Obama says “we are not seeing the same type of enthusiasm and support as when I was running.”
Yes, dude, because then you won and we all saw the results.
In what concerns profiling, I learned that the people who often repeat “let me be clear” suffer from mental fog. When you are completely clear, you don’t need to say that you are planning to be completely clear.
I’m blessed in many ways but I haven’t been blessed with an opportunity to teach literature or talk about books at work. You all know that this is something I’m very good at but it’s sadly not needed where I am.
So in the best neoliberal spirit, I’m going to do for myself and create my own opportunity finally to teach literature. In Ukraine. Who could have bloody thought but life is funny that way. The Ukrainian professors who invited me wrote today to say that I’m a saint because I’m not managing to transmit how very self-serving I’m being with this project.
I wasn’t going to watch the interview because I have an early public appearance tomorrow but I decided to see just a snippet and now I’m heaving with laughter, tears streaming down my face and my throat raw.
It’s pure comedic gold, people. It’s not OK to laugh at cognitively challenged individuals but I think you get a pass if such an individual is trying to get elected president.
I’m going to be all swollen and hoarse at my talk tomorrow but I don’t even care. Please watch if you get a chance. Watch with a loved one because nothing brings people closer than a shared laugh. I’ll give no spoilers because I don’t want to rob you of enjoyment.
Why do we need early voting if we have a whole day off work on Election Day? We have an early voting station on campus yet November 5 is a holiday. This makes no sense.
I’m prejudiced against people who are into early voting.
“Mommy, have you observed that the cost of living is rising?” asks my 8-year-old on the way to school.
“Why? Do you need me to buy something?”
“No, but I do need you to vote for Donald Trump to make sure that this stops happening.”
Readers, please feel free to leave reading recommendations in the comments but I’ll save you the time and explain it myself and then you can go to the recommended books for more detail.
In a socialist economy, the means of production are owned by the government. In order to manufacture absolutely any product, the government must plan in advance how much of everything it will manufacture. The entire economy has just one owner, so there can’t be a business that fails. This is called “planned economy.”
To make this single-owner machinery work, you need an entire apparatus that will figure out how much of everything – shoes, armchairs, hammers, eggs, planks of wood, etc – needs to be made (or imported, if there’s money for that) every year. Just imagine the level of planning even for a tiny country. Try to figure out, for instance, how many pairs of shoelaces you need to manufacture in a year. And in what color. And what length. And thickness. And you need to make sure that you’ve planned enough (but not too much) of the raw materials and components of the shoe laces. And the packaging. And so on. You’ve got to fixate on the quantity and disregard the quality to make this even kind of possible. Since you have no competitors, quality doesn’t matter. The whole market is yours.
In a market economy, there are many different producers for every item. Quality becomes majorly important because you don’t own the entire market. At the same time, your calculations of what you need to produce in a year are easier to make because you don’t have to cover every single need of everybody. You just do what’s realistic because if you don’t manage to produce every shoelace the country will need, there will be enough companies to pick up the slack. You also have the freedom to hire, pick and fire workers, adjusting the labor force according to need. This isn’t possible in a socialist economy because the social need to have everybody employed trumps the economic need to adjust the number of employees.
The socialist economy always fails because it’s just simply not possible to plan out as enormous an enterprise as a country. You’ll always end up miscalculating on a significant percentage of your predictions. Workers are not motivated to produce, or to work at all, to be honest, because their performance doesn’t impact the remuneration. No advantage accrues to you if you stay up nights and invent a process to manufacture shoe laces faster and more efficiently. To the contrary, your initiative puts a wrench into the system where everything is already planned. You are messing with everybody’s process unnecessarily. Everything will be done to discourage you from this unnecessary initiative.
So what have we seen in this very basic explanation I’ve given?
Poor quality, lack of innovation and shortages are imminent in a socialist economy. They are baked into the system. Human creativity is suppressed because it threatens the system.
In a socialist economy, the struggle is to make sure that everybody has enough of the very basics. And even that is never really achieved. In a capitalist economy, there’s no under-production. There’s overabundance, overproduction, a glut of everything. This has its own problems but it’s clear which system is more natural to the enterprising, inventive, competitive human spirit.
This is a great example of the neoliberalization of the brain:
This is not possible, sustainable or desirable. A state of constant unhappiness with what is turns people into an insatiable abyss of raging desire. A mad rush for better, shinier, newer, and always more, more, more is contrary to the optimal state for the human brain, which is stasis. Acceptance contributes more to contentment than change. The idea that we should be striving “to make the world a better place” is hubristic.
Talking about cosplaying, what’s with the outfit?
It’s sad to watch these impotent attempts at pandering to the population they don’t remotely understand. Even though Trump is managing to attract working class white men without flannel shirts and clumsy efforts at hunting, it’s not managing to sink in.
This is the perfect language-learning situation. Absolutely perfect. I’m so happy for you because you’ve struck language-learning gold.
Get an app where both of you can get the basics, and then do a language exchange starting with 10 minutes a day. For 5 minutes you speak your language, then the next 5 minutes, the other person’s. Then, gradually expand to 15 minutes, then 20.
The important part is it’s got to be every day or at least every other day. It’s a 20-minute time investment. 10 minutes on the app and 10 speaking to each other.
I learned Spanish through this kind of language exchange, and I started by listening to conversations and understanding maybe 3% of what was being said. Language exchange is the #1 way to learn.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
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