Clarissa's Blog

In private colkeges

students who don’t fall into the “athlete,” “legacy,” or “diversity” slots are called “over the transom.”

There is this story on the news about a woman in the UK who is protesting against the subway ads that say obesity causes cancer. She says the ads make her feel guilty for being fat and that’s intolerable.

We can rag on the woman because yes, her complaints are silly. It’s true that obesity elevates cancer risks, and denying that is not a rational thing to do.

However, we can also look at the reasons why so many people perceive shaming or guilt-tripping in all kinds of things and react as strongly as this woman did to the most obvious, inoffensive statements.

All of the precariousness and risk of neoliberal societies is for individuals to deal with. If you are not successful, that’s your fault for not being a good entrepreneur of the self. You need to manage yourself better. And whenever anything bad happens, it’s your fault for not running fast enough, for not processing the change well enough, for not managing yourself better. That’s the essence of the neoliberal ideology I keep talking about.

People get tired of the constant interiorization of guilt for everything, so they freak out over the seemingly insignificant, trivial things like that subway ad about obesity. The woman who is protesting chose this particular innocent ad to concentrate on but what actually causes her discomfort is the larger environment of the constant recitation of the idea that there is nothing but isolated individuals who are completely responsible for everything that happens to them.

We all know how I feel about organized labor. It is crucially, crucially important to have strong, functioning labor unions.

Look at the teacher strike in West Virginia. Isn’t it a wonderful, inspiring thing? The teachers refused to be further mistreated and abused. They organized, stuck together, and achieved a victory.

If you have ever done any organizing, you know that it’s not about making a logical argument, showing the numbers, and proving points. What’s a lot more important are human relationships, emotions, trust, feeling comfortable with people in your unit.

It’s a lot harder to organize in an environment of mistrust, suspicion, and mutual dislike between workers. Any collective action requires an enormous amount of trust between participants because getting atomized, alienated consumers to do any collective action at all is ridiculously hard.

The vision of self as an island that is better off outside of any collective process is formed slowly and by means we don’t even notice. Those people who tell me, “I don’t need a union. I can negotiate on my own behalf” or “and how do I know you won’t tell the dean what we’ve been talking about here?” are guided towards this vision of self and others. There’s a million strategies to make workers fear and avoid each other.

All of these microaggressions seminars, ethics trainings, gender parity tutorials – their whole point is to make workers detest each other. We tell ourselves they have no effect on us but that’s delusional and well in line with thinking that an exceptional individual can bootstrap themselves out of ideological and intellectual processes that everybody is subject to.

It does have an effect. All of these exhortations to suspect and fear our fellow worker have an effect. Nobody is an exceptional cookie that can rise above this. This is poisoning the workplace for all of us. This is what we need to resist.

Unless we have a clear vision of all the anti-labor strategies employed against us, we won’t win.

I’m baffled by this FB advice:

Never struggle peeling a banana again with this simple tip: turn it upside down! If you watch chimps peeling bananas, you’ll notice they start from the bottom.

Does anybody truly struggle peeling a banana?? More importantly, who on Earth tries to peel it from the top? That’s so weird.

In the blink of an eye, the most rabid of progressives have turned into free trade fanatics. It’s like they’ve been practicing for this their whole lives while sitting deep in a free trade closet.

Finally, the NYTimes is getting over it’s attack of prissiness and is managing to squeeze out a report that is at least not completely bullshit:

A Belarusian escort with close ties to a powerful Russian oligarch said from behind bars in Bangkok on Monday that she had more than 16 hours of audio recordings that could help shed light on Russian meddling in United States elections.

The “close ties” part is still hilarious. And the recordings that “could shed light” have been already published a million times. There’s nothing new here. Everybody who wanted to find out about this, already has. The Russians are going out of their way to make Mueller notice this.

Unbelievable. The next episode of Dr Phil will feature Anthony Scaramucci. Maybe I should start watching the cartoon channel for my escape from all this.

What’s next, Ivanka Trump on Shark Tank? God, I just realized that it’s actually quite possible.

The reason why I hate The Shape of Water is that it will give rise to endless daft “yay for transhumanism” academic articles and conferences. And I detest this shit even more than “ecofeminism.”

Klara’s favorite thing to do right now is for us to sit in front of each other and for me to talk while she listens with an enraptured face and those huge blue eyes staring with the kind of attention that a teacher in me can’t resist.

“What do you want to do?” I ask. “Play-Doh? Aqua mat? Dollies?”

“I want talking, mamma,” she says. “More talking.”

Sometimes she makes requests. “Talking about bear, mamma” or “talking about grandpa.”

She also loves observing me talk to other people. She sits there, quiet as a mouse (which otherwise never happens) and clearly enjoys the interactions.

She also now loves finishing the sentences in the books I read. Sometimes she doesn’t remember how a phrase ends, so she comes up with her own version which always rhymes and is often better than the original.

And she is finally in the word-artistry phase. For instance, she was fascinated to discover that “paci” is short for “pacifier.” So now anything she likes gets “fier” added to it. I’m now “mammafier” and N is “papafier.”

Yesterday she learned the expression “mamma is having a peach of a day,” so she now informs people that “mamma having peach of a day. Mamma eating peaches. Klara no eating peaches. Peaches are yucky. Eat more peach, mamma.”

She also learned from me to announce, “I’m having a great time. I’m enjoying myself”, which has strangers on the playground collapse in an attack of cuteness.