Clarissa's Blog

A war with Iran will not liberate the burqaed Iranian women. But it will give millions of them an excuse to move to Europe.

This has to be said:

I understand that he’s tendentious on this subject but he’s not wrong.

A virus infected all of the Earth’s animals, and they can’t be consumed anymore. Eating human flesh is legalized, and well-ordered, state-controlled cannibalism becomes the norm. Of course, we all now know that viruses can be used as an excuse for wide-scale societal modifications. In Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender Is the Flesh, the virus is a fiction created to advance a global depopulation program.

How does a society decide who is a human human and who is not so much and is fit to be eaten? What is a valuable life? And which lives can be sacrificed to the comforts of the more valuable ones? The premise of Bazterrica’s novel becomes less far-fetched when we remember that we have long accepted the volitional nature of the value of human life. If you don’t agree, I refer you to the recent legislation in Great Britain legalizing abortion at any stage of pregnancy. There is absolutely nothing different but the will of the mother between the babies who will be born and those who will be discarded. Bazterrica makes it very clear that she’s thinking about this analogy by placing the question of babies—which ones are treasured and why—at the heart of the novel.

This is a short book but it grapples with some of the most difficult questions of our times. Euthanasia, infertility, climate alarmism, fear of pandemics, hypocritical feminism. It’s a powerful novel but I can’t recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have a very strong stomach. I’ve felt nauseous for two days because the descriptions in the book are very graphic.

I discovered Bazterrica by pure chance at the bookstore yesterday. I didn’t expect much because a female Argentinean author in her fifties is, inevitably, very left-wing. The good news is that talent is stronger than the idiocy of even the most committed artist. And this is a talented book.

The university is closed for the federal holiday but I breached the perimeter and penetrated into the building through the loading dock. I’m here completely alone. The entire building is mine. I walk around in empty hallways loudly doing my German exercises.

I was trying to read an article about innovative teaching in elementary schools. But the article was written so poorly that I started to doubt if its author ever completed third grade. For reasons I fail to grasp, people who teach kids to read tend to hate the English language. The article used the following expressions:

• We delivered reading instruction
• Coming out of COVID, our students’ learning gaps were wide
• Our diverse learners needed diverse instruction
• That shift in mindset was the beginning of everything
• Nobody learns at exactly the same pace. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s powerful
• It’s focused, intentional, and impactful
• Our most vulnerable learners
• The number of students identified as at-risk has dropped by 25 points, with 19 of those points occurring this year
• We saw the potential to align our practices with how children actually learn to read

People who align practices are almost as obnoxious as the ones who amplify voices. And all these insufferable individuals flock to teaching.

Here’s the article, and believe me, I only took a minute sample of its extraordinary writing style.

This NYTimes article about kid summer camps is not paywalled and highly entertaining. It describes extremely pretentious people and their similarly pretentious concerns. I’m sharing so that people could have a quiet chuckle over these rich weirdos.

This is a terrible idea. I’m so tired of stupid neoliberalism everywhere one turns.

And for some light, humorous relief:

I don’t know what’s funnier, that this guidance exists or that there are people who are sincerely upset the guidance will go away.

My alcohol drinking days are long behind me but neither back then nor now do I seek the government’s guidance when deciding whether to drink. I assume there’s not a single person who would seek such a guidance.

There are good prequels and there are crappy ones. I’m not opposed to the idea of a prequel but it has to add something to the entire series. I liked The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Collins’s first prequel to the Hunger Games series. It explained why Coriolanus Snow was such a mean bastard and really contributed to the overall story.

Sunrise on the Reaping is also a prequel but it adds nothing, brings no new information and gives no fresh insight into characters. It’s a sort of a clumsy imitation of the first book in the series but with a young Haymitch Abernathy as the main character. The novel is clearly written so that there can be a movie with cool special effects. The story is predictable and quite soporific. To spice up the bleak, tedious brew of the plot, Collins fills it with inventive atrocities but piling horrors on top of each other makes them repetitive and uninteresting.

The movie will undoubtedly be visually stunning but the premise has gotten old.

The disciplinarian society is dead. Nobody cares what you do and how you live. People are trying to convince themselves that this is not the case. They keep repeating “society tells us to” even though society has gone away. They do it because they intuit that the end of the disciplinarian society is a disaster for most.

There are people, a minority, who don’t need an externally imposed structure because they created an internal one. They moved the disciplinarian inside. They live within a severe moral code that is internally sustained. They have their schedules, routines, and a rigid carcass of self-imposed limitations.

Most, however, are incapable of placing the raging desires that are the lot of every human into a cage and policing it daily. Without external sources of discipline, they get addicted to screens, become decision-averse, and perceive any limitation on satisfying each passing whim as crushing. They look unwell, both physically and psychically. The name of their illness is freedom with which they only know how to harm themselves.

Schooling hasn’t caught up with these changes and is still preparing people for a disciplinarian society that is no longer there.