Author: Clarissa

A Nationalist and a Globalist

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

A nationalist and a globalist walk into the Oval Office…

This is a fascinating dialogue. Your country was conquered, split in two, every woman aged two to eighty-two was raped, cities were razed, a million men were put in concentration camps. “Not a good day for you, eh?” says Trump who thinks in terms of countries.

Merz is clearly befuddled. Nazis were defeated. Nazis were bad. Defeating them is good. So it was a good day. A day of freedom. He’s not a German first. Or second. Or fifty-fifth. He’s part of humanity at large. His goal is to fight for things like freedom, no matter the costs to Germany. Those costs are not even on his horizon.

Two worldviews are colliding on front of us. This is truly remarkable.

Class Structure

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

There was an elderly woman who once explained class structure to me in the following way:

There are women who wash somebody else’s floors.

There are women who wash their own floors.

There are women who don’t wash any floors.

And there are women who never saw their mothers or grandmothers wash floors.

This isn’t a money issue. When this woman was a little girl she was exiled with her mother by the Stalin regime to Turkmenistan. And the mother still hired a local woman to wash her floors because she was unaware of other options.

United Around a Cause

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

The feminists and the anti-feminists have united around the shared cause of disliking men:

When Klara was an infant and I’d get up at night to feed her, one thing that always made me feel happy was seeing N sleeping cozily and comfortably.

Models of Femininity

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

The abortion scene from Girls we’ve been discussing portrays a woman who is completely in control of her emotions. She’s not emotionally incontinent, doesn’t pose as a victim, and doesn’t screech about mental loads. She projects strength and self-reliance.

And she’s a total sociopath.

This always happens. Whenever a competent, emotionally contained woman appears on the screen or in mass market books (think Gone Girl or House of Cards), she’s a total evildoer and murderer. This is how we learn that a good woman is an emotional wreck and we end up with all those women posting their freakouts on TikTok and writing screeds about mental loads.

Strange Rituals

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

Americans are obsessed with swimming. And potties, but that’s a story for another time. I don’t know what it is about swimming in land-locked Illinois that gets people going all gaga but every time I said I’m not putting my kid in swimming lessons, I’d get the same reaction as if I said I refuse to feed her. “But what if she never learns!!” Yeah, what if, we could think about that or watch paint dry because that would be less boring.

Klara decided she was ready to swim last Saturday. So she swam. That’s it, no lessons, no weird experiments like in this nutso-crazy-boom-boom video. Incidentally, it was the same with the weird ritual people call “potty-training.” I ran out of diapers one day, couldn’t be bothered to drive to the store, told her it’s toilet from now on, and that was the end of the “training.”

People complicate their lives unnecessarily. With potties I can at least understand the need but swimming baffles me. Everybody learns eventually. Or not. May that be our biggest problem in life, seriously.

Travel Ban

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

Here goes my Fulbrighter from Yemen. The backup was from Libya, so that one goes, too.

It’s fine, it was time to take a break from teaching Arabic. I’ve had only negative experiences with Arabic Fulbrighters for several years.

I Voted for This

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

I am so on Lutnick’s side, it’s not even funny:

I am so, so glad that finally, FINALLY, somebody in politics is stepping away from the neoliberal dogma of “removing all trade barriers”. No trade barriers means no nation-state. It means no country as a meaningful concept. It means uncontrolled migration. It means no culture, no civilization, and no America. It means one enormous global favela with a tiny oligarchy conducting medical experiments on the vast, undifferentiated mass of miserable, poor peasants.

I so voted for what Lutnick is saying. You go, Lutnick.

Different Degrees of Neoliberal

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

I rarely agree with this guy but I agree with him here:

Trump did well by kicking Elon to the curb. Elon is neoliberal, and doesn’t see anything beyond his neoliberal obsessions.

Yes, Trump is also neoliberal. Everybody is neoliberal. I’m neoliberal. But it’s a question of degree. Musk is out-there neoliberal compared to the rest of us. That’s why he can’t function without huge doses of drugs.

Khelif Is Male

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

Alan Abrahamson — a seasoned American journalist and member of the International Olympic Committee’s press committee — just published an excerpt of Khelif’s 2023 test results from a certified and accredited lab that stated “chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.”

Test Results Confirm How Bad the Fact-Checking Was on Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif

It’s ok, you don’t have to apologize. All I ask is, please consider why the very obvious fact that he’s a man was not obvious to you. And why “believe women” was suspended in the case of an Italian female boxer who stood very close to Khelif and got hit in the face by him. Why can’t we trust that a woman knows if she was hit by a man? Can we trust women at all or only when no man finds their conclusions objectionable?

AI Progress

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

That’s fine but I spent 15 minutes with ChatGPT yesterday, reading long and inventive explanations on how having sex with underage kids is not pedophilia if it’s done by Harvey Milk. Let’s definitely hand over these economically valuable tasks to an algorithm that considers pedophilia to be a great thing.