Hit the Road, Jacques

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

On one of my Uber rides here in Canada, the driver spent the entire ride listening on loudspeaker to a woman going about her day. She was doing the dishes, coughing, breathing, humming a tune, walking. She was clearly alone. I have no idea if she knew that he was spying on her.

I was transporting my mother from her first immunotherapy round (hence the Uber) and didn’t want any aggravation but we were both very creeped out.

Who can guess what the driver’s name was and why it wasn’t either Jack or Jacques?

Parenting Flex

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

Today I found out that my child, an American child in year 2025, doesn’t know the word racism. I’m the best parent in the fucking universe.

Boutique Worldview

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

A children’s bookstore in Montreal features these books at $36CAD a pop:

The best thing is that the books have very little text. Here’s a random page:

This is the perfect embodiment of the boutique leftist philosophy of life. It’s expensive, pompous but completely empty.

In Circles

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

This again? Is the economy that bad?

We are going in circles and it’s sad to watch.

Lobster Rights

~ Clarissa ~ 30 Comments

All people are divided into those who think the rights of lobsters are a nutty idea and those who don’t.

This is why I keep saying that we need to step away from the word rights because it’s become meaningless. It’s clearly not the lobsters who have rights but the people who want to lay claim to an exotic sensibility. This is the right to be a condescending git that’s codified in this new rule.

Great Priorities

~ Clarissa ~ 19 Comments

A new exciting way of saying “let’s lose every election from here into eternity” is brought to you courtesy of Kash Patel:

This is the guy who leads the agency that failed at apprehending the Brown mass shooter and turned out to be less intelligent than a homeless guy who ended up identifying the murderer. But at least Patel has his priorities straight.

At least, he didn’t say “Americans must wake up and prioritize Ukraine.” Thank Lord Jesus in heaven for small mercies.

The Value of a Constitution

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

Stalin’s constitution was amazing. It gustanteed phenomenal civil liberties.

Stalin’s USSR was terrible and had zero civil liberties.

Constitutions don’t make countries. People do.

How PR Firms Work

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

Because it’s not Joyce Carol Oates. It’s the young kids she hires to write her social media.

I highly recommend not following any accounts of famous people whose fame doesn’t come from online activities. Because they almost never have anything to do with their social media accounts. They hire PR firms which employ very young kids to write.

The fact that these young kids write stupid stuff is the whole point. It lets followers feel smarter than the celebrity they are impersonating. People enjoy that and keep coming for more. This drives engagement.

The quoted posts are the perfect example. Everybody who read them felt superior to a genius-level writer. This pleasing feeling of superiority encourages them to keep mentioning her. The PR firm can show a gigantic citation rate to their client.

Why Don’t They Ask?

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

I keep thinking about why I’m failing so badly to be a mentor to female students when I’m so successful with the male cohort.

The difference is that male students ask me questions. They want to know things. Female students, in the meantime, use any interaction to advance a narrative of their frailty. I come up, I lead with some of my best material, but they interrupt and launch into an exulted listing of their limitations.

I have no idea what this is, what causes it, and how to make it stop. I’ve tried reassurance. “No, you are not a loser. You are not bad at languages. You are not a mess.” It has zero effect. I’ve tried changing the topic. I’ve tried telling funny stories. In my desperation, I’ve even tried sharing advance knowledge about what will be on the final. Nothing worked.

In the video lecture on Thursday I mentioned that I was born in the USSR. Immediately I got an email from a male student asking where exactly in the USSR, and how is that area of the country different from others, and is it true that we had a lot of civil liberties in the Soviet constitution. Why aren’t female students interested? I’ve been teaching college since 2002. It’s a crapton of years. All I’m asking for is one, just one, female student who’d ask an unprompted question out of curiosity.

My Christmas Gift to You

~ Clarissa ~ 15 Comments

It’s a book recommendation because what else, right? But it’s a very good one. I looked long and hard for a novel with truly conservative sensibilities. One that shows the horror of COVID lockdowns, trans surgeries, gender insanity, euthanasia, and climate alarmism being used to introduce anti family policies.

And I found it.

This novel is The Merge by Grace Walker.

It’s set in London in the near future. The government decided that there are too many people and is preventing families from having children by levying enormous fines on them. A new technology is being advanced that claims to merge the consciousnesses of two different people in one body. Inconvenient individuals are told to merge with somebody else so that the government can destroy their bodies and save resources. Elderly parents, the sick, the disabled, the babies can be eliminated from society by getting them merged with a healthy person. The resulting merged person is given a new name and plural pronouns.

There are so many things in this supposedly futuristic novel that are very recognizable in the current moment. There’s no mention of COVID or the trans thing. The novel uses figurative language because it’s a novel, not a political screed. But it really hits home.

I was really afraid that the author would chicken out at the end and provide some leftist off-ramp but that didn’t happen. The novel stays good until the closing sentence.

People keep saying that nobody makes conservative art these days but that’s not true. I’m finding quite a lot of excellent stuff, all very recent, that’s deeply conservative. If you read The Merge and you don’t think it’s pro-Christian, pro-life, and against the hubris of humans wanting to be godlike and remake reality, I’d have to ask how sober you were when you were reading.

Absolutely, there’s conservative art and it’s very good. People who say there isn’t simply don’t go looking for art. They project their limitations onto a sphere that they have no intelligence or patience to enjoy.

So yes, merry Christmas, and I hope you enjoy The Merge as much as I did. If anybody wants to come back to this post and discuss the novel, that would be great. I see all comments with the most recent on top of my feed irrespective of how old the post is.