Clarissa's Blog

“Feminism is about giving women choice,” chirps some dumb starlet. 

No, you stupid piece of fluff. That’s what consumerism is about. 

The reason I’m crabby is that on Monday I stayed at home with Klara but there was a snowstorm, and I couldn’t take her out. I stayed home today but it’s the coldest day of the year, and I can’t take her out. It will be warm on Friday but I’m in meetings all day long, so I won’t be able to stay home and go out with Klara. And I have such great, fun plans for taking her out! Grrrrr.

There’s good news, though, and it concerns Trump’s childcare plan:

“[The plan] was just a total sell-out to everything that the left has been clamoring for.”

Since then, many more details about the plan have come out. At an estimated cost of $500 billion over ten years, it allows families to deduct childcare expenses from their taxes, up to the average cost of childcare in each state. The proposal also includes a new tax-free savings vehicle for childcare expenses, and a smaller tax credit for low income families.

This is way more important than some ancient tax return that proves absolutely nothing and serves no purpose at all. But the dumb tax return is being covered non-stop while the childcare plan isn’t. 

And nobody can say anything against Ivanka working on this since both Clinton and Obama foisted their wives onto our collective notice constantly. And a wife doesn’t even have unbreakable permanency inscribed in the nature of her relationship with a president like a child does. 

As for the objection that the plan is somehow insufficient, it’s idiotic because Obama had 8 years for a “sufficient” reform but nothing was done. 

And since I’m in a crabby mood anyway, I’ve got to ask, what the hell is Michael Brown’s mother doing, trying so actively to paint him as a gangster? The boy is dead, why tarnish his memory? 

Or does she honestly think that being a drug dealer gives him a better reputation than stealing? That’s just dumb because you can steal once and do it entirely on your own. But drugs mean you are part of something,  a gang. 

I’d much prefer if in the Michael Brown story we all concentrated on what matters: an unarmed person was shot six times and left lying in the street like a stray dog. 

The “alternative minimum tax” (AMT), which was introduced to ensure the mega wealthy pay a fairer share of tax, comprised $31m of Trump’s tax bill.

I don’t get the point of such ridiculous exaggeration. AMT starts and $200,000, which is the income of about half the town where I live. Educated professionals  (who are not professors, of course) don’t make less than $100,000 here in the boondocks and less than $150,000 on the coasts, and if there are two of them, that’s the AMT threshold right there. By referring to them as “mega wealthy”, which is patently ridiculous, you have made a step towards losing them in the next election. 

This could be worded in a slightly different way to avoid angering people. These tiresome rhetorical flourishes (neo-Nazis! Mega wealthy! White supremacy! Trump wants to murder me!) repel potential voters because nobody wants to be allied with screeching freaks.

And this is precisely why it makes no sense to be offended by the people’s eagerness for fake news. You exported them to the virtual world of fantasy. You can’t expect them to live there but consume the news from your world, the world from which you ejected them.

In the past, surplus populations produced by modernization (and that’s what modernization always does, it creates surplus people) were exported to the colonies.

Today there are no more physical spaces where the unwanted people rejected by modernization can be dumped. So instead, they are exported into the virtual world of the Internet and the fantasy world of drug addiction.

Drugs and screens are today what Canada and Australia were in the 19th century.

At the time when it was possible and necessary to resist liquid capital through not allowing it to shuffle large masses of desperate scabs around to break Labor, the EU did the opposite. It bent over backwards to help liquid capital destroy Labor. And now people can’t forgive it for doing that and don’t trust it. 

Today, only global measures can address globally generated problems. But the EU has lost people’s trust that it will do anything but assist liquid capital in its exploitation schemes. Can anybody really blame people for losing trust after being so massively betrayed? This is why I can’t blame the British people for Brexit. 

The way Labor fought against an excessive exploitation by capital was through strikes. The workers would organize, make demands and walk out. The capitalists would bring in scabs- desperate people who’d agree to work in exploitative conditions- to break the strike. Workers would resist. The result was an improvement of labor conditions. Everybody knows that. 

Then the capital became liquid and went global. And so did this whole process I just described. This is why unions lost power. The capital doesn’t operate locally. It started using globally produced desperate workers to break the Labor’s power.

But then there is the third stage in this process: scabs have become not human. And that spells the ultimate defeat of Labor because you can’t effectively stop technological advances. 

The problem is that everybody who is looking for a solution is stuck in the first two stages. 

So. Remember how I bugged you, folks, with the nation-state while writing the book? 

Well, after a short respite, prepare to be bugged again. 

I have a new project: citizenship. 

Hey, at least it’s something everybody can understand and discuss. Let’s all be happy I’m not into beta binomials. Because those suckers are crazy boring, believe me. 

In Switzerland, citizenship applications for people residing in small villages or townships tend to be judged not by the federal authorities but by local communities. If you are, say, an immigrant who lives in a small village, the inhabitants of the village can choose not to grant you citizenship if they feel that you are not being respectful of local customs and traditions. Even if you fulfill all formal requirements for citizenship, your application will still be denied if your neighbors don’t want you. 

This happened, for instance, to a woman called Nancy Holten who has been refused citizenship twice because she angered her community of Gipf-Oberfrick with attacks on cherished local traditions. Holten is one of those loud weirdos who tend to drive everybody round the bend with their eccentricities. Should she be denied citizenship, though?

What say you, readers? Who’s in the right, Holten or the angry villagers?