The singing is bad in this movie. I have to get this off my chest before I say anything else. Ariana Grande’s singing is of middling, mostly passable quality but the actress who plays the green witch is an atrocious singer. It’s a mystery why she was cast in this part. Truly, there’s no shortage of talented black singers. The African American community has not been known for falling behind in musical talent. If the producers wanted to find a talented black female singer, honestly , that should be easier than finding water in a flood. Yet they chose an actress with no talent. It’s interesting that DEI always promotes the black people who clearly have no place in the roles for which they are promoted. Talented black people, in the meantime, are almost aggressively thrown aside.

As for everything else, the movie is clearly addressed to a much older audience than the one it will get. For adults (who will never watch Wicked of their own free will), it could be an interesting movie. If it weren’t about witches, magic, and the Wizard of Oz, the portrayal of a person who is a bad human being but doesn’t know this about herself and believes she is a victim when she’s simply a trash person could be interesting. The idea that bad people don’t know this about themselves is kind of deepfor a Hollywood movie but it’s not an idea that can be fruitfully explored in a movie for kids. Klara is very advanced, but this part went right over her head.

At 9,5, my daughter is already at the older age of the audience. And the movie’s visual range, together with some elements of the plot, is very inappropriate even for her. Remembering that the viewers are in the ages 4 to 11 category, it’s bizarre that the movie is so adult. There are some frankly lewd scenes. The actors who play first-year college students are all middle-aged, and look old for the age they actually are. There are constantly non-binary men in the background, behaving in ways that are appropriate at a rave but not in normal life. The main plotline is that the green witch is a product of an extramarital affair. My kid doesn’t know yet that children can be born that way. I’ll have to have a conversation about that with her before the second part of the movie drops to the theaters. And I already had to have a talk with her explaining about eating disorders because I can’t leave her under the impression that it’s normal for people to look like Ariana Grande does.

The movie ends up being quite atrociously bad. It feels like the creators of the movie were victimized by a gang of pedophiles in childhood, and as a result, a significant part of their brain remained stunted while other aspects got way over-developed. Whoever wrote the film understands evil on a deep level but feels completely impotent to oppose it in any way. This is also a person who is strangely hypersexualized in unhealthy ways. He’s not a pedo himself. The movie doesn’t read like the creation of a pedo. It definitely does come off like the work of a sad and confused pedo victim.

If anybody else was obligated to watch, please make yourself known and we’ll discuss.

JUST IN – UK Home Office to assemble an elite team of police officers to monitor social media for "anti-migrant sentiment" in a new investigations unit to "flag early signs of potential civil unrest" — Telegraph

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 26, 2025

In neoliberalism, the state doesn’t disappear. It switches sides. Instead of helping, protecting and supporting the citizens, it turns against them. The state no longer derives its legitimacy from the citizens and doesn’t need to be nice to them anymore. It now begins aggressively to dispossess the citizens and its main function becomes to keep them beaten down enough so that they don’t rebel.

If you grow up in a country where everything always works, you don’t have to waste any energy on bending every aspect of uncomfortable reality to your will all the time. Then you have more energy for creative pursuits or for personal growth.

On the negative side, this experience can make you think that this is what life is naturally like. And it’s not. Everywhere else outside of your bubble of high civilizational advances it’s a constant battle against things, relationships, institutions, and social structures that are indifferent, hostile, and very uncomfortable.

This is why, instead of giving daily praises to life for placing them into a rare ultra-civilized pocket of reality that is hospitable and sweet, people act carelessly towards this inherited haven, destroying it for the future generations.

For the first time, I have in my hands a book that was translated by AI. There’s nothing in the publishing information about a translator of any sort, but I teach translation, and in class we explore the uses of AI for translating texts.

As expected, the quality of the translation is abysmally poor. It’s not that it contains mistakes but that not a single sentence is translated correctly. It’s a mockery of both languages.

This is not a work of fiction but they time will soon come when efforts to save on hiring a translator will lead to the brutalization even of literary books.

Comedian and author Tony Hawks explains why he isn't leaving his son anything in his will. pic.twitter.com/b8GI2NCkPZ

— BBC Sheffield (@BBCSheffield) July 20, 2025

I don’t know what kind of an actor this man is but that he’s a sociopath is a given. I feel for his children. Not because of money but because having a dad who calls you “an accident of birth” is a heavy burden.

What an excellent question.

