Clarissa's Blog

This should be wider known:

It means that you can’t sue for COVID vaccine and other injuries.

Another thing Biden did in the closing days of his presidency is this:

President Joe Biden this week granted clemency to a former Luzerne County judge convicted in the infamous “kids for cash” scheme to send children to for-profit detention centers in exchange for kickbacks.

https://www.goerie.com/story/news/politics/2024/12/13/biden-commutes-sentence-pa-judge-kids-for-cash/76964004007/

Biden is granting an extraordinary number of presidential pardons and this is one of them. Who else is being snuck into liberty in this wave of pardons is hard to track because there are so many of them.

What’s curious in the Lily Phillips story is that she turned those 100 men into unpaid labor for her thriving business. They were filmed as content she’s putting on her OnlyFans to generate income for herself. It’s worse than any brothel because there the madam at least feeds and clothes her whores.

Some of these men actually spent money to travel to become free prostitutes for Phillips’s business. All they got in return is 3 minutes of wallowing in other men’s sperm.

We’ve been hearing how Philips doesn’t value herself but she’s actually getting tons of money for all this. Women are socialized to put value on their sexuality. Men, on the other hand, are socialized not to. Which is why it’s easy for an army of OnlyFans and Co prostitutes to hoodwink them. Men’s sexuality is perceived as an excess, unwanted, poured into a Lily Phillips-shaped toilet.

Many doctors will be replaced by AI. All they do is diagnose and prescribe meds. AI can do it faster, cheaper, and with fewer mistakes.

The few doctors who treat the person and not his symptom and who have not reduced themselves to being a prescription pad will remain. The rest won’t be needed.

ABC agreed to pay Donald Trump compensation for their dishonest on-air claim that he had been “found liable for rape.”

I’m not shocked that ABC lied. I’m shocked that, after this and every single proof that ABC, CNN, NYT and all the rest of them lie shamelessly and massively, people will still read them, watch them, and take them seriously.

Mike Omer is a writer from Israel who pens excellent thrillers in English. These are undemanding, light reads that tilt politically to the left, but then, what doesn’t?

Today I finished his book Behind You, and I want to recommend it as a hilarious unintended parody of the Girl Boss trope.

Gemma, the novel’s main character, got into some trouble as a teenager and had to run away. At 30, she’s a married manicurist in Chicago and a mother of a little boy. When Gemma’s teenage troubles catch up with her, she decides to be a lonesome hero and solve them herself. Of course, she could ask her husband for help but she decides he’d get too emotional and it will be too much effort to manage his feelings.

The funny part is that Gemma is not a self-reliant, well-organized, emotionally self-contained woman. She’s a clucking, over-dramatic hen of a person who sees the most trivial daily mishaps as calls for extraordinary heroicism. I’ll give an example so that you see the kind of femininity that Gemma practices:

She rummaged in her bag. Moisturizer. Eye cream. Just massaging her puffy eyes with the eye cream made her feel so much better. Next came her makeup base. She’d left her blending brush in the bathroom at her mother’s house. Well, she would tough it out. She was hard core; she could rub it in with her fingers, no problem.

This isn’t meant to be funny. Gemma routinely congratulates herself for being tough and hardcore while flipping out over such tiny mishaps. Omer has a gift for spotting this fussy, self-involved womanhood that despises men as loser primitives while acting like the most loserishly primitive people in existence.

Like any writer, Omer wants his books to sell, and his audience is almost entirely female. He writes in a way that will make his female readers feel flattered. He adopts their habitual exasperated sigh of “ugh, men!” to attract them to the book.

Bindel is absolutely right. These men are horrible people engaged in a deeply immoral activity.

It’s utterly irrelevant that both Phillips and these men freely chose to engage in this nastiness. Making a deity out of “choice” is daft. People freely choose to do all sorts of atrocious things, and that “free choosiness” in no way makes what they do moral or good.

I voted for him and then he goes and does this to me. Unbelievable. That’s a betrayal of everything I hold dear.

I read some of the comments, and people massively agree that it’s better to have more daylight in the evenings than in the mornings. I’d rather have none most of the day but what about you? Dark mornings or dark evenings?

I saw the drones, too. Last Saturday. That’s why I know it’s not “mass hysteria” as some are saying. I was definitely not hysterical and I mentioned that to nobody since. It wasn’t an attempt on my part to make myself interesting on social media because I never posted about it anywhere.

We were in a group and we all saw them.

I have only now found out that other people have been seeing them in different parts of the country.

I didn’t film them or anything because I never wantonly film things I see.

So no idea what it is but it’s something.

This is me in 1995:

I’m totally so much prettier now, 30 years later. I’m not even talking about how much happier, more confident, popular, smarter, and just simply blooming I am today. Even physically I looked like a sick monkey back then. Although, obviously I have ailments now and I didn’t back then. At least not of the physical kind.

I feel so much kindness and compassion towards students precisely because they are young. Youth is hard. You can never afford anything, there’s always debt, crappy, crummy jobs, you feel self-conscious, you care about what everybody else thinks, you don’t know if you will end up married or alone (although in this particular photo I clearly didn’t have that problem), childless or with children, friendless or not.

And the really hilarious thing was that back then I thought I was hideously fat. Like for real, dude, youth is such a stupid time.

This is an excellent, excellent question, and I’ve been thinking about exactly this in the past few days. I’ll be on a show tomorrow to talk about this, actually, but since it’s not in English, I’ll explain my thinking here.

People ask, “how do I choose a profession? How do I decide what to become?” This is an outdated approach that worked in 1953 but causes pain and suffering in the reality we currently inhabit. Professions disappear. They get wiped out daily. If they don’t get wiped out, they get transformed beyond all recognition. What is my job, for example?

Is it a college professor? A scholar? A translator, an author, a university administrator?

No, no, and no.

My job is being Clarissa. I bring my skills, personality and way of being into different arenas, and since these skills and personality are good, I monetize them well in these different arenas. But these arenas aren’t me. I’m me.

When I describe the dismantling of my university, people assume I’m miserable. But I’m the opposite. Campus is where I come to practice my hobbies, pursue my projects of personal and intellectual growth, and use the resources available here to do that. It’s like when you are driving and you see police congregate around two vehicles that crashed. You feel compassion for the people involved but the crash isn’t really affecting you in any way. You are in your own car, going to your own destination. There might be a delay on the road because of the crash but you are still going towards your own goal.

I knew from very early in life that I need to arrange my existence in a way that will give me a lot of time to read, think, be by myself and live the life of contemplation. I’ve achieved that, I’m content, and everything else is other people’s car crash.

The disaffected, uninterested people from the original question went about choosing their profession in the opposite way of what actually works. They chose a field and then tried to squeeze themselves into it. That’s onerous and soon gets boring and heavy. The right way to do it is not to place yourself in a field but to place a job inside your way of being. Then, it becomes one of the many places where you enjoy the life that’s optimal to you. I love reading, so I organized my life around me reading. For others, it’s going to be something completely different but they should figure that out first and decide that this something will be their guiding light, so to speak.

Yes, what I’m saying is neoliberalism on steroids. I know that better than anybody but I look, for example, on the quit-lit academics who tied their entire sense of self to being an academic, and that’s not a fun place to be. I was a teenager when the USSR fell apart, and everybody simultaneously lost their professions. There were many people who were destroyed by it, and I knew even back then that I didn’t want this for myself.

In short, a job shouldn’t give you meaning. You have to find meaning and then bring it wherever you go, be it a job or a trip to the grocery store.