One of the main topics of nineteenth-century literature is the burning need to have children. The middle class was coming into existence, capitalism was being born, and the middle class needed to transfer its wealth to the next generation. That’s why it was crucial to have the next generation. Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, Clarín’s His Only Child, and Galdós’s Fortunata and Jacinta are great examples of such books.

Before, the aristocracy was obsessed with having an heir. But now, all of a sudden, it wasn’t just the aristocracy and the peasants that formed the society. A new, rapidly growing, suddenly literate and increasingly propertied group of people appeared on the scene. A whole cultural apparatus sprang into existence to entertain and express this new large group. The novel, which suddenly became massively popular, spoke to and for this new middle class. Marriage and children, the main vehicles of transmitting wealth, became the main topic. There was suddenly wealth to transmit and a belief that this was a situation that would continue in the future.

Today, the economic conditions that necessitated a large middle class no longer exist. The form of statehood that made it possible no longer exists either. The middle class is getting eroded by this change. A few members of the former middle class are moving upwards, into the newly formed transnational, cosmopolitan elite. The rest are moving downwards, into an undifferentiated mass of superfluous people. They are not much needed by the economy. They are definitely not needed in a way that would let them acquire some kind of property that they  would want to pass down to heirs. Instead of a necessity, having children becomes a status symbol for the elite and a severely limiting, near-heroic feat for the former middle classes.

There’s no longer the same kind of need for workers. Consequently, there’s not the same kind of need for children. That’s the world of post-work.

I think that the Fulbrighters are funded by the State Department, no? We definitely had no impact from the Department of Education closure but we did earlier from the State Department cuts.

But yes, there was a possibility of an interruption in payment for the Fulbrighters back in early March. I got interviewed by everyone and his brother. Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, St Louis something. Since then, the Fulbrighters have been paid in full for March and April. I had several possible scenarios for getting them paid, so there was no chance they wouldn’t.

I had several venues of financing lined up in case the State Department didn’t come through. Used the press coverage to bludgeon the administration into wanting to pay anything to make it go away. Then a very kind person offered to donate money to cover the shortfall. Thank you, kind person, if you happen to be reading.

In short, all of my people got paid and would have gotten paid no matter what. Please appreciate my great modesty in not writing anything about any round of this drama. I’m only mentioning it now because I was asked.

Good news! You can now see the 30 most recent comments in the sidebar. I can make it up to 60, so let me know if the current number is insufficient.

Wait, what? It’s already been decided that the Libs will win? The leftist who transed his own kid at Tavistock has been chosen by Trump as the next PM of Canada?

For the particularly gifted: no, I’m not supporting this statement by Trump. I’m criticizing it.

Not in the Middle Ages or at any time since, has there ever existed such an extraordinary number of works of literature whose female protagonists are abjectly, pathetically, and enthusiastically subservient to men as in the 21st-century literature.

Medieval heroines are actually not subservient at all. They have agency, they have willpower, the have their own interests and strategies that they pursue. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female characters are even more so. It all begins to change in the late twentieth century and explodes completely in the twenty-first. One after another female character enslaves herself eagerly to some dude. And it’s never a dude who offers marriage, children, money, an equal partnership, and respect. No, it’s always and invariably a man who treats her as a child.

This is fascinating to observe. One novel after another. Different authors, countries, generations, writing styles, political beliefs. The characters are poor, rich, mega rich, in the middle. Societies where women have opportunities that Elizabeth Bennett or Jane Eyre couldn’t begin to dream of. Yet these female heroines throw all the opportunities away to pursue infantilization and abasement.

Censorship always has the exact opposite effect from the one intended. We learned that back in the USSR but in the US the message is taking longer to land.

As I reported earlier, our Chancellor forced the student newspaper to remove the last sentence of an article that said “Fuck the Chancellor.” A week has passed, and the censored article has become part of the school’s mythos. It now firmly entered the institutional conscience. People discuss it loudly and happily in the hallways. Even those who never read the student paper before are now passing around screenshots from the original, uncensored version. Jokes and memes abound.

The Chancellor is young and inexperienced and doesn’t know that the only way to preserve respect is by being magnanimous, leaning into the joke, showing no touchiness, and projecting strength and confidence.

I once walked on a group of students who were parodying my teaching mannerisms in an exaggerated manner. It was spot on and hilarious. Also, very uncomfortable because I wasn’t aware I had been doing any of it. Students looked scared but I leaned into the fun and for the next few days exaggerated the mannerisms they had parodied, eliciting excited peals of laughter. The fashionable thing to do would have been to interpret the students’ mockery as a sign that they despise me because I’m a woman and an immigrant. I could have turned this situation into a banner of victimhood and waved it in people’s faces for years. Instead, I joined in on the joke and students loved it. It became easier to teach because I reestablished myself as a figure of authority that cannot be reached by student pranks.

I completely understand your feelings, believe me, I do, but unfortunately, there’s absolutely nothing you can do. They are co-dependent, and it won’t help anybody for you to join the co-dependency.

An addiction within a marriage is part of the marriage. For some reason, they both need him to be addicted.

I recommend gently removing yourself from discussions about the marital issues so that your friendship doesn’t become about their dysfunction.

This is why it’s very important to have a conservative government in Canada:

I was just fired by @VCHhealthcare after 13 years of employment as a registered nurse, with no severance, because I know that men are not women.

— Amy Eileen Hamm (@preta_6) March 27, 2025

This is from today.

When we think about the relevance of ideas, we naturally weight those ideas by their number of living believers. For instance, Mithraism is not relevant at all, since there are no living Mithraists. In historical terms, this algorithm yields a fisheye lens, focused on the present. The living, who exist, are more important than the dead, who do not. Now, let us reweight the relevance of ideas by their living or dead believers. Now, ideas matter if anyone has ever believed them. This political map too has a window: the Overton window of history. How does it compare to the Overton window of the present both in position, and in size?

Curtis Yarvin, Grey Mirror

What is our position vis-a-vis history? Is ours the only true and correct way of being, akin to a religion? Or can we accept that our current way of being is not vastly superior to any that existed previously but one of many valid ways of being? Is it possible that we understand some things worse than people in the past?

The ability to see the present as equal to and part of the past is comparable to the ability to see one’s own religion as just one of many religions. The discovery of this ability was the core mental transformation of the Enlightenment. Once the Peace of Westphalia recognized that multiple faiths could coexist politically, modernity began.

But in the domain of politics, our minds remain shrouded in medieval gloom. The Overton model is a pre-Enlightenment model. Everyone outside the window is a Gentile. That is, an “extremist.”

The entirety of our history save for the last 15 seconds is widely considered to be a manifestation of right-wing extremism, evil, mean, and completely mistaken. A person who thinks like this about his past will be extremely miserable. If you are burning with hatred for everything that happened to you until this morning, you will be seriously unwell. But that’s how we are all conditioned to think. Right, left, center – we all see the past as one huge mistake and the people who lived then as morally inferior to us.

But what if it’s the other way round? Is that at all a possibility? What if we are the morally inferior ones?

I removed all of the conservative influencers who shilled for soda companies in the past week. These influencers were soundly mocked and denounced by conservatives.

Does this happen in progressive circles? Does anybody mock and denounce pay-for-play posts that are funded by Big Pharma, for example? I was very proud to see how conservative media self-cleansed from these dishonest operators. But we need this kind of community responsibility among progressives, too.