Clarissa's Blog

To make sure that the closing days of my vacation are eventful, I accidentally poked myself in the eye. Twice.

Hurts like a bastard.

OK, I take back my skepticism over the Handmaid’s Tale fears.

Jokes aside, it’s easy to blame California or wokesters but we are all at fault. I’ve been saying for years that this is a culture where parental whims, no matter how bizarre and bad for the kids, are never criticized. We do not believe that parenting and its results are in any way connected. And if they aren’t, what’s the big deal of getting rid of moms to please a bunch of whiny gay dudes? It won’t have any effect because parenting never does.

This is only going to get worse until we find the courage to get rid of our taboo on holding parents accountable. And I say it as a parent myself.

It’s really curious how many of the children of the top Russian officials are… erm, gender-fluid. While the dads screech military slogans in Russia, their sons prance around in tutus and makeup in London and Berlin.

There is a massive Ukrainian offensive under way. Over 20 villages liberated in the past several hours. Russians are running away scared, so obviously they try to blow up more dams:

This is really nuts. Emotions, friends, families, respect – and probably bunnies, books, pizza and sunshine, too – are now all “sexuality.”

These people are very obsessed with sex.

I had two dreams.

One was to be accepted into a writing accelerator this summer.

Another was to be invited for jury duty.

They both came true. I’m invited to the writing accelerator AND to appear for jury duty on the exact same day.

I’m glad all real problems have been solved. Finally, we can concentrate on historical trivia.

I saw people actually discuss that the Bragg fellow was bad and ineffective. I mean, this is the army whose most recent important activity was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and we all saw how that went. Seriously, we need to concentrate on who was the good guy 200 years ago?

Most importantly, what is either side in the election promising that we actually need? It looks like they don’t bother to offer anything any more because we have consented to only getting symbolic wins and losses.

It’s either clumsy sarcasm or the author of the tweet has suffered a neurological event.

There are many “classical liberals” who believe that wokeism is horrible. They think we can walk back from the far-left excesses and go back to liberalism proper. The problem is that liberalism always inevitably leads to wokeism. Wokeism isn’t an erroneous detour. It’s the straightforward destination. When your organizing principle is seeking maximum freedom for individuals, soon enough the freedoms of the individuals will clash and you’ll need brute force to impose the freedom of some over that of others.

Elisabeth Roudinesco is a French thinker, and her book The Sovereign Self is a great example of the flaw at the heart of liberalism.

Roudinesco is horrified by wokeism which she calls “identity politics.” Everything she says about this cancer on humanity is correct. But the way out of wokeness she proposes leads right back to it because the organizing principle Roudinesco advocates is broken.

For instance, Roudinesco is opposed to seeing Muslim head coverings in public. France is a secular state, she says, and this must be respected. And then, literally two pages later, she declares that nations and national borders should be done away with because they are “prison-like” constraints on human freedom. Instead, Roudinesco proposes a planetary civilization organized around shared principles.

This sounds very cute but let’s ponder the practicalities of the “planetary civilization.” There are people who want to wear and see burkas. And there are people who equally passionately don’t. How do they coexist in the “planetary civilization”? The only possibility I envision is that one of the groups murders the other and forces everybody to comply with its preference.

The concepts of freedom and choice are great, if somewhat robotic. Press a blue button for A and a red one for B! But as organizing principles of human existence they are radically insufficient. A moment always comes when the freedom of one person to pursue his whims clashes with the freedom of another not to participate in that pursuit. We are all seeing right now what happens when society breaks up into influence groups that pummel each other for whose freedom is more important.

After a year and a half of trying, I finally got the permission to hire a full-time faculty member in French. With one condition.

Prepare yourselves.

No, I mean, really prepare yourselves.

I can proceed to hire a full-time faculty member in French immediately on the condition that I put in the paperwork to close down the French program. Also immediately.

This means I can hire a full-time, unionized person to teach a program that we are eliminating.

Yes, the permission and the condition are coming from the same people, in the same email, and the same sentence.

No, I can’t ask what this means. It’s like those automated banking call centers. There’s nobody to answer questions. Whenever I email or call, I get one of those “your email is very important to me. I’ll answer it as soon as I can” template responses.

I mean, what do I care anymore? I’ll hire and eliminate simultaneously, and then let the absolute doofuses who came up with this genius plan sort out the consequences.