Clarissa's Blog

Gosh, Hillary’s daughter is the worst public speaker ever. They should keep her off stage or, at least, not give her any lines.

A brilliant comment on the differences between Bernie and Hillary:

Sanders, right now, is riding a wave of unrealistic expectations. People want him to come in and “fix everything”—though without a clear explanation of what precisely is broken, and how it can be fixed. When I look at America, I see a country that’s done pretty dang well, except for the glaring problems of median wage stagnation and income inequality.

This is so true. People have a fantasy that a kindly white-haired Santa will bring them a huge sack of gifts and make the complex and scary world look simple and manageable. They know it’s a silly fantasy that will be disappointed:

If Sanders is nominated, I’m not sure whether or not he can withstand the harshness of the general election. But I expect his presidency would be a disappointment, because the expectations are so unrealistic. He won’t fix everything. He’ll have to compromise. He’ll have to ignore promises, or break them. And it will be a betrayal to his supporters. It’s a recipe for gridlock, or a GOP win in 2020, or both.

I suspect that the goal of Bernie’s supporters is precisely to get disappointed. They want to feel apocalyptic, dramatic and betrayed and are setting themselves for a fresh supply of this entertainment. And that’s a sign that, basically, they are OK with everything and opt for fun and enjoyment over any actual change.

There was a country fair in Plymouth back in 1906 where one of the contests consisted of people trying to guess the weight of a huge ox. They wrote their guesses on pieces of paper together with their names and addresses, hoping to get the prize for the best guess. 800 people participated in the contest.

After the contest ended, statistician Francis Galton took the tickets and analyzed them. He discovered that the average of all these guesses was almost exactly the correct weight of the ox. These 800 strangers guessed correctly!

This phenomenon has been verified many times since then and has been given the name “the wisdom of crowds.” Groups of people arrive at correct decisions collectively that they don’t make individually. In other words, groups know things together that individual members don’t.

HOWEVER!

The number one condition for this law to work is for each member of the group to have his or her own independent source of knowledge. Everybody needs to see that ox with their own eyes and not, for instance, hear about it on Putin’s lying TV or whatever.

Cucumbers, radishes, baby potatoes, parsley, boiled eggs, scallions, and shrimp. Looks and tastes very happy.

Turns out there is a plan to build in Moscow in front of the US Embassy a memorial to Native Americans who died during the expansion of the European settlers in North America.

Today’s segment of Dr Phil features 4 adopted kids from Russia who were subjected to horrific abuse at the hands of adoptive American parents. Of course, there are also the 19 Russian adoptees killed by American adopters and the kids adopted specifically to be exploited sexually.

For all his faults, Putin was absolutely right to ban international adoptions. It was a vicious practice that kept resulting in death and abuse.

This week, Russians have been discussing the story of a doctor from Belgorod who approached a patient in his hospital and murdered him by hitting him on the head, openly and coldly. The murder was recorded on video but all of the doctors at the killer’s hospital support him, and the maximum sentence he’ll get for the murder is 2 years.

Belgorod is the town on the border with Ukraine through which Russian tanks and troops moved in the direction of the neighboring country. It’s hilarious to see Russians cluck like scared hens, “How is this possible? Where is all this violence coming from?” now that the glorification of Russia’s unprovoked violence against Ukraine has born fruit within Russia itself. 

From a great article in The Atlantic on Obama’s last State of the Union address (that I didn’t watch):

The first thing that stands out is how the decline of economic terror has created space for other terrors.

This is so true. Rich societies that don’t remember what it means to have actual problems will always find a fresh tale of imaginary terror to titillate the sated consumers. 

The feminist movement imitated the trajectory of industrial capitalism. It was born in the XVIIIth century, consolidated in the XIXth when the capital needed more and more people to work in the factories irrespective of their physiology, won all of its major victories before the end of the 1970s, and fizzled out starting in ≈ 1980 when industrial capitalism began to disintegrate.

Since then, gender became a lot less relevant than mobility. Today, the issue of abortion access, for instance, is not an issue relevant to all women. It’s an issue relevant to women who can’t afford to  transport themselves easily and casually wherever the needed service is provided. Safe streets are crucial to women who can’t afford to move to a gated community, etc.

Capital never cared about gender. It’s entirely non-ideological, and that’s why the rise of capitalism coincided with the development of the civil rights movements. Today’s liquid capitalism cares about gender only inasmuch as it can be turned into an object of consumption. In the words of Ann Branaman, 

“‘Identity’ becomes a problem and a source of deep anxiety in liquid modernity; gender and sexual identity, like other bases of identity, become destabilized and deregulated, open to an unprecedented degree of individual experimentation and choice.”

Of course, this consumerist approach is only available to those who have the means to adopt it. However, those without the means eagerly celebrate this consumerist view of gender, hailing  a spoiled rich “being a woman means buying nail polish” celebrity “a hero” and “the woman of the year.”

If gender is placed on a Walmart shelf alongside bottles of cheap shampoo, its value as a mobilizing factor for political activism evaporates and feminism drowns in cheap, weepy sentimentality of Walmart commercials.

Of course, mass migration has many uses or nobody would promote it. For instance, it exorcises, somewhat, “the specter of uselessness”* that haunts so many people in the liquid world.

The arrival of migrants requires an army of bureaucrats, state officials, social workers, etc to process their paperwork, hand out new paperwork, file the paperwork, and come up with new kinds of crucial paperwork. In this way, you can occupy them for years, making it look like what they are doing is extremely necessary.

This is a way of pushing many locals out of the danger of slipping into the welfare class. For this purpose, a cushion needs to be created in the form of a much more dependent and helpless welfare class.

The longer the migrants stay unintegrated, the longer can this game be played. A self-reliant, independent migrant is useless in the game of providing the superfluous locals with the sense that they are not all that superfluous if there are people who are even more easily discardable than they are.

* The term was created by Richard Sennett.