Clarissa's Blog

I saw a video of a recently converted Javier Milei in a kippah, and it’s a big deal. An elected leader of a large Latin American country in a kippah and who’s a strong supporter of Ukraine is a very big deal. Now two Latin American countries have real conservative leaders. And OK, El Salvador is tiny but Argentina is big and important. If things get better there economically, this might start prying the whole region away from its deadly love affair with socialism.

It’s true. The Russian Black Sea fleet has been mega-whupped by a country with no navy. This is the biggest success of the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive, and it’s pretty amazing. Of course, the Western MSM spent months whining that the counteroffensive failed but it’s not like anybody expects them to get anything right.

And they still learned nothing.

OK, let’s give it some more time.

The Booker Prize was awarded to a novel that imagines a far-right totalitarianism “destroying our democracy” in Ireland. Apparently, the judges chose the book as a winner in response to “far-right violence [that] erupted in Dublin following a stabbing attack on a group of children”. The quote is from the NPR, which one can easily guess based on the use of the words “far-right” and the elision of the perpetrator of “a stabbing attack”.

It’s truly fascinating how people can live in the existing reality, observe everything that is going on and still think that it’s the Right that threatens our freedom. The exact same people who are terrified out of their heads to mention who actually stabbed the children in Ireland. The same people who live in actual daily fear of the censorious, aggressive, destructive left.

Now, this is serious. A highly successful, articulate immigrant group that can donate big and that’s over-represented in culture-making institutions. That would be a massive loss for the Democrats.

I’ve been puzzled for years why American Jews are so devoted to the Left that despises everything that matters to them. Still, I don’t think that the posr-October 7 moment would last and there will be a serious political realignment among Jewish voters. It will take much more to peel Jews away from the Left.

Yes, I’m sure Biden will really miss all the big donations from that extremely successful immigrant group. I’m also sure they’ll have a great alternative in Trump who is famous for bringing more and more Muslims into the country, at least until we know what the hell is going… Oh, wait.

You just can’t win with leftists. Here’s an example.

I’m reading a biography of famous Spanish writer Carmen Laforet who authored the second most widely read Spanish novel after Don Quixote.

Laforet’s future husband did everything a person humanly could to make her career as a writer possible. He found an opportunity for her to get her first publication, encouraged her to apply for a prestigious literary prize and even typed up the clean version of her first book so that she didn’t have to get distracted from her writing. He was a successful professional man and she an indigent, college student failing out of her second major. Yet he found the time and the willingness to put himself in service of her talent.

This was all happening in the 1940s, in Franco’s Spain during the autarky. Nobody much expected or wanted women to have careers. You’d think Laforet’s biographers would have something positive to say about the man who, in the most un-sexist way possible, advanced a woman’s career long before they got married and had a large number of children.

But no, the only scenario leftists can allow to exist is the one where an evil, oppressive husband steals his wife’s career and forces her to toil in obscurity, typing up his manuscripts as she swallows bitter tears of thwarted ambition. Instead of praising Laforet’s husband for helping her fulfill her dreams, they… rubbish the man for turning Laforet into a professional writer instead of letting her “live a life of complete freedom”. It’s unclear what kind of “freedom” the desperately poor Laforet could have achieved but who cares? As long as even the most helpful, supportive husband can be portrayed as an evil ogre, it’s all good.

Also, this idea of “complete freedom” as being preferable to a great husband, five children and a mega-successful literary career is pretty moronic. What does a person who’s “completely free” from all of this do all day? Stare at the wall, reciting leftist slogans?

The biography is good but the authors keep injecting their 21st-century activist hangups into the description of a life that existed in a completely different era and followed entirely different rules.

My husband has a hobby that gives us free air travel anywhere in the world and free access to all airport lounges. Today, we are exploring a golf lounge in Minneapolis.

There’s a mini-golf course and separate rooms for serious players who want to practice their… whatever it is you do in golf.

It’s really cool because I can give my kid a chance to run around between flights.

In the University of Barcelona in 1941, a professor of geography told his students not to use the words “orientation” and “oriented” because “this is Spain, and Spain is in the Occident, so let’s not use this orientalist vocabulary.”

This was a terrible post-war time. Many real professors had either died or gone into exile, so the university had to hire a lot of ideologically sound yet intellectually deficient quacks.

We are now doing the same kind of thing but without the excuse of a war or a dictatorship. We have gladly and eagerly assumed every insane ideological hangup of every possible authoritarian regime. Too much freedom sends people looking for boundaries, and in the absence of any real ones, they surround themselves with walls of superstition, quackery and self-policing. Our “pronouns: he, him” is the “touch wood” of a pre-industrial peasant.

Too much and too little freedom lead to the same place of great anxiety and generalized superstitious stupidity.