I woke up at 5:45 am to make blini and have been going a mile a minute since then. Held a meeting, created the Fall schedule for the department, sent in the annual report, answered many emails, translated 4 documents, did a taping, went to Sam’s, cooked salmon two ways (diabetic and normal), folded laundry, did German, started packing for Spain, squeezed in an hour of reading…
Why, why didn’t I have all this energy when I was 25? Or 30? On a regular day back then, I did maybe 5% of what I do now. And there was no cooking, folding, husband, or child, so I should have been swimming in free time.
That’s an interesting question but it’s impossible to discuss because people get triggered.
People in primitive tribes have a completely different subjectivity from ours. They are people. But they are people in a very different way than we are people. Their subjectivity, their way of being who they are inside their minds is unreachable to us. And ours is to them. The idea of being traumatized belongs to our very Western sensibility. They idea of a child as we perceive it, ditto.
And it’s not just primitive tribes. Our fellow Westerners who lived 200 years ago also were completely different in the way they experienced themselves. Our children are less mature at 25 than theirs were at 10. And this is not a bad thing. Ours need a lot more room inside their minds. They need more time to grow into that room.
A subjectivity begins to form before birth. So a Western not even an 8-year-old but an infant absolutely does perceive an invasion into their genital area as traumatic because these children already have the kind of subjectivity where bodies are autonomous and highly individualized. Whether they remember it or can verbalize it is entirely beyond the point.
In the linked discussion, Hanania is the closest to the truth but he’s still off by a mile because he’s unaware that his entire conceptual framework of society versus individual is very contemporary Western.
Can you psychoanalyze a member of a primitive tribe? Of course, not. Because that part of me that gets psychoanalyzed when I go to an analyst is entirely absent from his mind. He doesn’t need it. He wouldn’t survive if he did. In the same way, he has parts of his mind that I don’t.
There’s no perspective, actually. This isn’t a book that offers an analysis. The author states from the start that he doesn’t want to take a position and he stays true to that, at least in the 80% of the book that I’ve read so far.
Days of Rage narrates what happened. It doesn’t evaluate or judge. The author is way to the Left compared to me, which I notice, for example, in his wholesale acceptance of the Left’s narrative of race relations in the US. But he abstains from offering any judgment. You could absolutely read the book and conclude that the Weathermen, the BLA, the SLA, and all the rest of them were completely justified in everything they did. Or you could conclude the opposite.
The value of the book isn’t in its perspective, which it pointedly avoids giving. It’s in the extraordinary amount of research that Burroughs did. You could find all this information yourself but you’d have to dedicate years to seeking out all the books, records, interviews, etc.
Some of the groups Burroughs describes are more interesting than others. I was bored by the chapters on Puerto Ricans and enjoyed the ones about the Weathermen a lot more. You might see it differently, of course. But please don’t worry that you’d get brainwashed into any system of beliefs by this book. Burroughs wanted to give a comprehensive narrative of what happened and he definitely achieved that.
Between 1981 and today, Qatar has given more than $6.3 billion to U.S. universities — making it the largest foreign donor to American higher education.
Why? Because it understands Mao: whoever educates the youth shapes the future.https://t.co/frahLW8CNe
Well, that was a major waste of money given that there’s only a handful of students in the whole country who know what Qatar is.
The idea that there are any Muslim, Arab or Qatari values represented in US higher ed is laughable.
People should stop looking for foreign influences and look closer to home. If Qatar never existed, would the US higher education be any less woke? Of course not. Then let’s stop wasting our time and concentrate on what is actually causing the problem.
I detest the fellow but here he’s right. The words gifted and talented should be eliminated altogether from elementary schools. Teachers who mention these words in school around such small children shouldn’t be working in education.
I’m saying this as somebody whose favorite author in elementary school was Theodore Dreiser and who could read him and write about him fluently in three languages. The absolute last thing I would have wanted at nine was to be called gifted and talented and streamed away from my very few friends into a freak class.
Thankfully, even my narcissistically afflicted mother was lucid enough to realize that it’s not OK to do that to a child and refused all attempts to gift-and-talent me into skipping a couple of grades.
“Yes, but what if she’s bored in class with regular kids?”
I was deathly bored in class. This helped me develop a rich inner life and now I’m never bored.
So yeah. Elementary school! These are tiny kids. They don’t need to prepare for the competitive workplace just yet.
After the Weather Underground’s seven-year bombing campaign, three senior FBI men were heading toward a criminal trial. And not a single Weatherman.
Days of Rage.
For those who are wondering why the FBI is so lefty, Bryan Burroughs’ book provides the answer. The FBI agents who hunted the left-wing terrorists in the 1970s were rubbished, persecuted, and prosecuted for ridiculous things like steaming open and reading the terrorists’ letters. Twenty, thirty years of stellar records of serving their country amounted to nothing. Risking their lives to stop the terrorist criminals meant bupkes. FBI agents saw Dohrn, Ayers, Boudin, and the rest of the murderers rewarded with honors and high-paying jobs for terrorizing and killing people. The agents, in the meantime, were ground into the dust for trying to stop these lunatics from committing more murders.
Is it surprising that there’s a shortage of people at the FBI who are interested in stopping today’s Dohrns and Ayerses? The terrorists saw every one of their ideas become accepted, celebrated, and aggressively imposed. Why shouldn’t the FBI run around, investigating imaginary nooses at the behest of Weathermen’s students?
I once again repeat my suggestion that nobody should immigrate into this country without reading Days of Rage very carefully and getting tested on the knowledge of the material.
I promise I’m not trying to be difficult but how is this new ceasefire between Israel and Hamas different from the previous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that Trump got them to sign?
Are we stuck in an endless loop of ceasefires that are not ceasefires? I hope this one sticks, of course, like we all do.
Why do you say “parents”, though? Has anybody ever heard of a father doing this kind of thing? It’s always the mother’s initiative. And it’s the same motivation. The mother is repelled by the idea of her daughter growing into a woman and enjoying her own body like the mother never did. So she prevents that by mutilating the daughter.
Have you heard of FGM? It’s always pursued by mothers and in very aggressive ways. The justification is, “this was done to me, and now I’m doing it to her.” They say it completely openly, and the look on their faces tells you everything. These women know they were robbed and they can’t stand the idea of their daughters having what they never could.
Of course, what I’m describing is a completely different phenomenon from when a middle-aged man in a very masculine profession suddenly puts a wig on his balding head and insists that everybody call him Rachel. That’s autogynephilia, and it’s an entirely separate thing. This has nothing at all to do with his childhood. That these very different phenomena get grouped together is unfortunate and confuses everybody.
I got to the chapters in Days of Rage that talk about the Symbionese Liberation Army, and it occurred to me that the word Symbionese is precisely the kind of moronic neologism that Candace Owens would come up with. I keep getting distracted from the reading by images of Candace gravely explaining why it’s a genius term.
She didn’t actually come up with it, of course. She’s too young. But it’s totally her kind of dumbness.
Somebody asked if I watched “One Battle Too Many.” I almost never watch movies. All I ever watch is Matt Walsh and an occasional true crime documentary on Netflix. And then, I don’t really watch them. I listen and almost never look at the screen.
With movies, I just can’t process visual images the way I process words. Most actors look the same to me. I get viciously bored having to stare at a screen. N is responsible for Klara’s movie education, and together they have watched every American children’s classic. But I’m useless movie-wise, and I freely admit this.
I love old Soviet movies but my father was there when I watched them and he explained them to me. By myself, I’m impotent.
Is it a good movie? Has anybody on here watched it?
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