The dumbest kid in my class in the USSR, who was so dumb we literally thought he was retarded, became a history professor in the US, and I’m not even kidding.
The Dumbest Kid
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
The dumbest kid in my class in the USSR, who was so dumb we literally thought he was retarded, became a history professor in the US, and I’m not even kidding.
Clarissa's Blog 
How I wish you could give us his name! [I know you can’t.]
That X post drips with social contempt to the point that it looks like a manifestation of social hatred and class-based envy. It makes me think of the way Bolsheviks expressed themselves.
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Exhibit A in “How the Democrats lost the working class”
-ethyl
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A hatred of law enforcement is also evidence of a weak father complex. Good dad means a good, positive attitude to law enforcement. I like police. They are there to improve the conditions of my life. I like people in the military. I like people who work for ICE. I just generally respect law enforcement. And I had an excellent relationship with my clinically non-violent and and extremely intellectual dad.
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—The dumbest kid in my class in the USSR, who was so dumb we literally thought he was retarded, became a history professor in the US, and I’m not even kidding.
You refer to him as “he”, and he grew up in Ukraine, so with 99% probability he is a white male. So he must have gotten his US position on merit. It is quite possible that the rest of you just shat on some poor autistic kid that was too different. Or with poor social skills. I get it, you did not know any better. But using it as an argument now is very weird… looks to me like trying to bend reality to your model of reality.
In resoponse to Avi – hatered – yes. But it is not about class, it is about people capable of violence, especially while advancing the agenda the author of the post disagrees with. I am not him, so I do not know if he is enviuous or not, but for me there is zero envy. I would not take this kind of job for any money.
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I think there’s a class element in there. Leftists love public sector unions and have an immense capacity to tolerate dumbness and incompetence within their ranks, but hate police unions with a passion. Because in 2026 that’s the one public sector well-paying union job that doesn’t require going into debt for a master’s degree in basket weaving.
Agree with the rest of your post.
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I know several people who have seriously contemplated taking that job: because they are ex-military, they are patriots, and it pays better than anything else offering to someone without a master’s degree right now. Downside: travel. Not family-friendly.
All working-class white men.
I certainly read it as “you peons don’t deserve to make a living wage”.
Median household income is 84k now. In most places that’s not enough to buy a house on, if you already have a family. 100k is enough to boost a lot of families just over that particular hurdle. The left these days seems to have a huge animus toward productive non-degree-holders making enough money to support a family or own a house. Is it because so many of them cannot find jobs that will pay of their student loans?
-ethyl
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I do not know, ethyl. It is indeed possible that I have limited ability to properly put myself into the shoes of the American left, and therefore am projecting my own state of mind on them incorrectly.
I am in STEM, so my degree is not in basketweaving. I am educated in Eastern Europe so I do not have student loans. I am educated in Eastern Europe at the time of the economic crisis, and I have done a lot of blue-collar stuff while I was a student, so I do not have aversion or prejustice against it. I sometimes joke that if our university goes to shit, I can work as a truckdriver…
I think the left is not a homogeneous soup, and different people within the left have different reasons to believe what they believe.
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It would be great if these people explained their different reasons. Everybody seems to say that, of course, they are against open borders. And of course they are against eviscerating labor by underpaying illegals. And of course they are in favor of welfare protections. And of course they are in favor of free comprehensive public education. And of course they are in favor of free healthcare at least on the basic level. And of course due process and rights are crucial. And of course they are in favor of pensions for retirees. But they are also against the only thing that can make all these things possible but they just wouldn’t explain how they make that work in their own minds. Other than “I want everything to be good and nothing to be bad”, no argument is being advanced on how to achieve these great things by undermining the foundation of their existence.
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One thing the left does seem to share generally, in the US, in spite of not being a completely homogeneous group… is that it has dropped the working class like a hot potato. That used to be a reliable Democrat voting bloc. It seems to be part of the whole DEI/racebaiting/unlimited-migration thing, since much of the US working class is white.
Have you checked on the truckdriver thing lately, where you live?
Right now, in the US, experienced local truckers are having a hard time finding enough work, because our CDL agencies have been massively overtaken by fraud. Large numbers of illiterate migrants who cannot even read the road signs have been issued trucking licenses (in exchange for bribes). It doesn’t just bring down wages: it means that citizens who’ve been driving trucks safely for years can’t get work, because nobody’s offering. You can do off-books cash deals with illegals. Nobody even offers that to citizens because it’s too risky legally: as soon as there’s a black market, legitimate CDLs get crowded out.
