Clarissa's Blog

I always find it interesting how eager the proponents of small governments are to embrace initiatives promising to legislate away uncomfortable opinions.

Yeah, and how are you going to do it “on day one”? What’s the methodology?

All you can achieve “on day one” is make her scared to say these things aloud. But you can’t instantaneously persuade her she’s wrong. You can’t even stop the discrimination itself. But yes, you can shut her up. Is that what we are going to do? See who scares the other more? Terrify each other into silence?

None of this can be solved by the government. We’ll have to figure it out ourselves, like adults. Nobody can legislate wokeness or anti-wokeness away. There are no easy, “day one” solutions.

Folks, you’ve got to get over to Twitter. Matt Walsh is performing unconventional sexual acts on the management of Fox News. He’s giving it to them every which way. It’s almost embarrassing to watch. But really fun, too.

So once again I’ve been able to save our French program. I sicced our labor union director on the administration. They immediately folded and even apologized.

This is the same union director who publicly accused me of “wanting to cause mass deaths in the community for my personal convenience” during COVID. But I don’t hold grudges. I made friends with him since then over Ukraine and his support of it.

There’s a huge drama online about a young woman who has an adjunct job at Columbia. She says she lives in poverty, and people are blowing a gasket because nobody understands how academia works.

Those adjunct jobs are miserable. They pay a little over $30,000 a year, and you never know if your contract will get extended. There’s no chance of career advancement, so you are stuck for life, chasing these crappy temporary gigs. Adjuncts often don’t even get office space and have to see students for office hours at coffee shops. They don’t live a life of the mind because they never find out it exists.

And what most people don’t know is that the more expensive a university is, the less likely it is that an undergraduate student will ever talk to a real professor and not be stuck with these itinerant, hassled, uninterested adjuncts with zero intellectual life. Pay for an Ivy, and get nothing but these Molly McGhees for your money because real professors prefer to teach graduate courses.

Only at a cheap school like mine you are guaranteed to take every course with a real professor.

So yeah, Molly McGhee probably is as indigent as she says. She also sounds extremely shallow with not a thought in her head beyond the usual woke sloganeering. This is what you get for $30,000 in New York with New York’s cost of living.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. You want a real education, create good working conditions for the professors. And if you are looking for a college for your kid, the #1 question to ask is what percentage of courses in the program you are interested in is taught by NTT (non-tenure-track) faculty. Or resign yourself to paying for bitter Molly McGhees.

Inspired by the Ukrainian sniper, I decided to take charge of my own life. Because of a snowflake colleague, I’m forced to teach a course in the Fall that I really don’t want to teach. I hate everything about this course. Advanced Spanish, really? It’s so stupid. But I have to teach it.

So I decided to get creative. I threw away the multi-stage placement test, the syllabus, the textbook, the digital workbook, the composition, the tests, the “oral presentation” – all that sorry, outdated crap.

Instead of dumb multiple-choice clicking in a digital workbook, lab will mean discussion groups and one-on-one conversations with a native speaker. Zero staring at a screen will occur. Instead of the textbook, we are reading literature. The exam will be conversation-based. People wanted me to teach Advanced Spanish which I don’t believe should be an actual course, well, that’s what it looks like when I do it.

This course will be epic, and when the snowflake colleague deigns to come out of her huff, she’ll be sorry she left it in my hands.

In 15 years at the very least, nothing changed about this course. And then people complain about low enrollments. I’m surprised we got anybody at all to participate in this charade.

And before people say, “of course, you can do this, you are a department Chair”, I did an identical thing with another course in my very first semester at this university. An older colleague who had lovingly designed that course back in the 1990s almost had a conniption fit when I refused to use her VCR tapes (really, I kid you not, actual VCR tapes). And it was fine, everybody survived. Instead of the 15 students she normally attracted to this course, I got 70. (It’s a content course, not language).

I watched an interview with a Ukrainian sniper Serhey Pozniak. He was a successful businessman in his fifties and a father of 4 when the war started. Then he enlisted and became a sniper. One day, he stepped on a landmine and lost his leg.

With all that, Pozniak has a sweet, sunny personality.

“I’m fine with re-dislocation marches,” he says softly, with a self-conscious smile. “I can do 8 kilometers on this temporary prosthesis, it’s OK.”

“Wait, you are saying that you still serve?” asks a stunned journalist. “Without a leg?”

“Of course,” says Pozniak. “We haven’t won yet.”

“What motivates you?” asks the journalist. “What keeps you going on those 8-kilometer marches?”

“I just really love my country,” the sniper says. “Our nation must survive. This is the most important thing.”

“Was there a time when you got really angry?” asks the journalist

“Well, when I stepped on the mine, I realized that my wife would get really upset. So I didn’t like that”, says Pozniak with a soft chuckle.

This is a middle-aged, balding, soft-spoken guy with the personality strength of a Titan.

The Overton window has moved, and now what was very liberal in 2012 has suddenly become very conservative. You look at green-haired weirdos wailing that they “are like literally being genocided” if not everybody on the planet is staring at their naked butts all the time, and you think, “OK, whatever that is, I’m the opposite.” So you end up being “very conservative.”

People keep asking what could be done to solve the Russia problem. I honestly don’t know, and anybody who claims to know is a liar.

Ideally, Russians would go the way of North Korea. Isolated and eating each other out of impotent rage. Not much damage to anybody but themselves.

But it won’t happen because Russia isn’t a follower culture like Korea or China. These are people who will never abandon the idea that they deserve world leadership. We often rationalize things too much, thinking that China must want to control the world because it has the resources for it and Russia can’t because it doesn’t. But that’s not how will and desire work. Russia wants to lead and China wants to follow because that’s the culture.

Russians will never stop coming up with new ways of remaking the world. Because that’s who they are. They have already turned the twentieth century on our planet into a bloodbath trying to achieve that goal. Now the 21st century is being eaten up by them, too.

And we can’t say, “OK, let them lead if they are so into it” like Tucker Carlsons do. Because wanting to lead doesn’t mean knowing how to do it. Whenever Russians do lead, the destination turns out to be a huge concentration camp.

So yeah. I have no idea. This is a serious problem and closing one’s eyes to avoid seeing it or other childish coping methods don’t work.

When I first landed in Moscow I thought these infinite transformations the expression of a country liberated, pulling on different costumes in a frenzy of freedom, pushing the limits of personality as far as it could possibly go to what the President’s vizier would call “the heights of creation.” It was only years later that I came to see these endless mutations not as freedom but as forms of delirium, in which scare-puppets and nightmare mystics become convinced they’re almost real and march toward what the President’s vizier would go on to call the “the fifth world war, the first non-linear war of all against all.”

Peter Ponerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

Forget about Russia for the moment. I’m not posting this because of Russia. I’m posting this because it shows where “pushing the limits of personality” and “infinite transformations” lead.

Short answer: nowhere pretty.