Clarissa's Blog

What say you, people? How is the debate going? Don’t leave me hanging, give me your impressions! I can’t be there right now, but I need to know what’s happening.

People keep saying that Bernie has started courting the black vote. Is the following how he tries to do it?

Bernie Sanders questioned President Barack Obama’s leadership in a new interview, suggesting that he would be able to close a divide between Americans and government that the Obama administration has left open throughout his presidency. 

“There’s a huge gap right now between Congress and the American people,” Sanders said in an interview with MSNBC that will air Thursday on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” “What presidential leadership is about [is] closing that gap.”

Sanders acknowledged that Obama has tried to bridge the divide but said he hasn’t succeeded. “But I think what we need, when I talk about a political revolution, is bringing millions and millions of people into the political process in a way that does not exist right now,” he said. 

A black fellow is incompetent, weak and divisive while a white fellow will magically achieve what that poor doofus couldn’t, eh? Good to know.

What do you think about this Bernie ad?

I don’t like it. The idea it transmits is “everybody is the same, everybody is interchangeable, everybody is easily manipulated and needs me to condescend to them and tell them not to be manipulated. I stand above the faceless, nameless, interchangeable masses.” 

And it’s not just the ad, it’s the whole philosophical basis for Bernie’s campaign that alienates me. I don’t need more money, I don’t need free healthcare (I already have it and it sucks dick), I don’t need free college, I don’t need any part of what he’s offering.

What I do need he dismisses as trivial and unimportant. He wants to chase me back into the American 1970s that were peachy for people like him but shitty for people like me. In order to lure me back there, he tries to convince me that our interests are the same and being an immigrant and a woman has no special meaning. And that’s exactly the lie people like me have been buying into for 150 years with the same bad results. 

I don’t mind paying more taxes even though I’m well-aware that I personally will gain absolutely nothing and lose a lot under Bernie’s system of wealth distribution. But I want to see, at least, the recognition that I have needs of my own and I’m being asked to be very charitable and magnanimous and sacrifice those needs for the benefit of others. Don’t shit on my head and tell me I should be grateful because the pile of shit is protecting my ears from freezing.

There is a huge amount of howling about the interview Meryl Streep – one of the two Hollywood actresses with any talent at all – gave at the Berlin Film Festival. I find, however, that Streep was uncommonly kind and gracious to people who seem incapable of conducting themselves with any degree of decency. Here is the part that I found absolutely shocking:

Asked by an Egyptian reporter whether she understood films from the Arab world and North Africa, Streep said while she didn’t know much about the region, “I’ve played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures.”

When some dime a dozen quack journalist dares to take this tone with a world-class super star, the star in question needs to be an extremely charitable person to continue the conversation. I would like to see this creep of a journalist ask a male celebrity if he understands some crap movie or other. 

What’s especially obnoxious is that every feminist website in my blogroll is piling on Streep and not on this disrespectful, obnoxious jerkwad of a journalist. And then the same pseudo-feminists will whine how nobody takes them seriously in professional contexts, seeing zero connection between their readiness to support public putdowns of successful women and their own incapacity to be treated with respect in public spaces.

Reader Crystallizing Chaos always asks very profound questions. Here is the most recent one:

What is the cause of widespread sexual repression around the world?

A repression of all of our natural, animal instincts is the price we pay for civilization. None of our physiological functions (eating, sleeping, excreting, sex, procreation) occur whenever we feel the need for them to happen. Every single time we experience these basic needs, we thwart our desire, repress our wishes, and shroud the activity in a system of socially acceptable rituals.

The result of all this repression is a more comfortable existence in society. Coexisting with other humans would be even more unpleasant than what it now is if everybody satisfied their physiological needs the moment the fancy struck them.

The result of these constant limitations we place on our physiological urges is two-pronged:

1. We channel the resulting frustration into positive things (art, creativity, the life of the intellect, etc)

2. We channel the resulting frustration into negative things (war, self-destruction, illness, drugs, alcohol, etc)

This is the inescapable dilemma of human existence: repression makes life more comfortable, beautiful, hygienic, and pleasant but it also destroys us. The only way out is for an individual to master the art of channeling the frustration into more positive and less self-destructive things.

The shortest Soviet joke was the famous real slogan that you could see on many Soviet billboards, “Fly Aeroflot!” The two words still put me in stitches every time I hear them. We, the last remnants of the USSR, use this slogan in a variety of situations to transmit a meaning only we understand.

Riddle: why is the Soviet slogan “Fly Aeroflot!” so funny?

P.S. N reminds me that there was another very short Soviet joke, “A Jewish janitor.” But this one is hardly a riddle.

