Clarissa's Blog

This stomach bug I have is very weird. It goes away for a couple of days and I think it’s all good but then it comes back. The worst part is that it’s debilitating. I feel completely drained. 

I can’t wait to see our earnest progressives defend the sacred right of the Ivies to pay no taxes on the profits they get from investing into private jails and other equally wonderful ventures. I mean, Trump is opposed to it, so it’s got to be good. 

Wow, finally! I have dreamt about this for years:

Their tax proposal seeks to subject private universities with endowments of more than $250,000 per full-time student to a 1.4 percent excise tax on their net investment income. There are about 70 such universities. . . .

This is fantastic news, folks. The Ivies and other super expensive colleges are corporations that have been able to avoid taxation under entirely false pretenses up to now. They sit on those multi-billion endowments while forcing underpaid instructors to pay out of pocket for photocopies they use in class. 

I’m now understanding why the vile Larry Summers is so against this tax plan. He’s benefited massively from being part of such an untaxed corporation. 

Wow, this is huge. I didn’t think I’d ever see this even attempted. It’s a dream come true.

Society can be known by the kind of mental pathology it breeds, or rather, by what it labels pathological:

The vast majority of mental disorders are not illnesses, but biopsychosocial manifestations in individuals of broader social problems.

 Verhaeghe’s book studies the kind of mental issues that neoliberalism produces. Those who are damaged psychologically by neoliberalism are pathologized and dismissed with meaningless circular diagnoses:

A DSM-style psychodiagnostic classification is a moral ranking used to accuse people and get rid of them by means of labels.

The circular diagnoses (she has attention deficit and is hyperactive because she suffers from hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder) only make people feel guilty without offering any real help:

The description is presented as the cause of what is being described, and the use of abbreviations means we don’t see through the trick. 

There are no authority figures or centers of power that can be easily pinpointed in the world of liquid, diffuse power relations. People have to self-regulate and self-discipline in the service of power that they can neither see nor name. The absence of stable communities makes it hard to build and identity and leads to violence and psychological disturbances.

The book is a little basic for me because I knew most of this stuff. But Verhaeghe is a great popularizer. In my opinion, he doesn’t go nearly far enough in explaining how neoliberalism breeds mental illness but I understand that the resistance to these ideas is incredibly high, so he has to tread lightly.

You can laugh at the Bonjour-Hi legislation but tomorrow the provincial government will start wasting huge sums of money on sending inspectors to go on covert operations to convenience stores and diners, slapping fines on the miserable owners who slip up and breathe in after “bonjour”, which can be interpreted as the illegal “hi.” There are already crowds of these language police doing similar kinds of thing, so there’ll simply be more. 

So when you say “I want to pay higher taxes and get social services in return like in Canada”, remember that the social services you get in exchange for those ridiculously high taxes are these language police with their Pastagates and also the valuable privilege of waiting for a doctor’s appointment for months only to hear, “Psh, you don’t really think I have time to look at your test results, do you?”

​QUEBEC — Deciding Quebecers needed a course in “hospitality 101,” the National Assembly is formally asking merchants to warmly greet clients with “Bonjour,” and drop the old standard “Bonjour-Hi.”

So much effort, and still no Saizarbitoria in sight. You can abolish every Bonjour-Hi in sight and organize a million and one Pastagates, but there will either be great art created in the language or there won’t. Look at Russian. The largest country on Earth, an imperial power, but hasn’t produced any literature in almost a century. You can’t socially engineer this stuff. You just can’t. 

“A society in which differences are too great is as flawed as a society that imposes total uniformity: both breed violence. . . If the focus comes entirely to lie on separation and individualism, group forming suffers, leading to competition, social isolation, and loneliness. This provokes narcissistic aggression against the mirror image that we perceive in the other. . . It doesn’t take much for violence to ensure.”

                            – Paul Verhaeghe.

This is about the increase in narcissistic fracturing we discussed recently and the flare-up neo-Nazi tendencies.

“Schizophrenia has a hereditary component involving a combination of at least 10 genes. The presence of that combination increases the risk of this severe psychiatric disorder by 15-20%; the rest is down to external factors, one of the most important of which is being born in and growing up in a big city.”

A fellow on MSNBC goes, “I don’t care about tax cuts! They don’t matter! All that matters right now is the Mueller investigation. Because it goes to the heart of what we are as a republic.”

And I’m sitting there, thinking, gosh, man, what if somebody hears you? I mean, you are on TV so somebody just might. How do you think it sounds to people in Missouri or Montana that you don’t care about their taxes? 

And no, it’s not just this one guy. It’s the whole agenda of making sure the next elections are lost, too. 

Since I am interested in tax cuts, I’d love to see a table or a breakdown of how the proposed bill will impact my income group. If anybody comes across a reliable, non-partisan breakdown, please share. 

It’s curious that people who think there’s nothing better than complete liberation of an individual (aka a desiring subject) from all constraints are the same ones who worry about the planet’s resources being depleted. And the people who don’t give a crap about the global warming or finite resources are waging a quixotic battle to resist this complete liberation of desiring consumers. 

The most interesting question all of us should answer is where each of us believes the barrier to the desiring individual’s freedom should be. And who or what should place and maintain that barrier. God is no longer there to do that even for the very religious. The state is retreating from the task. The community has crumbled away. Where will the subjectivity that recognizes barriers come from?