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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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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