Opinions, art, debate
Parents create their child’s personality. Willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unawares, but they do it.
Adulthood comes when the impact starts moving in the opposite direction. Adult children (but only those who actually grew) begin to mold their parents.
On the positive side, the pelmeni family from Tuva is making N feel better about his parents.
“At least, my parents wouldn’t accept the pelmeni!” he says happily. “At least, they wouldn’t stoop that far! I’m sure they wouldn’t!”
His joyful face at discovering a family more screwed up than his is painful to see. I’m not entirely convinced his parents wouldn’t accept the pelmeni but I’m glad he’s happy so I’m not saying anything.
MEMBERS OF THE American Friends Service Committee, a prominent Quaker organization known for its progressive values and social justice advocacy in the U.S. and abroad, have raised an alarm about a woman holding a leadership position within the organization who they say has misrepresented her ethnic background for years and who they fear may be working on behalf of groups seeking to undermine their organization. Raquel Evita Saraswati, a Muslim activist who for years has encouraged people to believe that she is a woman of color, including Latina as well as of South Asian and Arab descent, is the AFSC’s chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer, a senior position that gives her access to the files of dozens of the organization’s staff and volunteers. But Saraswati, who was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel, is not a person of color, according to her mother, Carol Perone.
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/16/american-friends-service-committee-raquel-saraswati/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
If you care about “ethnic backgrounds” of people who work for you, this will always be the result. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, as they say.
Oskar Pierre Castro, a human resources professional who participated in the search committee to fill Sarawati’s position, told The Intercept that she had presented herself as a “queer, Muslim, multiethnic woman.” “It really touched all the points,” said Castro, who works for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a Quaker group that frequently partners with the AFSC, and who was involved in the search along with AFSC staff members.
Who talks like this about people? The woman is being described like an object for sale. Yippee, she met the list of specifications. Look how this HR guy speaks about a job candidate:
Castro added, “In my mind it was, ‘Great, a person of color, a queer person of color, who happens to be a Muslim, it’s a woman, all these things, and someone who seemed to get it. I definitely feel conned. … I feel deceived.”
How is it acceptable to reduce human beings to their body parts and sex habits? This is absolutely horrid.
Of course, if you are trying to make a shady purchase, you will end up being conned. I’m completely on this woman’s side. She duped the people who richly deserved to be duped because they despise other humans.
A neurotic is a traumatized person who is directing all of his energy into making others service his neurosis. Mental issues are a powerful mechanism of transforming reality and bending others to your will.
A responsible, adult individual treats his traumas with a professional or through a variety of mental hygiene means that everybody can individually access.
People who expect others to tiptoe around their traumas are manipulators. They aren’t necessarily doing it consciously but that doesn’t change the result.
By playing into this charade and assisting a neurotic in making his trauma somebody else’s problem, we become complicit in this manipulation.
This article was published yesterday:
I mean, you know?
Obviously, no apology is forthcoming from people who called us conspiracy theorists for saying exactly this for two years.
Now let’s wait for the shocking news that masks are useless against a respiratory virus and that mRNAs were a very bad idea.
Look at these happy faces! This family in the Russian Republic of Tuva received a package of pelmeni from the government for the son they lost in Ukraine.
Pelmeni are the cheapest food in Russia. It’s not a delicacy. They are an equivalent of our Ramen noodles. The stuff you buy when you don’t want to cook and need something cheap. So the joy of the receiving family is hard to understand.
Even less clear is how these people who probably never heard of Ukraine explain to themselves why their son had to die. Or what the reason is behind the mask theater, especially in a family that has cavalierly disposed not only of the health but of the life of their son in exchange for a package of pelmeni. Did their son crawl in the mud near Bakhmut in a mask? Was he worried about COVID?
Most importantly, why did they agree to pose for the photo shoot? There are more pictures, and it’s clear that it took a while to film the whole thing. I mean, your son is already dead. The worst thing in the world already happened. Wouldn’t you want to go grieve instead of plastering a smile on your face and posing for photos some bureaucrat will use for an annual report?
These people are in no danger (including from COVID). They have freely chosen to participate both in the war and in this mockery of their own dead son.
It’s cute to see a middle-aged person discover something I’m teaching my first-grader but yes, 95% of our mental states can be a product of a simple decision.
I don’t know why people relinquish control over their daily experience because it’s utterly unnecessary. All you need to do is decide before going to an event, a meeting, a drive, a grocery store, whatever how you are going to feel during the upcoming experience. Curious, elegant, competent, beautiful, effective – whatever you need to feel at any time, plan for it in advance and enjoy. There’s a lot of bad shit over which we don’t have any control. Why give up things we definitely can control when getting a grip on them is as easy as the above tweet describes it?
Our life is a story we tell ourselves about it. Absolutely anybody can describe themselves as “a stupid ugly loser who had terrible luck and never did anything right”, “a mediocrity with a humdrum boring life”, or “a brilliant beautiful individual who was extremely lucky in life and experienced amazing stuff.” Depending on the angle we look from, these descriptions can apply to everybody. We have complete freedom to choose the one we like.
With a wife like his, it would be supremely bizarre if he weren’t depressed. That lady could give a stiff competition to the Baba Yaga wife of the Russian POW I wrote about yesterday.
Nothing big, serious or significant was happening in the US in the 1990s and most of 2000s save for a short-lived, isolated trauma of 9/11. And that’s great. A boring life is a happy life. The popular TV shows of the day, Friends and Seinfeld, reflected that pleasant, tepid, bubblegum nothingness. But everything has a tradeoff. We now have elderly presidents, ancient speakers in the House and Senate, while the generation that grew up in the 1990s or 2000s, either vapidly sits by or throws tantrums over non-issues. In terms of artists or thinkers, there’s precious nothing coming out of today’s 40- and 50-year-olds.
In Ukraine, we had very eventful 1990s. The decade was anything but boring. As a result, we now have a generation of philosophers, writers, thinkers, politicians, statesmen, etc who grew up in that decade and who have ideas, strength, insight, agency.
On the positive side, there’s been some upheaval in the US since 2007. As a result, by the 2040s or a little later we should finally have a bunch of people with fresh ideas instead of moping drama queens or cranky senior citizens.
Folks, I take back any criticism I made of the chatbot because I discovered that it’s really great at writing long, utterly meaningless “rubrics.” I had no idea what rubrics were until yesterday when it transpired that I will have to write a bunch of them. Now that I discovered that the chatbot can churn them out like a crazy monkey, I’m in heaven. Here is an example:
Rubric for Final Exam in “Introduction to Hispanic Civilization”:
I. Content Knowledge:
II. Critical Thinking:
III. Writing Skills:
IV. Final Exam Specifics:
Total Points: 100
Note: The percentages assigned to each category are meant to be used as a guideline and can be adjusted based on the importance placed on each category by the instructor.
I have no idea what any of this means because I can’t force my brain to process this bureaucra-speak. But who cares? I’ll get the chatbot to create a mountain of these and bury our administrators.
Clarissa's Blog 