The left is enthusiastically *for* this. It ticks the ‘unlimited migration’ box, and also impoverishes white working-class men and their families (and for bonus points: working class black men also), who are the current declared enemy of everything left in America. Take a moment and extrapolate that across all wage-class professions, and you’ll have some idea of the problem.
-ethyl
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I’m not even that old but I clearly remember how “on the left” meant “for the working class.” Remember Michael Moore’s film about the plight of the workers at Ford factories who were told to “just move” and what a devastating and cruel thing that was? The Left was against outsourcing, against the WTO, against globalism.
In a flash, that all gets dropped, workers are told that “just move” is a great idea and they deserve losing everything anyways because they are all bigots. That was the quickest realignment in human history where people went from protesting the IMF to posting angry screeds in support of Christine Lagarde without taking a breath. Unlike me, who did change my political orientation, they insist that they are as much on the Left now as they were back then.
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That was, truly, a remarkable about-face. I’m still curious about how, exactly, that happened, and who engineered it.
These days the swap-outs are more obvious: we just reprogrammed the entire left to stop caring about renewable energy and the environment, after they’d harped on that for decades, because… the new AI surveillance state needs massively more electricity, apparently. Incompatible with previous environmental concerns.
What happened with the left and the working class though? At what point was it decided to throw them under the buss in favor of usesless degree-holders? I remember when “living wage” was all the rage in those same circles. Some people cite OWS for this– the last hurrah of the “let’s have a good life for everybody not just the rich” left… people who were involved in that say that it was immediately infiltrated and co-opted by corporate interests, and that was the end of it. I wonder if that’s the whole story? Certainly the modern left seems intractably oriented toward the interests of the top 1% in a way that it wasn’t (at least not obviously) before then.
-ethyl
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In the early years of the USSR, it was all about promoting extreme sexual promiscuity and gender equality and destroying the traditional family and all that. It took about 4 years to understand that this was incompatible with the industrialization and championing the working classes. So it was all dropped and the USSR went down the road of very traditional sexual morality. So this is a perennial conflict for the left. Workers don’t want to be gender fluid. So you either snub the workers or you snub the gender fluid. A movement that would be equally hospitable to both groups is an impossibility.
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Hi ethyl,
You just said something that sounds very strange to me. The very white-collar “left” that surrounds me is very anti-AI and anti-surveillance and against wasting energy in the datacenters, and still for everything green, and are sure Trump (whom they hate) and AI industry are in the same boat. Some believe Trump’s chaos is a deliberate distraction, from AI stsrting to destoy millions of jobs any time now.
Returning to the class issues and law enforcement… several things… I still believe that it is not about class per se but about the belief systems different classes seem to espouse. Or about stereotypes about these belief systems. Second, I discovered that on some level it is very difficult for me to accept law enforcement as “working class”. Sure, they are “working class” on most metrics, but in my mind they are almost a class of it own. I am also not convinced that trusting law enforcement by definition is somehow correlated with psychological health. There are many examples in world history where law enforcement could not be trusted and should not have been trusted. Should one trust Russian police enforcing Russian laws? Is one psychologically unhealthy for not trusting them? Finally, for me personally some branches of law enforcement (not local police of small midwestern towns, but definitely ICE) evoke associations with school bullies.
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The question of how to have rights and welfare without a nation-state remains unaddressed.
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Vo7:
It is very easy for me to accept cops as working class, because they make working class salaries, and I have mostly lived in working-class neighborhoods, where there were always one or two cops within a few blocks: they drive their patrol cars home from work so it’s no mystery where they live 😉
My gauge for what mainstream leftie america thinks is my inlaws: two of the last 100 people who get their news from CNN. It’s pretty clear that the memo has gone out: drop “climate change”, replace with “ICE drama”. This doesn’t mean that nobody cares about the environment anymore, only that it’s no longer being pushed via propaganda outlets, and things that would have caused an uproar a year ago for being “not climate friendly” are passing without comment now.
Why is that?
Because AI is the next econ bubble. Just like you can’t say anything in public about bringing housing prices down, for the last five years, it’s now not kosher to say AI is a bubble, uses too much resources, and is radically unsustainable. There are zero commercial applications worth the cost of running the things.
