Clarissa's Blog

N and I watched a movie called Margin Call. About 60% in I figured out that it’s about the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. About 95% in I figured out it’s about Lehman Brothers.

OK, I didn’t really figure it out. N told me.

There’s a reason I’m not a movie critic. I need somebody to provide running commentary for me to get what a movie is about. And N has a sore throat, so he’s been keeping silent.

I really enjoyed the movie. Mostly it was because N was sitting right there, and I’d enjoy staring at a blank screen as long as he’s close by. But the movie is perfectly fine. Every actor is a celebrity, although they aren’t given too much to play. The drama of “OMG, I’ll lose my job after making millions of dollars a year” seems kind of thin. I wanted to reach through the screen and pat these drama queens on the head, saying, “It’s ok, it’s just a job.”

The symbolism is very heavy-handed. Like when the two evil capitalists talk over the head of a cleaning lady like she’s not there and that symbolizes how they never thought of the damage their Wall Street shenanigans would do to people like her. Or when the movie ends with one of the Lehman Brothers bosses digging a grave for his dead dog. “It’s a dog eat dog business, and now the dog is dead.”

Since I’m on the subject of movies, can anybody explain who the people watching All Quiet on the Western Front are? Are they lacking a TV set and have been banned from all social media? Have they gotten too little war footage in this past year that they want to watch more war in their free time?

By the way, Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, was massively popular in the USSR. I find him soppy and tedious, so I never understood the Remarque craze.

Even more mysterious are the people who want to watch Women Talking. Whose life is so problem-free and happy-clappy that they need this utterly fake wallowing in non-existent misery? If your life is too saccharine sweet, instead of chasing reality by way of fake woke dramas, Google “what happened in Bucha” or ponder the fate of the over 100,000 Ukrainian children deported to Russia. That’s the kind of real-life horror that suffices to inspire a hundred more seasons of Law and Order: SVU.

One more thing about Margin Call, though. It’s not woke. I looked up the date. It was filmed in 2011. Twelve years, and what a difference in terms of wokeness.

Have you been watching anything good recently?

https://twitter.com/EHunterChristie/status/1621526454961065985?t=U_vSzntSGhPncmY3yabWdQ&s=19

Absolutely true. I’m for freedom of speech, so I don’t want Tucker to be silenced or censored in any way. But people need to be aware of what they are listening to. If they still want to hear it, great.

It’s very entertaining to watch how both the wokesters and the anti-wokesters diligently copy Soviet ideas and slogans, thinking that they’ve invented something new. This is an enormous failure of our education system that people sincerely perceive this Brezhnev-era narratives as something fresh and subversive.

Who was it that said the US won the Cold War? Whoever it was had absolutely no idea.

People sometimes forget or miss that when I comment on how things are done in America, I’m not comparing them to a Platonic ideal but to what I grew up with or experienced elsewhere.

For instance, I get many complaints about my posts on how well children are treated in America. Everybody has a story or several about a time when somebody was mean or inhospitable to their children and it sounds like I’m denying this in my posts.

But I’m not. I’m simply writing from a different frame of reference. I go to a 7-year-old birthday party, and there are no moms standing by the play structure and yelling, “Johnny! Stop! Get down! You are going to hurt yourself! What are you holding? Drop it! I said, drop it! It’s dirty ! There are germs! Put on your jacket! You are cold! I said, you are cold! Come here! Stand there! No, not over there, there’s a draft! Here! You are going to get a cold! Go over there! No, I said, over there!”

In America, it doesn’t happen. Moms stand there with beatific looks while kids go absolutely crazy. And that’s wonderful. Kids should be kids without constant editing. Yesterday, I was waiting for Klara during her robotics club, and another mom came up. I told her that kids had been playing in the mud and to expect her son to be mega dirty. She lit up and said, “Wonderful! What a joy! This is why I love this school. Outside play is a priority here, and that’s exactly how it should be.” Not a word about germs or messy clothes or how she’s going to slaughter the boy for muddying up his shoes or losing his gloves. To me, this is paradise. But people who have never seen the alternative don’t get why I’m so excited.

My mom saw that I let Klara paint a mural in her room and almost had a heart attack. The mural is colorful and huge. It goes from floor to ceiling and narrates the story of Klara’s life as she sees it. New episodes keep getting added. I wanted to explain the scenes in the mural to grandma but she was so disturbed that she had to leave the room immediately. Her verdict was that I’m raising a future serial killer by way of this mural. I reminded her that when I was Klara’s age, a teacher also predicted that I’d become a serial killer, and as we can see, it didn’t happen. But she still couldn’t get over the trauma of my permissive parenting.

