Ali Saqr al-Qasem, an ISIS member in Raqqa, publicly executed his mother Lina to prove his loyalty to the terrorist organization to which he belongs.

This is the first public matricide in Raqqa, but given the vision ISIS promotes of women, it’s unlikely to be the last. ISIS is currently touting the murder as an act of profound religious faith.

Russian-speakers, have you seen the documentary “Who Is Mr. Putin?”

I highly recommend. This what I’ve been saying for years pretty much verbatim, getting a reputation as a conspiracy theorist of the first order. And now it turns out I was right the whole time. I feel hugely vindicated. 

For non Russian-speakers, here is a very short recap: “the collapse of the USSR” was a fiction, a scam. The point of the scam was to change the economic model while keeping all the power and the riches in the same hands. Putin is just a front for the organization that faked the whole perestroika thing. His role in the organization was to facilitate criminal endeavors that underpinned the change of the economic model that wasn’t a real change. There was also an enormous amount of effort invested into ensuring that Russian people despised democracy. (Which they now obviously do.)

The film explores Putin’s many criminal acts that extend to Spain, Germany, Liechtenstein, his collaboration with the Colombian drug cartels, his cronies who hold all the leading governmental positions in Russia. 

It’s not that the USSR is coming back. It simply never went away. It just halfheartedly masked itself for a short while.

Also, Russian-speakers: I have been saying that Sobchak was a gangster since the early 1990s and nobody believed me. This was before anybody even heard Putin’s name. But I was always told I’m prejudiced. What do you have to say now?

Poor Germans, they never had any real colonies to speak of and no “brown people” to play out the white man’s burden upon. For over a century they have felt sulky that there were no “barbarians” for them to civilize.

And now they have finally figured out that it isn’t necessary to go anywhere and conquer anybody to play the role of benign, paternalistic colonizers. They can use globalization to have colonial subjects delivered right to their doors.

The next stage of the colonial game is, “Look how much we are doing for these animals, and they are still not appreciative.” After that it’s on to the stage of, “We were forced to show them their place since they don’t feel any gratitude for our civilizing kindness.”

The workplace is transforming in the era of liquid modernity, and Sennett analyzes the workings of the corporate workplace. Remember that manufacturing is dead, so every workplace is a corporate workplace today.

The qualities of company loyalty, steadfastness, experience, focused expertise, rootedness, orderliness are no longer wanted in the workplace. They are actually a drag on you, so drop them now if you haven’t yet.

The qualities that are in demand are the capacity to change, the adaptability, the love of newness, the ability to generate new ideas, rootlessness, ease of movement. A person who stayed at the same company for 20 years is viewed with suspicion. Reliability is out of vogue, it’s boring.

More than skill and experience, the workplace values talent and potential. Employees and employers are so invested into the hunt for talent that they bring the same attitude to politics. Voters don’t give a hoot about a candidate’s knowledge, experience, record, and expertise. They only care about potential. And potential is obviously all in the eye of the beholder.

Sennett wrote all this in 2006, by the way.

It often feels like all I do is read theory. But every single criticism of my scholarly production can be boiled down to one idea: I don’t read enough theory. I am fortunate in that my reviewers tend to be fantastic, really helpful, so I believe them: I need to read more theory. Especially since I never stay on one subject and move from feminism to the nation-state to the economy to queer studies to urban studies to the Spanish Civil War.

 

So I’m watching Gilmore Girls again, and since I saw it many times before, I started concentrating on the background, just to mix things up.

And I noticed something weird.

In the scenes that take place at Yale, at least 80% of people moving silently in the background are black. They never say anything, never participate in the action, their presence is never replicated in the classes Rory takes, people she hangs out with, her coworkers on the paper, etc. The black people just hover around noiselessly. And then disappear.

I’m guessing the show was trying to offset its all-white cast in this very bizarre way.

As a result of their complete dependence, infants become extraordinarily perceptive. Their only way to escape from intolerable terror is to develop perception skills. If an infant perceives that she is loved the way she needs to be loved by the huge all-powerful creatures around her, the anxiety that the creatures will not come when she needs them is alleviated. 

But if she feels that she is not loved as she needs to be loved, the doubt of, “Will I be left here to die?” remains.

As the infant grows up, he becomes less dependent and more capable of caring for himself. But the foundational memory of being put at the risk of extinction by lack of love remains. And it’s not like the people who didn’t love the infant enough will suddenly feel overcome with love for him when he is five, fifteen, or thirty. So the constant reminders of the destructive lack of love are always present.

This wounded person will be so overcome by anxiety that he will try to regain control over the situation. The only way to do that is to convince himself that he caused the lack of love that threatened his existence. And if he caused it, he’s at least somewhat in control. (It’s the exact same mechanism as the one used by victims of crime, for instance.)

This is why he will cling to the belief that he’s not good enough. Because if he is good enough, then it must mean that this horrible experience of being unloved is not about him at all. All this suffering, and it’s not even about him! It’s much easier to convince himself that it is about him and he has provoked the lack of love by not being good enough.

So she will travel through life, seeking out proof that she is undeserving of love, fat, ugly, stupid, useless. Because if that is true, there is always hope that once she makes herself deserving, beautiful, thin, smart and successful, then the love will come. And if, God forbid, it turns out that she is already deserving, beautiful, thin, smart and successful, then that means the love is never coming. And that’s the hardest thing in the world to accept.

So why do such people use the belief that they are not good enough as a survival mechanism?

In Lisa Gardner’s recent novel Find Her, the protagonist was kidnapped by a rapist and kept by him for months in a wooden box. She was completely dependent on him, never knowing if he’d show up and bring her food, clean her up, help her move. She was so helpless that a small object stuck under her head was causing her torture because she couldn’t move her head to find greater comfort. As a result, her personality was completely erased and she became insanely attached to the rapist.

This all sounds horrifying but aside form the rapist part, we all have had this exact same experience. Actually, this helplessness, dependence, incapacity to move on our own are the foundational experiences of all our lives. We were all this helpless as infants.

An infant is entirely dependent on the mercy of incomprehensible, enormous creatures who have to show up to feed, change and help her move. Or not. Like Lisa Gardner’s character, they never know if the all-powerful savior will come back or leave them to perish. 

Wow, it turns out there is now a fourth review of my first book. It came out in a very good, important journal, and the author is, again, an important older academic. The review is hugely laudatory.

This doesn’t suck at all.

You know these people who go through life thinking, believing, repeating, “I’m not good enough, not attractive enough, I’m fat, I’m a loser, I can never do anything right, I have bad people skills, I always mess everything up, etc.”? 

One can tell them many times that it’s not true, that they are not ugly, worthless, fat and stupid, but they won’t believe it. Want to know why?

Because that’s how they survive. This is their survival mechanism. Take the mantra of “I’m no good” away from them, and you are putting them at what they perceive as an actual threat of extinction.

So if you keep asking, “But why doesn’t it help him that I keep telling him how fantastic he is? Why doesn’t he believe me?”, remember: believing that he is good enough would be devastating to him. He is profoundly invested into maintaining the belief that he’s worthless.

In the following posts I will explain why.