Clarissa's Blog

Fully vaccinated Boris Johnson is self-isolating after being in contact with somebody who had a positive COVID test.

Maybe Johnson is an idiot.

Or maybe he isn’t.

I’m very much rooting for the former right now.

Another big victory for neoliberalism was to get people to develop emotional attachment to brands instead of people or places.

Brands are words. They are verbal constructs. We abandon our rootedness in material reality and get attached to verbal tricks that exist solely to get money from you.

I found out today about “Black Rifle Coffee,” a coffee brand that people bought not because they liked the product but because they thought the brand was somehow linked to conservative values. Then the founders of the company went on record to trash conservative customers and call them really bad names. The customers are now very sad.

I understand attachment to a product. There are products I love that serve my purposes well. But this is still about being grounded in material reality. People need to do stuff every day to ground themselves in material reality – including something so basic as walking barefoot outside.

The only words to get attached to should be inside works of art.

In Florida, we normally stay at a place where you can see many people on the beach whenever you look outside.

This time, however, we are staying at a place where the beach is deserted. (It’s not a hotel area). Wherever you look outside, there are no people. It’s just you and beautiful nature. It’s a very, very powerful feeling.

I now understand what drives the WEF crowd to want to lock us all up and remove us from view as much as possible.

I’m reading a book whose author tries to denounce neoliberalism in academia yet she uses neoliberal terminology like “emotional labor” and analyzes the grievances of a tiny identity subgroup.

Remember, neoliberal mentality turns every aspect of life into a marketplace. Talking about playing with your kids or sitting with an elderly relative as “uncompensated work” is neoliberal in the extreme. So is ditching the concept of workers in favor of a worldview that revolves around minuscule identity subgroups battling for scarce resources. The moment you hear things like “queer gender fluid academics of color,” please know that you are in the presence of a neoliberal ideologue.

A desk and a view. What else can one possibly need?

I have never seen the airport terminal that serves Florida destinations this busy. And I travel every year at this time. It’s absolute insanity here. Everybody is in masks except for us, and nobody is saying anything.

I brought the kids to buy jelly beans, and the Muslim woman at the cash register started praising me effusively for having so many kids. I’m hoping she didn’t think my sister, who dresses very young, is one of my army of kids, too.

In Argentina, gated communities are extremely popular with the wealthy. They are pretty, crime-free, close-knit, clean, and completely closed to outsiders. Do you know what such a gated community is called?

Country.

Like that, with an English word. “Vivo en un country.”

Only rich people deserve a country anymore. They could live anywhere but they want to live in a country, something they are denying everybody else.

So the next time they are shitting on your country, remember that they’d never say a bad word about their own. Your country is racist and located on “stolen land.” Theirs? Never. They need to destroy yours to feel comfortable in their own.

The country where the vaccine propaganda is completely out of control is Russia. I can no longer read any of my favorite gossip websites and social media accounts because it’s wall-to-wall COVID-mongering. Endless pictures of people on ventilators, stories of young people dying of COVID en masse. I just wanted to read about my favorite fashionable ladies having cat fights and posing in cute outfits, not see gut-wrenching stories about piles of unvaccinated corpses.

We went to an indoor kids’ entertainment place yesterday. There were screamy notices that masks are obligatory on every wall. We didn’t wear masks. Other patrons mostly wore their masks around their chins but they all gave us dirty looks.

It’s not health that preoccupied them. It’s that some people have the inner freedom not to perform rituals demonstrating obedience.

I truly have no words:

I reread the sentence five times, thinking I must be having a brain melt. But no, it’s still there. And nobody has the slightest problem with this.