Opinions, art, debate
I truly despair:
I mean. Dude already turned Georgia from red to purple and is proceeding to push it further into deep blue.
And the other side just dropped a batch of Russian propagandists on US soil and is gaslighting us into thinking that Kamala “is strong on immigration” and supports “law and order.”
I’m going to go do my breathing exercises now because observing all this is making me livid.
Very easy to make, light and delicious.
Mix 3 eggs with 300 grams of sour cream. Add some salt and pepper. A teaspoon of baking powder. Mix in 1,5 tablespoon of flour. Let the batter rest for 20 minutes on the kitchen counter until little bubbles form on the surface.
In the meantime, fry up some mushrooms. People usually fry them up with onions but I obviously skip that part. Add any herbs and spices you like.
Pour half of the batter into a smallish baking dish. I put parchment paper on the bottom so that it doesn’t stick. Put the mushrooms on top. Cover with the rest of the batter. Bake at 375°F for 15 minutes. Then poke the crust with a fork a few times and bake for 15 mins more.
That’s it, you can take it out and enjoy. This batter works great for chicken pie, too.
That a mega lefty Asian-American writer Emiko Jean would write the most pro-life novel I have ever read (or imagined reading) is a surprising and encouraging sign of a cultural turn that is underway. In Mika in Real Life, a teenager’s decision to give birth to a child of rape is never explained, let alone justified. To the contrary, it’s presented as such a normal thing to do that no explanation is necessary. The entire novel exists around the idea that this was the only good thing the main character did in her life. All of the pro-life folks should shut up right now because they usually make their case in the clumsiest possible way. Instead, they need to buy mountains of copies of Mika and hand them out to late teens and young adults. I’m a lifelong abortion rights supporter, and I honestly say that the book’s message landed with me. It didn’t transform me into a different person but if I’d read it as a teenager, it probably would have.
Jean is very mainstream, best-selling, and, once again, so left-wing that AOC looks conservative by her side. But she’s not writing about lefty topics anymore because there’s no longer that much interest.
Then there’s the exceptionally lefty Jewish-American Taffy Brodesser-Ackner. This year she also effectuated a sharp right turn away from her formerly deeply woke interests.
Writers are barometers of reality. If they have even a crumb of talent, their text will wrestle control and run its own way. I have no idea what Jean and Brodesser-Ackner wanted to say in their novels. It’s utterly unimportant because we can never find out for certain. But they are showing that the weather has changed and we are moving in a different direction now.
I got out of bed today, and for the first 10 minutes didn’t think about my foot at all! Because it didn’t hurt.
The biggest pain was usually right after getting out of bed because blood would rush to the foot. And now I get out of bed and feel nothing for minutes on end. That’s an excellent sign.
Exactly. I also want to mention that there’s a difference between “Señora + last name” and simply “señora”. While the former is an equivalent of “Mrs Jones”, the latter is, if not rude, then kind of going in that direction. It’s akin to when we addressed strangers as “man” or “woman” in the USSR. There was always a bit of implied disrespect in it. As there was in every Soviet interaction.
One thing I don’t allow (and glare at people unpleasantly when they try it) is addressing me by my first name if I haven’t introduced myself with it. I always disliked the forced American (and Spanish, as it’s very prevalent in Spain) egualitarianism. I cringe at calling the Dean and the Provost by their first names, for example. They encourage it but it’s so fake. We aren’t friends. We don’t want to be friends. We work in a hierarchy, which is excellent. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Also, I want to correct a popular misconception. People in the USSR didn’t address each other as “Comrade” past the 1930s. On rare occasion they used “Citizen” but that happened either in the context of the criminal justice system or ironically.
When students in my Spanish courses address me as señora, it really bugs me. These are non-native students, of course.
But when the French students say “bonjour, madame”, I find it charming.
These are the “Russian dissidents” Biden got from Putin in exchange for assassins and spies:
Three minutes out of captivity, and already working on behalf of the Putin regime. What a great deal. Importing Russian propagandists will definitely show those other Russian propagandists how opposed we are to Russian propagandists.
Here’s another so-called dissident busily fellating Putin immediately upon US-organized release:
These “dissidents” found no other topic of discussion than rubbishing the US for its supposed unfairness against Russia. We’ve got crowds of our own citizen bitching incessantly about America. What was the urgent need to bring in more?
Taffy Brodesser-Ackner is the author of one of the most exuberantly woke novels I ever read. It was published in 2020, and I wasn’t going to give this writer a second chance. When her new book came out last month, though, I decided to try it. And guess what? Brodesser-Ackner is now poking fun at the wokesters she worshipped only 4 years ago.
Here’s her description of a militant left-winger who is trying to impose ideological conformity on a Hollywood movie studio:
She was eager to “disrupt” even the most well-planned ongoing storylines and general, viewer-loved plot points with every social issue she could think of: sexual violence, sexual freedom, sexual terrorism, feminism, racial tension, voting rights, sex positivity, period positivity, pronoun use. Anya had created what she called a “Diversity Worksheet,” a veritable bingo board of these issues that each production should aim to include three of in each season: suicide, mental illness, guns, healthcare for all, “grooming,” border walls, segregation in schools, redlining, roofies, endometriosis, body positivity, Donald Trump’s tax returns, homophobia, Islamophobia, Islamophilia, juicing, “the refugee situation,” voter suppression, the prevalence of HPV. Plus there were five different kinds of abortion—second-term, back-alley, legal, accidental (!), third-term—that she wanted the shows to address. Anya could not get enough of the various ways there were to abort a pregnancy.
Long Island Compromise
Brodesser-Ackner writes about and for wealthy people. And it looks like they’ve tired from the earnestness of “social justice” and are ready to poke fun at it.
The weirdest Soviet foods I remember are as follows:
A. Boiled potato sandwiches. You slice boiled potatoes and place them on bread with some salt and pepper on top.
B. Watermelon rind jam. It was not at all bad-tasting, by the way. In the same family is candy made out of sugared orange peel.
C. Canned pasta. People were so into canning that when there was nothing else to can, they’d can cooked pasta in some weird liquid. It was like Chef Boyardee but in glass jars. Disgusting, both visually and taste-wise.
D. Of course, there’s also the famous Olivier salad that was a rendering of the signature dish of a French chef in cheap Soviet ingredients. The Olivier salad is such an atrocious mix of ingredients that even Spanish cuisine pales in comparison. I adore it, though, even knowing how exceptionally unhealthy it is.
E. Pasta with sugar. My family never reached such levels of poverty but among the even less fortunate it was popular to eat cooked pasta with a generous sprinkling of sugar. Nobody heard of pasta sauce. Cheese and butter were a distant dream, so this was a way to make the sad, grey-colored and very sticky Soviet pasta slide in better.
The great theorists of neoliberal subjectivity formation, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval said that destroying symbolic forms brings about mass psychosis. They also called the need to normalize all forms of exotically transgressive behaviors a clinical perversion. They were equally harsh with the belief that going through sex partners like Kleenex is in any way liberating. And the idea that you can change sex through medical procedures evoked deep derision from them
That very left-wing thinkers spoke like this as recently as 2009 is truly something to ponder.
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