A tenured professor was fired for saying the words “fuck” and “pussy” in the classroom.

Want to guess what she was accused of? Sexual harassment.

Now that she’s gone, the tender little snowflakes can be free from the horrible trauma of this very intolerable vocabulary.

Once again, where is the idiot commenter who was convinced that tenure means one can’t get fired? Hello, idiot, are you still being idiotic or have you come to your senses?

Greeks have finally clocked on to what’s happening and have taken to the streets to beg idiot Tsipras to pay the creditors and do all he can not to abandon the Euro zone.

I feel bad for the Greeks. As if the situation didn’t suck enough, they had to go and saddle themselves with the Tsipras fellow.

P.S. Of course, many of these protesters are only there because their employers made them. But still, it’s good to see more than one intelligent Greek at a time.

In case you need any more proof that people are oblivious and stupid.

A blogger writes about the ideological conditioning that her findamentalist parents subjected her to and that she now resents:

Ten years ago I cheered as politicians denounced gay marriage. Ten years ago I spoke to reporters, explaining my support for “traditional marriage.” And here I am, ten years later, crying tears of joy that marriage equality is now the law of the land in all fifty states.

Without any transition from this thought, though, she continues to tell the readers the following about her 6 – year-old daughter:

My daughter Sally has been a supporter of marriage equality since she first became aware of it several years ago.

Just like her parents, the blogger is so utterly clueless that she believes a toddler is capable of having political opinions. In reality, of course, any kid’s political agenda consists entirely of pleasing Mommy and Daddy. The poor child just says whatever she needs to please Mommy, and the insistence with which she feels she need to perform this task is quite sad. And the blogger (who has published maybe over a hundred posts denouncing her parents for stuffing their politics down her throat since her childhood) is not noticing that she is parroting her parents in a really scary way.

The chances that the blogger’s daughter will grow up and start a blog about how her oppressive parents dragged her to gay – support rallies but now she has repented and knows better are extremely high. Because everybody needs to construct their own identity outside of the shadow of lecturing parents.

P.S. By the way, when I was a child, nobody lectured me on gay marriage (because it wasn’t an issue under discussion in the USSR at all), and you know what? I grew up and figured it out all on my own. And I’m sure that my support of gay rights is entirely my own because I was accidentally left in peace to make up my own mind.

And the moaning about the horrible spread of vice is getting to a hysterical pitch. Here is David Brooks ‘ s latest bout of bellyaching:

We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and

commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms.

People are very uneducated. If they read any books at all, they’d know that this kind of whining has existed for as long as human beings have been able to pen a sentence. Older folks begin to fret about vice and barbaric sexual environments whenever their own capacity to “sin” begins to falter.

Becoming very preoccupied with the supposedly fraying moral fiber of society is not only boring as hell but also a sign of irreversible old age.

So did you know that before the decades of 1870 and 1880 Americans ate salads together with their meals (like I do)? The weird custom of bringing a salad out before the rest of the meal and finishing it before serving everything else was an affectation introduced by the nouveau riches who wanted to stand out from the plebeians.

Regular Americans served their salads in the form of a chopped head of lettuce with sugar and vinegar. The custom of substituting sugar with olive oil was introduced by those who were rich enough to travel to Europe and observe that custom there.

So I’m watching another TV series on Netflix, The L Word. The show is a lot of fun but there a two things that bother me:

1. The show follows the model of Queer as Folk way too much. There are some lines or plot twists that are borrowed verbatim from that (enormously popular and amazing) show. There is even a character who dies from immunodeficiency, which is not something that’s central to the lesbian experience. This bothers me because, yet again, lesbians are positioned as being secondary to gay men. I have no doubt that there are lesbian experience and lesbian subculture that are different from those of gay men, yet we don’t see them in the show a whole lot.

2. The actresses are all extremely skeletal, except for the straight women. The lesbians I know all value and love the female form. A straight woman is much more likely to be skeletal these days than a lesbian. 

Otherwise, the show is very good, honest, not saccharine at all. And it gives a lot of screen time to Katherine Moennig who is incredibly gifted for an American actress.

I know I’m very late with these TV show reviews, but what can I do if I never have a chance to watch television shows with continued plot lines during the regular working schedule? 

Author: Rafael Chirbes

Title: Los viejos amigos

Language: Spanish

Year: 2004

My rating: 7 out of 10 (because I read his other novels and they are even stronger)

When, oh when, oh when will this brilliant writer finally start getting translated into English*? There is nobody who writes better than he in Spain today, a country where talented writers abound.

“People were so afraid that we’d achieve our Communist revolution and end up taking away their property,” chuckles one of the protagonists. “And then it turned out that they are not even that good at making money within their beloved capitalist system. We, the former revolutionaries, are so much better at amassing fortunes.”

The encounter among a group of old friends who used to dream of the revolution in the Spain of Franco get together thirty years later for an exquisite dinner and swap memories of what it meant to be young and idealistic. Their trajectory is that of the writer himself. Chirbes is both a Marxist and a connoisseur of expensive wines and food. The writer can’t fail observe the irony of his great financial success within the same capitalist system that leaves so many of its staunchest supporters to live in poverty.

* Actually it seems like his most recent novel will appear in English in 2016. It’s a novel of the crisis, and it is absolutely fucking devastating. Until the very last word, it just doesn’t relent. I warn you, though, this is art, not some Girl on the Train kind of trash. This is a novel that requires you to be intellectually awake and present for every single word. It’s complex, it’s infused with history and ideology, but I’m here to guide you through the reading. This is an encounter with art in its purest form, so I highly recommend.

So our university’s chancellor has finally been kicked out. This is the same person who was shocked to discover that “in China they, like, totally speak their own language and many of them don’t even speak English!”

For 3 years, we have been writing endless essay-type evaluations of this chancellor. My evaluations of her actually had bibliographies attached. And it wasn’t all in vain! The Board of Trustees heard us and kicked her out.

We can change things if we put our minds to the task. This is a victory for the good people.

The governor of Illinois, a.k.a. Big Government Rauner, decided to throw a childish tantrum and let the state start a new fiscal year on July 1 without any budget at all.

If anybody deserves to get flak for his incapacity for bipartisan cooperation it’s Rauner. He just won’t negotiate with the state’s House of Representatives at all. Rauner is acting in an extremely tyrannical way, he is disregarding the democratic process, and is refusing to take any action at all to resolve the issue. 

The state’s Supreme Court rejected Rauner’s pension reform. The House demonstrated why his budget is untenable and impractical. So Rauner got all pouty and decided to throw a tantrum and just not disburse any money to any state institutions in Illinois. 

I swear, I’m yet to see a lazier, more disorganized, more overemotional politician with a shorter attention span. Rauner seems to have thought that a state could be run like a business: you give and order and everybody jumps to attention. But that’s simply not how democracy works. There are elected representatives, the courts, the voters, and you can’t just lord it over everybody all the time. Just a few months after getting elected, Rauner has run the state into a ditch and is doing nothing but throwing fits over the whole sorry mess. 

If there are people around here who voted for Rauner (which I don’t believe because they’d have to be functionally illiterate), can you tell me what you were thinking when you saddled us with this corrupt, unstable freak?