Opinions, art, debate
Wait, what? It’s already been decided that the Libs will win? The leftist who transed his own kid at Tavistock has been chosen by Trump as the next PM of Canada?
For the particularly gifted: no, I’m not supporting this statement by Trump. I’m criticizing it.
Not in the Middle Ages or at any time since, has there ever existed such an extraordinary number of works of literature whose female protagonists are abjectly, pathetically, and enthusiastically subservient to men as in the 21st-century literature.
Medieval heroines are actually not subservient at all. They have agency, they have willpower, the have their own interests and strategies that they pursue. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female characters are even more so. It all begins to change in the late twentieth century and explodes completely in the twenty-first. One after another female character enslaves herself eagerly to some dude. And it’s never a dude who offers marriage, children, money, an equal partnership, and respect. No, it’s always and invariably a man who treats her as a child.
This is fascinating to observe. One novel after another. Different authors, countries, generations, writing styles, political beliefs. The characters are poor, rich, mega rich, in the middle. Societies where women have opportunities that Elizabeth Bennett or Jane Eyre couldn’t begin to dream of. Yet these female heroines throw all the opportunities away to pursue infantilization and abasement.
Censorship always has the exact opposite effect from the one intended. We learned that back in the USSR but in the US the message is taking longer to land.
As I reported earlier, our Chancellor forced the student newspaper to remove the last sentence of an article that said “Fuck the Chancellor.” A week has passed, and the censored article has become part of the school’s mythos. It now firmly entered the institutional conscience. People discuss it loudly and happily in the hallways. Even those who never read the student paper before are now passing around screenshots from the original, uncensored version. Jokes and memes abound.
The Chancellor is young and inexperienced and doesn’t know that the only way to preserve respect is by being magnanimous, leaning into the joke, showing no touchiness, and projecting strength and confidence.
I once walked on a group of students who were parodying my teaching mannerisms in an exaggerated manner. It was spot on and hilarious. Also, very uncomfortable because I wasn’t aware I had been doing any of it. Students looked scared but I leaned into the fun and for the next few days exaggerated the mannerisms they had parodied, eliciting excited peals of laughter. The fashionable thing to do would have been to interpret the students’ mockery as a sign that they despise me because I’m a woman and an immigrant. I could have turned this situation into a banner of victimhood and waved it in people’s faces for years. Instead, I joined in on the joke and students loved it. It became easier to teach because I reestablished myself as a figure of authority that cannot be reached by student pranks.
I completely understand your feelings, believe me, I do, but unfortunately, there’s absolutely nothing you can do. They are co-dependent, and it won’t help anybody for you to join the co-dependency.
An addiction within a marriage is part of the marriage. For some reason, they both need him to be addicted.
I recommend gently removing yourself from discussions about the marital issues so that your friendship doesn’t become about their dysfunction.
This is why it’s very important to have a conservative government in Canada:
This is from today.
When we think about the relevance of ideas, we naturally weight those ideas by their number of living believers. For instance, Mithraism is not relevant at all, since there are no living Mithraists. In historical terms, this algorithm yields a fisheye lens, focused on the present. The living, who exist, are more important than the dead, who do not. Now, let us reweight the relevance of ideas by their living or dead believers. Now, ideas matter if anyone has ever believed them. This political map too has a window: the Overton window of history. How does it compare to the Overton window of the present both in position, and in size?
Curtis Yarvin, Grey Mirror
What is our position vis-a-vis history? Is ours the only true and correct way of being, akin to a religion? Or can we accept that our current way of being is not vastly superior to any that existed previously but one of many valid ways of being? Is it possible that we understand some things worse than people in the past?
The ability to see the present as equal to and part of the past is comparable to the ability to see one’s own religion as just one of many religions. The discovery of this ability was the core mental transformation of the Enlightenment. Once the Peace of Westphalia recognized that multiple faiths could coexist politically, modernity began.
But in the domain of politics, our minds remain shrouded in medieval gloom. The Overton model is a pre-Enlightenment model. Everyone outside the window is a Gentile. That is, an “extremist.”
The entirety of our history save for the last 15 seconds is widely considered to be a manifestation of right-wing extremism, evil, mean, and completely mistaken. A person who thinks like this about his past will be extremely miserable. If you are burning with hatred for everything that happened to you until this morning, you will be seriously unwell. But that’s how we are all conditioned to think. Right, left, center – we all see the past as one huge mistake and the people who lived then as morally inferior to us.
But what if it’s the other way round? Is that at all a possibility? What if we are the morally inferior ones?
I removed all of the conservative influencers who shilled for soda companies in the past week. These influencers were soundly mocked and denounced by conservatives.
Does this happen in progressive circles? Does anybody mock and denounce pay-for-play posts that are funded by Big Pharma, for example? I was very proud to see how conservative media self-cleansed from these dishonest operators. But we need this kind of community responsibility among progressives, too.
The local public high school spent $7,000,000 on remodeling the bathrooms into gender neutral. This means that teenage boys and girls will use the same bathrooms in order to be inclusive.
Now the school is in a budget hole and will start firing teachers. Some people are trying to organize an opposition to this plan but half of the community is repeating moronically that this is somehow caused by Trump. Obviously, the school isn’t funded federally. Obviously, the toilet remodel could not be afforded and was a disaster on every level. Obviously, this is the repeat of my university’s trajectory where an expensive rebranding campaign was purchased and now the university can’t afford to employ professors.
Just as obviously, it’s impossible to get people to notice how this works.
I wish people read their own texts before posting:
“My marriage failed, so here’s my advice on how to have a healthy marriage.” Do people hear themselves?
This is always a result of neoliberalism. Call it woke, call it a blue giraffe with white dots, it doesn’t matter. That’s what neoliberalism always leads to. We are behind Russia on neoliberalism and can observe what our future will look like if we don’t stop careening towards it.
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