In France, food is sensational. In Portugal, food is also sensational. In Spain, food sucks absolute ass.
And then people will claim that national identity and cultural differences don’t exist.
Category: Uncategorized
Unions and Me
In answer to somebody’s very good question about my general attitude towards unions, I have this to say. I’ve always been ambivalent about unions. On the one hand, we definitely need them because look what’s happening. We really need strong unions as the era of post-work dawns on us.
But the problem is that unions always end up defending people from needing to work. My graduate union at Yale wanted to fight to abolish grades and the Latín requirement. It wanted to fight for the right of people who failed the comprehensives to continue in the program in the same status as those who passed. It wanted to fight to let us stay in the program for 8-9 years. I was an organizer for the union and I suggested that we fight also for the right of those who wanted to graduate sooner. That didn’t go over well. We always ended up fighting for the rights of absolute losers at the expense of people who actually loved the work.
In the current union, for which I was a rep at some point, we have the same problem. During COVID, the union got downright vicious to prevent me from working in-person. Mind you, I wasn’t making anybody else do it. I scheduled everybody in the exact modality they wanted. But the union went to war (and lost) to prevent me from working. Because the fact that I worked was showing up everybody else who wasn’t.
I often have a feeling that the best scenario for the unions is that everybody gets the UBI and doesn’t work at all. I don’t know why it always ends up going in that direction. I want to be enthusiastic about unions. It’s either them or neoliberalism, and we all know how I feel about that. But every single time, unions champion the right of the worst layabout to do absolutely nothing.
We are currently in a very serious situation at my school. People can lose their jobs. Programs can get eliminated. And I have a terrible feeling that the only thing that the union will achieve in its negotiations will be to remove me and install, at a modicum of my compensation, somebody who is a very good person but for a variety of personal and health reasons shouldn’t be anywhere near this job. It’s like they picked the most loserish scenario on purpose and went after it with a single-minded devotion.
I agreed not to go to the press. I could have been very effective doing that but I decided to honor the union’s plea not to do it. I refused interviews with two very serious newspapers and a local TV channel. And I’m now visited with the horrible suspicion that the only effect of all this will be to cut my term as Chair short and to replace me with somebody who… is not in any danger of being asked to speak by the press, let’s put it that way. Or to defend people’s jobs. Or fill out the simplest paperwork.
I want to believe that this is my bad luck and not all unions are like this. But what I’m seeing is not heartening.
Carrère, Camus, and the Soviet Kommunalka
I finished reading Renaud Camus’s Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings. It’s an excellent book but there was something in it that shocked me. And it wasn’t a text by Camus. It was a letter written to Camus by another French writer, the mega best-selling novelist Emmanuel Carrère. I have written about Carrère here, if anybody needs a recap. In short, Carrère is a talentless hack and a Putin-loving lefty who accuses everybody of being a Nazi while praising actual, self-described Nazis like Eduard Limonov.
In his letter to Renaud Camus, Carrère chides the philosopher for his belief that there are way too many migrants in France. He says that if a horde (his word, not mine) of African migrants were to invade his apartment, he would not complain because such an act would bring about global justice. Carrère also says that the French have absolutely no right to live in France that supersedes the right of any recent arrival to live there. Not only does he find no validity in the nation-state, he seems unaware that such a concept even exists.
In response to Carrère’s fantasy of a horde of Senegalese and Afghanis moving into his beautiful apartment and exiling him and his family into one single room while they rubbish up the rest of the place, Camus, who is intellectually on a much higher level, responds that what Carrère seeks is the repetition of the Soviet kommunalka. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, normal people were forced to accept families of uncultured peasants moving into their apartments. The owners would be relegated to one tiny room and would have to co-exist with drunk, chaotic, nasty lumpenproletarians who would blow their noses into the curtains and spit on the floor. If Carrère were at least a bit educated, he’d know that his dream was already put into practice and led to very bad results.
Carrère is very famous in France. His books sell amazingly well. He is considered a true intellectual authority in spite of being a very weak writer and a shallow person. The mega-well-read Camus, in the meantime, is banned, cancelled, and persecuted by the country’s legal apparatus for wrongthink. Another significant difference between them is that the untalented but rich Carrère is a Putinoid and the intelligent, massively banned Camus is pro-Ukrainian. This cannot possibly be any other way because birds of a globalist feather flock together, and Carrère has natural sympathies towards the aggressively neoliberal goals of Putin’s Russia.
Quote of the Day
This is from a book by Mikhail Veller, a Jewish Russian-language writer:
US Jews are the active force of left-wing movements. They work to create chaos and bring about a collapse of institutions, achieve the triumph of aggressive stupidity and enshrine a parasitic worldview. They are convinced that this constitutes progress. Why do Jews support leftist movements, helping to destroy the USA, a country where Jews are doing well and everyone is doing well – and to establish an insane socialist order led by dominant minorities? An order that will clearly and inevitably lead to cruelty, bloodshed, economic collapse, devastation, chaos and civil war. Because these minorities cannot run a country. Try to find a single example where they could. You'll find none. Why do left-wing Jews in the USA act to their own and their country's detriment? Are they suicidal morons? In other words: why do they objectively strive for a result that they cannot possibly want?
Old Age Welfare
The complexity of getting any services for retired people who aren’t familiar with the constantly changing technology is aimed at excluding them from welfare. It’s a standard neoliberal move. Old age requires a lot of welfare protection, and that’s annoying to neoliberals. I’ve noticed this on my trip to Canada where I have three retired relatives. I helped them renew their dental cards and noticed that it would have been very onerous for them without a younger person to do the online renewal.
The Way to Be
The bronze winner has the right attitude to life. Let’s all be like this happy, confident dude who makes his own joy b
Don’t Tell Him
I would never tell him. So the young dude said something stupid. Big freep. Maybe he was drunk. Why make a mega big deal about it? Why spoil a sibling relationship over a couple of clumsy phrases? I understand that the wife is hormonal but she needs to get over herself. In 30, 40, 50 years, her husband will really need his brother. Robbing him of that over a chance to feel self-righteous stinks.
Grim and Cynical
Wait, so it turns out that this whole time Biden also had a very bad form of cancer? And they still tried to run him?
That’s so grim. And cynical.
Union Betrayal
Whoever said I was dumb to trust the union was right. OK, I know nobody said it in those words but people thought it. And they were right.
The union conspired with my colleagues to exclude me from the bargaining process. They broke the procedure set out in our collective bargaining agreement, so the need to exclude me must have been pretty pressing.
At this point, I have no idea what’s been negotiated because it’s been done behind my back.
This all happened a week ago, and I so don’t care that I didn’t even bother to blog about it. But then I thought that I owe the people who tried to warn me about the duplicity of the union an honest account of the story.
I’m not putting a brave face on it, I promise. I really don’t care. I acted with absolute integrity throughout the process. I sacrificed my interests to protect somebody who had caused me a lot of annoyance because it was morally right. I waged a battle against my baser instincts and won. Plus, I have my writing accelerator next week and who cares about department drama.
True Feelings
Freud urgently needed to decipher the true feelings of the Germans behind this social housing for refugees:
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