Clarissa's Blog

Instead of making teachers in public schools actually teach instead of assigning this stupid “internet homework,” these bastards are robbing several more trillion from the people to put them in the pocket of an already fabulously rich broadband and “online homework solutions” provider.

I’m particularly impressed by how this “internet homework” is being presented as something completely natural and even beneficial.

I interviewed a graduate student from India for an assistantship job. She’s in computer science.

“Are you sure you will have time for this job?” I asked. “You must be very busy with your studies.”

The student smiled shyly. “Oh,” she said, “actually, I have so much time. The way coding is taught here. . . I already know all of it. It’s at such a different level than we do it. It’s very much. . . for beginners.”

She’s here for the visa, not the knowledge. We have no knowledge to give because we are hopelessly, pathetically behind. Instead of gearing our programs towards students who are capable of succeeding in their subjects, we embrace an insane, unscientific myth that nobody is naturally gifted and that every brain is an exact copy of everybody else’s. We “deemphasize calculus” and everything else that requires a stronger brain capacity to pretend that people are interchangeable widgets.

Gosh, even in the USSR we had schools for the mathematically gifted, the linguistically gifted, the athletically gifted, etc. The Soviets were ideological but not to the point of destroying the mathematical sciences in service of the ideology.

Mind you, though, this is not an accidental insanity that can be corrected. This is the foundation of the left’s worldview. Either people are identical dolls painted different color or they aren’t. Differences between individuals and groups that are in-born, not socially manufactured, either exist or they don’t. Either the gap can be closed or it can’t because some people just don’t have the brains for it.

Once you accept that some people are mathematically gifted while others aren’t, you can no longer argue that everything can be changed, engineered away, “re-imagined.”

The local grocery store advertises appointments for “COVID vaccine and flu shots.” I wonder where they find the difference when the degree of effectiveness is similar.

I went to the grocery store yesterday. Several times I caught myself grabbing something I always buy, noticing the price, and putting it back because the price is not what I’m used to. The raise I got this year will be eaten up entirely by the inflation.

I’m sure soon enough we’ll get inured to the high prices. And that’s not good because it’s part of what I keep talking about. The dispossession, the robbery, the enormous transfer of capital that is being deployed against us on all sides. That’s the most important thing happening right now.

A great article on postliberalism by Sohrab Ahmari.

Ahmari reproaches Dreher for not being done with liberalism already and moving on. Liberalism – a worldview that places human liberty above everything else – is doomed to become illiberal, coercive. We’ve discussed this on the blog when we talked about Patrick Deneen’s work.

For those who missed it, here’s an example. Say, you want to live as 15 different genders. In order to do that, you need me to refer to you as corresponds to each gender whenever you feel like it. Moreover, you need me to believe that you are, indeed, 15 different genders. But I don’t want to do it. In fact, I can’t. Your freedom to be what you want is in conflict with my freedom to think what I do. Eventually, you’ll need a moral order to rank whose freedom is more deserving. And a political order to coerce one of us into relinquishing their freedom.

Or, say, you want to be free from fear of COVID. And to achieve that, you need me to modify my behavior. But I don’t care about your freedom from COVID. Whose desire is going to win? Again, a moral and political order will come into existence to rank our freedoms as more or less important and coerce one of us.

Ahmari is right when he says that liberalism is as coercive as any other worldview. Why not just ditch it altogether, he asks, and accept a way of being which is also going to be coercive but at least won’t be as sterile and misery-inducing as liberalism? He’s impatient with Dreher who can’t renounce liberalism and move on.

The problem is that within liberalism you still get a chance to negotiate whose freedom is more deserving of protection. Everybody still gets a chance to win. In the alternative order that he seems to propose, some people will always lose. It will be a lot more static and less protean than liberalism. That’s not an easy thing to accept, especially when nobody says clearly who the non-negotiable losers will be.

After playing with a bunch of kids for a few hours, Klara asked, “mommy should I do what other people think is right or what I think is right?”

Took everything I had not to deliver a speech on COVID in response. But I’m very glad she’s asking this crucial question at an early age. The sooner you start, the easier it goes.

I don’t know why there’s such a brouhaha about people buying a lot of milk. Klara quit drinking milk this summer but before that she was guzzling it by the gallon. A three-gallon jug would last her 8-9 days. I don’t drink it at all because of the high sugar content and N is lactose intolerant. So that was just one small kid. With 10 kids, 12 gallons a week is actually quite little.

It’s really ludicrous to dump on people over milk. Milk is a basic staple. It’s not like they complained over the price of beluga caviar.

There is a small benefit to being torn out of your linguistic environment. You begin to recognize when writers use vocabulary that was created much later in their period literature. I’m noticing such blips both in Bykov and Shamil Idiatullin, a new Russian writer I’m exploring. (Obviously, Shamil Idiatullin is Russian not in any ethnic sense but in the language he writes).

Bykov’s characters who live in the 1930s use the expression “вот это вот всё”, which is a very recent verbal tic that arose way after I emigrated. Idiatullin’s character intersperses his speech with “как бы” in 1983, which is impossible because this particular tick was born in the 2000s. It has the same effect on me as if characters said “go, Brandon!” to mock the authorities in 2008. I notice these things because I wasn’t there when they were born and they aren’t natural to me.