Clarissa's Blog

“The last time your grandparents saw you, you were three and a half years old, Klara!” I gush.

“Is it the half that’s after two or the half that’s before four?” Klara asks.

Kids ask the deepest questions.

Professors left campus for 18+ months and now they are stunned that academic self-governance has been eroded into utter insignificance. They keep trying to offer their opinions and I’m tired of saying, “Look, I’m sorry, but nobody is soliciting our input. We are being issued directives that we must follow. We’ve been completely removed from the decision-making process.”

“Yes, but we always decided these things ourselves!”

You relinquished your power for 1,5 years and what did you expect? That nobody would pick up what you dropped? That it would be waiting here for you whenever you deigned to come back? Sorry, my friend. It’s gone.

I’ve been on campus full-time since July 1, 2020. I’ve been wailing and screaming about this since then. But nobody was there to hear me. And now it’s too late.

There’s a very work-intensive committee I’ve been on since 2019. I don’t choose busy-work committees, and this one did a lot of very practical stuff. It hasn’t met once in any format since March 2020. Somebody is doing the work of this committee. Somebody is making the decisions that it used to make. Professors have been excluded.

I’m going to teach translation next semester. I ordered a textbook and then discovered that in the middle of it there’s some stupid dig at Trump. Honestly, can one get a break from Trump? What on Earth does he have to do with translation?

Obviously, I’m not assigning this part of the textbook but by God, don’t these people ever get bored? Why can’t there be one topic – translation, pickles, cement, something – that’s free of virtue signaling about Trump? There’s a whole psychopathology going on here and people are indulging it gleefully.

It’s ludicrous to suggest that people with a mental illness so severe it requires not only life-long medication but also a series of radical surgeries have a good insight into their affliction. We don’t consult schizophrenics’ on how to treat schizophrenia, do we?

I truly hate this piece by Abigail Shrier on Bari Weiss’s Substack. I can’t figure Shrier out. She’s either an extraordinarily stupid person or a provocateur who normalizes terrible things under the guise of opposing them.

In the linked piece, she has some “trans doctor” explain that the main problem with giving 9-year-olds puberty blockers and then cutting off their genitals a bit later is that these children mightn’t have had time to experience an orgasm, which may thwart their sex lives later. From which it can only follow that sexual molestation of these children is a great thing done for their own good.

The usefulness of puberty blockers is questioned in the article but only because it makes the eventual cutting of children’s genitals inconvenient. Essentially, the whole article is an illustration of a spat within the child mutilation industry on the most convenient way of pursuing this goal.

Shier gives complete credence to the idea that a two-year-old can have “gender dysphoria” and that Jazz Jennings is a woman. Readers go to her for an alternative point of view and get treated to several dozen repetitions, fired off at a rapid clip, that men who say they are women are actually women. This is precisely how the most effective propaganda works. It affirms some of your concerns while asking you to accept the terms that inform its belief system. After you have accepted that a he is a she and repeated it many times as payment for a crumb of approval and solidarity, you find yourself arguing whether it’s best to mutilate a child before or after you’ve sexually abused him because you’ve already conceded everything else.

Particularly upsetting is the excited whelping of the conservative crowd that “these are trans doctors who are saying it! This makes it so much more valuable and true!” We’ve already seen this in the aftermath of the last election (and every election before it) where a vote from every identity group that the left claims is superior was hailed as, indeed, superior.

You can never win a fight conducted entirely on somebody else’s terms. You can’t submit rhetorically and expect to dominate eventually. For human beings, submitting to the opponent’s rhetorical regimen is the equivalent of an animal lying on its back and waving its paws in the air. The moment you say “BIPOC people” or “Jazz Jennings is a woman,” that’s it, you have signaled your defeat. Everything that comes after that is you begging for mercy.

Do you know what the dirtiest, most disgusting place on the Internet is? I accidentally stumbled upon it today, and it’s rancid in its stomach-churning putrefaction. The utter degradation I witnessed there is not something I want to see again.

That place is in the comment section to the announcement that Ron DeSantis’s wife has breast cancer. What needed to have happened to people, how much they needed to be abandoned by anything human to gloat, finger-wag and preen over a mother of little children getting cancer – her illness might be cured but theirs won’t.

It’s truly a great punishment to live with a soul that is such a cesspit. People wash their hands several times a day but allow their inner lives to rot and stink to high heaven.

I’m not going to link to this ugliness and filth. I’m going to take a long shower and hope to forget what I saw.

For Russian speakers, here’s a beautiful post about my native city or, rather, its Jewish version. It brings me to tears to think how all of this was destroyed to turn the city into the vulgar, ugly mess it was by the time I was born.

USSR was amazingly good at turning everything into the same shade of shit.

Would anybody on here miss Facebook if it disappeared forever? Definitely not me.

And as for Instagram, that thing is downright evil.

Unfortunately, both these bastards will be perfectly fine. We will never get rid of them.

In my higher-level seminars, the lowest grades for every assignment are always those of Hispanic students. These courses are taught 100% in Spanish, and you’d think that a lack of a language barrier would help but nope. Never.

Another very low-performing group are African Americans. However! I have noticed that if I provide a free language tutor, black students are massively more likely to use the tutor’s services and they begin to close the gap extremely fast. I had 3 black students who were flunking out at the beginning of the semester. I deployed the tutor, and now all three are at low to mid Bs. And that’s in only 6 weeks. At this rate, they’ll be at an A by December. This tells me that their problem was bad language instruction in high school. In the 12 years that I’ve worked here, I’ve had exactly one black student who came to us without being handicapped at the level of the basic language skills. And in 12 years, we have graduated 4 black students total. Take into account that 15% of our students are black, and you’ll see that this is disturbing.

According to my observations, absolutely nothing helps advance African American graduation rates like free tutors. I’m so happy I came up with the plan to assign a GA to be a free tutor full time. (She’s free for the students but we pay her a salary and cover 100% of her tuition. I’m not exploiting anyone.)

All of the money that’s wasted on an endless procession of Vice Provosts for diversity, when instead we could hire an army of tutors and help these students. It’s a crying shame to have so many black students who take on debt to go to college and then have to drop out while we blab endlessly about our commitment to diversity.