history and how we managed to stumble into here, try Homage to Catalonia ;-D
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Eh, he’s not bad as a journalist. His descriptions of the lives and conditions of coal miners are the best part of the book. But then he goes and shoehorns in a whole almost-unrelated section on why everybody loathes the socialists of his day (because they are loathsome and they always talk about things that scare normal decent people), and then tries to launch off of that into how socialists can stop repelling normal people: stop talking about all that stuff that repels normal decent people, and instead go with some nice, safe, vague handwavy stuff about freedom and justice. It’s fascinating how he names a dozen really specific things socialists need to *stop* talking about, and then can’t come up with a single really specific thing they *should* talk about. The moral: Be more vague. Because if you talk about what you’re really about, you scare away normies. And you *need* the normies onboard.
He sees the problem so well, but can’t make that last little leap into: normal decent people are repelled by this, because it’s repellent. He can’t articulate *how* socialism is going to save us from the evils of the world. Just, here’s the problem. Here’s socialism. Somehow socialism is the solution. All the steps in between: magic.
Last ten percent of the book took me forever because it was so idiotic.
-ethyl
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This is so spot-on. It happens to every leftist who understands the terribleness of his side but still can’t relinquish his attachment to it. They are locked in this sad circle where the solution for the leftist ills is somehow more leftism, better leftism, purer leftism. That the whole thing might simply be crap doesn’t occur to them because that would leave them unmoored and forced actually to think outside the strictly drawn ideological lines.
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What’s most jarring about it is how very little that scene has changed since 1937. He was writing nearly 90 years ago, and still, they haven’t come up with a positive message and they have no specific goals, other than “we’re against that, them, and those“. They’re not for anything. Solely a force of destruction, which naturally attracts only nihilists. And they still can’t figure out why nobody who has anything good going for them wants to sign up.
Sad is the right word.
Even when Orwell is talking about the coal miners, it becomes obvious that the only people actually giving practical help to these people are religious organizations. And he’s still so ideologically blinded he can’t read the implications of that.
-ethyl
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They are for RIGHTS. Which means autocracy will be imposed by any means necessary under the guise of defending rights and establishing a regime of caring.
The result is that everything that makes life worth living is destroyed. And then they wonder why so many of them are in the grip of depression and other forms of mental discomfort.
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Don’t forget FREEDOM. Freedom from responsibility, freedom from consequences, freedom from relationships, freedom from obligations, freedom from morality…
Why, why don’t normies seem to want all this freedom?? It’s a mystery.
-ethyl
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This has been the great swindle of our times. The idea that freedom and choice – always, of course, reduced to the maximization of partners in the sexual sphere and the minimization of anything that’s not raw numbers of fleeting liaisons – are the most important things and are worth any sacrifice has done untold damage. I hope young people start digging their way out from under its weight.
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methylethyl
Orwell was living in the depression following the first world war. There were no easy solutions, both fascism and communism did not work then, and are highly unlikely to work now.
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Clarissa
Sorry to be late to this dance, but this is insight is brilliant: “That the whole thing might simply be crap doesn’t occur to them because that would leave them unmoored and forced actually to think outside the strictly drawn ideological lines.” The thing is for this old cowboy that ideology includes feminism, which I consider the rather nasty sister of communism.
Orwell’s hatred of poverty and tyranny led to his great written works on those mean and miserable areas, he understood because he had deliberately moved himself to try to understand. And yes, he had many weaknesses, some considered him misogynous, others a rake. For some strange reason some women were attracted to him, he was a serious, and serial, womanizer, perhaps even a sadomasochist. He was not kind to either of his wives.
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LOL, this insight ;-D
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LOL, c’mon, a rooster will die fighting to protect his flock, and even gently call his hens when he discovers goodies, but there is no discussion, nor any courtship, when ruling the dunghill ;-D
I agree with Helen Andrew’s concerns about growing feminization because feminism, wokism, and whatever new terms the herd imagines has been gutting Western civilization for decades. Andrew’s solution is the complete removal of all female preference in every institution, both private and public. We simply cannot afford that oppression circus any more, enough is enough. There is absolutely no reason for sexual or racial preference, use merit alone, and we might hope to return to normalcy within a generation.
https://ifunny.co/picture/i-m-not-old-fashioned-i-m-just-from-a-YFCICYNmC
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I definitely don’t have to be convinced to remove sex and race preferences. I’m all merit all the way. Quotas of any kind are completely contrary to my beliefs.
I hope nobody suspected that I’m for diversity quotas.
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Clarissa
“I’m all merit all the way.” Do you believe that your institution hires and promotes solely on merit?
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We have a hiring freeze. Nobody is hiring. Tenure lines are dying. My department alone lost 6 tenure lines out of 11 since 2018.
Our academic promotion standards are pathetic. People get promoted on the strength of one or two lifetime publications. It’s a joke. None of this is sex or race based. It’s simply that we are dismantling ourselves by offering an unsustainable sinecure to very few.
What academia’s problems are and what people think they are exist at an enormous remove from each other.
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Hiring is such a sore point that even just hearing the word depresses me.
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At the conference right now, there were many of these typical feminist presentations about how women are oppressed by “society”, and there are all these roles and expectations.
And it all sounded so quaint, so outdated. Almost nostalgic. Because there is no society. Nobody expects anything from anybody or cares at all.
That’s why I don’t find it interesting to talk about feminism except as something in the past. There are no men or women as a meaningful category anymore. Raging egos is what’s left.
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Well, they won. Now they’re queens of the dunghill.
-ethyl
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Yeah, being a private contractor, I have some difficulty relating. Financially, my best contracts required 12½ hr and six and a half days per week for most of the year ;-D
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I work a lot, too, because I enjoy it. People who occupy positions that others would really appreciate while hating their jobs the whole time really annoy me.
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”People get promoted on the strength of one or two lifetime publications.” Damn, I am not surprised by growing problems in academia, but that took me aback.
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I spent years trying to convince people that teaching a couple of beginner classes, doing zero research, and showing up to work twice a week for a few hours is an unsustainable model. They don’t want to believe me.
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LOL, you don’t have to dissuade me, I don’t think I even finished reading it. Had read his writing on the civil war first, largely curious because of a photo of the time with him, Hemmingway, Bethune, holding a puppy. I was losing all interest in the left because of identity politics.
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