Clarissa's Blog

The preceding post also illustrates why AI will never be able to offer psychological help. It will simply mirror people’s inflamed egos back at them, “validating their choices” and confirming how right they are in everything. The users will feel reassured in their extreme rightfulness, and grow lonelier, angrier, sadder, and more confused.

I put the question – what makes a good mother? – to a clinical psychologist.

“Well, you can only really answer that in the context of whether there’s a good father present.”

Would she have said the same if I’d asked what makes a good father?

➡️ https://t.co/MANeiZ4H9I pic.twitter.com/xYYtaaKypC

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 3, 2025

No, she wouldn’t because if the mother is alive, she’s almost invariably present. The phenomenon of mothers abandoning their children is extremely rare. Male and female bonding is very different, and we create many broken families by denying this.

But the psychologist’s words offer an important insight. A mother who speaks badly of the father is a bad mother by definition. A mother who disrespects the father is a bad mother by definition. And so on.

Does anybody else find it as funny as I do that real democracy always and only means having one-party rule?

Even Orthodox Americans are Protestants at heart.

Two examples.

Our parish elders extended an invitation to a new priest. We’ve been without a priest since January 1st, and it’s hard. Finally, the elders found a priest who is eager to relocate and take on our parish. But a bunch of parishioners are unhappy because the process was undemocratic. We didn’t get to vote on the new priest. The idea that an Orthodox church should be a democratic institution is ludicrous to me. What’s next, we’ll vote on which parts of the service we want to eliminate because they are not inclusive enough? The whole point of being Orthodox is that you want a hierarchy, an unchanged millennial tradition, a break from the consumerist model of endlessly choosing and deciding everything. The idea that people who converted fifteen minutes ago should get a vote on par with the members of the parish council who were born and grew up and grew old in this parish is nuts.

“How are these elders better than me?” asks a young dude who got baptized last year. That the elders have been here forever and consequently understand the parish much better never occurs to him. Equality! One person, one vote! Roots and history are nothing! That the elders have been mowing the lawn, cleaning the grounds, and running the food pantry for decades while you showed up yesterday with opinions and a sense of self-importance doesn’t occur either.

Another objection to the new priest is that he does parts of the service in Old Slavonic. “We don’t understand what he’s saying!” the refuseniks exclaim. It’s unclear what it is they need to understand. The service hasn’t changed in a thousand years. We’ve all heard it in English many, many times. There are booklets in every seat where you can read the whole text in English. And that’s not what an Orthodox service is for anyway. You don’t come to engage with the text of the service on an intellectual level. That’s Protestantism. Orthodoxy doesn’t claim that every individual is his own priest. It claims the exact opposite. It invites you to be part of something that’s bigger than yourself. You are subsumed into the tradition. Your personal whims are unimportant. You accept, obey, and defer, and in the world of ceaseless choices and decisions it’s extremely restful and peace-inducing.

We had one dude a while ago who would actually interrupt the sermon with his corrections and observations. He ended up having to leave when he realized that an Orthodox sermon is not a debate club.

There are opportunities for an enormous amount of personal growth in learning to bow your head and accept. For three hours a week you can experience a bit of humility and put away your hubris. You can feel instead of think. You can find joy in the realization that many generations of people heard the exact same service and sang the exact same hymns in the exact same order, and it’s all already done. It’s completed. It’s decided and finished. It’s there for you and you needn’t work on improving the process. Your ego can take a rest. It’s not about feeding it and making it feel important. It’s about doing the exact opposite.

The way to get good at sex is the same as the way to get good at any other process: Once you're done, roll out the whiteboard and together do a no-fault analysis of what went wrong, what went right, and what could've been done differently.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ (@ESYudkowsky) May 1, 2025

I also suggest inviting your mother to go over the breakdown and give helpful suggestions.

Zuckerberg explaining how Meta is creating personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones: “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.” pic.twitter.com/Y9ClAqsbOA

— Roman Helmet Guy (@romanhelmetguy) April 30, 2025

Leaving aside the deeply boring part about Zuckerberg’s AI bots, what I don’t understand is the need for 15 friends. Does the average American have no family? No job? No household tasks?

How can one squeeze regular outings with 15 friends into a normal life?

Even if you take them in batches of five, it’s three outings a week to maintain weekly contact. Who is with the kids while you are out with these batches thrice weekly? Who makes the dinner and folds laundry? Who packs the lunches and changes the bedding?

Or is the idea that these friends would agree to meet once every two weeks? Good luck finding 15 such accommodating bastards.

And then there are the text messages. Each friend needs to be buoyed up with strings of 6-7 messages at least every three days. You need to see, read, and watch each friend’s links and memes and react to them at least minimally. There are doctor’s appointments, kids’ milestones, profligate cousins, husbands with back pain, drama at the knitting circle, etc. And then the diagnoses begin. And the surgeries. And the cancer scares. And the actual cancers. Nobody who is regularly undergoing this with three friends would agree to 15. I’d enthusiastically consent to immediate euthanasia if forced to do this for 15 people, batches or no batches.

Of course, Zuckerberg is an individual who says things like “having demand for 15 friends”, which makes it clear that only months of serious torture would induce anybody to be his friend. But this comment still struck a nerve. I constantly feel guilty for not being able to give enough to my friends, and the idea that I’d want to populate my life with fifteen and then perish with guilt altogether is not pleasant.

Daily, there are fresh updates about the rich criminal history of “Maryland Dad” who was “mistakenly deported.”

Footage has surfaced of “Maryland Dad” being caught in the act of human trafficking in 2022. Since it was 2022, ICE refused to pick him up and he continued his gang activities, his wife-beating, and his abuse of her children.

It’s fascinating that a gangster who is in the country illegally and engages in all sorts of criminal acts is utterly and completely un-deportable. He beat that poor idjit wife for years. He was apprehended for a variety of gang activities. Yet he was never deported. Is there anything a person like Abrego García can do to get deported?

It’s also quite fascinating that US politicians would go to El Salvador and pose for pics over a wife-beating gang-banger. Apparently, “the era of #MeToo” was thrown away the moment it became convenient to move on.

Confucius said that the only people who are incapable of changing are the smartest and the dumbest. I’m neither, so I decided to embrace change in the form of heightened curliness. It looked better yesterday but now nobody will believe me.

My mother really slayed today. She’s undergoing her third round of chemo, and I called her at the hospital to entertain her with the story about Canadian concentration camps.

“Ah!” she said. “I know what we should do. I’ll take off my wig, and we’ll ask the nurse to snap a pic of me holding it. Then you can tell your colleague that Canadians scalped me.”

I’d do it if I didn’t fear that the colleague would take it seriously.