Stalin’s constitution was amazing. It gustanteed phenomenal civil liberties.
Stalin’s USSR was terrible and had zero civil liberties.
Constitutions don’t make countries. People do.
Author: Clarissa
How PR Firms Work
Because it’s not Joyce Carol Oates. It’s the young kids she hires to write her social media.
I highly recommend not following any accounts of famous people whose fame doesn’t come from online activities. Because they almost never have anything to do with their social media accounts. They hire PR firms which employ very young kids to write.
The fact that these young kids write stupid stuff is the whole point. It lets followers feel smarter than the celebrity they are impersonating. People enjoy that and keep coming for more. This drives engagement.
The quoted posts are the perfect example. Everybody who read them felt superior to a genius-level writer. This pleasing feeling of superiority encourages them to keep mentioning her. The PR firm can show a gigantic citation rate to their client.
Why Don’t They Ask?
I keep thinking about why I’m failing so badly to be a mentor to female students when I’m so successful with the male cohort.
The difference is that male students ask me questions. They want to know things. Female students, in the meantime, use any interaction to advance a narrative of their frailty. I come up, I lead with some of my best material, but they interrupt and launch into an exulted listing of their limitations.
I have no idea what this is, what causes it, and how to make it stop. I’ve tried reassurance. “No, you are not a loser. You are not bad at languages. You are not a mess.” It has zero effect. I’ve tried changing the topic. I’ve tried telling funny stories. In my desperation, I’ve even tried sharing advance knowledge about what will be on the final. Nothing worked.
In the video lecture on Thursday I mentioned that I was born in the USSR. Immediately I got an email from a male student asking where exactly in the USSR, and how is that area of the country different from others, and is it true that we had a lot of civil liberties in the Soviet constitution. Why aren’t female students interested? I’ve been teaching college since 2002. It’s a crapton of years. All I’m asking for is one, just one, female student who’d ask an unprompted question out of curiosity.
My Christmas Gift to You
It’s a book recommendation because what else, right? But it’s a very good one. I looked long and hard for a novel with truly conservative sensibilities. One that shows the horror of COVID lockdowns, trans surgeries, gender insanity, euthanasia, and climate alarmism being used to introduce anti family policies.
And I found it.
This novel is The Merge by Grace Walker.
It’s set in London in the near future. The government decided that there are too many people and is preventing families from having children by levying enormous fines on them. A new technology is being advanced that claims to merge the consciousnesses of two different people in one body. Inconvenient individuals are told to merge with somebody else so that the government can destroy their bodies and save resources. Elderly parents, the sick, the disabled, the babies can be eliminated from society by getting them merged with a healthy person. The resulting merged person is given a new name and plural pronouns.
There are so many things in this supposedly futuristic novel that are very recognizable in the current moment. There’s no mention of COVID or the trans thing. The novel uses figurative language because it’s a novel, not a political screed. But it really hits home.
I was really afraid that the author would chicken out at the end and provide some leftist off-ramp but that didn’t happen. The novel stays good until the closing sentence.
People keep saying that nobody makes conservative art these days but that’s not true. I’m finding quite a lot of excellent stuff, all very recent, that’s deeply conservative. If you read The Merge and you don’t think it’s pro-Christian, pro-life, and against the hubris of humans wanting to be godlike and remake reality, I’d have to ask how sober you were when you were reading.
Absolutely, there’s conservative art and it’s very good. People who say there isn’t simply don’t go looking for art. They project their limitations onto a sphere that they have no intelligence or patience to enjoy.
So yes, merry Christmas, and I hope you enjoy The Merge as much as I did. If anybody wants to come back to this post and discuss the novel, that would be great. I see all comments with the most recent on top of my feed irrespective of how old the post is.
Q&A about the Literature Curriculum
Oh, what a lovely question. A lovely, lovely question.
I would include An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser so they can understand the American East Coast. And The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner so they learn about the American West. And yes, these are very long, but what’s the rush?
I’d include short stories by O. Henry and Jack London so that they can understand the American spirit.
For Europe, I’d put Robinson Crusoe by Defoe and Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne.
Ivan Bunin’s diary of the Communist revolution of 1917 Cursed Days is crucial to understand the horror of the twentieth century that haunts us still.
I’d put poetry by TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney on the list.
These are the titles that come to me early (9 am) on a Saturday morning without much thinking. What would you add?
The Free Money Experiment
Yet neither US Somalis nor Somalis in Somalia became wealthy en masse as a result. There’s nothing to show for this money. It evaporated.
This is yet another example that giving people “free money” doesn’t work. Maybe it’s time to conclude this experiment and do something different.
The Traveling Term
The term “neoliberal” traveled in the same direction as I did. Originally, it was very lefty-coded. But today, it only appears in far-right circles.
Every time I try to use the term in a publication (which is 90% of my publications these days), I get a lot of pushback.
This happened because the left found out how much it enjoyed everything it used to decry. And the right found out that “free markets” and “choice” can very easily be applied to human beings, body parts, and life itself.
Serious or Pretending?
What puzzles me is, does he really believe this extraordinary crap? Or is it a put on persona? It has to be, right? Nobody is that clueless.
Readiness Test
The real test here is: are you fully inhabiting the existing reality? Can you describe David Barclay Moore’s appearance and sexual preference without googling him?
For extra credit: is the book about racism and homophobia?
If you can’t answer these questions on the spot, you are not ready for life in year 2025.
Those People
It’s a very good thing I no longer live in a big city because I’ve been in one for two days and I already Doordashed a latte.
It’s raining like an absolute bastard or I would have walked. But yes, I did it, and now I’m one of those people. Might have to vote for Pete Buttigieg now to stay true to my latte Doordashing identity.
Clarissa's Blog 