Opinions, art, debate
At a local trampoline park filled with people of all ages, I left all our coats and shoes, including two pairs of UGGs, a pair of Michael Kors sneakers, and a leather jacket, unattended in complete certainty that nobody would take them. A young dad left his laptop and walked over to the basketball hoops from where the laptop isn’t visible. There are two unattended Stanley cups whose owners are certain they’ll be there when they come back.
It’s not abnormal or immoral to want to live like this.
Here’s a question to ponder. We’ve been hearing a lot from the leaders of both political parties that America is based on a set of beliefs, and anybody who shares them is automatically American.
But how do we know anybody’s beliefs? Because they say so? Words are cheap.
Also, what do we do in cases like Zohran Mamdani who gets elected to a position of great power and immediately declares that he’s against American principles and wants the opposite ones?
When words become more important than reality, the results are always bad. Propositional or credal mean “based on words.” A propositional nation means no nation.
Who else thinks that these revelations of fraud will come to absolutely nothing whatsoever?
I don’t want to be cynical but what is the solution? Dragging screaming, tearful black women in hijabs away from their nine kids? Having that be the news story for months? And then what? Even if several of the fraudsters go on trial, what prevents an army of new ones replacing them? Nobody is getting deported, that’s all a fantasy. We couldn’t deport Kilmar Abrego García who is illegal, and these are all citizens. So then what? Even taxing remittances has not been passed and there seem to be no plans to do it.
And what’s the motivation to do anything? Voters will move on from this story to some imaginary war on Venezuela (if they are on the right) or war on Denmark (if they are on the left).
You should see the procedure I go through to expend state funds on buying printer paper for my department. We keep the paper under lock and key. There’s pre-order accountability and post-order accountability. I know everything that was bought with department money in the past 6 years, and I can guarantee that no state funds were wasted or misappropriated. I’m an honest person, and the recent revelations of mass fraud didn’t tempt me to start stealing. But now whenever I file a request to buy a package of printer paper in the amount of $6.55, I’ll feel stupid. And cynical. That’s the only effect of this debacle. To make honest people cynical and disappointed in the very concept of a country as a meaningful category of engaging with reality.
All day I’ve felt like absolute donkey’s vomit. I had no alcohol yesterday, ate very sparingly, and engaged in no excesses. The only explanation for feeling like the world has wiped its rugged butt with me today is that I caught a virus. Which is extremely bad timing as I have tons to do in the next few days.
Thank you to the person who recommended the book about Matthew Shepard in the anonymous comments. I’ve been listening to it and it’s kept me very entertained on the day when I’m utterly useless. Great book, mega shocking.
Is it humanly possible to be any more gay than Mamdani?
His gayness is the only endearing thing about him, which is why I bring it up.
White Rex is alive:
Maybe there’s hope for Russian nationalism after all.
It’s a great way to start the year. I hope everybody is celebrating their hearts out today.
When school is in session, I get up at 5:45 am. To make that possible, I’m in bed by 9:30 pm. And it’s fine.
But the moment school closes, I’m blissfully back to my natural state of going to bed by 1am and getting up by 9. My mental health experiences paroxysms of delight when that happens.
You can’t change us, fuckers. So don’t even try.
At least somebody gets it:
The whole idea of the “Global South” which is incongruously led by Russia is about this form of ethnic resentment. Why Russians decided to turn non-white is completely beyond me but there you have it.
Anson Frericks believes that the current version of neoliberalism should be abandoned in favor of its original form. His idea is that Milton Friedman’s “shareholder capitalism” should be brought back instead of today’s “stakeholder capitalism.” These are terms that I don’t find particularly useful because they don’t explain anything.
Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism of half a century ago was hostile to government and uninterested in ideology. At that stage, neoliberalism needed to decouple nation-state structures from the economy. The best way to do that was to narrate business as a space of freedom. Freedom from government supervision and from ideology. This strategy made sense while the nation-state was strong.
Once the nation-state was weakened, neoliberalism proceeded to replace it. With itself. The nation-state creates ideology. It can only exist because it can create and impose ideology. So if you want to replace it with yourself, you should become the source of ideology. You must create and impose ideology. You must become the Big Brother.
Anson Frericks’ lament in Last Call for Bud Light is that we have departed from the Milton Friedman-era origins of the system. He’s like a mom who sighs that her teenager is rude and doesn’t want to kiss mommy but remember how sweet he was at 15 months? That a toddler grows up into a teenager is normal. Freedom as the highest value naturally leads to the idea that there should be freedom to edit the bodies of small children, especially if that’s very profitable. That yarn has unspun, and there’s no stuffing it back into the original packaging. Frericks’ biggest example of a business that managed to stay away from manufacturing ideology is … Netflix. Which promotes ideology with the rigidity of the Soviet Pravda.
Clarissa's Blog 