Why can’t we say that? My personal hypothesis is that probably the one thing AI can do with all that electricity, is accomplish the global-state dream of total surveillance. It takes too much labor to go that last mile of analyzing every phone call, every email, every security video, every purchase. The ideal application isn’t commercial or profitable.
It’s nice that your colleagues don’t entirely turn on a dime when the memo goes out. I’d guess they’re all older than 30, and the older people get the more difficult it is to get them to adapt to new tech. I didn’t get a cell phone until I was 25, and I still have a fairly adversarial relationship with it. I refuse to smartphone. I do all my computing on a desktop, and still prefer assembling the tower myself so that I can replace parts when they break. I don’t know anybody, male or female, under 30 who would even contemplate any of that, because newer tech is so wholly integrated into their lives. The people using AI to cheat their way through HS and college right now will never think twice about it, regardless of their political orientation.
-ethyl
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Thank you for your response, ethyl.
I still insist that I have learned about AI being the newest left-wing fetish from you yesterday. On the first day of this semester I told some anti-AI things in a class of 200… shouldn’t I have been cancelled by the left mob by now? 🙂
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Nobody ever says directly what the actual goal of all these BLMs, anti-ICEs, and so on is. Nobody says “we are here to defend a billionaire’s right to outsource your job.” It always hides behind appeals to some imaginary group of oppressed people. It’s perfectly fine to rail against economic inequality as long as you support every cause that brings it about. It’s the same with AI. Denouncing it is allowed. Doing anything that will destroy the middle class through the use of AI isn’t.
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V07: I don’t think AI really is a left or right thing. I think it’s a technocrat/deepstate thing, and there’s a lot of propaganda going around about it. But most of the commentary I encounter in my right-silo’d corner of the internet is negative. Everybody hates it, except the illiterate, who think it’s a literary magic mirror that makes them look smart. And the dumb investorbro early-adopter types who get stars in their eyes about *every* new thing, waited in line to buy the new iphone the day it came out, etc.
AFAICT that isn’t right or left, it’s “tech” which is its own thing (much like “big ag” and “the pharmaceutical industry”) and aligns with whoever and whatever it can buy. Musk and Thiel are the most visible ones currently, but… that leaves all the whoevers that’re contracting with the DoD whose names we’ve never heard. I don’t think any of them can be trusted.
If left and right are both opposed, you really have to ask: where is all the rah-rah press coming from? That’s not in the interest of normal people on any side. It’s in the interest of governments and corporations. That skews left at the moment by default, simply because the left has decided it’s against the demos, and for the rich. I’m sure the people pushing it couldn’t care less.
-ethyl
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—If left and right are both opposed, you really have to ask: where is all the rah-rah press coming from? That’s not in the interest of normal people on any side. It’s in the interest of governments and corporations.
seems we agree on something, but I still have to ask: who happens to be the head of your government right now?
—That skews left at the moment by default, simply because the left has decided it’s against the demos, and for the rich.
I doubt even the loud part of the left has decided exactly that. My personal opinion is that they are just propping up their self-esteem, in a somewhat narcissistic manner.
Look, I have enough left-wing / DEI / watever points. If there were memos coming from some centralized leftwing authority and telling rank-and-file what to do and what to think, I’d be receiving these memos.
I think we are dealing with a lot of self-censorship and self-policing on the left. For instance, why did the left decide to mostly ignore the Iranian protests? Despite the fact that Iranian protestors are ideologically closer to the left and the current US administration is closer to the ajatollahs (sorry, but this is my opinion). I think it happened because most public figures on the left are too afraid to be seen supporting the same things as Trump or Israel. Which in my opinion is completely silly – if Trump/Israel calling something white forces one to call it black, then one is, technically, 100% controlled by Trump / Israel.
P.S. My support of the Iran protests does not mean I support bombing of Iran.
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V07:
Dunno if you’ve noticed, but the head of our current government is a populist, while the majority of the entrenched bureaucracy remain devotedly left. Have you ever seen the Republican/Democrat divide in the US, among government employees? Observed the interesting phenomenon that is: federal law enforcement trying to enforce federal laws, and offenders being released (declined to prosecute, slap on wrist) by state authorities and federal judges? There’s the head of government, and then there’s the vast human apparatus of government: and they’re very much ad odds with each other right now. This was not true of the previous administration.
“I doubt even the loud part of the left has decided exactly that.”
