Clarissa's Blog

The way my brain works, I sometimes get confused and hassled about very basic things. For example, today I need to figure out fast of I could do an appearance at 7pm Kyiv time. In the moment, I had zero understanding of when that was and was experiencing brain fog. So I asked the AI, and woe betide me. Here’s the response:

All I wanted was to know the time, and this is what it did to me.

It has become clear why Belarus has failed so badly in its efforts to remove the dictator Lukashenka:

In the photos, we see the leader of the Belarusian opposition Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya with the Soros family. I’ve long said that the Belarusian opposition is almost as weird as the Russian. Turns out they are both owned by the Soroses. No wonder these have been the most ineffective oppositions in the world.

When the economic crash came to Ireland in 2008, things got tough. Businesses collapsed, building projects were left to rot, people cracked under the pressure. But the economic part is not the worst. Money can be figured out. It’s the other, non-tangible costs of the fluid way of being that are the hardest.

Paul Murray’s novel The Bee Sting tells about the costs of fluidity that lie far outside of the economic realm. The 650-page book is so well-constructed that I didn’t figure out what the author was driving at and how everything was going to come together into a coherent message until the last pages. I was worried to the very end Murray wasn’t going to pull it off but he did, and I’m majorly impressed. Reader zinemin who recommended the novel gets my deepest gratitude. I’ve waited for a real, serious anti-neoliberal novel in English for years, and finally it came. Ireland rules.

The novel tells about the Barnes family, mom, dad, an 18-year-old daughter, and a 12-year-old son. Mom, dad, and daughter are so completely absorbed in the burning issue of whom to bed that they don’t notice that everything is collapsing around them. With the greatest patience and humor, Murray shows what it looks like when people turn sex into an idol and worship at its altar. As mother, father, and sister stumble around in their sexual haze, predators, wokesters, crooks, and pedophiles swarm, eager to feast on the carrion of a rotting family.

Family, which is the Great Unchosen, is the only hope of survival amidst the battering flows of uncertainty. Will the Barneses figure this out in time? Will we? Or are we going to sacrifice what matters to our fascination with chasing after freedom and choices?

Murray smashes us right against these crucial questions, the most important ones we can ask ourselves. Is duty more important than feeding our incessant wants? What is more likely to bring happiness and peace, doing what’s right or following our whims? As he leads us towards the answers, Murray pokes fun at woke gender-fluid brats, climate whisperers, pretentious professors, and silly college girls who buy into leftist fads. He also offers a nuanced and brave depiction of homosexuality, both male and female.

Often an author knows how to write well but has absolutely nothing to say. Joyce Maynard is a great example. But Murray not only writes brilliantly, he has tons to say about stuff that really matters. He’s a major talent, and I’m shaking with joy that I found this author.

I’m particular fascinated by which governmental agencies were sponsoring Politico with taxpayer money’s

Extraordinary stuff.

With the Soviet newspaper “Pravda” at least we knew it was government press and treated it accordingly.

People talk about neoliberalism like it’s still 1985 and neoliberalism is this sort of an unchangeable monolith. But it’s not. It changes, it moves. It is honest in the sense that it demands from us the same changeability that it manifests.

The first stage of neoliberalism was the reduction of the state institutions that guaranteed (or attempted to do so) the welfare of the citizens.

The second stage was putting in place of those institutions mechanisms of state control that ensured ideological compliance.

By the end of the second stage, the state transformed itself from an entity that sought legitimacy through the consent of the subjects into an entity that silenced the subjects and expressed consent on their behalf.

The institutions of the state are now stronger than ever but their function is no longer to help out citizens in difficult times. It is, instead, to shut up the citizens when they want to speak out about the difficult times.

I will leave everybody to figure out for themselves if removing these currently existing institutions of the state helps or thwarts neoliberalism. I’ll remind you, though, that neoliberalism is not about destroying the state. It’s about making it do something completely different than before.

Arestovych sums it up best of all:

That really does impress. We had no idea it was even possible actually to do something without all the prattle.

Byung-Chul Han defines rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world:

Rituals transform the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space; they render time habitable. They structure time.

We no longer value rituals, and don’t use them to make our lives more stable. To the contrary, we have come to see stability and predictability as something negative.

As a result, in our current existence

time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream.

We have stripped daily life of beauty when we expelled ritual from it.

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways.

In rituals, people come together to engage in a time-hallowed practice that takes them away from themselves. Rituals aren’t about anybody’s individual self and they remove us temporarily from the field of decision-making. Everything in a ritual was decided for us a long time ago, and that’s a great relief. In our self-obsessed culture, anything that distracts us from our fixation on the self is curative.

Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence. They depsychologize and de-internalize those enacting them.

I had an online meeting today with somebody from the US Department of State, and they are definitely still working from home, is all I can say.

This is from Matt Walsh’s thread, so I didn’t find it myself.

She doesn’t sound completely uneducated or dumb. Uses the Oxford comma, and all. Has money for a neuropsychologist. So not a confused illiterate lady who simply doesn’t know the answer.

What is it, then? Is she really this clueless? Or did Matt Walsh manufacture this comment for rhetorical purposes, which is what I prefer to believe and wouldn’t even blame him.

Honestly, at 33 it’s weirder to be really into going out for drinks with buddies than into productivity. Usually, people get their drinking and partying done in the previous decade of their lives, and then it gets boring and one can move on.

I say all this as somebody who did quite a lot of nighttime drinking with buddies in my time but you don’t spend your whole life doing it. You experience it and then move on and develop other interests.