China voted in the UN to recognize Russia as the aggressor in its war against Ukraine. Two days later in the same UN China explained that “yes, we voted for the resolution but we don’t really believe it, yet we still voted but we don’t agree with our own vote.”

These are people who can’t defend their own opinion even at the stupid UN. Nobody cares about what the UN says. Only a total weakling goes into such a state over a UN resolution.

This kind of weak, childish flimflamming brings to mind a country that allowed a virus to escape from a lab because of complete ineptitude, then tried to conceal what happened, then started abusing its own population to conceal that it concealed what happened. It also reminds of a country that hasn’t been able to figure out which Western system of thought to adopt and never even attempted to develop its own.

Is global dominance on the cards for people who can’t make up their own minds on anything?

The West, by the way, totally led during COVID. It led first into a stupid place, then out of the stupid place. But everybody dumbly repeated everything that the West did.

In any case, the talking point about China seeking global dominance is almost as stupid as the talking point that “we need to prevent World War 3.” The latter is aimed at first-level people (the most primitive) and the former at the second-level (somewhat less primitive).

The saddest thing is that Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán does have some talent. Unlike its neighboring countries, Chile doesn’t have much by way of literature, and one doesn’t want to see a literary gift that finally cropped up in the country go to waste. Unfortunately, Trabucco Zerán got an MFA at a woke US school. And now she’s trying to squeeze her talented writing into the Procrustean bed of social-justice dogma.

Limpia is narrated by a live-in maid of a professional couple in Santiago. She’s a resentful, first-level kind of person, and it’s interesting to see her try to make sense of the lives of people who are less primitive than she is. But Trabucco Zerán can’t leave well enough alone and tries to massage the story into a tedious class struggle narrative. As a result, the novel ends up being a lot more boring than it needed to be.

Trabucco Zerán is young for a writer, and one does hope that she stops writing for woke, rich Americans and starts noticing her own large Spanish-speaking audience. Of all the ills that the US inflicted on Latin America, the woke garbage is the worst, and that’s in spite of stiff competition.

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers/

This quote is from Whittaker Chambers’ famous review of Atlas Shrugged, but things have changed since 1957, when the review was written, and now much of writing is like this.

Today N was some years old as he went to the first double date of his life. Not that he talked to anybody except me but still it happened. I’ll ask tomorrow if he noticed the other people there.

We had Syrian food. It’s outrageously good.

Rejoice, everybody! The austere religious scholar has competition:

Apparently, Bill Gates has never met any human children. This explains a lot.

It’s a church in Reykjavik. I’ve never been but wow.

Faith is beautiful.

Klara wants to make sure everybody knows what she needs:

In order to complete my new research project, I need to raise my productivity threefold. Not forever, of course. Only for the next three months. Theoretically, it’s doable but it requires a serious lifestyle adjustment.

I’m very excited to try. The trick is to avoid a slow-motion change that consists in adding a couple hundred words to my daily total every few days. Instead, I go straight from 300 words to a thousand.

I found the two 7-year-olds discussing the importance of the freedom of speech and private property. It’s incredibly cute.