Clarissa's Blog

This is the kind of stoicism that’s plain stupid:

Hard should not be the point. Easy, joyful and enjoyable is. Also, it’s sad that a strong, young man – not an invalid recovering from a terrible illness – should congratulate himself for something so primitive. What’s next, being proud of flossing?

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba gave a long interview recently and told about what the first days of the war were like for him. He was in the White House the day before the war. Suddenly, the door opened and Biden walked in with his cabinet. That’s when Kuleba knew that things were really bad. Presidents meet with presidents. They don’t make unexpected visits to Foreign Ministers.

Kuleba says everybody at the White House treated him like he had terminal cancer. Biden showed him a photo of his dead son and said, “You have to think about your children.” Nobody expected Ukraine to survive the first 72 hours. Look at the map of Eastern Europe, and you’ll understand why. Kuleba listened to the President of the United States say farewell to him, went home, and went to work.

That’s why it was such a big deal when Zelensky filmed himself and his cabinet in the streets of Kyiv in the first days of the war saying, “I’m here, we are all here, the party leader is here, the entire cabinet is here. We haven’t left, we are staying, and we will fight.” I never thought he would leave. Even at the lowest point of my esteem for Zelensky, I would have never suspected him of leaving. My fear was that he’d be captured and murdered in some horrible, humiliating way. Seeing him stand outside with his whole cabinet and reassure everybody meant everything. I have now watched that short video maybe a hundred times. I believe that the most important lesson in life is to be able to say, “I’m here and I’ll keep fighting.”

Arestovich also said he wasn’t expecting to survive the first two weeks of the war.

Think about this. He knew he would die but he went on YouTube every day to reassure millions of people and carry us through those terrible days with nothing but the force of his personality. This is enormously beyond any stoicism. You can decide not to whine and meet death with strength. But to carry millions of people out of despair and into a certainty of a win while you are preparing to be killed, you’ve got to have something inside yourself that makes it possible. Obviously, Arestovich is a deeply religious person but there are many religious people who couldn’t do this.

Here’s Kuleba’s interview with English subtitles. The translation is not great but still understandable:

And then I see people who think it’s OK to claim they are harmed by the presence of Ben Shapiro, and. . . Yeah. Don’t be like them. Be like Kuleba, is all I can say. The future belongs to the brave, not to pathetic little snowflakes who “feel unsafe.”

Look at Kuleba, too. He’s only 41. He has young children. This is not a ripped, muscular hero. Kuleba is nothing like, for example, Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Zaluzhny who is huge and tough and looks like an armored vehicle. Kuleba is a nerdy, soft guy in eyeglasses. But his quiet, dignified bravery is stunning.

Think, also, about how it happened that the entire Ukrainian leadership consists of these young, extremely strong people who speak languages, have a vision, and have proven to be completely unbreakable. This is not an accident. There is an entire philosophy of life behind this phenomenon. The way they explain it is that they are what the West really is, not as a region but as a way of being in the world. And if what traditionally counts as the West has forgotten about it, we will keep it alive because we are here.

We are all here, we haven’t left, we are staying, and we will keep fighting.

Well, Obama only bailed out Goldman Sachs, so we are on a much better path with Biden. Maybe one day we’ll get to see a bailout for the people who actually need it.

It’s a relief, though, that all the fears that Obama would control the Biden presidency behind the curtains turned out to be unfounded. The Biden administration ended up being extremely different in every way. And that’s good.

Also, let’s give credit where credit is due: there’s no pressure against the unvaccinated, no rumblings of a lockdown, no massively woke legislation. This is a lot better than I feared. Which doesn’t mean it’s perfect but it could have been worse.

It would be great to find a similarly calm attitude on the other side and hear an occasional recognition that Trump created no disaster or calamity either.

When people feel “harmed” by the presence of Ben Shapiro and start apologizing for the “painfully clear” and weighty decision to inflict the atrocious damage of a nerdy Jew’s appearance at an event, it’s a sign that something went really wrong somewhere.

As an artist, my daughter works in the tradition of Hieronymus Bosch. Here is a segment of the mural she created over her bed:

For most white-collar jobs, from secretary, to copy writer, to a PR agency, you can hire extremely effective people in poor countries at a fraction of the cost. They will work remotely (and who doesn’t in these jobs?), put in about 500% of effort, and won’t pout or tell you about their endless mental crises.

