Alex Pretti

Instead of going in circles and repeating the same thing, let’s look at this from a different angle. People want neoliberalism so badly that they are willing to lay down their lives for it. They are willing to accept the most terrible forms of torture for it. Here is an example:

Being gang raped for 6 hours is something that a neoliberal subject uses to develop her personal brand and to monetize. It doesn’t get any clearer than this. You’ll have to tear the gang rapists, the Somali “learing centers” and all the rest of it from her cold dead hands. She loves all of it and she won’t let it go. She’s not experiencing “suicidal empathy.” This woman’s world has no empathy in it at all. She’s in the business of monetizing the emotions we leak as we recoil from the story in horror.

When we see welfare become a criminalized free-for-all, when cities turn into shantytown dumps, when the middle class remains a distant memory and child-bearing is enthroned as class privilege, let’s remember that this came about because people passionately wanted it. Let’s remember that they wanted it so badly that some of them went into the streets and laid down their lives for it. And they wouldn’t do it if alongside with everything it takes away it didn’t give them something so big, so enjoyable that no sacrifice would be too small.

Another #MeToo Story

Another story has dropped of a #MeToo-inspired destruction of a guy with a fancy job. It’s only men (and extremely rarely women) with coveted jobs that are targeted by #MeTootery because nobody else attracts the eager whoredom of #MeTootie victims.

Asher was a star: the acclaimed author of four novels, including the internationally best-selling Thirteen Reasons Why, which had been adapted into a hit Netflix show that was about to release its second season…

Asher has never been formally accused, in any forum, of harassing or harming a woman—nor ever investigated, let alone found guilty, for such an offense. But he has lost pretty much everything—not just his identity as an author but his agent, his publisher, his livelihood, and his reputation. His marriage is over. He’s been virtually unemployable since it happened, he says (do an internet search for his name and you’ll understand why) and his life savings are gone.

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-metoo-destroyed-the-author-of

Asher didn’t harass anybody. He didn’t act violently towards any woman. What he did do was have an affair with a woman on whom he cheated with a bunch of other women while cheating with all of them on his wife. In short, he treated women like disposable toilets for decades until one of the toilets finally shat back on him. They all deeply deserve each other.

The idea that women crave being ejaculated into and discarded has proven to be a lie. Who could have possibly guessed? Asher violated the gods of consent by fibbing to his mistresses. I don’t know if he’s learned anything from this but if he did, I hope it’s that consent is a terrible guide to morality.

The problem is that we still collectively can’t say this honestly. Instead, we throw around accusations of rape and harassment. It’s the general dishonesty of our sexual philosophy as a society that caused #MeToo. Women like Asher’s mistresses, of whom he had about a platoon-sized troop, pretended to “just want sex”, and Asher pretended to believe them and never asked himself why none of these women “just wanted sex” with any married janitors or unemployed guys. Neither he nor they deserve compassion. They play these stupid games and we are all on the hook because we are the ones who have to sit through endless harassment trainings when we all live in extremely faithful, happy marriages.

Who Goes Chagos?

Wow, people, whuuut? The Chagos deal is off? How could I possibly have missed this?

Trump did good. This deal was an abomination.

I’ve seen five trillion reports on something rude Trump said about the British army but I didn’t see this excellent news on Trump forcing out of existence a deal to hand over British-controlled lands.

People urgently need to do some soul-searching as to why they value words over actions. Forget Trump. This is a blight on any life project if it’s based on worshipping words and disregarding action.

Winter Storm

Two places are filled to the brim on the eve of a promised winter storm: the gym and the grocery store. I visited both and came home to make a diabetic fish stew: no potatoes, no rice, no roux. Fish, kale, and Bangkok spices.

This is the first normal winter we are having in 17 years here. Normal winter temperatures that you associate with Illinois. And it even snowed more than once.

I remember when I was pregnant with Klara, I wore the exact same clothes and shoes the whole pregnancy which culminated in February. I was glad not to have to spend money on maternity boots but it felt weird to wear a summer getup in February. It only snowed once that winter and that was the day before she was born, making the drive to the clinic for high-high-risk pregnancies very entertaining.

Cat Owner Advice

Do you have advice for a first-time cat owner?

Before anybody freaks, please remember that nobody, including me, thought I’d be a good driver. And I’m an excellent driver. I love driving and always invent new routes to get in and out of state, even if they take much longer because I love being in my car. The point being that I can be good in very unexpected arenas.

Burdensome People

A woman in Canada was euthanized because she was unwell and it bored her husband to have to take care of her. There was no place in a hospice for her and, in spite of the woman not wanting this, she was put to death.

Remember what I keep saying about healthcare collapsing when there’s no nation-state? This is what it looks like. It starts with the very elderly because it’s easier to get people to accept getting rid of them. But it doesn’t stop there. Inconvenient people who require effort and can’t be farmed for utility get swapped out for newer, healthier models. Don’t get old or sick, is the lesson.