You are absolutely right. I’m very neoliberal. Forget fluid borders, the whole texture of my life is neoliberal. I use the Forest app to track my productivity. I use Duolingo to learn German when I have no actual need to do that, and I have not broken my streak even on the day I had surgery. Or when I traveled internationally. Or on the day when I could barely speak after dental surgery. I’ll probably still be keeping the streak on the day of my funeral. This gives me great joy, and you won’t understand it if you aren’t completely neoliberal yourself.

I’m obsessed with my morning and evening routines, I have five trillion planners, I have a steps streak that is a whole performance. I have read every neoliberal self-help book and can wax poetic on deep focus for hours. I pursue several careers at the same time and change my opinions on everything regularly. What I don’t know about personal branding is not worth knowing.

Yes, I am neoliberal. I played against a much more ferocious form of neoliberalism than the one that has appeared so far in North America, and I won. Not only am I good at this shit, I love it. It is because I know and understand it so well that I say that for most people it’s the absolute death. Yes, you can win in the neoliberal game. But you need to be a very specific type of person with very specific kind of neuroses. Everybody else loses. Not because they are worse. Or better. But because that’s how this system works. Those 2,5 million nice, well-meaning, trusting people who watched the Candace Owens videos and took them seriously will not do well in it. Neoliberalism will chew them up and spit them out.

I personally am fine, though, yes.

Hulk Hogan, a famous wrestler and media personality, died a couple of days ago, and I wanted to share the story of his struggle against the scandalous website Gawker because maybe people don’t know, and it’s a truly shocking story.

Gawker published a sex tape with Hulk Hogan and refused to take it down. Hogan was broke and didn’t have money to fund a protracted legal battle with the website.

Billionaire Peter Thiel also hated Gawker because they had outed him as gay when he wasn’t ready to come out. It’s not ok to out gay people unless they hold political views that you don’t like. This is standard journalistic morality these days.

Thiel offered to fund Hulk Hogan’s legal battle against Gawker. After years of lawsuits, Hogan won an enormous amount from the website and from the CEO personally. Gawker went bankrupt, and deservedly so. When news appeared of Hogan’s death, the former Gawker journalists engaged in the most disgusting exhibitions of joy. To demonstrate the moral caliber of these members of the press, I want to post this little excerpt from the testimony given in court by the Gawker journalist who published Hogan’s sex tape:

It’s not surprising that people turn to the likes of Candace Owens for their news because, whatever her faults, she’s a huge improvement on these types of people.

RIP Hulk Hogan who, although not my kind of athlete, brought a lot of joy to people.

My kid scored in the 98th percentile on reading and vocabulary and the 99th on writing on the Iowa Standardized Tests. Her reading and writing are at 9th grade level.

This is not surprising given how much we talk. We went to the kids’ gym today, and we talked so much, my jaw almost fell off. And of course, when I talk, I use all of my normal professorial vocabulary, such as, “I admonished the lab worker for her unseemly conduct and implored her to abstain from such behavior henceforth.”

Forget 9th grade, I think she’d beat most of my college students in vocabulary skills.

Of course, it’s all funny until you remember how many people watched the Candace Owens’ series and thought what she said made sense. Many watched for entertainment purposes, like I did. But there were hundreds of thousands of sincere viewers who took it all completely seriously and nodded sagely when Owens said that Marie Claude was a suspicious name.

These people can’t help it. They were born this way. The intellect is a physical characteristic, like height. You can’t change it by any amount of exertion. And height doesn’t change your life in a fundamental way, not like intelligence does, unless you suffer from actual dwarfism. These are people who are very confused by things that you and I don’t even notice. The world is getting more complicated. There’s now AI that will require increasing levels of discernment. The whole structure of life is changing to benefit those who are better cognitively organized and can exert the greatest self-control. This leaves many people – good, well-meaning people – out in the cold. And it’s not their fault. They were simply born this way.

This is why I laugh at Candace who is rich and will be fine. But for her sincere viewers I feel nothing but kindness and compassion. We accept that “born this way” is real in everything but intelligence. But that’s wrong. It’s unfair and it hurts people. It hurts all of us because we engage with a falsified picture of reality.

Americans are very lovely people. They smile at strangers all the time. Because of my dental procedure, I currently can’t smile. People stand there, beaming at me, while I look at them morosely.

As a result, I have had to explain about my dental surgery to several strangers today. It’s nice, everybody is supportive and shares their own story of dental woe.

Wonderful, lovely people.