Opinions, art, debate
Here is an interesting thing. The Bernie Sanders campaign contacted me from the very start. They knew my name, my email, and my address. The only way for them to have this information is through the Obama campaign databases. I donated to Obama back in 2012, which is how my information got out there.
However, I haven’t been contacted by the Hillary campaign. They don’t seem to know I exist. So what does this tell us? Who is really supported by the DNC?
I know that many people don’t find this relevant but all I can do is get the information out, make it Googlable. Who knows, maybe one day it will make a difference.
My university owns a small old airplane it uses to give flying lessons to students at our other campus. Governor Rauner got upset that the plane was used once to transport two university administrators to Springfield to lobby against him and his hijacking of the budget.
So Rauner decided to take revenge on us by refusing to give our most vulnerable students the grants that have been promised to them. The money for the grants is there, sitting in a trust, but Rauner is keeping it hostage to punish us for lobbying against him.
Mind you, this is not something I’m assuming or guessing. This is what Rauner himself told us. We petitioned him to let the students have their grants and he responded that the students will have to live with the consequences of our administrators lobbying against him in Springfield.
Turns out I’m one of only 4% of white people in the US who support reparations to African-Americans.
The reason why reparations are so unpopular among everybody but me and a few other people is not that I’m morally superior and everybody else is a vicious racist. I’m not and they aren’t. The real problem is that the issue is being presented to people in a very heavy-handed, flat-footed and frankly stupid way.
Trying to guilt-trip people with rants about white supremacy, “Whiteness”, white privilege, original sin, the “white racial spoils system” that benefits even the poor whites (see the linked article, for instance, it’s all there, I just copy-paste) achieves nothing. People are alienated by the rants and turn away. And what’s especially curious is that the least racist will be antagonized by these rants the most. The only way out of the alienation is to do what I do and reject the ranters as idiot clowns who are not to be taken seriously. But hey, I’m from a different culture, it’s easy for me to do.
It is so obvious that this is not the way to achieve a political goal that I believe the ranters don’t actually want reparations to become reality. They want to feel important and aggrieved and they easily sacrifice those who actually need reparations. It’s the same strategy as the one that is making climate change so repellent to so many people as a political issue. More often than not, it seems that the activists are passionately dedicated to the goal of not being successful and not attracting anybody to their cause.
As I keep saying, a huge part of what people see as political activism is actually extreme psychological dysfunction.
In Alice Dreger’s book that I reviewed recently, there is an amazing detailed description of how activists work when they really want results. Dreger’s organization of people who fight for the rights of the intersex achieved phenomenal success. It’s insanely hard work but it brought actual results. And the #1 rule was: don’t rant, don’t accuse, don’t yell, don’t guilt-trip. Listen, flatter, cajole, thank, show that you are grateful for any interest towards your cause, recognize your opponent’s humanity, accept that the opponent is basically a good human being who wants what’s best. And remember, in the case of the intersex, the opponents were doctors who’d been cutting off the genitals of these very intersex, mutilating them for life. Try accepting the essential goodness of somebody who left you sans a clitoris and you’ll understand what kind of personal maturity and intellectual growth the activists had to bring to their cause.
Unfortunately, Canada is no stranger to school shootings. A teenager shot up a residential building and then a school in Saskatchewan today. Five people are dead.
Today’s Uber driver was Mustafa from Montenegro. I was glad to get him because if there’s got to be forced sociability, I’d at least like to talk about things that interest me, and a fellow European is likely to do that.
Mustafa was very interested in the Litvinenko murder, the fate of the Donetsk Airport, and Putin’s criminal connections.
In return, I tried reassuring him that Hillary will win the election but I was not very successful.
First, we heard that Bernie Sanders was a white supremacist, and now it turns out he’s a misogynist. There is obviously no proof but rumor has it that some fragile flowers have had to take to their fainting couches after Bernie’s supporters addressed them. No, seriously:
I have increasingly been hearing from people, especially women, that they don’t feel like they can express support for Hillary Clinton without getting shit for it from Sanders supporters. That is so upsetting to me. And if the fact that so many women I know are, quite understandably, intimidated to publicly support Clinton doesn’t speak to the misogyny on which Sanders is trading, I don’t know what would.
If women are intimidated into silence by Bernie’s supporters – an inoffensive bunch if I ever saw one – what better argument do you need that a female Commander in Chief will not be able to function properly?
People keep talking about Victorian women, but I read a lot of Victorian literature, and this kind of fragility was unknown in that era.
There is this stock scene that travels from one teenage TV show to another: students take the SATs and it turns out that a lazy layabout who never held a book is a genius and has a great score. Because intelligence is something that simply happens.
All of these brilliant diagnosticians who never read, entry-level workers who dazzle everybody with their “natural” brilliance, and people who are depressed because the right combination of happy pills hasn’t been found are a reflection of consumerist culture.
In the consumerist world, everything and everybody is a product possessing a set of immutable characteristics. There is no point in developing and changing. Instead, the goal is to discover the in-built features and put them to use. It’s the most fascinating thing: people sincerely see themselves as no different from microwaves and cell phones. Experience, effort, knowledge, credentials are actually defects. I mean, do you prefer a used microwave or a brand-new one? Well, political candidates like Trump are like that new microwave for the voters.
I was discussing immigration with somebody right now, and my interlocutor exclaimed, “But shouldn’t the refugees be grateful to Europeans? If they come to the EU to save their lives, they should feel grateful to those who welcome them!”
The answer is NO. No, no and no. That’s not how human beings work. The words “should” and “be grateful” go together as well as “must” and “love”.
A psychologically healthy individual will, above all, struggle to preserve the sense of self-worth. People need to see themselves as valuable and important. If you want somebody to lick your hand and look at you with devotion for a plate of food, get a dog.
The best way to engage with people is, instead of thinking of reasons they should be grateful to you, to concentrate on how you might be grateful to them. And after finding that sense of gratitude, ask yourself for how long it would exist if the other person began to expect and demand it. I’m betting not for long unless you have a strong masochistic streak.
Germany desperately needs immigrants. 700,000 people emigrate from the country every year. [These are people who leave something great for something even better. Migrants like these constitute an enormous part of all migratory flows but they are rarely talked about because their comfort with liquid modernity is threatening. It’s much more pleasing to imagine an immigrant as invariably pathetic.]
There are 2,000,000 vacancies in Germany that are begging for highly qualified, educated personnel to fill them. There is also an aging population that needs young people to work in these high-tech jobs and feed the elderly.
Germans could say, “Hey, we need help here. We need immigrants who’ll assist us in solving this problem.” Then they’d go around the world trying to make themselves attractive to such immigrants.
That, of course, would require acknowledging vulnerability and need. And that’s not very pleasing. So instead Germans try to solve their problem in the same way as one of my colleagues asks for favors. Instead of coming to me and saying,
“Hey, I need a favor. Could you substitute me next week?”
she says, “Hey, there’s something really great I can do for you. I know you need experience teaching this kind of course, so I’ll let you substitute for me next week and you’ll gain some much needed experience!”
If you are desperate to preserve moral superiority at all costs, all you’ll end up doing is alienating people. Germans cling to their superiority through positioning immigrants – whom, once again, they desperately need – as subhuman, inferior, incapable and lacking in agency.
[And I’m not just ragging on Germans here. They are only an example. There is hardly a rich, developed country these days that doesn’t play this game.]
Moral superiority always comes at a great price. If you are desperate to play the Savior, you will never be free from endless crises and total collapse. And the only way to avoid that is to stop trying to be superior, acknowledge vulnerability and ask for help.
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