Category: Uncategorized

Stuff of Nightmares

~ Clarissa ~ 39 Comments

I don’t know if this exists but the mere possibility fills me with terror:

I’m not referring to the old washer, of course, but to the new one that is connected to a cloud. That stuff freaks me out royally.

Another thing I hate passionately are subscriptions. I saw online that there’s now an app that finds the subscriptions you long forgot about and helps you cancel them. Why we agreed to the fishy, dishonest subscription model in everything is incomprehensible. It’s a money drain on customers that gives us zero value.

Church and State

~ Clarissa ~ 17 Comments

Why was the government funding the hobbies of Catholic bishops? Aren’t we supposed to have a separation of church and state? I’m not Catholic. Why should my taxes fund Catholic programs?

No disrespect at all to Catholics but I would be equally opposed to taking the money of Catholic, Protestant or atheist taxpayers and  putting them towards Orthodox initiatives. How is it decided, anyway, whose denomination gets funded and at what rate?

Forget the Twentieth Century

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Conservatives are so terrified that liberals will call them racist that they will lionize any non-white lefty grifter to prove they aren’t. We will never stop being enslaved by the pathologies of the twentieth century until we move on from our fixation on racism.

The Final Stretch

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

I have entered the final stretch of writing my book. Final doesn’t mean short but there’s finally an end in sight. Writing a book is done in such small (compared to the whole) increments that it’s hard not to feel like it will never be completed. Now, however, I’m sure it will be completed.

In the meantime, what should we talk about? What interesting subjects have not been covered yet? Suggestions welcome and encouraged.

Switched Channels

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

This is very well observed. The same people who cheered the murder of a pharma CEO have now turned into Reaganite free-marketeers.

“The markets don’t like this!” say yesterday’s Democratic Socialists who have now embraced anthropomorphizing the market.

Does Rape Exist?

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

I agree. Men have no physical advantage over women. Men are women are physically equally strong. This means that rape victims – which are overwhelmingly women – are all liars. Rape doesn’t exist.

Or does it?

Either men are physically stronger than women, or they aren’t. If they aren’t, rape doesn’t exist.

Press Strategy

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

I’m refusing all requests from the press to talk about the collapse at my university. The only reason I’m refusing is because the union asked the membership to do that. The union has its own press strategy, the leadership says, and please to let them unfold it.

I’m putting a lot of trust in the union here. Let’s hope it doesn’t sell us out.

I don’t know, am I being dumb trusting the union as much as I do?

Can We Ditch Neoliberalism?

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

I don’t believe that ditching neoliberalism will work, unfortunately. We’d all have to become a lot more disciplined, consume a lot less in every way, acquire a lot less cheap plastic stuff, cheap plastic relationships, cheap plastic entertainment. Learn to make things, feelings, relationships, ideas last. I don’t think there’s a large collective wish for any form of self-restraint.

Difficulties of US Manufacturing

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

I started reading what seemed a reasonable article on the complexities of bringing American manufacturing back. The argument seemed to make sense until it degenerated into the favorite neoliberal idea about the low quality of Americans compared to other, more adequate humans:

Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.

In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders.

https://x.com/Molson_Hart/status/1908940952908996984?t=iSCBRb-Ecf8jTQRB7p5gFw&s=19

It goes on in that vein but I think we get the general idea. The only conclusion we can draw from the description of these utterly horrible, useless Americans is that things would be enormously better if they could be replaced by better-quality humans.

It’s interesting that nobody ever explains when exactly Americans went so bad. Was it before, during or after their jobs were shipped overseas? Were they always such exceptionally low-quality people or is this a new development?

By the way, I found the link on Curtis Yarvin’s X account. He’s wealthy and doesn’t like Trump’s tariffs. I’m mentioning this to inject some complexity into people’s thinking.

Also, for additional complexity, the quote I posted is an almost verbatim rendering of parts of JD Vance’s autobiography.

Package Deal

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

Yes, the neoliberalization of the soul is just as bad as that of the market. It’s a package deal. It changes the workplace, the family, the self-perception.

That’s why people who are doing well economically and have been impacted very positively by offshoring manufacturing jobs are just as depressed and overmedicated as everybody else. That’s why every social class is living its own version of a moral collapse. That’s why the children of the rich are as lonely and lost as those of the poor.