As a result of playing at the pool with a bunch of 10-year-old girls, Klara learned the word ‘popular.’

“Olivia is popular, mommy,” she says of one of the girls. “I popular, mommy? Is my dolly popular? Is mommy popular?”

I’m afraid if she plays with some 12-year-olds she’ll start asking me how many Instagram followers I have.

Comey and Hillary’s emails are on the news again because idiots abound. I’m afraid that this really important article on the assault on science by online outrage-mongers will get no attention. Unlike the stupid emails – and shame on those who still can’t let go of this subject – this is an issue that actually matters.

Last evening, two very young Hispanic men by the pool were loudly explaining to an American friend how they could get legalized in this country.

A stocky middle-aged military guy appeared by the pool. He was wearing one of those T-shirts that list the names of fallen comrades on the back. When he heard the young fellows loudly elaborating on a plan to “marry an American girl for a green card and then dump her ass once the three years run out,” his eyes got very big and round like saucers and he started to fume.

“Why gentleman making funny noises, mommy?” asked Klara who heard his grunts.

As bad luck may have it, the American friend had the brilliant idea to ask the illegal comrades about being drafted. And they started rubbishing the army. The military gentleman looked like he was literally ready to blow his lid. At this point, I was really missing the quiet Brits with their books on the royals and their bizarrely silent and shadowy teenagers.

I was afraid that if I continued answering in a noticeable accent Klara’s questions about “why gentleman so funny, mommy?”, the military guy would decide we were collectively mocking him, so we left the pool.

British guests at the resort are the best. They sit around the pool reading glossy new hardbacks about the royal family. And the genre is popular with people of all ages, it seems. They actually sit there and read stuff like Harry. Conversations with the Prince.

The whole thing is made especially weird by the presence at the pool of a gentleman who looks exactly like a slightly younger Prince Charles. I jump up every time I see him, it’s such a likeness. The gentleman is traveling with two pasty sulky sons in the high teens and a stunningly beautiful, young and clearly expensive wife. It’s like they are a traveling British mystery in the making.

The only thing in Deneen’s book I disagree with is his prediction that the soaring inequality of (neo) liberal societies will bring some sort of a revolt that will take the form of a populist dictatorship or something of the kind. As long as there are screens and UBI (that, once again, already exists under different names), there will be no revolt.

The rest of what he says I have been retelling pretty faithfully in my “Individuals” posts. It’s really fascinating that Deneen, who is obviously very conservative, says the exact same things almost verbatim as the Marxist Zygmunt Bauman.

Actually, the story about Mayor DiBlasio in one of the previous posts is a great example of the individualist ideology I’ve been discussing here. He proceeds in accordance of his deeply individualistic view of human beings. He sees humans as completely identical and ahistorical objects on a shelf. If anything goes wrong, they simply need to be moved to a different shelf.

The possibility that human beings are a part of something, that they don’t come from a conveyor belt, that they can’t be extracted from everything that went into their making is deeply alien to him.

Liberalism is about freedom. The greatest freedom it seeks is freedom from what an individual hasn’t chosen. Since nobody chooses their family, in order for this philosophy to be sustained it has to pretend that family’s impact either doesn’t exist or can be erased.

The question is, though, whether it’s an honest mistake or a desire – unarticulated and unacknowledged as it might be – to widen the gap between oneself and the losers in the neoliberal economy.

A good school, for me, is the one where kids who love reading, who love learning, who enjoy accumulating new knowledge are in the majority. As a result, nobody can say, “Ha ha, look at this freak, he likes to read books. Let’s beat him up!” because there isn’t anyone like this at this school. The teachers there don’t have to spend any time or energy on getting the “ha ha, let’s beat him up” kids to stay in place and listen to the material, so they can introduce more material and study it more in depth.

We are all former smart kids here on the blog. Honestly, isn’t this the definition of the good school that we’d all die to attend back in the past? A place where we could just be ourselves with our stacks of favorite books and our nerdy hobbies? Where it wouldn’t be a mark of losership to be us but would be the norm?

What else can a good school possibly be? A place with a huge new gym and tons of the shiniest gadgets? A bunch of teachers who have some really uncommon, life-changing pedagogy [that doesn’t exist, by the way]? A different way to teach school subjects that is unknown to everybody else? When you were a kid, would you choose the school I described above or the gadgets and PhD-holding pedagoguess?

When I say I had a great class this semester, what can I possibly be referring to if not the students who were there to make it great? Same me, same material, same pedagogy would produce a completely different result with different students. A school doesn’t make students good. Students make a school good.

Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a social media app that will reach kids as young as five years old. Suggestive that harmful persuasive design is now honing in on very young children is the declaration of Messenger Kids Art Director, Shiu Pei Luu, “We want to help foster communication [on Facebook] and make that the most exciting thing you want to be doing.”

I’d put these fuckers in jail. These are real evildoers.

I highly recommend the whole piece.

Few things are more ridiculous, immoral and dumb than the progressive approach to education. People like this DiBlasio fellow don’t care about students or education or anything but making themselves look good in the eyes of their idiot peer group.

This NYC school that I know nothing about and have no interest in learning is just a symptom. We are seeing this approach at work everywhere, and it’s extremely destructive.

I remember once driving such a progressive education freak to an attack of tachycardia by asking, “Is it possible that they didn’t pass the exam because they don’t know the material?” In his world, the only reason why anybody fails at school is because they are oppressed by evil forces and not given enough of a chance. The existence of students who simply are not prepared is utterly impossible for them to accept.

Unlike classical liberals or neoliberals, progressive liberals don’t openly support the truly stratospheric inequality of modern times. To the contrary, opposing the inequality is a large part of their platform.

Curiously, they achieve a whole lot in every area that matters to them but this one. Inequality grows. The reason why they are so unsuccessful at this task is that everything else they do undermines it. The easily uprooted, solitary nomads with fluid identities, who are their most protected class, are a guarantee of exploding inequality. And the worship of choice as the main tool of freedom is the guarantee that the environment will be depleted and the planet will be killed.