Clarissa's Blog

I just signed the contract for the book. I know these are great problems to have and I sound ungrateful bitching about the need to do all this paperwork but I’m a very limited person. Outside of physiological necessities  (of which blogging is one), literally all I want to do is spend time with my family and work on my research. I feel resentful when I’m forced to do anything other than that.

First, I was told that I should be seeking copyright permissions for every text from which I cumulatively quote more than 500 words. So I did. Now it turns out it has to be everything that’s over 300 words. 

Thank goodness I can still use the word “and” without seeking copyright permission.

I know I’m like a broken record but it’s deranged. I am doing these authors a favor by quoting their work. I’m not seeking any monetary gain. I’m not preventing them from selling their work, just the opposite. But every publisher (except for a small independent poetry press) is making me jump through endless hoops get these permissions. 

So damn annoying.

In under two years it will become clear that Trump won’t bring the [non-existent] industrial jobs back but people won’t care because he’ll distract everybody’s attention by starting some idiotic war with whomever the Russians tell him to attack: Iran, the Saudis, etc. Everybody will burn with patriotic enthusiasm, and the economy will be forgotten. And then, after Trump and his cronies steal everything there is to steal, we will have a global economic crisis.

Yes, it happened already, in very recent memory. But people tend to repeat the same dumb mistakes as many times as possible.

Another part of the recipe for “how not to win Iowa” is doing things like adding whenever Tim Kaine’s name is mentioned an invariable “although he’s not great on choice.” 

Save for marching around in a T-shirt saying “Abortion Is Grand”, Kaine did everything, violated every principle of his denomination to be supportive of choice. And still many Liberals were making faces and criticizing. What message does it send to people who are pro-choice but not pro-abortion, people who used to have reservations but no longer do, people who are still trying to figure it out? 

And this is just one example. 

Constant spectacles of policing each other’s orthodoxy (or “calling out”) should be discontinued immediately. They scare people off. And the word “privilege” should be forgotten. It will never win any elections bigger than an election of the president of the Society for Spoiled Rich Brats.

National governments are being displaces from power and relevance by supranational corporations anyway. Here in the US, we stopped pretending and handed the presidency directly to such a corporation.

Hey, folks, did you see this website listing professors who spread liberal propaganda?

In all fairness, the listed professors do sound very cuckoo.

People, great news. The English translation of Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge finally came out. Of course, a translation is always just that, a translation, but this is a work of art that deserves to be read and reread. This is what great literature is about. The novel is absolutely devastating. It’s one of those reading experiences that stay with you for the rest of your life. For as long as I live, I will not forget when and where I was while reading the novel.

If you read the novel and don’t get it, please don’t tell me. I don’t want to be disappointed.

You can find the book here.

If it’s OK to give political influence to a wife, why is it not OK to give it to a daughter? Or a son-in-law? If it’s OK to have a foundation that benefits from your political power, then why is it not OK to have a company that does it?

This is why I kept harping that Hillary’s greatest disadvantage was getting into politics as a wife. That’s why I keep saying that Michelle Obama should never run for office. Once you populate the seats of power with wives and their foundations, all sorts of relatives with their business entities will follow. 

We don’t have a high moral ground here to object to all of these Ivankas-Melankas and their extended families polluting the political process. We participated eagerly when it was convenient.

I wish people didn’t use words they don’t fully understand. It makes as much sense to say that “Trump isn’t neoliberal” as it is to declare that I’m not postmodern. You can’t decide on an individual basis to be outside the system you inhabit. And by the way, believing you can comes from a postmodern neoliberal mentality.

I know everybody hates the posts with quotes, so I promise to dial it down a bit. But this one is just too good:

According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America’s economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country’s economic activity last year. Clinton, in other words, carried nearly two-thirds of the American economy.

Some people are busy working, while others are busy being bored. So they try to shake it up by electing clowns. And that’s why they hated the hard-working Hillary and identified with the lazy layabout Trump.