Ah, I see that Tucker Carlson is still interviewing people who fantasize about having sex with Barack Obama. There aren’t many around, so he has to travel the world in search of them.

Also, I have an FtM transgender student, who is one of my most active, engaged students. It’s becoming clear why girls are increasingly interested in becoming boys. If that helps you shed the burden of sitting there in complete silence, constantly worried about what people think about you, it’s not unreasonable to want it.

You can’t talk people into massively wanting something that doesn’t benefit them in some way. Instead of talking about moronic things like “social contagion”, we should instead discuss what’s actually going on. What is it that we are teaching girls about being female that they are so eager to reject? I don’t see the issue of “striving for perfection femininity” in American women over the age of 50. This is something that started around the early 2000s. So it’s relatively new and can be corrected.

The mega popular movie “Barbie”, for example, advances the idea of femininity that, if I believed it, would make me want to be male, too. I know better because I’m older and from another culture. But all the little girls whose moms took them to see it and who hear all these things from their mothers all the time don’t have a way to know that it’s all just empty posturing. They think it’s true and want to escape it by any means necessary. I can’t blame them for it because, God, it must suck so badly being this constantly aggrieved person.

I was talking to a colleague in history who expressed an opinion that all the best language students are female because women are better at learning languages.

This is, however, one of the many issues where culture beats biology. My best students are always male because women in this culture are afraid of making a mistake, so they never speak. And if you don’t speak, you don’t learn. Language is all about accepting that you won’t be perfect. If you can’t accept that, you won’t succeed. You have to be fine with looking like a fool in public and see that as an acceptable price to pay for learning.

Ethnically, my weakest students are always Hispanic, even though you’d think it should be the opposite because they don’t have the language barrier.

My best students are usually black. This is a culture where people aren’t trying to be perfect all the time and aren’t afraid of being performative. Right now, a third of my students are African American, and they are all doing fantastic. With black students, the male-female differences that I see among whites are erased because black female students have no problem with being loud and active.

In language courses, I have to correct people a lot. That’s the whole point. I can’t teach if I don’t correct. White female students react to corrections like I have put their entire existence into question. And that’s a huge barrier to fluency.

My mother traveled from Montreal with a large suitcase that contains a 5-pound bag of cooked bacon, a bag of Brazilian nuts, and several packages of pasta.

There were a couple of items of clothing hiding between food packets but they were clearly not the star of the show.

You, people, are weird. Unless the poll was administered exclusively to 13-year-olds, in which case it’s fine.

Early Socialists were in love with eugenics. In the 1900s-1920s, the cool thing was to be a feminist Socialist who was into eugenics. Or a Socialist eugenicist who was into feminism. Or any other combination of the same three things.

So how did it all work?

These non-Soviet Socialists were genuinely worried about poverty. Why did so many people live in such terrible, subhuman penury? What was causing this? Oppression, obviously, was the Socialists’ answer. But what made this oppression possible?

The poor had too many children, was the answer. They were too stupid to control their procreation and ended up having large numbers of children. Their children were as dumb as their parents because of heredity, and there were so many of these congenital morons that it was impossible to introduce any rational, progressive measures into society.

These aren’t my ideas, of course. I find this kind of thinking not only immoral but unsupportable. As we can all see, neither contraception not collapsing birth rates eliminated poverty.

But back then this seemed like a plausible explanation. So the way to eliminate poverty was to have feminists convince women to stop procreating that much, which would gladden the eugenicists by improving the quality of the human stock, and that, in turn, would please Socialists because the resulting higher-quality humans wouldn’t be so poor.

The crimes of the Nazi Germany made it impossible to wish openly to get rid of lower-quality human beings in favor of higher-quality ones. So now the intellectual heirs of those early eugenicist Socialists claim that there should be fewer people because people are bad for the nature.

But you can see how the underlying ideas haven’t really changed that much.

The new president of Argentina Javier Milei is interesting because he’s trying to pry apart the economic neoliberalism from the political and ideological neoliberalism. I don’t know if he’ll be successful or if this can be achieved at all. But at least Milei is trying while others have stuck their heads into their anal cavities and are offering no solutions whatsoever.

Neoliberalism was originally economic in nature. It was created as an alternative to the economic measures put in place by most developed countries to appease the pro-socialist elements in society. The first neoliberals said, screw this, why are we putting the brakes on our productivity and entrepreneurship? Why do we constrain ourselves with all these government regulations? Why are we imitating the Soviet economy to appease a few cranks who are terrified of freedom and are eyeing socialism with curiosity?

OK, they didn’t really say that. There were many very complex intellectual debates but we’ll all die of extreme old age if we get into details.

I personally have never had a problem with economic neoliberalism. I experienced its most hardcore version in post-1991 Ukraine, and I did amazing. Loved it.

