Clarissa's Blog

The eclipse culminated with a huge bout of thunder. The heat is supposed to drop after it rains. That was one useful eclipse.

The eclipse is unexpectedly cool, folks. I’m actually feeling it. Yay, I’m not as old and jaded as I thought I was. 

As the saying goes, after the age of 40 you have to choose whether to prolong your life or prolong your. . . Please guess the last word of the saying.

Instead of having the regular, familiar and comforting nightmares about coming to the first day of classes without any syllabi, tonight I had nightmares about Jewish pogroms and having to escape the slaughter.

I was completely wrong about July. It turned out to be a great month for the blog, with really good readership numbers. It was the best July the blog has ever known by far. 

Thank you for reading! Much more exciting stuff awaits us. 

This is one of the rare times that I don’t envy the environment in the world of business. At my work, we are practically exhorted to take students out to view the eclipse instead of teaching regular classes. 

But this feeling is as rare as the eclipse. Just an example. We had a 2,5-hour all-faculty meeting on Friday. A huge group of people, free coffee, free food, the eve of the new academic year, finally we have a budget and can pay for academic travel and other good stuff. You’d think anybody could get people energized and excited under these circumstances. At least, you should get me excited because I don’t require all that much. But no. It didn’t look like a single person got a shot of energy out of it. 

(It used to be different back when I first came here but the administrators who knew how to do this have all left).

It’s beyond unfair that I work among such a large collectivity, and I have to do all this for myself.  All of my motivation, energy, drive and fire have to come from within. And it’s tiresome. 

In contrast, you should experience the environment at my sister’s business. The air is crackling with energy. People look happy to be there and convinced that what they do has value. Nobody mopes. Or at least not 💯% of the time. So yes, I envy that. 

I don’t get this. Why shouldn’t kids play in the backyard if they are lucky enough to have one?

A beautiful piece on why it’s important to read books we don’t understand.

How is it even possible to fit souch stupidity into such a short post?

Just as I started kind of liking Applebee’s, it decided to dial back the good changes. 

Walmart came up with a very dumb idea. 

Turns out that school vouchers are supported by the majority of African Americans.

Nothing else this time because the blogroll has been signally boring this week. 

And within the same trend, a fellow I’ve been following on FB has announced today that he has to quit FB because he’s about to lose his job. His employers are getting tired of hearing from endlessly indignant right-fighters who are outraged by his posts. He’s the kind of writer who can’t be easily identified as being on the left or on the right. Meaning, the only kind it makes sense to read. 

Anybody with even a glimmer of originality always ends up broken down and pushed out of blogging or social media. The only alternative is to avoid any subjects that can prove remotely controversial. Or somehow find a way to burrow into the deepest obscurity.

Internet enthusiasts used to warn against the dangers of governmental censorship of the Internet. Now they are all saying that in their wildest nightmares they couldn’t have anticipated how eagerly and happily users would self-censor until turning the Internet into a place to shop, gossip, and stare at cute kitties. 

Very, very sad news about Fredrik deBoer. I have no idea what happened but the linked post sounds very desperate.

I hope Freddie finds help in the place where he’s going. 

The article I liked in the collection is by journalist Paul Mason. He is from a working class family, so he tends to idealize the working classes, especially the way they were in his childhood. But at least, he’s not engaging in a wholesale condemnation of workers as racistsandsexists that is so fashionable right now. 

Mason explains that working classes withdraw their consent for mass migration into the country not because they are innately evil but because they legitimately feel that their working class culture is being eroded into oblivion. Plus, there are great observations on how neoliberalism tries to annihilate “space, community and non-abstract labour.”

Here is a quote I liked from the piece: 

The authoritarian populism that is mobilizing working class voters is, essentially, a demand for deglobalization. It’s reactionary nature lies. . . in its complete ignorance of the complexity of the task.

But, Mason says, those under 35 have so interiorized the lingo of joyful acceptance of globalization that it’s not going to be turned back. Mason is very optimistic about the “young networked internationalists” while I’m not, so he sees a very positive scenario of “saving globalization by ditching neoliberalism.” I don’t always want to be a negative scarecrow, so I’ll just let it stand for the moment.