I love Americans because they are extremely kind to children. Today I had to take Klara to a restaurant between an outdoor activity and an indoor activity. We went to a fancyish place because nothing else is close enough and has food that we’ll both eat.

Klara was plastered in mud. She is wearing white today, so the mud was very visible. And what do you think? Nobody batted an eyelash. You are welcome everywhere with a child, even a mud-encrusted, disheveled little creature with dry, dirty leaves in her hair. What a great, highly humane society this is!

There is much talk of authenticity today. Like all of neoliberalism’s advertisements, it appears in an emancipatory guise. To be authentic means to be free of pre-formed expressive and behavioural patterns dictated from the outside. It prescribes that one must equal only oneself and define oneself only through oneself – indeed, that one must be the author and creator of oneself. The imperative of authenticity develops a self-directed compulsion, a compulsion to constantly question oneself, eavesdrop on oneself, stalk and besiege oneself. It thus intensifies narcissistic self-reference. . .

The striving for authenticity, the striving to equal only oneself, leads to a constant comparison with others. The logic of comparison transforms otherness into sameness, and thus the authenticity of otherness consolidates social conformity: it only permits system-compatible differences, namely diversity. ‘Diversity’ as a neoliberal term is a resource that can be exploited. Hence it contrasts with alterity, which eludes any economic utilization.

Byung-Chul Han. The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today

Propagandists have the capacity to make us feel like they are saying something we always wanted to hear. It’s as if they peered into our souls and found the words to express exactly what we felt deep inside.

But not all people who say things that resonate with us are propagandists. How do we distinguish between a manipulative liar who hits us in our Shadow to dupe us and a person who has insight that enriches us?

There are several steps we have to make to root out a propagandist, and here I want to talk about the first one. It’s a very obvious one but people forget to make it way too often.

The step I’m talking about is to ask, “is there evidence that this person is sincere? Or is he avoiding the need to live what he preaches?” For example, is this passionate anti-vaxxer fully vaxxed? Is this passionate vaxxer avoiding the vaccine? Did the public school advocate put her kids in private schools? Does the anti-racist activist have black friends? Does the “trad wife” run a successful business? Does the homeschooling advocate employ 3 nannies and barely ever see her kids?

This seems so obvious but people often fail to take this step. Russian propagandists rant about the evil West while their wives and children all have American citizenship and live in Miami. The propagandists earn the money to keep their wives and children in Palm Beach by getting a million duped losers to listen about stories about how terrible life in Palm Beach is.

Tucker Carlson’s children are all in Ivies and nepotized into the establishment, the money for which comes from hypnotizing the same million of duped losers (most of Tucker’s viewers are now in Russia) with stories about the terrible US establishment.

Insight or an exploitative lie? It’s up to us to find out.

This is only the first step, though. There’s a lot more we need to do as part of our intellectual hygiene.

The Ukrainian student loves everything about the US. Except for one thing that evokes something akin to sacred horror in her.

“It’s that thing they call coffee,” she says.

It’s true that pretty much nobody in the world understands the weird swill that passes for coffee in North America. I’ll be in Spain in a couple of weeks, and real coffee is what I anticipate the most.

It’s even worse in Canada. I remember staring at a cup of “coffee” in Canada and asking, “why, God, why? There must be a reason you permitted this abomination to come into existence but what can it be?”

I found a website in Ukraine where I can buy electronic versions of books in Ukrainian. I’m ridiculously happy.

Obviously, it’s easy to find pirated copies but I couldn’t live with myself if I cheated Ukrainian authors out of well-deserved income. A new, recently published novel costs between $2 and $3.50, so it’s a steal as it is.

I don’t want to persecute my regular readers with detailed discussions of Ukrainian books that haven’t been translated, so I want to open a different blog where I’ll post about my readings in Ukrainian. I looked around, and literally nobody is doing it on a serious, consistent basis. As a result, the book market in Ukraine is filled with expensive, translated – and normally extremely woke – garbage when books by national writers, which by their very nature are the opposite of woke, languish in undeserved obscurity.

Yes, my Ukrainian is currently in a pretty bad shape but I’m nothing if not obsessive. I’m memorizing vocabulary lists to recover the knowledge I had 20 years ago. To my great shame, my only published article of literary criticism in Ukrainian was originally in Russian. My father had to translate it for me. So I have a lot of work ahead of me to learn to write well.

Then I’ll come here and gossip about my experiences as a Ukrainian-language blogger.

Not only is this artificial intelligence quite artificially biased, the text it produced is absolutely horrid. So I’m seeing the artificial part, but the intelligence part, not so much.

And a little gift for the sad individuals who continue to stan for Russia and its “conservative values”:

Russia unveiled a new monument honoring Stalin in Volgograd today.

They will never learn. pic.twitter.com/oWcZ7SS016

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 1, 2023