Clarissa's Blog

The Fall is finally here. We’ve been outside since breakfast. First, we went on a long walk to our local nature preserve, and now Klara is sleeping under the staircase in the backyard.

We had almost no COVID lockdown, but every year we experience a May-October weather-related lockdown. We sit sadly indoors, with our ACs cranked up to the max, staring out of window at the burned-out lawns.

Now that we are finally out of captivity, we can’t force ourselves to go back inside.

I gave a dictation to my beginner Spanish students last week. One sentence was, “I like my friends because they are fun.”

As I dictated the sentence, I saw that students weren’t liking it. Some started whispering among themselves. There was a couple of eye rolls.

“What?” I asked. “Is the sentence difficult?”

An uncomfortable silence that greeted my question was suddenly interrupted by a student who said, “I’m sorry, professor, but ‘I like my friends because they are diverse ‘? That’s weird.”

Other students began to nod.

Turns out the students mistook the Spanish “divertidos” (fun) for “diversos.” But I didn’t mind the mistake because it taught me something important.

I know everybody likes these images of how terrible destruction in Ukraine is healed and things are getting rebuilt, so here’s one more:

It’s very pleasing to a healthy human brain to see order appear in place of chaos and observe the results of human ingenuity and hard work. Such images tap into our survival instinct and make us feel stronger by reminding us of the greatness of the human intellect and spirit.

Last Friday, the Biden administration issued a bombshell, in the dry bureaucratic language of export control regulation. In an interim final rule filed by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, a set of rules called the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) were amended “to implement necessary controls on advanced computing integrated circuits (ICs), computer commodities that contain such ICs, and certain semiconductor manufacturing items.”

In plain English, it was a kneecapping of the Chinese tech industry, depriving it of the advanced chips—and the means of making them—vital for everything from smartphones to self-driving cars.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-10-14/biden-s-chip-restrictions-on-china-show-shift-in-us-views-on-technology

Wow, folks. Of course, we have to thank Trump for starting the trend and normalizing nation-state protectionism but this is taking it so much further (and yay to that):

The Trump administration, for its part, targeted Huawei Technologies Co. and its fellow Chinese telecom ZTE Corp. with what were at the time unprecedented sanctions. The Biden administration has essentially expanded those measures to the entire Chinese tech sector,

There are very clear continuities between the Trump and the Biden administrations. Both are radically different from the Bush and Obama administrations. Both are enormously more pro-nation-state than Bush and Obama. They are still not even remotely as pro-nation-state as I’d like them to be but the shift is stunning.

There’s so much screeching and propaganda on social media that you’d think Trump and Biden were from different planets. People buy into the hype, get emotionally invested, and don’t see what’s under their noses. Remember COVID? How did their policies differ? They didn’t. Leave it all to the states, don’t do any federal mandates, and wrap things up whenever possible without intruding on the states’ decisions in any way. The Trump policy flowed so smoothly into Biden’s, nobody noticed a change.

Unfortunately, both are intensely bad on immigration but that seems unavoidable at this moment.

I’m observing this with great interest because if the US sticks with the nation, that’s a mega important development.

She could just imagine him lumbering away from her like a startled bison at such a naked statement of affection, redoubling the barriers he liked to erect if ever they got too close to each other.

Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood

I highly recommend this lecture by Timothy Snyder (audio). It’s not interesting in what it says about Russia and Ukraine but it’s fascinating in what concerns Snyder’s complete blindness to how perfectly what he calls fascism describes the liberal worldview of which Snyder himself is a passionate adept.

For Snyder, fascism does the following:

– it doesn’t accept the existence of facts. Only beliefs matter. Beliefs are reality.

– it can’t tolerate a plurality of opinions. A single correct viewpoint exists and everybody must hold it.

– it posits that there is a state of ideal, unmarred wholeness and purity that everybody must aspire to. Bad things exist in the world because it hasn’t accepted the redeeming single truth.

– it states that destroying people because they disagree with your single, correct, unifying vision for the whole planet is fine. They aren’t really people, so their destruction doesn’t matter.

Snyder ahistorically calls all this fascism but we know it today as wokeness.

The piano made the house vibrate. It sounded like a megaphone through which a human soul was screaming into the universe.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Yes, I totally blame Van Gogh for the global warming. If only he ate his soup like normal people do, we wouldn’t have these problems now.

Or something.

You got to give it to the climate movement. They are extremely consistent. Their absolute incoherence is never interrupted by the slightest effort to make any sense to anybody.

And look how great this works:

Mass mobilization is declared in Russia.

Near a million men of working age leave the country. 200,000 get conscripted.

Their property is siphoned off to the banks for non-payment of their debt obligations.

An acute labor shortage is created, justifying an even more explosive than usual influx of migrants.

Population replacement, anyone?

That there are people who seriously call this model “nationalism” is mind-boggling. This is pretty much the exact opposite. Forget whether nationalism is good or bad for the moment. It’s simply not this, irrespective of whether you like it or not.

A colleague suggested we cancel our highest-level seminars because “they are too hard and students don’t want to sign up for them.” Of course, my highest-level seminar this semester is over-enrolled but it’s easier to generalize and make assumptions about students than wonder if it’s not the course but yourself that they are avoiding.

In my experience, students don’t come to a course. They come to a person. I’m teaching Cervantes this semester. We simply do not teach anything harder than that. Plus, I have a charming habit of scheduling my courses on Friday mornings when nobody else wants to teach or come to campus. And yet I never worry that my classes won’t make minimal enrollment and will be cancelled. I worry that everybody who wants to sign up won’t fit into the classroom.

The same colleague complains that students cheat and use Google Translate. I have the same students but they all hand in honestly written essays with tons of mistakes. I can’t remember when anybody handed in anything written at above their level of language proficiency.