Clarissa's Blog

They must have been really worried about the NATO expansion.

Here’s a second post on my Ukrainian blog. This one isn’t a book review but a personal story about how I learned to speak Ukrainian back in 1984.

I’ve been wondering why Ukrainian philosophers, thinkers and pundits are so much more interesting to listen to than the Western ones. They aren’t any smarter. They don’t have significantly higher IQs. They haven’t read anything others can’t access. Why, then, does everything they say feel fresh and important?

It’s simply because they are free. They let their thoughts roam far and wide, unconstrained by political correctness, politeness, fear of wounding sensibilities, and the need to be nice, egalitarian or inclusive.

For me, it’s not even about what they say, although it’s always very fruitful. It’s the feeling of freedom, the capacity to be ironic, and the unconstrained flight of ideas that I find hypnotic.

Today, I’m going to spend 2,5 hours at a mandatory meeting where we’ll discuss our feelings about the video of police brutality in Memphis and “how we can do a better job of serving communities of color in a society dominated by institutionalized white supremacy.” It is my deeply held belief that such meetings destroy the capacity to think profoundly and freely precisely among the people whose job it is to think.

This is a practice question for the MCAT, the Medical College Admission Test. Can anybody ask a chatbot because I have no idea what the answer is supposed to be.

Erm. No, I don’t want “one definitive answer”. The whole attraction of Google is that there’s a lot of different sources of information, not just one “final truth” preselected by some woke 23-year-old Snapchat addict. Also, Google has no barrier to entry while the chatbot is completely inaccessible unless you provide tons of info it can’t possibly need. Given how woke its creators are, the access to the chatbot and the quality of its responses will unavoidably be regulated according to everybody’s ideological reliability profile. People who are asking the chatbot facetious questions about political issues are putting themselves on all sorts of blacklists as we speak.

Let’s hope that the general stupidization of all online options doesn’t rob us of search engines, giving us instead “one definitive answer” chosen by a bunch of eager brainwashed children.

To distract myself from all the sadness, I have opened up my new blog on Ukrainian literature. You can find it right here but, as I warned before, it’s in Ukrainian.

The first post is dedicated to a novel about Ukrainian Soviet writers in 1946. As I say in the linked post, the scenes of writers having publicly to confess their ideological transgressions feel surprisingly current.

Yes, the cover art tends to be really out there. This is a sad remnant of the 1990s when nobody wanted to read anything serious, so trashy, garish cover art became a norm.

Terrible news from Turkey. What an incredible calamity! How fragile is human civilization in the face of natural disasters.

Humans should stand together defending civilization instead of murdering other people and destroying civilizational achievements.

I have had the dubious honor of becoming one of the leads – or sales targets – for unscrupulous salesmen of the kind you see in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Whenever you publish anything, salespeople arrive in droves, trying to exploit your belief that you are an unrecognized genius. For about a month, I got an avalanche of phone calls (including at work) telling me that Hollywood and Netflix are desperate to buy the rights to “my story”, and all that’s needed is for me to pay “a small cataloguing fee” for world fame to arrive.

I’m about the worst possible mark for these poor salespeople because I have no delusions of creative grandeur or dreams of quick riches. But the salesmen didn’t know that, so they kept trying until finally I got placed on some black list of “deadbeats” and they disappeared. Their techniques are identical to the ones you see in the movie. Apparently, there hasn’t been much progress in sales tactics since the 1990s.