You’re outside the US? Nobody comes right out and says “I’m for the rich!” of course. Because obviously they’re for the welfare state and poor immigrants and the freedom of homeless people to camp, shit, and shoot up anywhere they please (just not in their neighborhood), and the endless release of petty and not-so-petty criminals back into the wild. That’s what they view as being on the side of the poor. The problem is that they refuse to see that this is all at the expense of the working class, actively makes normal workers’ lives worse, and when anybody points that out, they’re awfully quick to say “RACIST!”– which I think is equal parts animus against the working class, and a shield for their own egos. It’s hard for people to see that the things they promote are hurting others. We have all sorts of interesting psychological mechanisms to protect ourselves from those realizations.
It’s entirely possible for people to be supporting policies that benefit the rich at the expense of low-income working families… and never actually admit that to themselves or anybody else. They are full of compassion for “the poor” and they are immune to information about the real-world effects of what they support.
Of course you are dealing with self censorship and self policing on the left: the left has been doing absolutely psychotic social-norms enforcement for the last decade. It’s a survival tactic. The problem is, most people cannot maintain contrarian principles in the face of a complete lack of social reinforcement. People are weenies. Most, when they have to put on their workplace opinions at the door each day… it’s a scam at first, but eventually their minds and hearts conform to the mask. People need to fit in with their group, the people they spend most of their time with. Everybody hates the norms police, but they are ever with us because they are very effective.
You and I, of course, do not get the memos. Those go to the media, politicians, influencers, and the propaganda bot-armies. We’re expected to take our cues from those sources. There have been enough internet personalities honest enough, however, to publicize the memos (they were offered money to do the talking points and refused), that it’s no longer in doubt they really do exist. In case you were still not sure just from watching 100 unconnected sources all move in lockstep and start using the exact same phrases at the same time.
-ethyl
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—Dunno if you’ve noticed, but the head of our current government is a populist, while the majority of the entrenched bureaucracy remain devotedly left.
Well, he can act quite decisively when he wants to – on tariffs, foreign policy, etc. So him not acting decisively on the issues where most people agree on, despite being a populist, indicates that he does not want to.
I also noticed that in your previous post you have effectively excluded the left from the “demos”… Sorry, you are (I am indeed outside of the US) parts of the same “demos”, whether you or the Left like it or not.
I am not watching CNN. I do not even have cable. I believe that my information sources are quite diverse, so Facebook cannot figure out my political views and assign me to any particular echo-chamber and keeps showing me all kinds of stuff. I make my opinions based on what I read. For example what kinds of conclusions one may make from reading this very blog, with some additional corroboration from other sources, inlcuding US government accounts?
The goal of the current immigration enforcement is to ideally get rid of all the illegal immigrants, not just violent criminals. Because entering illegally is a crime in itself. Also, it is perfectyl OK to conduct ICE operations in as inpleasant manner as possible, because that would scare as many illegal immigrants into self-deporting. Ideally, we should limit legal immigration too. To protect jobs, welfare systems and… some sort of cultural and ideological uniformity. (Here my danger detector goes up, because I am an immigrant, and I am not into “ideological uniformity” with the Right. I am not an American, so I do not believe in Americal exceptionalism and therefore I do not believe that US will manage this version of nationalism any better than, say, Eastern Europe.) Then I see yesterday’s official post from the US Department of Labor which proudly claims, in black and white, that new jobs created by your Great Leader should go to american-born citizens. I hope you understand why official statements like that corroborate my existing view that your government is wannabee fascist?
As far as this working class business goes, I am not a Communist. So I do not believe anybody is right just becasue they are working class, or a good person just because they are working class. One can be working class and a sadist. Or have any set of moral failings. The same applies to the “capitalists”, and the same applies to the managerial class.
Why do I care? Because I live in Canada, and I used to live in the US for many years and have a lot of friends and acquantances in the US. I feel I am living in Austria in the 1930-ies… Not in Poland, fortunately, but living in Austria is bad enough.
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V07: You’ve made a lot of assumptions about me there, and I’m having a hard time parsing it because your POV is pretty alien. It’s like having a conversation with someone who is actually on the phone with someone else, and not talking to you at all.
-ethyl
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—You’ve made a lot of assumptions about me there,
???
—and I’m having a hard time parsing it because your POV is pretty alien. It’s like having a conversation with someone who is actually on the phone with someone else, and not talking to you at all.
Can I help you with that somehow?
