Clarissa's Blog

What a great book, my friends. I can’t recommend strongly enough because it’s rare that a book on economic history is written in such a clear, jargon-free style that a non-specialist can understand and enjoy.

Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local traces the development of neoliberalism in two countries that were ruled by authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century, Spain and Romania. These countries achieved democracy after their authoritarian regimes couldn’t be sustained any more and both neoliberalized. This happened at different times, obviously, and different forms of neoliberalism were implemented.

I found absolutely fascinating the discussion of how, in spite of the autarchy, Franco put no limits on how freely different economic ideas were debated. By the mid-1960, pretty much everything that Marx and Engels ever wrote got published in Spain, let alone the anti-Keynesian stuff of the nascent neoliberal theory. And contrary to a widespread opinion, the technocrats were developmentalist, not neoliberal.

Franco himself was, of course, not neoliberal. But he did nothing to prevent these ideas from becoming very popular among establishment economists either. In Romania things were different. The ideological control was real and hardcore. As a result, when neoliberalism finally came (as it did everywhere), adapting it to local needs and specifics was a lot harder for Romanians than for Spaniards.

There’s a lot more fascinating stuff like this. The most important takeaway is that neoliberalism is extremely flexible. Extremely! Got it? This means that we don’t have to live with the ugly, nasty version of it that’s been shaping up since 2008. It has gigantically good parts, and we can keep those while throwing away the garbage ones, such as the incessant woke screeching of Twitter and Nike. (This isn’t in Ban’s book. It’s my attempt to improve upon his analysis).

In short, great book. Reads like a detective novel. Not overburdened with footnotes, and most importantly, the author blissfully keeps value judgments and political manifestos to himself.

In a strange twist, I now often find myself defending the COVID vaccine from the vaccinated.

“You are vaccinated! You are protected!” I respond gently to wails of “I don’t want to die” and “what we need is to lock everything down immediately.”

They do believe in the vaccine but more as a spiritual matter. It has no practical purpose for them but a deep emotional meaning.

You don’t know what suffering is if you haven’t tried to explain to a graduate student from Africa why it’s not OK to say “colored people” but a great idea to say “people of color.”

The new excuse for endless lockdowns is, “yes, Omicron is mild but it causes long COVID which reduces people’s cognitive capacity. I don’t want to become stupid!!!”

The effort of willpower required to abstain from saying, “honey, are you sure you didn’t get it at birth because you aren’t that bright” is enormous.

Any good book recommendations on the post-apartheid South Africa? The more recent, the better.

Thanks!

The first book I read this year was almost good. The story had a lot of potential but the author’s technical skills were insufficient to make it work. As a result, at least half of the novel is pretty much unreadable.

Here’s what happened. Marilé, the protagonist of the novel, is one of those perennially infantile women who are always looking for a man to rescue them. When she accidentally causes the death of a child, however, nobody can save her from the fallout. Even though she didn’t mean for the little boy to die, the kid’s parents and their friends can’t just get over the fact that Marilé caused his death. The community where she lives begins to shun her, and Marilé doesn’t have the maturity to deal with that.

“But this is unfair!” she exclaims. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Grow up,” her husband tells her.

But Marilé is incapable of that. Instead, she abandons her husband and her 6-year-old son and runs away to be rescued by a wealthy American. When the wealthy American dies 20 years later, she goes back to look for the now grown son to be her savior du jour.

This could be a great story but it ultimately doesn’t work because the author decided to tell it from the perspective of Marilé who is so vapid and shallow that the narrative soon becomes excruciatingly boring. Piñeiro tries to create sympathy for Marilé but that contradicts the logic of the story. The struggle between the author’s intention and the direction where the story leads blocks the story from moving in any direction. As I said, it’s a failure of the writer’s skill that prevents this book from being any good, and that’s unfortunate. How people deal with the inevitable and unfair bad shit happening to them is a fascinating topic but this novel didn’t manage to give the readers anything other than the obvious conclusion that infantile people don’t manage to deal with it at all.

Local public schools moved to online learning today. This means faculty will demand that we move online as well because they can’t leave the kids home alone. This will be a disaster for me because I’m teaching a course this semester that needs to be done in the lab. I put so much time into developing it. If these neurotic bastards force me to go online, the course will be a failure. We are starting in a week. There’s no way I can redo the whole course at this late date.

It’s very hard to live this way when you can’t plan anything because of these psychotic drama queens.

People, do read this news item because I can’t even. Two teenagers stole a van. In the process of stealing it, one of the teenagers drove over the other one and killed him. Now the parents of the dead teenager want the prosecutor to charge. . . the owner of the stolen vehicle because his van tempted the carjackers to commit the crime, ultimately causing his death.

I will never get over how permissive the American culture is towards piss-poor parents. These horrid people raised a little criminal who ran around stealing vehicles. And they feel so self-righteous that they dare to blame their kid’s victim for his crime.

My sister who lives in Montreal is booking salon appointments and spinning classes in Ottawa, a city 50 minutes away that isn’t in lockdown. If anybody told us of this two years ago, we would have laughed in the weirdo’s face. And now we are the weirdos.