Clarissa's Blog

Have you seen the images of the 💯 th anniversary of the CCP? Scary, right?

Do you think it is possible in the US? Why or why not?

Klara now listens to books and / or plays on her own for hours. I’m free to do whatever I want. Read, watch Mexican soaps, take baths while reading and watching soaps. This situation plunges me into intolerable feelings of guilt. If you ask why, you are probably not a parent. Guilt is the default state. I feel like a horrible mother because I’m not entertaining her. Even though she adamantly refuses to be entertained and insists she wants me to leave her alone.

In the USSR, you weren’t allowed to sell your apartment. So if you needed a bigger or a different apartment or one located in another neighborhood, you had to swap. Rarely did people find partners for a direct swap where each family would need exactly what the other family had. So what you had to do was build chains. If I go to A’s apartment, and A goes to B’s, B’s family splits and goes to C’s and D’s apartments, while C and D get married and move into mine. Then you have to get everybody on board and make sure they all move in and out at the same time.

Something similar happens in my work as Chair. Today, I had to close an under-enrolled section, open another, swap two more, and shuffle a bunch of people around so that everybody goes into the correct section, nobody’s schedule is disturbed, teaching loads are preserved, students don’t get lost, and the Dean’s Office is happy. It’s like a mathematical puzzle, and I love it. I had no idea I’d enjoy this kind of stuff so much. My Soviet skills are in high demand.

And to people who think socialism would be so much better, what I have to say is: you poor innocent child. You have no idea and good for you.

The ‘natural framework of the human body’ fixed limits to pleasure and performance that have become unacceptable today. The body is now the product of a choice, a style, self-fashioning. Everyone is accountable for their body which they reinvent and transform as they please. The new discourse of pleasure and performance obliges people to furnish themselves with a body that can always surpass its current capacities for production and pleasure

Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. The New Way of the World: On Neo-Liberal Society (2009).

A great country, a wonderful people. Many happy returns to a country that is so much bigger and stronger than any passing insanity of its rulers. Soon enough the exasperated “oh, Canada. . .” that I so often say these days will be replaced by an admiring, happy “oh, Canada!!” And then I will come home.

If you are looking for a great beach read – or a book to distract you from this terrible heat – Ruth Ware’s most recent novel is perfect. It’s set at a remote ski resort. In the midst of a snow storm. And a terrible snow avalanche. Where everything is buried under a blanket of snow. And it’s really really cold.

The plot is equally delicious. A group of people who founded a fussy tech startup get together at a remote resort and start killing each other. They are all just as ridiculous and obnoxious as you imagine rich techies to be. They bicker and act so pretentiously that it’s really fun when they start getting bumped off.

I’ve read all Ruth Wares, and this is the best one yet. Breezed through it in a few hours, it was so much fun.

The new Yoruba instructor who hasn’t seen my face yet addresses me as “sir” multiple times in each email.

I find it oddly endearing. Makes me feel like I’m in the military. “Sir, yes, sir! Ready to go, sir! At your orders, sir!”

We are having a Zoom meeting tomorrow, so I finally did write to say that I’m actually a ma’am to avoid shocking the instructor when he sees me.

I don’t know what’s happening in Canada, honestly. Every day I read about the burnings of churches. Here’s today’s news, a Catholic church in Edmonton. Yesterday I read about an Anglican church burned in BC. I went to read comments about the burnings on Twitter and they are almost without exception justifying the vandalism.

This is a great quite from Edwin Black, the foremost historian of eugenics in the US:

Mankind’s quest for perfection has always turned dark. Man has always existed in perpetual chaos. Continuously catapulted from misery to exhilaration and back, humanity has repeatedly struggled to overcome vulnerability and improve upon its sense of strength. The instinct is to ‘play God’s or at least mediate His providence. Too often, this impulse is not just to improve, but to repress, and even destroy those deemed inferior. Eventually, the Judeo-Christian world codified the principle that all human life should be valued. . . Science offers the most potent weapons in man’s determination to resist the call of moral restraint.

In people under the age of 60, almost all deaths and hospitalizations in intensive care for COVID occur in obese people. The risk for people under 40 who are at a healthy weight is too low to measure.

All of the readers of this blog yawned at this point. Yeah, we all know it, what else is new.

But friends, normies don’t know this. Seriously, ask them. They don’t know. I recently asked a normie friend, “who is at a greater risk to die of COVID, a 20yo or an 80yo?” She said the risk is the same. She is a Full Professor, not some idiot living in a cave with no internet access.

This isn’t widely known. And yes, weight loss is a long-term proposition. But we’ve been at this COVID silliness for 1,5 years. Instead of pouring money and effort into keeping people sedentary and eating junk, we could have done the opposite. That would have really made a dent in COVID mortality. And diabetes. And heart disease.

But it wouldn’t be profitable for the companies that govern us with the help of what we traditionally know as governments. So it is up to us to stay alert and do the right thing for ourselves.