Clarissa's Blog

One important reason why the GOP won in Virginia is that they did the work. Early in the ballot count, Fairfax County started waffling, saying that there won’t be able to count, technical issues, blah blah. But there were Republican observers and lawyers on the ground ready to act. The top lawyer for the GOP was there, marching in, all ready to take depositions and gather evidence. Immediately, the “technical issue” got solved and the votes got counted.

Also, unlike in the CA recall, in VA the GOP actually had a campaign. They isolated a crucial mobilizing issue: schools. School closures and racist education. They beat that drum relentlessly, leaving aside the outdated, stupid free-marketeering slogans. And people responded. Once you notice it’s not 1981 any longer, it becomes easier to connect with voters. This is the GOP of the future. It’s in its infancy and I hope it grows in this direction. Less Reagan, less Bush, and more current, important issues that interest today’s voters.

Suffering doesn’t make people better. It makes them worse. It saps energy, it makes people bitter and jaded.

Solzhenitsyn tells in The Gulag Archipelago that he believed he would find better people in the camps. That suffering would cleanse them and make them kinder, give them an understanding of what really mattered. What he found was the opposite. Except for the profoundly religious people who were bearing the suffering with dignity, everybody else was made a lot worse by it.

This is why it bugs me when politicians run on the strength of their sob stories. Everybody has a cross to bear. Some are heavier than others. That’s the nature of human existence. But the weight of each individual cross tells us nothing about the person bearing it. All pedophiles are victims of childhood sexual abuse. There’s nothing moral in theirs or anybody else’s suffering.

We used to have a department chair with a great sense of humor. I stew at every woke directive but that guy found ways to be funny about this stuff.

Once he was told to provide the numbers on faculty race and ethnicity. He compiled a completely true list that went like this:

• Prof. A – Venezuelan-American
• Prof. B – Jewish-Canadian
• Prof. C – Jewish-Argentinean
• Prof. D – Jewish-Ukrainian
• Prof. E – Jewish-Brazilian
• Prof. F – Jewish-American
• Prof. G – from Texas, refused to disclose

The administration returned the list for the Chair to redo. In response, he added “Ashkenazi” or “Sephardic” to every Jewish-something professor and in brackets explained how he arrived at the conclusion of who was which). After that, the administration left him alone.

Am I looking in the wrong place? Did Youngkin win? I’m trying to Google it but all the top articles are old.

I feel great dismay when I see this kind of thing:

You can’t win by accepting the most immoral and ludicrous ideas of your opponent. We already have a party that invests skin color and immigration status with virtue and morality. People who share this worldview and like to collect rosters of trendy identities aren’t going to suddenly like you.

This is a horrible, horrible framing. Our narrative should be “our candidates won because they have better ideas.” That’s it. Their DNA and the biographical details of their ancestors are immaterial.

Please, please, let’s not get so inured to this kind of thing that we accept it as normal. In the early USSR people were exterminated on the basis of their parents’ professions. It was cool to have children of factory workers on the roster like today it’s cool to have children of immigrants. And children of doctors or, even worse, priests and horse-owning peasants lived in terror because they were considered defective by birth.

Favored identity groups change but the principle remains. Let’s refuse to accept it.

The most beautiful words in the English language are “freeze warning in effect.” Forget Shakespeare. This is true poetry.

I’d bring Ramon Saizarbitoria’s Martutene, Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World, and Miau by Benito Pérez Galdós. I could spend years rereading them. Plus, they are long. I wish the question included a fourth book so I could add Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.

When people say “the Bible” in response to this kind of question, I feel like they are virtue signaling.

It’s worse when they say War and Peace. Are you really going to read that crap? How many times?

We have four candidates for the top administrative position on our campus. Three are standard diversity bureaucrats who love “anti-racism,” austerity, and big data. The fourth enlisted in the army at 37 after the 9/11 terror attack and told us about his church and how much it matters to him. He also happens to be anti-austerity and doesn’t think we need more ‘anti-racism.’ I’m kind of stunned that such a normal candidate squeezed through.

These are all diversity hires, of course. But at least one is a normal human being, so that’s already big.

Good for him. Only a total robot could stay awake during this event. Of course, I prefer a the president who wouldn’t show up at all but I wouldn’t judge this one for conking out. This is the only reasonable response to the “UN climate conference.”

Friends, here’s a great article about feminism and bio-libertarianism. A little quote:

A feminism fighting back against the bio-libertarian nightmare. . . defends human nature and the body, against technologies that would remodel us in the name of utopia. Commercial surrogacy, transgender ‘medicine’ and experimental human-animal chimeras are just the start. Resistance requires a willingness to re-open the question of those embodied ways in which men and women are different. 

Skip the historical overview and read the rest. It’s excellent stuff.