Clarissa's Blog

I was waiting for the new novel by Stephen Markley, the author of Ohio. He’s very talented, an amazing young author. I highly recommend Ohio to everybody. It can be read as a companion novel to Demon Copperhead, although it’s not aa good.

Finally, Markley’s new novel came out. I downloaded a sample and, God, it’s so woke, it’s almost like a parody of wokeness. The novel belongs to the genre known as climate porn and aims to get people scared of the global warming.

“We are all going to die because evil capitalism destroyed the planet!”

But that message falls flat because there’s something much scarier in the book. It’s the possibility that we are all going to keep on living in a world of unbearable wokeness where small children lecture each other about ‘gender essentialism’ and lovers exchange strings of ‘anti-racist’ slogans in bed because it’s more enjoyable to verbally fellate Ibram Kendi than to make love to each other.

If you read the article I linked yesterday about the woke youth leader Keisha turning a summer school seminar into a cult, this novel is written by somebody who sounds like the graduate of that cult and Keisha’s beat student.

I wouldn’t even mention any of this if it weren’t for one thing. Markley is very talented. His is a unique literary gift that arises once in a generation. With everything I mentioned above, the writing is still painfully enjoyable.

I’ve waited for a Stephen Markley for twenty years, and finally he’s here but he’s been perverted by wokeness. He’s still a great writer. Not great as in “good” but great as in “outstandingly talented.”

It will be very strange to be in Europe in 10 days. The knowledge that there’s a war going on in the continent is going to make it a weird visit. It always feels disorienting to be back on the home continent but this time it will be stranger than ever.

In Kirkby, UK a migrant sexually harassed a 15-year-old girl. She had the presence of mind to steadfastly refuse and film his behavior. This is an unusually resourceful girl because even in my twenties in Canada when I was constantly sexually harassed by men from cultures where women are cattle, all I felt was fear and shame. Living in the areas with a high number of such men is constant degradation, constant humiliation and fear. Obviously, this very real sexual molestation is of no interest to #MeTooters but that’s a different story.

The harassed girl in Kirkby posted the video of the harassment and a riot broke out. It’s impossible to find out anything online about what went on because the only existing description has the words “far-right” three times in every sentence making it impossible to read. And of course the most famous Putin pawn in the UK has come out with a much stronger condemnation of the protesters in Kirkby than he ever did of Russian genocide in Ukraine:

I oppose rioting, burning, looting, violence, window breaking, all that. Oppose it completely, it’s a breakdown in civilization, it’s a barbarity that turns people into braying mules. But we’ve spent several decades pretending that this sort of harassment doesn’t exist. This is the result. The path away from rioting isn’t more silence. It’s less.

If you want to be entertained, here’s a delicious long read on wokesters eating each other alive over who’s a bigger traitor to the dogma.

That people would willingly subject themselves to the insanity described in the article when they can be free and simply enjoy life is puzzling. There are so many real, serious hardships in life. Why, why would anybody choose to have a terrible time when they don’t have to? Why amass imaginary “harms” when you can read books by the fireplace, lie in the garden soaking up the sunshine, or laugh with friends over your favorite memes?

The author of the article looks for compassion but I don’t feel sorry for him. He thought he could unleash this ideological monster and somehow avoid it eating him. It doesn’t work that way, however. Both he and “Keisha” – and the young ideologues they raised – will be devoured by the vampire they collectively created.

The same teacher who informed my kid’s class that “a white person killed MLK” now found it necessary to give a presentation on the global warming. As a result, I had to spend two days turning it from a high-anxiety topic to something non-disturbing for my kid.

These are very small children. They feel helpless around big issues that they can’t comprehend. All it does is make them scared and upset.

This teacher is new at the Christian school, so she hasn’t yet abandoned the public school mentality. I’m getting increasingly annoyed with these forays into adult topics when almost nobody in the class even reads fluently yet.

This whole idea – which is very present in higher ed, too – that you should propagandize and convert instead of teaching your own discipline in which you are educated and credentialed is wrong. If your profession is early childhood education, what the flying ef are you doing, plunging into environmental sciences or race relations history in which you are not qualified?

A few days ago, a colleague who is a professor of chemistry was chewed out publicly for saying, “I teach chemistry. I don’t lecture about race in my classroom.” Fifteen minutes later, he was chewed out again for having high fail rates in chemistry. But still, he’s supposed to give valuable class time to spout inanities about race relations.

So I finally did try out the ChatBot for myself. Here are my takeaways:

• the algorithm is extremely basic
• the output is the definition of generic
• it isn’t anything remotely resembling a search engine because it doesn’t search for information. I gave it my full name and full title, yet it didn’t figure out I’m an existing person.
• any professor who gives assignments that can be done by this program deserves to be fired
• I gave it an acronym and a link where it’s explained, and still it returned a mistaken version of the full title
• however, there’s a positive side. It can churn out large amounts of completely generic text on administrative subjects. I’m doing an annual report, and it gave me a long very rough draft. If you are working in a bureaucratic system where you want to drown people in a tsunami of meaningless bureaucratic sentences, it can be useful.

Biden just gave a State of the Union speech whose key themes and most enthusiastic riffs could have been lifted—albeit with more Bidenisms and fewer insults—from Trump’s populist campaign.

Ross Douthat, NYTimes

Absolutely. Only blind partisanship can prevent people from seeing this. The moment we free our brain from personality cults it becomes clear that the Biden presidency has enormously more in common with the Trump presidency than, for example with Obama or Bush Jr times.

Obama was Bush Jr version 2.0 and Biden is Trump version 2.0. Yes, the rhetoric is completely different and so are the slogans. But surely we are smarter than the incompetents who take slogans seriously and confuse them with action?

I feel sad for people who are so in thrall to slogans and personality cults that they can’t see the obvious similarities between Trump and Biden administrations.

Yesterday I was driving home and saw a very long line of cars queuing for something. This brought back all the bad memories from the lockdowns when people would line up to the Starbucks window in order to relive the memory of driving to work and stopping for some coffee. I did it a couple of times, too, to feel like myself again.

I wondered what people could possibly line up for in the absence of a lockdown. What can be so attractive on a freezing February afternoon?

Turns out that a Chick-fil-A opened in town and people are going cuckoo-bananas with joy. I never understood the love affair people have with Chick-fil-A. My niece comes over from Canada, desperate to go there. Locals sit in their cars for an hour. Why? It’s one of a million fast food places. OK, it’s better than Arby’s but then partially digested concrete would be better than Arby’s.

I don’t get it.

By the way, in case anybody is wondering, my favorite fast food in the US is KFC. That shit is irresistible which is why I never go.

In Europe, my favorite fast food is at those shawarma carts you can find everywhere. Wonderful stuff!

Right-wing ADHD and left-wing OCD are always battling each other, and the OCD tends to win. Persistence vs protean excitability is a predictable contest.

Isn’t it curious, though, that the proponents of changeable, flighty fluidity are like pitbulls with a bone regarding everything they want while the defenders of stability are malleable and movable?

https://twitter.com/kat__stafford/status/1623685159328292864?t=HF9a9ndwVvQxWUbrG0wHaQ&s=19

The terrible impact of COVID mitigation on learning at every level is a very important topic. However, in what concerns the linked article, I’m overwhelmed by the learned helplessness and extreme entitlement of everybody involved. COVID looks like a tiny blip on the surface of a much bigger problem.