Clarissa's Blog

I’ve been sitting here all day, listening how being a mother is this horrible thing when we all know it’s really the best. Why are we saying things we know to be untrue? Even when the writer analyzed expresses great joy at being a mother, we immediately have to conclude that she’s a stupid, brainwashed victim. Sounds like a bit of a projection to me.

This is your daily reminder that one of the most dangerous things to a child’s physical health and sanity is a neurotic parent with high anxiety and a non-existent sex life:

There’s no chance these men have been properly laid since the time the children in question were conceived.

This is not a pandemic of the vaccinated or unvaccinated. This is a pandemic of the unfucked.

Nothing bugs me more than seeing female academics whom I know personally and who adore their husbands and children go on and on at academic conferences about how important it is to “subvert the normative expectations about the importance of marriage and childbearing” and how you can be alone and still happy.

Let the women who are alone and happy tell us about it. But it all sounds quite ridiculous when a happily married mother of three who keeps sharing packets of her kids’ photos bleats about the heavy burden of normativity.

On the positive side, I did ask why “freedom of choice” for women is limited to the freedom to abort a pregnancy and never includes the freedom to have children. Especially given that far more women in Spain report not being able to have as many children as they want than women who report not having had as many abortions as they wanted. Obviously, nobody had an answer but two young female scholars nodded vigorously.

This “traditional gender role” we keep denouncing is increasingly a class issue. It’s kind of sick to promote a single, unattached lifestyle when you can afford not to live it yourself and so many women (especially in Spain) simply can’t afford the normativity that they long for. I completely support everybody’s right to be married or single as they wish but it’s an undeniable fact that lonely, unattached, fluid subjects are more profitable economically and useful politically. It used to be the opposite but that system of economic and political relations is long dead.

We keep fighting the battles of 1852, which makes us look like total idiots.

https://twitter.com/nickconfessore/status/1461148994718121987?t=kIHLypn2CtB0-2ZMMfHPkw&s=19

Remember, it’s the grandchildren of these young commissars that will lead us out of this mess. Not by doing anything but simply by feeling absolutely nothing but contempt and boredom when hearing today’s “diverse slogans.”

Of course, we don’t have to wait for the grandchildren of today’s 18-year-olds. We could stop reacting to the slogans ourselves. However, the trick is that after the rot has gone this deep, everybody has to become indifferent to the slogans. 100% of people. It doesn’t matter that there will always be cynical operators eager to exploit the slogans for personal gain. That’s unimportant as long as nobody takes the slogans seriously.

To give an example, if somebody posits a question like this one, not a single person who isn’t completely senile would think, “yes, there might be something to this”:

It doesn’t matter if people still publicly proclaim this silliness as true. Freedom comes when nobody who isn’t severely cognitively impaired can seriously believe that Harris is being criticized because she’s “a woman of color.”

Since that’s impossible right now, we’ve got to wait for it to happen naturally. Herd immunity to the warm feelings of sweet self-righteousness one can derive from these slogans develops in the third generation.

I know this is not what anybody wants to hear but I honestly don’t believe anything else will work. This is religious fanaticism without a god. I grew up in a country that was built by exactly this kind of fanatics and destroyed by their grandchildren who couldn’t be assed to believe any longer. Since the woke fanatics are into self-worship, they are shitty parents who can’t transmit their faith down the line.* The children are too beaten down to react at all but the grandchildren have enough freedom to not care.

So yeah, by the beginning of the next century, this crazy stuff will be done for sure.

* And that’s how they differ from a traditionally religious society where there is an immutable law outside of the self. That kind of society can last for a thousand years.

P.S. See here:

How do you think her children are going to feel about this stuff when they grow up? Or any children who grow up on this? What about their children? What are the chances they won’t roll their eyes at the silly old lady prattling on about the frumpy old systemic racisms? I adored my great-grandma but it never occurred to me to share her sincere Communist beliefs. Not that she ever tried to inculcate them into me because even though she was a Stalinist (literally), she wasn’t as far gone as the people who buy the “anti-racist baby” books.

I feel sorry for the poor tykes of the batshit crazy momma, of course, but we all carry out burdens.

People who have newly (and oldly) received passwords! Please don’t narc on me to the authorities. I’ll be fine but you’ll carry it on your conscience forever. Your eternal soul (or mental health, if you prefer) doesn’t deserve to suffer on my account. I’m not worth it.

I’m speaking at a conference at 7 am tomorrow, and I didn’t even remember the topic of the talk (or whether it’s on Spain or Central America) until two minutes ago.

I don’t write “conference talks” and I don’t recommend people do it at all, especially if they don’t have a million publications. Write articles, submit them for publication, and then you’ll be able to cull any number of talks out of texts that will be already written and a lot less tentative and confusing than whatever you write purposefully as “a conference talk.”

The genre of “conference talk” in the Humanities should die a painful death as soon as possible. We end up with crowds of people who have dozens of these “talks” that never turned into actual research.

I spent 10 minutes talking to a colleague from Spain today, and now people at the Mexican restaurant think I’m from Spain. I unwittingly imitate the accent of whomever I spoke to in the morning. It gets really weird when I get together with a guy from Kentucky before work. And even weirder when I speak to my husband before leaving for work. Then I spend the whole day with a heavy Russian accent in all of my languages and the Kentuckian friend is powerless to change it.

There are rumors of merging departments at my university as an austerity measure. I said, merge me with anybody except for the sociology and history folks if you want to avoid bloodshed on campus. Those are sick neoliberal bunnies, and they’ll either murder me in an attack of wokeness or commit an en masse harakiri because we just can’t coexist.

The government is forcing a completely new and untested medical technology into the bodies of children as young as 5 to benefit a rapacious pharma company known for unethical medical practices.

Do you still think that “single-payer healthcare” is a good idea? In neoliberalism, the role of the government is to facilitate the transfer of capital to the tiny transnational global elite while destroying welfare protections. What makes you think a reason won’t be manufactured to deny you healthcare for refusing to be a guinea pig for yet another experimental medication?

I understand (if not support) being for nationalized medicine 30 years ago. But things have changed. There is no longer anything that can be meaningfully called “a nation.” The government as a concept has mutated into something completely different from what it was last century. When is a good time to adjust your thinking in a changing situation? When is it time to notice that things are changing?