A clinic that was trying to offer a tiny measure of protection to miserable, mistreated kids is destroyed by a bunch of unhinged “trans activists.”

“The reality is that Bernie voters know that Bernie isn’t going to get to implement even a tiny portion of the things he proposes. . . Given a choice of voting for an insider who has been part of that fail over the past forty years, or for an outsider who hasn’t been part of that fail, Bernie voters choose to vote for the outsider. This isn’t Bernie supporters being immature or unrealistic. This is Bernie voters being desperate.” The kind of childish tantrum described here is the definition of immaturity, buddy. The Bernie voters described in this quote are whiny, stupid children with zero brain matter. I’m not saying that actual Bernie supporters are this way, of course. The author of the linked piece is simply projecting.

A brilliant, brilliant, brilliant post by a Hillary supporter. For fairness’ sake, I’d love to link to something as strong by a Bernie supporter but all I’m finding is as weak and mumbly as the stuff I linked above. The bern people feel is not translating into strong writing. But I’ll keep looking!

There are strong, meaningful posts questioning Bernie, though. Here is one. Mind you, I don’t like this author. But it’s undeniable that this is strong writing.

You’ll be shocked to see the obnoxious way in which fundamentalists mock restaurant servers.

As we say in my culture, Inside Higher Ed is so desperate that it started to fuck mice. The academic publication promotes the services of some quack who sells fake essays (slightly disguised but still) to college students.

Austrian police tries to excuse the actions of a man who raped a small boy. Read the whole story to see how the rapist explained why he committed the crime.

Talking about creeps, the bizarredom of people who persecute kids for exchanging nude photos is sickening. The only reason why they get so aroused by the practice is. . . that they get aroused by it and freak out over these feelings.

Rich, spoiled brats use the BLM movement to excuse their ridiculous screwups. Disgusting!

Elizabeth Warren is dishonest. Color me unsurprised.

Tenured professors are fired for displeasing an administrator.

The aggressive egg and the meek sperm: how we project our hangups onto the process of fertilization.

As I keep saying, Democrats are doing all they can to scare away as many reasonable voters as possible.

“To a great extent, multiculturalism and other forms of “global consciousness” serve as companions to economic globalization. They promise to teach us how to navigate cultural differences in ways that defuse conflict, promote cooperation, and thus ease the way toward a global marketplace overseen by well-trained, benevolent technocrats from the Kennedy School of Government.” Yes.

Newborn nurseries are being closed to service an anti-woman, patriarchal agenda with dire consequences.

Immigrants contribute to economic inequality by being so much more driven and successful.

More dumbassery from the desperately woman – hating Corey Robin:

On a related topic, Rutgers historian Donna Murch has an epic piece in The New Republic about the Clintons’ tough-on-crime policies in the 1990s.

I wonder, how does this lame piece of fluff explain his failure to ascribe Hillary’s activities as Secretary of State to both Clintons? Or her work in Senate?

I also wonder, if there is some hopeless, god-forsaken broad that sleeps with this loser, does he refer to his posts as “our posts” and his salary as “our salary”?

My Uber driver says, “At first I thought you wanted to be picked up either in front of the entrance to the part of the hospital where I had my gall bladder removed or the part where I go to visit my urologist. But it turns out that you were waiting in front of the building where I had my heart surgery!”

The driver is way past 80, and the recitation of his medical history lasted us pretty much all the way from St Louis to my house. Which is great because the fellow has hearing problems and blissfully did not expect me to speak.

So I watched Beyoncé’s new hit “Formation.” The video is sensationally talented. I’m not very visually oriented but even I can see that it’s a freaking work of art. Not a single frame is out of place. There is so much meaning to every image. Gosh, I could be watching this video for hours and not get enough. This video inspires one’s intellect to work, and I suggest watching it if you need a jolt of enthusiasm for intellectual labor. I had no idea such talented videos were being created.

The lyrics are great, too, strong, meaningful, original. Good lyrics.

The music, however, fails to live up. The stunning artistic feat of the video deserves more than this vapid imitation of Lady Gaga. I know Beyoncé’s fans will be unhappy, and hey, I love Beyoncé, she’s extraordinarily talented. And I love Lady Gaga, too, she’s fantastic. But the insistent Lady Gagaization of the entire music space needs to stop.

Beyoncé could have done a lot more to live up to the video.

P.S. People are now saying that the video is a cynical ploy to appeal to white folks while betraying the interests of black people. Obviously, it’s not for me to say how black viewers will respond to the video but I absolutely insist that it has great artistic value irrespective of the race of the spectators.