Category: Uncategorized

Maybe I’m channeling too much Glenn Greenwald these days, but my excitement over the realization that there are two whole leftists who don’t like totalitarianism is intense.

Alex Jones was truly despicable. It was easy to support the silencing of somebody this disgusting. But it always starts with the despicable. Always. The moment we collectively consent to the silencing of the despicable, we open the door to ourselves being declared despicable and silenced. Hence you are either a free speech absolutist or you consent to complete censorship and totalitarian control. There is no middle ground.

It shouldn’t be about personalities or “winning.” There should be principles. If Twitter were to ban Joe Biden, I’d be exactly as angry as I was when it banned Donald Trump. Why it isn’t so for many people is something I’ll never comprehend. How can your loyalty to somebody else be greater than your loyalty to yourself? This is not OK.

Americans have an extremely low tolerance for conflict. It’s a culture of pleasantness. This is not a bad thing at all but a side effect is that when people try to express anything they know is unwelcome, it’s so hard for them that they have to rev themselves up into a rage and hysteria to do it.

This is where the whole phenomenon of Karens comes from. Women especially have a very hard time knowing how to ask for something, so they go into an attack mode when they try. I had this experience today when a woman wanted to ask me to wear a mask in an outdoors space. I have absolutely no problem accommodating such a request but the poor thing struggled so much with making the request that she turned into a screeching harpy and almost burst into tears.

The political space is polarized and unlivable for the same reason. People don’t know how to disagree calmly. They need an excuse to say “no, I don’t agree,” so they rev themselves up with fantasies that the opponent is the ultimate evil to be able to do it.

Here’s an extremely important article by Glenn Greenwald on the efforts by House Democrats to ban conservative news sources out of existence:

Two senior members of that Committee, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) also sent their own letters to seven of the nation’s largest cable providers — Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice — as well as to digital distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu) demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did to prevent conservative “disinformation” prior to the election and after — disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by the only conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.

I think that most people who vote Democrat are well-meaning, good people. But I don’t understand how they manage not to be horrified by this.

What is it that Democrats are giving you that makes this unimportant? Why is this not absolutely terrifying and just wrong?

The BIPOC talk is titled “breaking the cement ceiling.” As I look into the mirror, I’m wondering if I’m being invited in the capacity of the cement ceiling.

I haven’t been getting enough sleep, so color-wise it works.

Seriously, though. I assumed I was invited as a victim. But was i invited as a victimizer? “It’s because of pasty people like you that we have no opportunities!”

I kept misreading “aromantic” as “aromatic” and wondered why the aromatic people were all so angry.

On the same day, I received a notification that the Provost approved my promotion to Full Professor and an invitation to give a talk on how I’m being denied opportunities in academia as a BIPOC woman.

I’ve been studying my appearance in the mirror ever since. I’m one of the two women invited and, Lord have mercy on my sins, I looked up the other woman’s photo. She does look more BIPOC than me. Everybody does, of course, but I’m still very confused.

How do I respond without getting myself onto any lists of moral reprobates?

I’m walking across campus in a summer blouse and sweating bullets. Just like every stupid pseudo-winter we have around here.

Only a week ago I was happily shoveling the driveway.

P.S. 64°F. I’m wishing I had put on sunscreen in the morning.

Here is a completely serious question. When a child gets vaccinated, nobody tells you “here’s a measles vaccine, make sure you isolate the child to prevent contagion for the rest of her life”. A vaccine is supposed to be the end of the conversation, not the beginning. We get the vaccine to avoid hiding and fearing for the rest of our lives. Right?

So what is the point of this COVID vaccine if it does none of that? If you still have to mask, distance, and quarantine, then what’s the point?

I keep hearing that “yes, the messaging on the COVID vaccine is all wrong.” But is it really the messaging? Or is it the truth? Is the truth that nobody is going to allow us to resume our lives post-vaccine? Are we being told the truth and we refuse to listen because it’s bad news?

Here’s a statement from Fauci. Note that even restaurants are off limits post-vaccine:

“Babies in cages” have been renamed:

Please follow the plot. If Trump does it, it’s babies in cages and fascism. If Biden does it it’s facilities and . . . by the way, did you know that he appointed the first woman of color to something?

In the USSR, our politicians were really bad public speakers. Everybody who spoke in public was really bad at it. There were a million jokes ridiculing the Soviet leadership for their garbled speech. Solzhenitsyn wrote about the ways in which the regime made it impossible to speak clearly because the ideology was supposed to be confusing.

Speaking clearly was very dangerous. The dogma changed fast, and you needed to be able to deny you had said something that had been in keeping with the dogma last week but then was declared completely unacceptable two days later.

Americans always think they have invented the wheel but all of these “lived experiences,” “whiteness isn’t about physical characteristics,” and “inclusive chest-feeding” have been done to death. You have half a continent deathly tired by all this. Yet they plough on, pompously educating the people who heard all this “anticolonial, anti-racist” blabber back in daycare on how important it is.