How you know that Ukrainians have joined the parish:
I make these crepes for my family but unfortunately I can no longer eat them myself.
This is a fun article about kitsch statuary found on the French eBay: For Sale, France, Barely Used – by…
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Continue reading →: Tasteless
The administration of my university is refusing to negotiate a contract. The overpaid, incompetent top administrator is wasting gigantic amounts of money on vanity projects. Expensive new buildings are being built, but they stand filthy because janitors can’t take the terrible working conditions and leave in droves.
Yesterday, people went out to protest. And what I found interesting in the whole thing is that the top administrator called them tasteless to discredit them. Not dishonest, not wrong, not lazy, not confused, not entitled, but tasteless.
This is not the first time he does this. When people complain about low pay, inflation eating up the salaries that haven’t seen a cost-of-living increase in years, and the lack of a contract, this administrator routinely tells some anecdote that positions him as a fancy person with refined tastes and an expensive lifestyle. What’s really entertaining is that flaunting one’s wealth in the faces of people who say they struggle to put food on the table because you’re underpaying them is the most vulgar, low-class thing of all.
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Continue reading →: Snippets and Jingles
I have now read the phrase “Lindsay Clancy begged for help” in six different languages in my X feed. Obviously, there is no international propaganda campaign in defense of this horrible woman. People are chanting the same meaningless sentences around the world because that’s how most people are. Their entire inner world consists of snippets and jingles that they heard somewhere and repeat because the snippets sound smart to them.
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Continue reading →: Age-related
While, once again, I do not recommend this life strategy, being an old mother is in many ways really great. Yesterday I woke up at 5:30 a.m. to prepare a 3-course hot lunch for my fifth grader. In spite of numerous reminders, she forgot to bring it with her and ate some weird thing served at school.
Was I annoyed or snippy with her when I found out? Not a bit. My capacity to get upset over little things is about fifteen years past its sell-by date. I live amongst a husband who has never been nagged and a child who has never been snapped at or criticized. Not because I’m a wonderful person, but because I’m extremely middle-aged. I’ve simply aged out of all of the stuff that strains marriages and complicates parenting endeavors.
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Continue reading →: Verbal Tics
Even right-wingers have adopted much of the left’s obsessions and verbal tics. They keep criticizing “white liberal women.” One in every three sentences they emit is a condemnation of these “white liberal women.” They don’t stop to think whether black liberal women are so much better than the white ones. Which, of course, they aren’t. But that’s not the point. It’s the leftist habit of using “white” as an insult.
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Continue reading →: How to Make Yourself Depressed
The real problem is that it’s socially acceptable and prestigious to pose as a victim. Victimhood and suffering, even if they are completely fake, are prized social achievements.
Our brain believes what we tell it. If you pretend to be overworked, overwhelmed, and miserable for social clout, soon enough your brain will believe it and you will feel overworked, overwhelmed, and miserable.
In academia, for instance, whining is everybody’s favorite hobby. Throughout my years at department chair, we had a self-pity group for female chairs. They’d go to restaurants and bars together to discuss how they are disadvantaged as women. I never went.
Even writing productivity groups are infected with the poison of self-pity. Once you tell yourself that you never have time to write and that everything around you is set up to prevent you from writing, you will most certainly end up not writing. Yet this is exactly what people do.
But it’s everywhere, not just in academia. And it’s getting worse. People talk themselves into believing that somebody’s out to get them or that their suffering is profound, and then they actually start to suffer. Yes, you get social acceptance and prestige from it, but is it worth it? Unless you’re a sociopath, you will end up integrating the fake persona into the real one.
People methodically drive themselves into depression out of social conformity. Yes, the woman in the image above is posing. It’s all fake. But she’ll get herself into feeling exactly what she’s enacting very soon.
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Continue reading →: Postpartum Psychosis
When my daughter was between two and a half and three years old, she went through a tantrum stage. The way she organized her tantrums was hilarious. She would look around, scout a location where she would be visible to me but be in no danger of hitting any furniture, lower herself very carefully to the ground, arrange her clothing so that it wouldn’t get crumpled, and proceed with the tantrum. I would get up and go to another room. She would stop the tantrum, get up, follow me to wherever I was, and repeat the procedure.
What conclusion did I draw when observing this? The same one that you drew when reading my description. This was not a real tantrum. A real tantrum happens when a child is so overcome by a powerful emotion that he is unable to complete these hyper-rational steps and most definitely is incapable of caring about the convenience of the exercise and the state of his clothing.