This case is causing no outrage. We have traveled far down the road of normalizing the elimination of inconvenient people given that only a few years ago the case of a man who disconnected his comatose wife from life support to please a new bit on the side did shock people and at least provoked a discussion. In that case, the wife was not conscious and was not asking to be spared death. We are now at the stage when a person says. “Please don’t kill me” but she still gets killed because she’s a burden.

Typical

This is very symbolic of what the Left always ends up doing. They think they are punishing some rich dude who isn’t even there but instead they punish a bunch of innocent working folks who haven’t done anything at all to deserve it.

The Smartest Kid

The smartest kid in my class in the USSR was (as I know now but had no way of knowing back then) autistic. He was a very weird boy who spent half the class time sitting under a desk and quietly singing strange songs of his own making. Then he’d emerge from under the desk and stun the teacher into complete silence by delivering a mini-lecture on logarithms or something equally obscure.

This was a small, scrawny kid with a perpetually runny nose who would hang off a bar in gym, unable to do a single push-up. He was the last to enter puberty long after the other boys started shaving and talked in deep voices.

But the funny thing is that the other boys worshipped this kid. He was invited to every birthday party. He was never bullied. Once a hulking dudebro type from a neighboring trade school tried picking on this kid at the stadium where we all went for PE and all our boys rushed the dudebro in a stampede to protect the tiny, weird classmate.

He didn’t seem to need people much but the other boys always flocked to him. I’d see them smoking and drinking beer behind the school building while the weird kid talked about his logarithms, and they were all listening to him in grim but respectful silence.

Ours was a weird school. We had kids from the families of the Soviet elite who were ultra privileged and wealthy. We had students from the most prole area of town, children of alcoholics and convicts. And we had people like me, from the educated but perennially poor intelligentsia. Breaking these class barriers within the school was utterly impossible. Except for the autistic boy who was loved by every social group.

This boy was legit a genius. He became the director of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at a ridiculously young age. Last I heard, he was pulling huge research grants and had many patents for his inventions.

The Unconservative Disposition

I received this great question in the anonymous comments:

What you call a conservative disposition seems to be the normal human disposition. What would be its opposite and where do you see it?

Yes, it’s normal to get attached to people and the traditional ways of doing things. But it’s not the only approach on offer. The unconservative disposition (I’ll call it the fluid one) is very much in existence and it’s having the conservative one for lunch.

Here’s an example. The Math and Stats Department needed a secretary. It’s a real need because they have a large operation and absolutely do need clerical support. What would you do if that situation arose and you wanted to solve it from a conservative approach? Let’s assume that, for reasons completely outside your control, you can’t hire. Your largest program can’t start the semester without a secretary. What would you do?

You’d reassign a secretary to Math and Stats, right? Find a program that’s smaller and doesn’t need much clerical help and you’d reassign their secretary to Math and Stats. Is that what you would do? Congratulations, you have a conservative disposition.

But that’s not at all how it was done at my university. Everybody got reshuffled. My secretary went to Math and Stats while Anthro’s came to me, History’s went to Geography, Geography’s went to Chemistry, and Chemistry’s ended up in English. Which, in turn, sent its secretary of 18 years in the same workplace to Anthro.

We are at the beginning of the semester. Having every department train a new person at this very busy time disrupts everybody’s work. It seems like the most unproductive way of handling things. Secretaries spend half the day trudging back to the buildings where they worked for many years to visit old buddies, use the vending machines they like, get coffee from the best coffee cart which, of course, is located at the corner of their old building. It just doesn’t taste the same if it’s not from that familiar coffee cart!

The mentality that finds what I just wrote incomprehensible and that believes “you should never let a good crisis go to waste” is the fluid, anti-conservative mentality.

I talked yesterday to a colleague who accepted early retirement. She doesn’t want to but she’s not allowed to teach European history, which is her specialization. Instead, she’s pushed into teaching colonial American history. And she can’t because she doesn’t know it or have any interest in it. If you think it’s ideological, it’s not. She’s the wokest person known to humanity. But the Dean says, and I quote verbatim, “I don’t understand this weird attachment people have to teaching within their specialty.” He doesn’t understand attachment. He sincerely doesn’t get why you’d want to hold on to the field to which you have dedicated decades of your life. And then we expect him to get the pain of an office worker who misses her friend at the copy center and her tradition of walking together to the same vending machines at the same time every day.

Disruption for its own sake is what fluid mentality is about. Disrupt, change, reshuffle, “just move.” It’s a coherent and consistent way of being in the world. It’s very real and all the fancy people have adopted it.

The Dumbest Kid

The dumbest kid in my class in the USSR, who was so dumb we literally thought he was retarded, became a history professor in the US, and I’m not even kidding.