Clarissa's Blog

I received my very first email addressed to me as a specialist in Central American literature and culture. I’m swollen with pride.

What I don’t like about Jordan Peterson is that he can’t coherently deliver even a very good and reasonable argument. He starts speaking, and it’s great, but only up to a point. Then, something clicks and he brusquely veers off into exhibiting his neuroses that have absolutely nothing to do with the point he was trying to make.

To give an example, I saw a clip of him talking about childhood aggression. He started saying that all children are aggressive at the age of 2. By the age of 4, most get socialized out of it (meaning that they learn socially acceptable ways of exhibiting aggression). Those who don’t get socialized out of it by 4, will behave anti-socially until 27-8, which marks the next stage of when they can move out of the anti-socially aggressive behavior. This is all good, useful stuff.

But then, all of a sudden, he switches into a completely irrelevant and, frankly, idiotic point that adult women are more aggressive on social media because they are into reputation destruction, etc. This is, obviously, his way of complaining that women are mean to him online. And a good, useful narrative that he started with and that people really need to hear is lost. It’s such a pity because many people would find it useful to hear about childhood aggression and how normal it is.

This is why everything Peterson says or writes sounds like verbal soup. He simply can’t stay on point. Such a shame because he does have useful things to communicate.

Professors are the limit. It’s not enough to have unheard-of job security and tons of free time. No, they also need to make sure that nobody ever dares to express an opinion on the quality of their work. And have everybody constantly recognize how much they suffer from COVID and racism-sexism.

And with all that, they still want to transform colleges into online diploma mills because they can’t be arsed to show up at work even just twice a week for a couple of hours.

Another mass shooting, this time in Southern California. It’s what, the sixth one in three weeks,?

People are really decompensating.

P.S. OK, I googled it, and there have actually been 20 mass shootings since Atlanta.

I love the Pioneer Woman brand. Of course, it’s a total rip-off of the Cath Kidston brand, which I also love but you can’t find Cath Kidston around here. And it’s closing anyway. So I’m glad that Pioneer Woman came in its stead.

It’s my birthday month, and if anybody is still looking, this is a hint.

At a store, I saw a whole rack of cute house dresses. Maybe there are people who use them as summer dresses but probably not in my age group.

The dresses had a small item in the same fabric attached to them. “Ah!” I thought. “Matching underwear! That’s cute.”

But then I came closer and realized that it’s not matching underwear at all. It’s matching face masks.

I was going to buy 3 or 4 of these dresses (I’m obsessed with cute house wear) but the masks put me right off the idea.

Look how useful the lockdowns have been to the Zoom class:

This “pandemic mitigation” is simply too useful as a means of wealth transfer to be abandoned easily. Also look at the previous moment when these figures were at an all-time high. That was when the austerity in response to the global recession hit. First home purchases drop as more people are pushed out of housing market, while investor purchases boom because a small minority makes out like bandits.

Yes, we are totally all in this together.

Twitter is unreadable today. Everybody is making clumsy April’s Fool jokes which invariably consist of people saying the opposite of what they believe. As a result, my feed sounds like a meeting of pouty COVID-obsessed SJW snowflakes. This makes me feel like I’m at work even when I specifically left campus to have a peaceful lunch break away from all that.

I hate this inane, childish tradition.

Here’s a detailed explanation of why “vaccine passports” are a horrifying idea.

It’s extremely difficult for most people to process the world through anything but analogies with past experience. New information doesn’t land. So when they hear “vaccine passports,” they imagine those sheets of paper moms get from pediatricians to show the school that their kids have been vaccinated. After that, it’s impossible to talk to them because they have found their “it’s just like” and won’t consider the possibility that it just isn’t.

Anything can be declared a public health menace. Anything. Participation in a protest, a social media post, a research article, a friendship with “dirty, ideologically diseased” people. You can’t possibly know who will have the power to do the declaring in the future. But once you allow yourself to be digitally tracked and have your behavior being used to grant you access to work, school, banking, socializing or going outside, there’s no going back to just being. Being unmodified and unmessed with. Being human.

I strongly urge everybody to read Zuboff’s book Surveillance Capitalism. In that book, Zuboff says that our only way out of this nightmare is to realize what is happening and say “no.”

I’m begging people to put aside their “but it’s just like childhood proof of vaccination” for 5 minutes and consider, what if it’s not? What if it’s possible for completely new things to come into existence because new technology appears?

Of course, in order for the rhetorical trick described in the previous post to work, the label needs to be something that people really don’t want to be. Adding “phobic” to your insults is particularly brilliant because it puts you in a position of a psychiatrist giving out diagnoses. That’s a role that projects great power.

Nothing is more pathetic than people who try to attach labels that nobody minds. “Socialist! Communist!” These meant something negative in 1952. Today they are a badge of honor sought by the privileged classes. “Yes, but how is communism better than nazism?” It’s not but making these lame, nitpicky points about why your insult SHOULD land if only the world were fair is loser behavior.