This is how I know that Lindsay Clancy did not experience postpartum psychosis. Postpartum psychosis is real. It is a terrible and extremely rare affliction. It is incompatible with planning, scheduling, and calculation. You cannot choose to put off a psychotic episode to a convenient time that fits your schedule. The reason why psychotic people are found not guilty by reason of mental defect in court is because they have no control over their actions. A real psychotic break is a physiological event. In this sense, it’s like a heart attack. You cannot say, “OK, it’s inconvenient for me to have a heart attack on Tuesday, so I’ll put it off until Wednesday afternoon.”
The capacity of creating and executing a plan is evidence of rationality. The plan can be despicable, but the evil nature of your actions in pursuit of executing this plan is not evidence of irrationality.
That Clancy “asked for help” or was on a cocktail of strong meds is irrelevant to the issue of whether she was in control of her faculties during the murder. She did not flow off the handle and start hacking at strong adults who could physically overpower her. To the contrary, she schemed to get such a strong adult out of the house and attacked people who could not defend themselves. That she attempted to commit suicide after the murders is also not evidence of psychosis unless we decide that all suicidal people are psychotic.
It’s the same thing with Decarlos Brown. He targeted a small, skinny woman. He explained that he targeted her because of her race. He positioned himself behind her to be able to attack her successfully. None of this is psychotic or irrational. It’s evil. But it’s not a foundation for a not guilty verdict.
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Continue reading →: Hauser’s Law
The top tax rate has hovered from 92% to 28% in the past 80 years. Yet, as a percentage of the GDP, tax revenue remained in the same small range.
You can charge the top earners under 30% in taxes. You can charge them over 90%. The amount of money that the government receives as a result remains identical.
Raising the taxes on the rich to sky-high levels has been done. Here in this country, it’s been done. It changed nothing. This is not how you strengthen the welfare safety net. This is the opposite of how you strengthen it.
What exactly needs to happen for people to learn from the recent past?
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Continue reading →: The Post-truth Art
The modern novel is, first and foremost, about the art of making a novel. But as the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu would say, in order to understand and love that about it, you need to possess a form of cultural refinement that most people cannot access.
Bourdieu wrote in the 1980s, so I have something more recent to add to his ideas. Bourdieu said that contemporary art is divorced from the object of representation and married to the form. Meaning that it doesn’t care that much about being truthful or realistic. Creating an original, beautiful form is much more important. Being able to enjoy a painting that doesn’t reflect any real object, a poem that does not rhyme or tell a story, and the novel which cannot be summarized as being “about” something is a mark of a higher social class. This is post-truth art for a post-scarcity society.
Remember how in the movie Devil Wears Prada, a chic, fashion-industry woman explains to a young, frumpy, low-class intern how the outfit that the low-class intern wears is a bad imitation of last year’s fashion trends? What Pierre Bourdieu would call “popular classes” have invented their own form of post-truth art. They watch Candace Owens videos and pro-Clancy TikToks because that is their form of post-truth art. They too live in the post-scarcity world, so it stands to reason that they want a knock-off of post-truth art. Candace Owens performs the same role in their lives that Rafael Chirbes does in mine.
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Continue reading →: How to Become Religious
I know this guy who was very non-religious. A hyper-rational guy in a highly intellectual profession. He and his wife put their young sons in a Catholic school three years ago because the memory of COVID was strong, and they were among the people who no longer trust public schools to stay consistently open.
The Catholic school offers a tuition discount to people who are part of their congregation. This father thought, “Hey, if I can save some money by doing it, I’ll just show up to Mass on Sundays, and it’s an excellent deal money-wise.”
Forward three years, he got baptized into the Catholic faith and is now a very eager, sincere, and happy Catholic.
People think that they need some sort of a correct degree of religious feeling in order to start going to church. But it’s not how it works. There is no need to wait to have faith before you go. You simply need to start going. Faith is a process. It’s actions. You need to start participating. Feelings are a result of the actions. You’ll feel it once you start doing it.
This is going to be a very profane analogy, but this is like going to the gym. You don’t go to the gym for the first time because you’re an athlete. You start going consistently, working out, and then you become more athletic. Yes, there are people who are born into the faith. That’s how it should be, but I’m not talking to them right now. I am talking to people who are kind of curious but are waiting to be illuminated before they go.
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