White collar workers in rich countries know (or intuit) that their jobs are about to go the way manufacturing jobs went in the 1990s. So they press their competitive advantage which is that they are (in their opinion) better-quality human beings. They can’t say that in those exact words because it sounds icky, so they deliver the message through BLM signs and rainbows in their social media and LinkedIn, endless demonstrations of refined sensibilities as they film their mental collapses and post them on TikTok, the confusing language of wokeness, and bizarre identities and sexual preferences. The marketing slogan this is supposed to transmit is, “Hire me because I know how to protect you and your company from being hounded by a mob of rabid leftist protesters.” I’m not saying people think it in those precise words but neither do we think things like “let me cook this dish because my husband loves it and I love him and want to do something nice for him.” We just do it because it feels right.

#MeToo and the cancel culture exist to make these people competitive on the labor market.

And what’s with the inane moaning that “Biden is buying votes”? Of course, he is. He’s s a politician, so he’s delivering for his voters. College-degree holders are his voters, so he’s delivering results for them. They’ll be happy, so they’ll vote for him again. And this pearl-clutching about the inherent immorality of pandering to voters is an excuse to cover up your own impotence.

“And why aren’t people who paid off their loans responsibly getting anything, waah, waah, waah?”

Because nobody they voted for can be assed to do anything for them, that’s why. And they won’t be assed until we make them.

Conservatives have been on the defensive for so long, they now can only say what they are against but never what they are for.

“We are against abortion!” OK, but what does that mean? Exceptions? Life of the mother? Ectopic? How about miscarriage? I have two friends who miscarried. One at 7 weeks, another at 10. Both were devastated but the heartbeat just stopped. It happens a lot in the first trimester.

You know what happened next? They had to take abortion pills. Unlike they show in soap operas, a woman doesn’t go, “Ah! I think I just lost my baby!” It’s, sadly, a lot more complicated and horrible than that. Since nobody on the Republican side is saying anything, these women are quite justified in wondering whether Republicans plan on denying abortion pills to the women in these tragic situations. Will such women – who tend to be in a terrible emotional state – have to prove that they didn’t choose to experience this tragedy? Will they be hassled? The weaselly “let the states decide” doesn’t help. Yes, let them, but what is your position? Like the Democrats can’t define what is a woman, Republicans are unable to squeeze out what is an abortion.

Now we are seeing the same incapacity to say anything proactive about the Biden college loan forgiveness. “We are against!” OK, great. What are you for? If your argument is that this unjustly helps out college degree holders, are you planning to do anything for people without college degrees? Free vocational training for everybody who seeks it? A huge tax break for families that are priced out of the house market and have to rent? Or is it only corporate handouts to supranational corporations that you support? Do you want to be the party of the working people who currently don’t have a political force to defend their interests or will you keep trying to ingratiate yourselves with the corporations that have long abandoned you and gone full-on woke?

Then again, illegal immigration. “End Biden’s border crisis!” OK, how? Build the wall? Stop processing immigration claims from illegal crossers inside the US? Move the immigration process outside of the country? I love all 3 solutions (just as I love the measures to support the working class I listed above) but what is the official position of the Republican party? Before Trump, it was a party of a fanatical, single-minded support for mass migration (see the policies of Reagan and Bush Jr). Is it still?

Trump was refreshing because he spoke in the language of what we need to do instead of what we should try to prevent. By the way, this is true in our individual lives, as well. Don’t fixate on what you don’t want. Concentrate on what you do.

Midterms are coming. I want to vote Republican straight through. But honestly, I have no idea what I’ll be voting for. With Democrats I do know in minute detail. I hate it but at least I know what it is.

There’s an unfortunate tendency among conservatives to fixate on good manners, politeness and propriety to the exclusion of everything else. We’ve seen it with Never Trumpers who had attacks of the vapors every time they saw Trump on TV but not because of any policy he championed. It was his rudeness that drove them to weekly conniptions fits.

Now this is happening to Ron DeSantis. He called Fauci a little troll, and the same group of conservatively minded castrati is happily performing the old aria titled “How Could He Ever Be So Impolite?” They didn’t suffer from lockdowns and have no desire to notice how much rage about it people feel. DeSantis does notice and shrewdly uses it to make voters feel heard. If you don’t like the vocabulary he uses in the process, fine, word the issue however you want. But don’t pretend that there’s no issue at all and we have nothing better to do than discuss DeSantis’s word choices.

Arestovich says – and I agree completely – that stoicism is the philosophy of losers. If your whole worldview is about preparing you to bear hardship and loss, life will oblige and give you exactly that. Instead of preparing themselves for suffering, people should prepare to win.

Everybody will experience suffering. We’ll all get knocked around by life, without exception. But getting fixated on it is unhealthy and counterproductive. All of this willpower crap is simply masochism in a respectable disguise.