Strangely, it never occurs to anybody to argue that half of the Aztec or Inca emperors or African chieftains and kings were white. The only culture that has to be insistently and counterfactually presented as being the today’s embodiment of diverse is the European culture.
Author: Clarissa
More Days of Rage
When in the mid-1970s radicalized Puerto Ricans graduated from small-scale terror attacks to the deadliest bombings of the radical era, NYPD couldn’t investigate their crimes. A few years previously, civil rights groups had forced NYPD to destroy all the information it had gathered about these terrorists. Police officers weren’t allowed to track their movements, infiltrate their terror cells, or attend their meetings undercover. When Puerto Ricans switched from limited-range to large-scale bombings, NYPD was caught flat-footed, not because it didn’t want to do the work but because it wasn’t allowed to do it.
Does this remind you of anything?
Everybody who immigrates into the US should have to read Days of Rage and get tested on the contents. The reading and the test should also be a pre-condition on receiving a student visa into the country.
National Book Award
I’m trying to read an article about this year’s National Book Award, but the reading is not going well because the article is as follows:
Two of the shortlisted novels, by Washington and Alameddine, explore distance and connection between gay men and their mothers. Rutherford’s and Russell’s books are historical fiction, while Majumdar’s novel spends one tense week with an Indian woman trying to emigrate in the face of a climate crisis.
Several of the nonfiction finalists tackle contentious contemporary issues head-on. Omar El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” is about the response of America and Europe to the destruction in Gaza. In “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World,” Jordan Thomas digs into a destructive six-month fire season sparked by climate change. . .
The other finalists are Kyle Lukoff’s “A World Worth Saving,” which mixes Jewish mythology and adventure in a story about a trans teenager’s efforts to dismantle a conversion therapy program.
These might all be talented books, by the way. They sound moronic because the person The New York Times paid to write the article is a moron who hates literature. She thinks that reading is about familiarizing yourself with “issues.” An intellectual invalid who has no idea how to derive pleasure from reading.
I researched her, and it turns out she wrote a novel. About issues. And fashionable identities.
Therapy Ban
There should be a ban on therapy for children, period. Any therapy.
Children are never the problem.
More Leftist Violence
This is now a daily occurrence. It’s very concerning. If you have any time at all, please read Days of Rage. Or I’ll record a video about the book and bug everybody with it.
Meantime
Meantime, in Russia:
Protected: Why Is It Always Women?
A Strange Game
Indian Student With $100,000 Columbia Scholarship Denied US Visa. Here’s Why
Kaushik Raj’s semester at Columbia University was set to start in August, but around that time, he received a letter from the US Embassy in New Delhi telling him his application had been rejected
This is such a bizarre situation. Journalism is dying. Yet Columbia is acting like there’s a gigantic shortage of journalists that needs to be plastered over with extraordinary expenditures.
We are playing a very strange game, and nobody is bothering to explain the rules.
Fetal Heartbeat
Once again, people are discussing fetal development on X like science hasn’t changed in decades. Scientific advances and technology always develop. We saw Klara’s heartbeat on an ultrasound at 5 weeks. People who claim that an ultrasound can’t pick anything up until 8 weeks are behind the times by at least a decade. I saw her heartbeat and I saw her in the summer of 2015 when I was at barely 5 weeks pregnant. Of course, I had a situation with which we are all familiar, and that is why the pregnancy was so closely monitored. But the ability to see the baby and listen to the heartbeat at 5 weeks was already very much there ten years ago.
More Tulathimutte
Of course, after reading Tony Tulathimutte’s new novel Rejection, I had to read his first book Private Citizens. I’m only 1/3 in but I can already say that it’s eminently worth reading. It’s not as narratively adventurous because it was his first novel, and writers grow. But that makes it easier to read.
Private Citizens points to the huge gaping hole in the middle of the neoliberal worldview. It’s the conflict between the productivity-maximizing entrepreneurial self and the indulgent, ego-flattering desiring self. The persona that gets up at 5 am to do gratitude journaling and prepare for a productive day is not the same one that is dedicated to humoring one’s every identitarian whim. How can you be hard enough to impose yourself on life while simultaneously so soft as to constantly flow and mutate?
The characters of Private Citizens are trying to bridge this gap and mostly failing. Tulathimutte is great at diagnosing the problem but he’ll never provide a solution. He’s trapped by his political beliefs and will circle around the issue endlessly without noticing the obvious solution. He’s still a great writer, though. These are excellent novels that I’m enjoying greatly.
Clarissa's Blog 