Opinions, art, debate
Remember the pregnant brain-dead woman we discussed a few days ago? She was 21 weeks pregnant, not nine. But the article I linked did make it sound like it was 9 weeks. This happens every time I access MSM. Lies, manipulations, everything is perverted.
Now imagine what happens to people who get all their news from these sources. And then we wonder why they believe in Canadian concentration camps, insurrections, and crowds of kids perishing from COVID.
This reminded me of yesterday’s discussion about a person finding non-existent “rape culture” in a cartoon.
It’s like when your finger is hurt and everything rubs against that poor finger. It takes on an oversized role in your life. It throbs and pulsates. This is how it is for neurotics. Life itself becomes about their neurosis.
I wish people who keep saying this explained what they mean. Are they claiming that Corey Comperatore was not killed and the other two men were not wounded? That the Comperatore family were what? Actors? That authorities in a Dem state conspired with Trump to create these fake victims? I hope nobody is claiming that because it’s on par with the Sandy Hook shooting being fake.
So if there was a shooting, is the narrative that Trump hired somebody to shoot in his direction? That’s insanely risky. Not a trained sniper but some crazy kid? Trump clearly likes himself very much. He wouldn’t stand there knowing that a weirdo boy was pointing a rifle at him.
People keep repeating that it’s staged. Crowds of people at work believe it. But I can never get them to explain what they mean.
The ongoing discussion about the cartoon I posted yesterday reminded me of a Latin American literature course I took as an undergrad. We read a short story where there was a description of a tree growing in main character’s garden. The professor told us the tree symbolized a penis and went on and on and on about that imaginary penis. I tried very hard to see where she was finding a penis in the description of the tree but failed completely.
When I complained to another student (the burly Mexican dude I wrote about previously), he had an explanation.
“The prof is a lesbian,” he said. “Just let it go, you are too young to get this stuff.”
“What makes us French is that there are no more French. They don’t exist anymore.”
And it’s like that with everything. What makes women women is that there are no more women. There are no more children as a discrete clear category, no more humans. Everything is permeable, everything means its opposite. Democracy means autopen and candidates removed from the ballot because they are icky. Freedom means curfews and cancellations. Poetry means Amanda Gorman. Banned books means incessantly and aggressively peddled ones. Normal means fascist and fascist means normal. Anti-racist means extremely racist.
Can the Left be refashioned into something decent? Can it coalesce around something that will not repel large swaths of people? Can it find a new, more positive direction?
There’s no going back to “the means of production.” Working classes and boutique identities of pansexual, polyamorous gender-queers cannot coexist. Non-binary pansexuals only exist because they own the means of production and they aren’t going to be sharing them with plumbers and grocery clerks. The whole point of being a pansexual gender-queer is to signal contempt for the plumbers, to domineer and eviscerate them.
Do I have any far-right readers? I’d love to know if I do. I’ve never met anybody far-right in RL because where would I find them? But at least to have some come to the blog would be fun.
Dear far-right readers, please make yourselves known.
As for me, I can say that my child is on the regular schedule of childhood vaccinations. We all know how I feel about my child, so that’s the best answer I can give.
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.
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.
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.
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