Thanks to Dashcam

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

Back in 2012, my takes on the Michael Brown murder were completely off. I apologized for them here on the blog in 2019. This is not an excuse but I sincerely couldn’t believe Brown would lunge at an armed police officer. I feel stupid now but even Matt Walsh recognized recently that he found it hard to believe back then.

After seeing all of the dashcam footage of many such cases, we now all know that it does happen. It’s been eye-opening for many people. Almost weekly, there are cases where we can see footage of exactly this kind of thing happening. We should all be grateful that now police are equipped with cameras and we’ve become immune to the Michael Brown type of hoaxes.

Parrots

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

She is a US citizen on US soil. How can there be “due process” to people who are not bound by the US Constitution? It’s perfectly fine to be against the bombing of the TDA boat. But it’s not ok to repeat “rights” and “due process” like a parrot without a shred of understanding of what these words mean.

Cultural Confusion

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

Can anybody explain this viral video to me?

I must lack cultural competence to understand it. Why was the woman so desperate to get the ball? White middle-aged women are usually terrified of public unpleasantness. This must have been really important to her if she went over to get the ball away from a child. But why? I understand that sports fans want these balls. I tried to imagine an equivalent situation for myself. Let’s say there’s a limited number of volumes of a heretofore unpublished novel by Rafael Chirbes. I’d want one pretty desperately. I can enjoy it far more than any child. But would I go badger a boy and his dad to get one away from him? Not a chance.

This must be something cultural for me to have absolutely no read on the situation.

Cultural Center of the World

~ Clarissa ~ 18 Comments

It’s a pity nobody bothered to tell the world what its economic and cultural center was, so it went completely unnoticed.

It’s hard to say who is more stupid, Xi for saying such stupid things or Merkel for having a guy check if these childish mumblings were true.

Q&A: Libertarianism

~ Clarissa ~ 21 Comments

Libertarianism is the philosophy that makes neoliberalism possible. They stand to each other in the relationship of a theory and the practice arising from the theory.

My own attitude to neoliberalism is that of an intelligent smoker to cigarettes. An intelligent smoker might love his cigarettes while also recognizing that they are very unhealthy. We’ve all known that one person who smoked two packs a day since 14 and is perfectly healthy at age 85. But we all know that this person is an outlier. She (it’s almost always a woman) probably has some genetic glitch that makes her immune to the harm of her habit. Much as she might love her ciggies, she won’t give a pack to a 5-year-old.

Libertarians, unfortunately, don’t understand the part about the glitch. They are almost invariably very brilliant, high-IQ, very organized people. Their fatal flaw is not realizing that almost nobody else is that way. Their ideas are deadly to those who don’t have their glitch. They want to distribute cigarettes, metaphorically speaking, to every 5-year-old. The neoliberal reality that libertarian philosophy engenders is fantastic for these glitchy (in a good way) people but deadly to everybody else. Libertarians are at war with human nature itself. Their theory appeals to the best qualities in human beings, and that makes it very attractive. But it makes no concessions for the irrational, emotional and dark side of humanity. And that’s why the results of their theory are so hellish when put into practice.

Small Details

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

There might be an added complication of not being able to listen to anything if you don’t get born, but who cares about small details like that, right?

Before social media, one could go one’s whole life without knowing how incredibly stupid many people are.

The Death of Libertarianism

~ Clarissa ~ 38 Comments

And that’s when libertarianism finally died:

RIP, libertarianism, which is simply neoliberalism for nerds.

Swear

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

I’m very annoyed by the sudden flooding of public spaces with swear words.

This is now in every bookstore, and I have to do weird acrobatic things to get my body between this kind of stuff and my child:

At a local coffee shop, at the ice cream store, at a small clothing boutique, there are items branded with a wide collection of swear words. The arts and crafts fair is the worst. “Mommy, I wanted to look at a dolly,” my kid says, “but she has a bad word written on her tummy. Can we leave?”

Nobody but an extremely infantile person can enjoy this kind of branding. This is very belated teenage rebellion that is embarrassing in adults. Yet we are all hostages to these unhealthy people of whom there’s suddenly a legion.

More Ambiguity

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of my friend’s death. Her story is a study in ambiguity. She met her husband when she was 16 and spent the next 20 years being beaten and raped by him.

Finally, she left him. They both paired up with other people. At age 46 she got diagnosed with terminal cancer. My friend was not religious. There was no consolation. She spent the five years that it took the disease to kill her in a state of the darkest, most terrible depression.

And do you know who was the only person who was there for her every day of the illness? Her ex-husband. He called, came over, drove her to appointments, talked to her for hours. I felt suicidal on every occasion I spent time with her, she was in such a state. But he somehow managed to stick around. I’m not saying he’s a good person but these two people had something that was both extremely dysfunctional and bound them together like you can’t imagine.

Life is complicated. Nothing has an easy, clear answer.

The Charlotte Murder

~ Clarissa ~ 17 Comments

This is the story that I mentioned several days ago. A career criminal with a lifetime of arrests and early releases stabbed a Ukrainian woman in the neck for no reason:

Of course, if she weren’t new to the country, she’d known not to turn her back like this. But that we should know and live with this knowledge is not great either.