Clarissa's Blog

The harassment training at work has been amended to include “OK, Boomer” as an example of harassment. I’m waiting for Karen and Brandon to make an appearance.

To clarify, I think “OK, Boomer” is stupid. So is Karen. (Brandon is still new and fun). But harassment? Words need to have meaning. If this is harassment, then nothing is.

I continue rescuing condemned books from the library, and today I liberated this gem:

It explains why Iberian America isn’t obsessed with race like Anglo America.

I’m running out of space in the office but at least I’ve rescued some great books. You should see the recently published crap that was preserved instead of these wonderful older volumes.

The reason why the now fashionable “thank you, Pfizer!” is so jarring is that we’ve all been sick, some of us quite seriously. We’ve recovered, often thanks to medication of some sort. People have had surgeries, requiring an anaesthetic. But have you ever seen people express thanks to pharmaceutical companies?

Moreover, we all eat. Does anybody thank the companies producing food? Surely, food is more crucial than the COVID vaccine.

A famous Russian writer Edward Radzinsky says that there’s no such discipline as history. History, he says, is today’s politics projected onto the past.

It’s true that no discipline is as blatantly ideological as history.

I’m once again trapped in reading Bildungsromane, and I started thinking about what peer groups value based on gender. When I was a girl, the only thing that was valued was whether you had a boy who brought you presents. And when I was a young woman, the only thing that was valued was if there was a guy willing to offer marriage.

In the male Bildungsromane I’m reading, it looks like what boys value is physical strength and if you can beat somebody up. I asked N and he says it’s exactly how he remembers it. Apparently, he spent his teenage years beating guys up and getting beaten up.

I’m very glad to be the age I am because I no longer even bother to think about what my peer group values.

These sudden, unanticipated school closures have one goal: to squeeze as many people as possible out of public schools. I have seen announcements of this kind many times in recent days. Schools close one day a week. Two sporadic days a month. Classes are cut by an hour. Then, on some weeks, by an hour and a half. It’s all very unpredictable, and that’s by design. If the mother wants to hold down a job, she’ll be forced to pull the kids out of public school and find another solution.

This is austerity in action. And it’s coming for every public service. Policing, roads, fire stations, everything. The goal is to make all of us poorer, more scared, more helpless.

The largest inflation jump in 30 years:

And this is before we pump out another 4 trillion into building anti-racist overpasses and the rest of the BBB crap.

What was that saying about the people who vote against their economic interest?

In the USSR, I felt endlessly angry about every bit of stupidity that was inflicted on us. Forced attendance at demonstrations, obligatory trips to the kolkhoz, everything. Most people accepted it and tried to find something positive in it. Why feel angry about something you can’t change? they’d say. And when the USSR ended, they kept putting up with its remnants – the same obligatory trips to the kolkhoz, the same humiliations, the same disrespect. They didn’t understand that the only way to stop it could only come from them. They had to stop participating. There’s no benign outside authority that can make things better. Only you can do it. You decide where the off-ramp is and you take it when you choose to do so.

Went on Facebook, discovered that the most leftist, anti-corporate friends are posting gushing, unironic “thank you, Pfizer!!!!! I ❤️ Pfizer” pieces, closed Facebook, and now am struggling to hold down the desire to vomit.

This is so delusional, it’s even kind of sad. Rufo did the boring grunt work. And did it, and did it, and did it again. That’s why he got results. A vapid gesture like that letter will never have an effect. It’s infantile, childish behavior that expects these kinds of things to work and produce results.

It’s the perfect illustration of what I described in the previous post. Patrician mentality of spoiled brats.

(For the non-US readers, Chris Rufo organized parents to stand up against indoctrination in schools, delivering a victory for Republicans in the Virginia governor election. Cathy Young signed a letter with a bunch of other people mildly squeaking something vague about illiberal ideology. Now she thinks that the results Rufo achieved are due to her single little squawk. Truly, many people have no perspective at all. And if you aren’t subscribed to Chris Rufo’s newsletter, please do. If nothing else, the guy is a study in relentless, hardworking, steely determination.)