Clarissa's Blog

The US naturalization and citizenship form asks me if I ever tried to prevent anybody from practicing his or her religion. It also asks me if I have a good moral character.

It’s great for Trump that he already has citizenship or he wouldn’t pass.

President Donald Trump appeared to equate US actions with the authoritarian regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview released Saturday, saying, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

This is exactly what progressives have been saying forever  (not only about Putin but about everybody). This is also the line that’s made conservatives fume with rage for equally as long. 

It’s truly funny that “America is a source of all evil in the world” will now be part of Republican ideology. And it will because Putin is in love with this idea. 

As you might have noticed from the title of Federici’s book, she worships Shakespeare’s Caliban. She has read a bit too much of the idiot essayist Fernandez Retamar and has decided that Caliban symbolizes the oppressed non-white minorities fighting against colonial oppression. 

What’s really crazy, though, is that Federici, a feminist, is so eager to worship a rapist. The goal of Caliban’s attempts at liberation in the play is being able to rape Miranda. Federici avoids mentioning this unpleasant fact because everything fades away once she gets a chance to posture as an anti-racist.

There is a whole generation of feminists who are more than happy to piss on every feminist issue if they get to scratch the itch of liberal guilt in exchange. 

I knew this one was going to be bad but I had no idea the extent of sloppiness, idiocy and ridiculousness I was going to discover. 

The premise of Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation is that during the European Middle Ages women – especially the peasant and proletarian ones – were hugely empowered, sexually liberated, financially independent, and professionally successful. They worked as doctors, artisans, barbers and even priests in alternative religious arrangements. Women were also free to dedicate themselves to the most fulfilling and truly female pursuits of infanticide and prostitution, and nobody judged them for that because everybody accepted that women are a mystery. Medieval women could spend tons of time with each other and avoid the company of men as much as possible. 

But this idyll ended once capitalism came. Oh, that evil capitalism! Without it, a woman- say, Silvia Federici – could be happily prostituting and infanticiding all day long. Instead, she gets to write books and give lectures. Oppression! Horror!

In support of her argument that capitalism brought enslavement of formerly free and joyously infanticiding women, Federici discusses witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries. She tries to inflate their importance by claiming that “hundreds of thousands of women” or as many as 600,000 women were killed in an act of genocide during the witch trials. What’s especially cute is that in her own endnotes she recognizes that this number has nothing to do with reality. (It’s well-known that the true number is about 40,000 although Federici respectfully quotes some freak who claims that as many witches were killed as Jews during the Holocaust). Few readers are anal enough to go digging through endnotes, which is what Federici counts on for her argument to work. 

The bloopers I’ve been quoting today and yesterday all come from her book. She is not very well-read, and there’s about a blooper a page. Whenever she says things like, “Nobody ever wrote about X”, for instance, I can immediately think of half a dozen people who did. 

Federici’s idealization of the pre-industrial world and of all civilizations that are not European is boring and reductive. The belief in the prelapsarian world of purity is not new but it’s dangerous in a study of history. 

In view of the failure of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, Putin is trying to pick a fight with Belarus. One pretext to invade Belarus can be to defend it from an (entirely imaginary, of course) invasion by Poland. Trump’s officials are busily helping Putin solidify this narrative:

According to one U.S. official, national security aides have sought information about Polish incursions in Belarus, an eyebrow-raising request because little evidence of such activities appears to exist. 

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/foreign-policy-trump-speaking-campaign-language-45264646

Another cute blooper from the same academic:

The Battle of Lepanto escalated hostilities against the Muslim world. 

You can just imagine the Muslim world, sitting there peacefully and politely, as the hostilities are treacherously escalated against such quiet, peaceable folks. 

Of course, it’s all crap. The Muslim world, the non-Muslim world, and the whole world waged war and did both horrible and wonderful things. 

But hey, this is the same ultra famous scholar who said that European proletarians welcomed the Arab invasion of Europe in 711 because it was going to put an end to their exploitation. 

In this worldview, any invasion, decision, act of warfare, etc carried out by non-Europeans  (and later by anybody but the US) is good and progressive. Shit, this is -the dominant, by the way – school of thought that promotes the idea that the Aztecs and the Incas practiced feminism and communism until Spaniards came and inflicted sexism and capitalism upon them.

If the deaths of millions of indigenous people of the Americas from communicable diseases in the 16th century constituted “a genocide” at the hands of Europeans, it has to follow that the deaths of millions of Europeans from an epidemic of plague 150 years earlier were also a genocide. Presumably, at the hands of the Eastern merchants who brought the disease on their ships. 

I don’t understand how one can be considered a scholar and use terminology so carelessly. I’m reading a book on medieval history that everybody quotes and it’s filled with this kind of bloopers.

The Russian offensive at Avdievka is failing. One of the military hospitals where wounded Russian soldiers are being sent, for instance, can no longer accept patients because it’s bursting at the seams. Others are still accepting the wounded but there are so many that things are looking bad. 

Putin is furious. He just fired a bunch of high military officials. This defeat was not anticipated, especially since this time Putin has been sending regular troops quite openly. (Before, the troops had to pretend that the had wondered into Ukraine by mistake or that they were there while on leave.) 

The reason why Russian troops are failing once again is that they are not fighting with Ukraine. They are fighting with their fantasy of Ukraine. It was much easier for them to achieve their goals in Syria because they are not emotionally attached to a fantasy of what Syrians should be like and could create real plans for actually existing situations.

Trump supporters are trying to argue with me on Facebook but it’s useless. Their command of the English language is so poor that I have no idea what they are trying to say. And neither do they. Here is the most recent example:

Keep picking on trump and see where it gets you! As Glen Beck said, he is a counterpuncher, so keep punching at him  with your mouthy remarks and watch him let you try and figure it out. We all know how that scenario will play out!

“Watch him let you try and figure it out”? Huh? “Punching with mouthy remarks”? 

I’m sure she’s one of those resentful blobs who keep moaning that immigrants bother them with their bad English. 

Romanians are protesting massively against corruption. Good for you, Romanians! Maybe your example will remind Americans that only a constant opposition and struggle against corruption can keep it at bay. Because the ease with which Americans are welcoming corruption into their society is disgusting. 

I hope the people of Romania win.