Two assumptions behind this equal opportunity garbage annoy me.

One is that I’m choosing from a plethora of candidates who are eager to come work for us. The reality is that I’m calling around, begging people to accept a contract. Everybody says no. I’m at the point where somebody I know met a woman at the swimming pool who says she has a neighbor who might be interested. The equal opportunity paperwork directs me to “list all candidates, including the gender and race of each.” And I can’t get past the word “list” because it belongs in a completely different reality.

The second thing that I find absolutely insulting is the assumption that I would reject a qualified candidate and choose a less qualified yet lighter-skinned one. I’m not asked to sign pledges that I wouldn’t pee on the floor of my office, so why require the equivalent in these equal opportunity papers?

I know I say the same thing every year but the insult gets renewed at the start of every hiring cycle. Where is my presumption of innocence? Why am I treated like some horrible person when I’ve done nothing to deserve it?

It’s that time of the year when I have to write missives to the “Equal Opportunity Office” which start with the words:

Professor XYZ is a male Caucasian, however we have extended him an offer of employment because he’s highly qualified…

These “male Caucasians” and “female Hispanics” are all people I’ve known for years. They have no idea I describe them in writing this way. They have no idea I have to justify every… unappealing identity, so to speak, in order to be able to hire.

Yes, I literally have to write apologetic documents for every non-minority person I hire.

I feel absolutely humiliated by all this. Congratulations, Americans. You’ve really done yourselves proud here.

This kind of thing makes me want to stick my index fingers into my ears and scream, “Go away, go away, go away!”

Seriously, ef off far far away from us with your bleating, stupid political correctness. How does it occur to anybody to choose precisely this moment to use us to virtue signal?

Today, Klara read a 120-page graphic novel beginning to end and ate 3 bowls of borscht.

I have achieved parenting nirvana.

I know it’s very annoying that I keep posting about all these fascinating authors and thinkers in other languages. Believe me, I do all I can to uncover interesting stuff in English. I scour new releases. I look and look and look. I read more in English than all other languages combined.

And it’s not all useless. I’ve found two recent worthwhile books in English in the past couple of years, Franzen’s Crossroads and Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Yes, this is slim pickings for the entire English-speaking world. But I’m not abandoning hope. There’s a new release by Richard Russo coming up. He’s been kind of blah and PC in recent years but he can come back at any time.

Obviously, if you’ve found some gems among new releases, I’m eager to hear about them.

People who can narrate their lives as a string of disadvantages are psychologically very unhealthy. Purposefully pushing such people into the medical profession is immoral.

This is what happens when people start seeing themselves as gods. They think it’s up to them to reward the suffering with the Kingdom of Heaven Earth. That in the process they will send straight to heaven the future patients of these fake doctors is of no interest.

Juan Manuel de Prada writes that back in 1972 – which is incredibly early and prescient – the great Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini warned that a new form of capitalism was being born that would move dramatically to the left. Pasolini said that this left-wing capitalism would use sexual freedom and a pretense of wide-ranging , unheard-of tolerance to impoverish many and enrich few.

Pasolini was a gay Marxist. And he was horrified by what left-wing politics and the idolization of sexuality were turning into.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensating to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

The fireworks were really puny this year. I remember during COVID people really went all out. A lot of pent up everything was exploding.

Remembering COVID made me kind of sad. So did hearing the explosions. Plus, today I finished the novel Excellent Women about the lives of 1950s British spinsters, and the book is depressing. It’s well-written and even humorous at times but I found the lives of those poor women who call themselves “rejected” very sad. I know a couple of women like that, and it’s heartbreaking how they try to fill their lives and grab on to tiny, insignificant events to pretend like something is happening.

These days such women tend to be cognitively challenged. And men. I also know a man like that. They lead very orderly, routine-driven existences. In Barbara Pym’s novel, the rejected women fill their lives with church affairs. Today people don’t have that, so it’s harder.

It’s a good novel, if somewhat too deliberate and a bit forced at times. It’s just so hopeless, and I guess it wasn’t a good moment for me to read it.