Clarissa's Blog

We had a house party today, and I knew there was something that I really enjoyed but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

But then I knew. Nobody had mentioned or thought of COVID all day.

I have the best friends.

Here’s the reason why people who gather with friends or organize children’s parties are persecuted.

Living a life that’s unaffected by COVID is now a status symbol. Regular people can’t go to the kid’s gym here in town. But if you can shell out $150 for an hour of play, you can bring your kids and a bunch of their friends, and they can play.

It’s the same with a million other activities. Art classes, music classes, sports, play spaces.

And, of course, it’s the same with schools. $1,200 a month gets you in-person teaching and summer camp and kids’ theater and gym and a music teacher and a tennis instructor.

COVID, schmovid. Those who can pay send their kids to a real school. In the midst of the worst lockdowns, you can buy access to any public space you want with any number of maskless people if you have enough money. Museums, performing arts. It’s all open. Just not for me and you.

When you organize a kid’s birthday party or hold a barbecue at your place, you rob these people of their status symbol. If anybody can have a party, theirs becomes just one of many.

I know for an absolute fact (because I heard people say it quite openly) that this is how this works. A kid who says “I had a birthday party” is signaling to other kids that she’s part of the wealthy minority.

Normal life has been turned into a luxury product. And now the rich are purchasing normalcy for themselves and their kids. The whole point of a luxury good is that only a few can have it. The enjoyment that can be derived from the feelings of “I’m a good parent / superior human being because I can give all this to my kid” is intense. Why would the people who can now afford to buy normalcy give this privilege away? Why would they share it with you? Why would they give up the gigantic competitive advantage that having a normal childhood brings?

The next step will be to demand QR codes that attest to your ideological purity. It will be done under the guise of anti-terrorist measures. Your entire digital footprint will be scanned and analyzed to diagnose you as ideologically healthy or diseased. Your access to public spaces will depend on the degree of the ideological compliance your digital footprint will reveal.

Absolutely will happen.

So Canada’s Trudeau said that he isn’t planning to use proof of vaccination as a basis for admission to restaurants or other public events.

Immediately, the self-righteous, the outraged, and the terrified (which are the majority) started wailing and begging for vaccination passports.

I’m telling you, folks, elites schmelites. It’s impossible to introduce a serious change and sustain it without an enthusiastic consent from the majority.

We had an anonymous survey on my campus. A bunch of people responded that they are loving the current situation because their schedules were too busy before COVID, and now it feels like a vacation. These are the honest folks who put into words the feelings of most lockdowners.

I thought I was the only person who made a wish when a clock hit 11:11. But now it turns out that many people are doing it.

It’s kind of upsetting to have to share your neurosis. I thought it was only mine.

This is a 42-year-old woman:

One of many cases.

If this were the much-maligned HCQ, we would see wall-to-wall coverage of these adverse reactions, and the wailing and moaning would be incessant.

Here’s an absolutely brilliant article by Matt Taibbi on the Sovietization of the American press. I don’t read or watch legacy media, so I wasn’t aware of any but one of the examples he gives. What he describes is shocking even to me. It’s even more disturbing that millions of people take this kind of thing absolutely seriously. They don’t feel humiliated by it, and that’s tragic.

The absolute winner in the “Spanish is a defective version of English” competition at NEMLA is the following statement attributed to one speaker today:

“Indian rectum is mocha.”

The runner-up goes to “Allah Allah oh Allah everywhere in Arizona.”

Thank God in heaven, I gave my talk in English, so nobody can accuse me of anything. I did speak in Spanish during the Q&A, though, so I’m somewhat concerned.

To say that I’m angry is a serious understatement. I’m absolutely livid. To be told, at a modern languages conference, that our languages aren’t real languages if they are not English is just the limit. I hate these inclusively diverse and structurally fragile bastards with every fiber of my being.

I will try to organize a letter of protest about this.

So the conference of the Modern Languages Association, right? Emphasis on languages. As in many different languages. In my session, obviously, everybody is a Spanish-speaker.

Because Spanish is a language. Or so we thought.

At the beginning of my session, a representative of the association appears in my Zoom room and tells me that I have to turn on automatic speech recognition that will provide captions. For purposes of inclusion.

Sounds great, right?

That is, until you discover that this automatic speech recognition only understands one language. Which is THE language. English.

So what happens to those of us who speak other languages at the conference on modern languages? The speech recognition assumes we are speaking a defective version of English and transcribes all we say into English.

Mind you, it doesn’t translate. It transcribes.

I’m not allowed to turn off this garbage. As a result, it assigns to me things I never said and that the automatic speech recognition assumes I said. To my horror, I discovered that I spent half the session saying some sort of garbage about Taiwan. Which I never mentioned.

Another speaker was recorded as saying that “Oprah is a child controller.” She didn’t speak about Oprah or children.

Most shockingly, “Moshe should run Africa and go supreme” was a statement assigned to another speaker. I don’t think she knows because most people can’t follow subtitles as they speak.

The captions move so fast that it’s impossible to catch everything that goes into them.

At any other time, this would be funny. But the way things are, it’s downright dangerous to have a transcript associated with your name where statements are assigned to you without any input or control on your part.

This is how things always are with “inclusion.” Intentions are great but the result is both insulting and horrible.