Clarissa's Blog

I understand that Cuomo is repulsive, but this dude? Seriously? A chirping, prattling airhead bimbo guy?

I need to remember that when people ask, “so what are your plans?”, the answer they expect does not begin with, “I’m working on a book titled Neoliberal Love and I’m currently on the last novel I’m analyzing…”

BREAKING: Vancouver just renamed Trutch Street to Šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmsəm Street to be inclusive pic.twitter.com/sdKAXj2iky

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 22, 2025

What are you going to do with these people?

We watched the kids’ Pixar movie Elio, and among the human characters almost nobody is white. There’s one white boy who is a bully and one disheveled mad scientist. Everybody else, including at the airspace base, is non-white.

Where did all the white people go? There’s no explanation. This is something that simply is.

The dumbing down of the SAT proceeds apace:

They shortened reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage.

This resulted in the elimination of significant portions of SAT’s previously used reading material, including “passages in the U.S. founding documents/Great Global Conversation subject area,” because of their “extended length.” Nevertheless, the College Board takes the view that the rigor of the Reading and Writing segment is unchanged. They claim in the assessment framework that the eliminated reading passages are “not an essential prerequisite for college” and that the new, shorter content helps “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”

The SAT’s Trust Fall

Please look at the preceding post and tell me what other consequences of what we saw in that video there could be. The children of the people in that video won’t have a native language. They will not be able to read texts of any complexity. They will not be able to understand figurative language and read fiction.

Remember the student who couldn’t understand a short story title? The story began with the words “Carlitos loved the United States and had a huge American flag in his room.” The story was titled “Stars and Stripes.” The student kept insisting that the story title was about nature because she sincerely couldn’t connect the title and the first sentence. Even after prompts such as, “what does the American flag look like? How can you connect this to the story title?” she couldn’t answer.

Many people look at the watermelon video and see convenient devices that efficiently move the watermelons and can be shelved until next time when all watermelons are moved. But these are human beings with all the human complexities and needs. You tear them out of their cultural, familial, linguistic, and geographic context at a great and terrible cost.

And please, please don’t adduce arguments about mass migration a hundred years ago. It’s embarrassing to say such things. Human subjectivity changed dramatically since then. We now live in a world that demands enormously more from us cognitively than at any previous time. And we respond to this challenge by destroying the capacity of millions of people to develop the cognition that can grapple with this growing complexity.

We are crippling these people and their children because it’s convenient to have them cheaply move watermelons. How can this possibly be a good thing?

What happens when Trump deports these immigrants in California? Are you going to do their job for them? pic.twitter.com/RFM3hDZzZH

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) June 21, 2025

It’s 2025. There are self-driving cars. This all was automated a long time ago everywhere where slave labor was not allowed.

What’s happening in this video is deeply immoral. The people in it have abandoned their families, friends, communities, their culture and their language because some absolute dick prefers to exploit them rather than automate. Let’s not be on the side of the exploitative dick.

The erosion of shared culture – religion, ritual, myth – has left the modern subject increasingly alone with their mortality. In the absence of shared symbolic containers, death anxiety becomes unmediated. Without cultural meaning systems to metabolise death anxiety, we see a rise in pseudo-substitutes: performative identity, health obsession, productivity as virtue. These offer no real containment – just distraction.

@BrightonPsych

So. How is everybody feeling aside from disappointed and duped?

Anybody got any unexpected takes?

For her teenagers, soda and energy drinks occupy a unique role. “It’s a kind of social currency for them,” she says.

Her 17-year-old daughter, Olivia, confirms this dynamic.

“ I feel like when you walk into first period in the morning, everyone has like a Red Bull, an energy drink — it’s a social construct for sure,” says Olivia.

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5432809/trump-snap-food-assistance

This is supposed to be in the Portland, Oregon area. I don’t deny people’s capacity to behave in weird ways but this is not the fashion where I live. Red Bull is what 50-year-old contractors in the construction industry drink. I have not seen it among students since  2011. Very rarely there is a Propel but other than that it’s either Starbucks or a water bottle. Americans all must carry a water bottle. It’s right there with the driver licence. I’ve gotten so Americanized that I also feel weird if I haven’t had anything to drink for over 30 minutes.

In the meantime, a new video:

People in the comments say I sound like a song.