I’m not passive and my extremely aggressive attacks on anybody who annoys me are notorious. Still, I don’t hate the word “problematic.” Do you? Do you agree it’s a word for meek women?
Facebook is no treat to blogging, but this is. We need to protest and denounce these kinds of things wherever they appear. We need to save blogging because its power is significant.
We were invited to watch the Superbowl by a local family but we are not going. I’m too afraid of people going all scarily religious on me.
BBC celebrates “the year of the whores.”
Pornographic tiles from the XVIIIth century are too sexy for us to look at in the XXIst. What sexual revolution?
If you subscribe to the Economist, you are wasting your money. That is a magazine written by complete idiots who project their silly beliefs about the US onto other cultures without even trying to analyze how things work elsewhere. Here is a shining example: “The state is one of the chief obstacles to Russia’s modernisation. During the 2000s the number of bureaucrats almost doubled. A quarter of the workforce is employed in the public sector.” And from the same article: “Although Russia still boasts some of the most entrepreneurial and hardy businessmen, who are determined to succeed and continue to invest, many burn out and leave. Economic activity in the country is waning, mergers and acquisitions are drying up and capital and brains are flowing out of the country.” I could keep quoting because every word of that article is an exercise in complete idiocy.
Some discussions on blogs are even better than the posts they follow. See this: “The women assistant professors complain about the oppression they suffer from second wave feminists who made it possible for them to get jobs en masse. I of course like Kimberlé Crenshaw but I am not at all impressed with intersectionality used as weapon in the battle of competitive misery.” Brilliant.
“There will be no net gain over the long term in manufacturing jobs in the US on in China. In fact in thirty years, there will be nearly no humans working in manufacturing anywhere on the planet.” Exactly. A Bachelor’s degree will be the new high-school diploma. If you don’t have one, you will get lumpenized for sure.
An interesting discussion of what constitutes “making it.” Do you agree that it is not knowing how much things cost?
A survivor discusses what makes people join oppressive patriarchal religious groups.
People at the link are having a hissy fit over the following comment even though it is absolutely right: “There are millions of jobs that are available and others that are emerging that require skills that people don’t have now and if they had them they could fill those jobs.”
Banks prevent people from accessing their own money. Everybody is shocked, but in Canada, with its mafia-controlled banking, this has been the case forever.
Clarissa's Blog 
If I never again see “problematic” used as a stand-in for “it bothers me and I don’t know why/don’t want to put in the effort to formulate my opinions of this better”, it’ll be too soon.
LikeLike
I don’t quite get this, Stille. If something bothers me, I may know why immediately. Often, however, it takes days or weeks, rarely, even years, to understand why. The word ‘problematic’ is easier to type than “it bothers me and I don’t know why.” Either one serves as a marker that indicates that I will likely comment further sometime.
LikeLike
I think I spent too much of my misguided youth hanging out on feminist blogs/IRC channels where calling something “problematic” served as a marker that the person will not likely comment further on the subject.
LikeLike
“the year of the whores”
I’d say ‘to be followed by “the year of the investment bankers”‘ but I respect whores too much.
LikeLike
I have no idea what the subtle nuances of a word are, as I am not American. I do think people need to figure out what and why something bothers them, though, rather than using words that have an objective aura but no content. That is intellectually cheap. But even professors and all sorts of people can be intellectually cheap, especially when they have to function outside of their subject area. As for me, if I am ever described as problematic I will find that amusing. I am way, way, beyond the boundaries of where “problematic” was last sighted — so distant in fact that I may even seem to be my opposite. I may seem bubbly and light and full of thin air like your ideal champagne.
LikeLike
I don’t think I have ever described a person as problematic. Situations are what can be problematic.
LikeLike
Первый случай привлечения ребенка к ответственности за гей-пропаганду среди детей зафиксирован в России. В постановлении комиссии по делам несовершеннолетних одного из маленьких городов Брянской области (населенный пункт не раскрывается для защиты ребенка) от 16 января этого года, оказавшемся в распоряжении Znak.com, указывается, что в ноябре в ходе некой «профилактической работы» выявлена ученица 9 класса, «открыто признающая себя лицом нетрадиционной сексуальной ориентации».
Также, по утверждению комиссии, девочка «систематически распространяла информацию, направленную на формирование у несовершеннолетних (видимо, речь об одноклассниках — прим. ред.) искаженного представления о социальной равноценности традиционных и нетрадиционных сексуальных отношений».
http://www.znak.com/urfo/news/2014-02-02/1017612.html
LikeLike
Yes, I was just about to blog about this. The kid will now be officially listed as a juvenile delinquent simply for being gay and saying openly that being gay is in no way inferior to not being gay.
Vicious animals are now hounding this poor teenager. 😦 😦
LikeLike
Why is it beginning now in Russia? No more important problems?
LikeLike
These things erupt precisely where there are more important problems. Russia has extreme trouble constructing a national identity. And if you need to make people unite around something, hatred serves that purpose very well.
LikeLike
I don’t have any issue with the word “problematic” at all. Sometimes things are problematic! It’s a good descriptor. 🙂
LikeLike
It is problematic to see this word as 100% problematic. 🙂
LikeLike
Mismatches of skills to jobs: Other factors involved, such as location, candidates’ home ownership rates, candidates’ other responsibilities limiting mobility (eg, elderly parents, special needs children), prior history of employer with similar jobs in same location, Some skills and jobs are hard to access for those with high level skills in another field. Say, you are an unemployed Ph.D. and there’s a Walmart greeter job available – you are overqualified if you admit to having a Ph.D, or even a B.A.. Forget about finding full-time K-12 teaching jobs. Some types of jobs have been sent offshore and the skill base no longer can be found in any city or town, because no-one trains for those jobs. A German factory sets up in the USA – no machinists in that medium-sized town – factory starts its own apprenticeship program. Home ownership has been the American dream, but when the economy gets bad, home ownership prevents mobility to new job locations. There have been plenty of jobs in Montana and the Dakotas due to fracking, but the cost of living there has risen above the level of pay for many of the jobs.
LikeLike
What we are discussing are not the imaginary sufferings of people with PhDs who, in reality, don’t want jobs at Walmart even more than those jobs don’t want them, and not the dramas of those who take out enormous mortgages because of some ridiculous fantasy, and not the job search process of people with school teacher diplomas.
There is an enormous social transformation under way, which is similar to what happened during the industrial revolution. And, as happened 200 years ago in some places and 50 years ago in others, the ones who will suffer the most are the poorest and the least literate.
LikeLike