Opinions, art, debate
A real fundraising text by a Democrat candidate in Massachusetts:
Forget the neologisms for a moment. Look at how many times “I’m” appears in this very short text. Five I’m and an additional I. There’s an extraordinary amount of unnecessary information, some of it repeated twice but nothing at all about what the candidate plans to do for the voters.
“I’m not good with children, I don’t like children, so maybe I shouldn’t have any” is not a smart thing to say. You aren’t good with other people’s children. This is a category of being that exists on an entirely different plane from your own children.
I’m great with babies and very young toddlers. As soon as they start to walk, I begin to find them tiresome and boring. But they are other people’s children. This has nothing to do with how I feel about my own.
My father was the best father in the world after N. And he was notorious for his deep dislike of children. People in general weren’t his thing but other people’s children specifically he found very disappointing. He supported people having as many kids as they wanted, of course, but he would not willingly seek the company of a child. But with his own children he wanted to spend all the time possible.
It’s very, very different with your own, I promise.
The saddest thing I’ve seen today:
A 6-year-old child should be drawing her own pictures, not staring stupidly at a screen.
Why do people do this to their own kids? They have a lifetime of sitting in front of a screen ahead of them. Why is any of this necessary at 6?
I’m not even asking why a 6-year-old needs to know who Elon Musk is.
I set a 10,000 step goal in early May, and I only broke the streak once when I was really unwell.
At first, it felt undoable, especially since it’s been viciously hot outside. But since then it turned into a lifestyle. I complete my 10,000 steps without even noticing it much. I simply started doing things on my feet that I used to do sitting or lying down. My German exercises, listening to my books or to videos. It’s great. I’m planning to get to 15,000 a day and stay there permanently.
By the way, today I listened to Candace Owens’ interview of her husband, and it’s very funny. He read Theology at Oxford and uses words like “hermeneutics” and she thinks that Marie-Claude is a suspicious name and that you must be part of a conspiracy if you’ve listened to Chopin. A bigger case of opposites attracting can’t be found.
This is an excellent idea:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department is proposing requiring applicants for business and tourist visas to post a bond of up to $15,000 to enter the United States, a move that may make the process unaffordable for many.
In a notice to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, the department said it would start a 12-month pilot program under which people from countries deemed to have high overstay rates and deficient internal document security controls could be required to post bonds of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 when they apply for a visa.
This is an excellent idea. For people who want to do tourism or business in the US will not find these amounts onerous. Those who do are neither real tourists nor business people.
I don’t think this will actually happen but it would be an excellent way to mitigate the problem of visa overstays.
Everybody at work suspects me of possessing secret knowledge because I’m so calm and completely absent from the discussions of what is going on.
I have no secret knowledge but I have followed the neoliberal strategy of privatizing success and socializing failure. The person in anonymous questions who asked for neoliberal pointers, please add this to your arsenal. Maintain a laser-like focus on your own project.
That I’m diabetic doesn’t mean I want everybody to develop Type 2 diabetes. To the contrary, I want fewer people to develop diabetes.
Similarly, that I’m an immigrant doesn’t mean I want more people to become immigrants. I wouldn’t want my child ever to be an immigrant.
Why is this so hard to understand?
This post is inspired by a conversation with a non-immigrant colleague earlier today who doesn’t understand how I can be opposed to mass migration if I’m an immigrant myself.
I don’t need to see myself reflected in other people to feel comforted. Even I’m not that neoliberal.
I’m not giving any updates on the situation with my department because it’s so cooky I don’t think anybody will believe me. I don’t know how to narrate the story while not sounding completely barmy.
Here’s a very small part of it so that you understand what we are talking about. At the end of June, Department Chairs were saying goodbye to those who were stepping down from the position.
“What about you?” people asked. “Are you going to continue as Chair? What is going on with your department?”
“I have no idea,” I said honestly.
After July 1, I had to go into the payroll system to find out if I’m still getting paid as department Chair. Because – get this – no human appears to know. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Every two weeks, I access the payroll system to find my status from there. No human being communicates with me about it. We no longer have any idea who makes the decisions or if anybody does.
See? I told you it was nuts.
The plot based on an encounter of an innocent child with the hypocritical world of adults has been done to death. To revive this exhausted topic, Gary Shteyngart sets his novel Vera, or Faith in a near future where Eastern Europe has formed a Coalition of Illiberal States, Ohio constantly tests women to see if they have had an abortion, AI and self-driving cars are everywhere, and Russia is colluding to make the votes of immigrants in the US count for less than people whose ancestors have been here since the revolutionary war.
None of this, however, is what makes the novel fail. You can be an ideologue but still be great at your craft. Shteyngart’s main failure in Vera is that of a writer whose plotting is too lazy and character development is careless. He’s not a talentless author but he wants to write political manifestos more than novels. And this destroys the literary quality of the book.
One great problem is that Shteyngart writes the little 10-year-old heroine, Vera, like she’s a boy. He hasn’t made the slightest effort to understand the experience of a girl growing up, although there’s a trillion coming of age novels about little girls. Suffice it to say that the brilliant, well-read Vera with a mega progressive mother never heard of menstruation. That the daughter of left-wing parents doesn’t carry around “a menstruation kit” since at least age 7 defies belief.
This is only one thing out of many that makes it clear that Shteyngart doesn’t care much about the characters he creates. The plot is equally carelessly constructed, accelerating at the point where the author gets bored with his own story and is eager to get to the end as fast as possible. When a character becomes inconvenient, Shteyngart writes him out of the novel in a sloppy way.
Shteyngart is not devoid of talent. I did finish the novel, which means there’s enough in it to hold my interest. But he’s lazy. Yes, his gift is on the modest side but that’s precisely why he needs to grind more than authors with greater natural gifts. I won’t be reading anything else by this author because, at the age he is, I don’t believe he’ll rethink his entire life strategy and start to work to defeat his sloppiness and laziness.
Words fail to describe how terrible these people are:
For students in Illinois, mental health screenings will soon be required alongside annual vision and hearing exams.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a bill into law Thursday that will require public school students in grades 3 through 12 in the state to undergo a mental health screening each year.
This alone is reason enough for people who can’t afford private schools or homeschooling to move out of Illinois.
Even the USSR with its famous punitive psychiatry didn’t go this far.
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