Opinions, art, debate
I’m the best worst student known to humanity. The Dean made us read a book of neoliberal propaganda and hold a two-hour discussion of it.
Obviously, I didn’t even consider opening the book, let alone reading it. But I easily made the impression of having perused it with great care and attention. During the discussion, I’d crack the book open, catch a random sentence, and then say, “what I found especially provocative / curious / engaging, etc is” and reproduce the random sentence verbatim.
A man like what? Has somebody been listening to Russian propaganda?
Bandera is our José Martí or Simón Bolívar. He fought for national independence. It’s normal for people to celebrate their national heroes. Every nation-state has theirs and celebrates them. I’m not sure what specifically bothers you about this very normal behavior.
This is clearly part of Trump’s negotiations with China. He accepts these 600,000 students in exchange for something. Rare earth minerals, maybe? In any case, I understand, though not approve, what Trump is doing.
China’s strategy is harder to fathom. It has adopted the strategy of El Salvador before Bukele. El Salvador would aggressively push the best and the brightest out of the country so that they’d send back money and create a semblance of an economy. This is done by desperate, failed countries with a surplus population. Everybody else tries to keep its elite instead of throwing it away like a used Kleenex.
How bad are things in China that they are so desperate to get rid of these 600,000 young people?
JD Vance is now informing us that WW2 ended in a negotiated settlement.
No, you incredible pussy. It ended because we killed those bastards dead. That’s how it ended, you unpatriotic piece of utter ridiculousness.
Honestly, if in 2028 it comes to Newsom vs Vance, I’m kind of not that opposed to Newsom.
I found an intense, unexpected pleasure in talking to students about socialism.
The future is bright.
I don’t like either design, to be honest. The first one is what a Soviet antiquarian would have. The second one is the antiquarian’s nouveau riche son after 1991.
They are meant to be special, privileged. It is their default, as failure is the default of their less affluent contemporaries. A network of adults will nourish them, cultivate them, pass them on to other adults. It is a world of recommendations. It is a world of reputations. But in this world their lives can be derailed, overturned. If they cross a certain line. If they make a serious blunder, and are caught. By instinct they know to placate some adults more than others. Adults who wield power, and are willing to use it.
Joyce Carol Oates, Fox
Oates is speaking about students at expensive private schools. They are nurtured and groomed to be the elite. Their admittance and permanence in that class hinges entirely on their capacity to absorb, retain, reproduce, and enforce the behavioral and linguistic norms of the elite. These norms are designed to be abstruse and counterintuitive in order to weed out as many people as possible. They are also—and in this the new elite differs from the way elites were historically—highly mutable.
Every society has an elite. That is not in itself bad. Egalitarianism is rooted in a fantasy, and not a particularly smart one. Historically, an elite was one by birth. This is “unfair” but the positive side of this unfairness was that the elites did not exist in a state of abject terror that their elite status would be taken away. Today, you get expelled from the elite for one wrong word uttered years ago. Like everything else, status has become highly fluid. People live in fear of losing theirs.
Terrified elites are destructive. They flail about, embracing every fad that makes them look exceptional and deserving of their status. Everything new eventually becomes not new. This requires more fads to be invented because the inner circle isn’t stable. It gets redrawn all the time, and ideological obsessions, newspeak, and boutique beliefs are the crayons used to redraw it.
We threw away the idea of birthright aristocracy because it was “unfair” but the system we created in its place is hardly any more fair. Access is still barred to people who can’t empty themselves completely in order to adopt any shape that serves as a ticket to entry at any given moment.
That people who do manage this kind of fluidity are highly neurotic is a given. The human brain appreciates stability and routine above all. The need to throw away all certainty and wipe off all content in order to retain your membership in the elite is psychologically destructive.
The whole point of having a birthright elite was to have a class that was rooted in tradition. It had to maintain the cultural legacy of society because that maintenance work was its reason to exist. Today’s elites do the exact opposite. They erode, take apart, and destroy. Having an elite that works to unmake the culture instead of preserving it is the only thing we gained by pursuing fairness.
Orthodoxy is, indeed, experiencing a boom. The majority of our parishioners are now very young men. Two of them are African American.
Orthodox Christianity has no roots in the African American community, so these young men must have really wanted to be there. As an Orthodox parish in a very white town, you know you are getting popular when black people make a point of seeking you out.
All we are missing is some young women. Sadly, we are not in a place culturally where young women do the sort of seeking that brought their male peers to our parish.
In Victorian England, most people didn’t have clocks or watches. They had no way of knowing when to get up. This brought into existence the profession called knocking-upping.
A knocker-upper walked down the street and tapped on the windows with a long pole or a broom.
People paid him a penny a month. AI tells me that it’s around 50-75 cents in today’s money.
For some reason, I’m finding the existence of a knocker-upper to be very endearing.
We have embraced this strange belief that every person should spend their entire twenties and probably also thirties choosing their way to a highly individual, boutique and bespoke recipe for happiness. The idea is that there’s absolutely no playbook you can follow. The previous generations didn’t leave us any knowledge regarding what works for people. Everybody always starts from scratch and flails completely alone in efforts to construct a tailor-made lifestyle that reflects every aspect of their complex and different individuality.
People waste years or even decades of their lives chasing after an individual formula for happiness only because the belief in its existence flatters their ego.
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