But then economic neoliberalism began to overstep. It turned out that it co-exists beautifully with authoritarian regimes. In fact, it thrives there. And for an authoritarian regime to exist, you need group think. So it happened that neoliberalism walked into a situation where it proclaims the primacy of individual freedom while abolishing not only freedom but the very possibility that there will be individuals in the future.

To give a recent example of how neoliberalism loves authoritarianism, remember during COVID when everything was closed except Walmart? And Walmart ended up eating the market share of many small stores in a situation that was engineered by the government and imposed with an iron fist.

Or the mass migration that neoliberalism so loves because “freedom” must mean everybody is free to go live wherever they want. This “freedom of movement” is being carefully engineered by government institutions and rammed down our throats with great force. Our mass media, in the meantime, are bamboozling us with lies about this whole situation. The migration problem is a perfect example of economic, political and ideological neoliberalism working together. Do you like it?

Neither do I.

Surely, we can be entrepreneurial and productive without going to this extreme.

Can we effectuate a divorce between neoliberal economy and neoliberal politics / ideology? Can we embrace the repeal of regulations on appliances that people on this blog rightfully love but reject the idea that men can be women? Can we find a reasonable place in our love of freedom and just stop there?

It’s been done in the past. Capitalism is wonderful, in part, because it self-corrects beautifully and effectively. Why shouldn’t it be able to self-correct now if we guide it there?

This is the question Javier Milei is asking. And it’s s very important one.

This is probably the best thing I’ve seen on Twitter in weeks:

Isn’t it absolutely precious? The guy passionately denies that there’s Marxism in schools and then… offers the most primitive Marxist explanation in existence. And there’s no pause between the two statements.

This is what happens when you use words without trying to find out their meaning.

We had some unusually cold days this January. A local church decided to open up a space in the basement to make a warming station for the homeless. There are no homeless in our town but the neighboring town does have several, so church members would drive them over to the church, feed them, and give them a warm place to sleep. Every church has a specific branch of charity that it favors, and this one concentrates on the homeless. It’s been doing this for years, if not decades, and nobody ever had a problem.

However, our very red town now has a woke mayor and a woke group of new aldermen. They completely spoiled our traditional summer park festival by filling it with booths of such inappropriateness that I had to shepherd Klara out before she saw things I wouldn’t be able to explain. The festival is now called “Unity Fest” but it’s more about advertising every variety of sexual deviancy than promoting unity. The church I’m telling you about sent some people with goats and Jesus flyers to the newly woke festival, and I guess this upset the organizers.

As a result, this year the municipal authorities forbade the church from offering a warming station. They came up with a series of bureaucratic objections. “You didn’t file for permit. Yes, you did but you filed too late. You didn’t file too late but it’s the wrong form. It’s not the wrong form but the signature is in the wrong place. It’s not in the wrong place but…” And so on.

In the meantime, it’s getting extremely cold, and nobody is doing anything. The church, of course, said screw it (or whatever the religious euphemism is), and opened the warming station. The city authorities fined them heavily for every day they were helping the homeless.

We are a small town, and all of this is widely known and passionately discussed. Everybody except a couple of known curmudgeons is siding with the church. But what gets to me is the extreme pettiness of the woke leadership. They don’t like the church and decided to let a dozen homeless freeze just to annoy the pastor and the parishioners.

People will want to know how we ended up with this woke mayor. We had a really wonderful right-wing mayor who saved us from COVID lockdowns and did a lot to make us the best town in the region. But he retired and the only people who ran for mayor were a fun guitar-playing dude who masked his wokeness behind a clown persona and a trad right-winger lady who thought we should go back to being a hamlet where she grew up 50 years ago and where you had to drive 40 miles to buy groceries. There is a constituency of people in town who do have that sort of nostalgia but they are a tiny minority. Everybody else loves stores and restaurants and understands that the people who moved into town since year 1970 aren’t about to move out, so fantasizing about empty fields springing up where there’s now housing.

This is such a typical right-wing fail. Antagonizing the masses and losing elections to a fun wokester who skillfully concealed his extremism.

Since I’m on the subject, the entire portrayal of gay men in American entertainment is screwy. Gay men don’t get together to be “like” heteros. They get together specifically to be not hetero. That’s kind of the whole purpose. But the only type of gay couple you see portrayed any more is a dude who acts like a very stereotypical wife and another dude who is a very stereotypical hetero husband. They usually have a gigantic number of kids and it’s constantly underscored that they are so busy with the kids that they never have sex anymore.

I look at this, and I wonder, have the scriptwriters ever met any gay men? It’s the entertainment industry, so it shouldn’t be that hard.

The diversity we are being constantly lectured about isn’t really all that diverse at all. It always tends towards the hoariest, most boring stereotypes. Even hetero couples don’t live according to these stereotypes.