Clarissa's Blog

It’s like people are congenitally incapable of learning. The media are bursting with the endless speculation as to why Comey was fired. Nobody has been able to interiorize a simple fact: Putin wants to see the US in utter disarray to bolster his argument that democracy always leads to chaos. 

That’s what he wants. Chaos, disruption, confusion. And these days he gets exactly what he wants in the US.

There is no other goal beyond the chaos. The chaos is the end in itself. 

I don’t have the slightest doubt that Putin is over the moon about the investigation of the Russian involvement in the US election. If the investigation stalls, I’m sure he’ll feed it. This is why I hate Maddow with her dumb show. There wasn’t a peep out of her about Russians when it could have had a positive impact. But now, when this talk of Russians does nothing but feed Putin’s ego, she can’t shut up. 

If Trump is impeached, this will do zero good to us (Mr. Fanatic Pence, hello) but will make Putin ultra happy and strengthen him to keep messing with the electoral process in the US.

A little boy noticed that some of the kids playing in his street are very clean and neat while others are super mussed up and dirty. 

“Grandma, why are these other kids so dirty?” he asked. 

“Because they are Russian,” Grandma said. 

“Then who are we?” asked the neat little boy. 

“We are Jewish.”

According to this classification, our Klara is very Russian. By the end of the day, her outfit bears evidence of a day spent running, grabbing, crawling, playing, trying to feed herself, and exploring the texture of every object she comes across. 

Comey gave Trump the presidency, and in return Trump not only fired but humiliated him.  

Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow. 

Let’s see who’s the next expendable simpleton. 

Every evening Rachel Maddow triumphantly and painstakingly proves that 2 + 2 = 4.

Drives me up a tree. 

Where the eff was all this when it could actually make a difference?

If anybody thinks that dropping the Rauner-hijacked health insurance is easy should think again. The website is broken, and the HR people pretend to be too busy to help. 

I literally don’t know a profession that is as riddled with useless, self-important folks as HR. 

And I hate Rainer, too. 

For my sins, Klara really likes dogs. During our walks, she is on the lookout for them, and when she sees one, she gets very happy and makes woof-woof sounds at them. She learned this from her favorite book about a puppy called Biscuit. I hate this book because Biscuit is very dumb. He never says anything but woof-woof. But Klara loves Biscuit, and I recently discovered that there’s a whole Buscuit-related industry, with books, toys, and everything else. 

I tried getting her interested in kittens because I hate them less but it’s not working. Or maybe potted plants because I almost don’t mind them. 

Does anybody know if large pet stores have actual pets inside them so that I can take her to look at them?

I used to read a ton of this sort of crap, and what’s worse, I believed it. The result of the ton of readings was that I was persuaded that there were no black people in the suburbs because they all lived in The Wire-sque ghettos. 

Then I actually moved to the suburbs in a deep red area and found out how wrong I’d been. I discovered that there is a robust African American middle class that lives in the suburbs in beautiful big houses with enormous lawns. I now feel like a dumb racist fuck for allowing an offensive image of black people to be implanted in my head. My only excuse is that I’m an immigrant, and it took me a while to make the money to actually move to the suburbs and see for myself. 

Mind you, this all happened long before I read or watched any conservative or even centrist media. It was only after I started to suspect that something was wrong with my favorite The Nation that I decided to give a try to American Conservative. For years, I’d only read sources like The Nation, Jacobin, and Feministing, and wouldn’t even touch anything like Washington Post because I thought it was a mouthpiece of rabid religious fanatics. 

This is the most insidious kind of racism, by the way. This strand of liberalism is so invested into pitying African Americans that its adepts produce a skewed image which does enormous harm. 

And they do the same thing for immigrants in intellectual professions

Turns out Spain was exceptionally mean towards Jews starting as early as the 7th century. Everywhere else in the post-Roman territories the secular Roman tradition of respecting the Jewish right to worship was being upheld even by Christian bishops. Except in Visigoth Spain where this Roman tradition was discarded.

Or take that horrible woman from Duke Divinity I linked to yesterday. It’s clear from her comment that she doesn’t give a fuck about diversity. All she wants is an opportunity to hound and bully somebody. Or take the people who are gleefully hounding Tuvel for publishing a scholarly article they don’t like. They simply enjoy her pain, that’s all. 

There are people like that in every society but the rest of us choose whether to tolerate them or shut them down. During Stalinism, crowds of such eager bullies adopted the rhetoric of the proletarian revolution to persecute and destroy people they didn’t like. Nobody could stop them because they had the world’s most powerful repressive apparatus on their side. 

What’s wrong with us, though? Why do we put up with this shit? If normal people – who are an enormous majority- started telling such bullies “What you are doing is horrible. I won’t speak to you or be in the same room with you until you stop”, the bullies would soon fold. Only a total sociopath can tolerate social exclusion, and they are not sociopath. They are simply bad people. And we have bought into the neoliberal alienation to the extent that we don’t see it as our collective responsibility to school bad people into good behavior. 

Every Saturday and Sunday at 5 pm I retire to my room and stay there for 2 hours, reading newspapers, listening to birds sing outside, scrolling through my newsfeed, watching Shark Tank recordings, and applying facial care products. Nothing work or family related because I’m more than my work or my family. 

On weekdays, I have my time between 8 and 10 pm, and I have never succumbed to the unhealthy temptation to grade or check work emails in that time. 

Yes, you can, as well.