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Probably not. It’s a problem I run into in person now and then, and I’ve never been able to solve it there either: I’m having a conversation with someone, and then it becomes apparent they are not talking to me, but to a mental construct they’ve pasted my name onto: answering questions I didn’t ask, attributing to me opinions I have not espoused. Nothing I say makes any difference: conversational dead end and waste of energy in every single case. (shrugs)
No ill-will or anything: I don’t know what causes it. Probably something about my affect/approach. Not a vortex worth getting sucked into.
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I also don’t see why it’s supposed to be a particularly repellent job. The duties of the job go against the “primacy of individual choice” mentality, so maybe that is it. Why is it bad to remove people who are here illegally? Because they want to be here. We should respect choices. There’s nothing beyond this that anybody has even tried to advance as an explanation.
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Because they are cops. The current left is radically, consistently, anti-enforcement-of-laws, particularly enforcement that makes life better for normal working people who can’t afford to live in gated communities.
It’s still about class.
-ethyl
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This anti-police stand of “I prefer to pay for my own protection” used to exist in the far reaches of principled libertarianism. And it’s fine because libertarians weren’t burning down police precincts or bring legislation to decriminalize violent offense. It was more of a theoretical position and we all knew they were simply trying to be cute. All of a sudden, we have a whole wave of people that seem to have embraced this approach with no attempt to think through the consequences. They are possessed by the spirit of the times which they don’t even understand.
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I wasn’t trying to make a political statement. This is simply a funny story to me. Some people are late bloomers. My own husband didn’t know the letters of the alphabet at age 7 but he knew how to set a building on fire and practiced that skill avidly. He was an illiterate juvenile delinquent and arsonist as a pre-teen. And then look what happened. 😆😆
The kid I wrote about wasn’t autistic or socially incapable. He was a big, nasty bully who couldn’t read in fifth grade. He was expelled for knocking a small kid’s teeth out.
What happened after that I don’t know and as a pedagogue I’d love to find out. But clearly something big took place and this kid grew up to become a big asset to society.
I’ve worked with juvenile delinquents and I know that you can absolutely turn even the most violent child around if you know what you are doing.
We did have an autistic kid in our class and I’ll post about him later today. It’s also a fascinating story.
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Family friend worked for years as a parole officer. Did a midlife career change to become a teacher– teaching teenagers in the *special* school for juvie delinquents who’d already been kicked out of the regular schools because they were so unmanageable. Most people wouldn’t take that job. But coming off of being a parole officer, he loved it: said he was working with the same people, but it was really nice to get at them *before* they’d completely nuked their chances of ever having a decent life.
-ethyl
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—I wasn’t trying to make a political statement. This is simply a funny story to me.
But you put it together with ICE-related stuff, so you saw some connection here.
As for why oppose ICE if one is not for unlimited immigration? My five cents – I oppose its current edition because I see it as a federally deputized right-wing militia. If Trump turned some other three-letter agency into a federalized right-wing militia, I’d consider it a fair game to sabotage that agency.
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The connection is the part about the stupid kid.
What would be the alternative to prevent an open borders reality? If not deporting people who are here illegally, then what?
I notice that once again no explanation is being advanced by anybody of how the institutions of the nation-state are going to survive without the nation-state.
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v07
Thank you for clarifying your position.
When people talk about the Left in the context of the current political discourse in the US, they’re mostly referring to what is known as the Woke Left, i.e. the Neomarxist turn that is nowadays joined in unholy and apparently bizarre alliance with the Neoliberal turn in political regrouping.
Such people may not represent those who really wield power on the Left, and may not even be the majority of people on the Left, but they are certainly the most representative of those who consider themselves on the Left. They are certainly the dominant force in academia and media, and they are definitely at the centre of the political debate.
When you say “the Left”, you seem to be evoking instead the party that sold itself as the proud defender of the working class, the blue-collar workers doing largely manual and often menial work with a minimum of educational credentials, against the interests of the managerial and capitalist class.
Most people on today’s “Left” see working-class groups, in particular those made up predominantly of White heterosexual males, as their new class enemy, an enemy, what’s more, that must be defeated, routed and, if possible, exterminated.
To make a long story short: you’re barking up the wrong tree, mah friend.
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There’s currently this entertaining phenomenon where the future Democrat contenders for president go on the talking circuit to present their candidacies. Every single one of them gets hopelessly tripped up by the question “can a man become a woman?” They can’t say yes, they can’t say no. They end up squeezing strange verbal soup out of themselves and I really liked them more when they were protesting against outsourcing jobs.
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