That’s exactly what I tell students about the need to learn to pronounce my last name. “Nobody passes the course without pronouncing it correctly. On the first try,” I say.
I do it to gauge their level of language competence. If they laugh at the joke, I know their Spanish is good. Obviously, I don’t really care how they pronounce it as long as nobody tries addressing me by my first name. If they do, I stare at them morosely until they desist from this strange endeavor. Usually, they settle on “profe”, and that’s perfectly fine.
Yet another scam in higher education is “dual-credit courses.” High school students take classes in their high schools and for some incomprehensible reasons these classes are supposed to count towards both high school and college completion. Which is nuts on every possible level.
I’ve been sent a bunch of high-school “syllabi” that I’m supposed to evaluate and say to which of my courses they correspond. It’s a total joke because these are not real college-level syllabi, nor are they supposed to be. All they have is “learning objectives” and diversity statements. There’s nothing about actual material covered. To me, Spanish 101 covers conjugation in the present, object pronouns, verbs like gustar, comparisons and preterite of regular verbs. Everything else is not Spanish 101. I don’t care what “culturally relevant and inclusive projects” they do in high school. If you can’t conjugate in the present and use object pronouns, you haven’t completed Spanish 101 and are not ready to go into 102.
All of this crap exists to pander to parents. They want a shortcut which does not exist. But we are supposed to pretend that it does, and it’s annoying.
The cat is now used to me playing with her in the evenings. If I’m slow on the uptake, she pretends to play by chasing an imaginary toy, flipping on her back and pretending to hold the toy with her paws. Then she stares at me meaningfully as if to say, “do you get it now? Playtime, lady. Chop chop and look spry.”
Outside of playtime, she wants to lie on me and stare into my eyes. If I’m holding a book, she tries to swap it away with her paw. I don’t know why everybody says that cats are aloof and want alone time. This cat doesn’t want any alone time. She wants to be with people all the time.
I almost never go on Facebook but today I did because I wanted to see if people were saying anything about the new construction project here in town. While a was doing that, the cat jumped on me (I swear, this cat is friendlier and needier than most dogs) and I pressed something that sent out “friend requests” to a whole bunch of complete strangers. Now they are all accepting these friend requests. And I still don’t know anything about the construction project.
I hate Facebook and everything about it. But maybe I should post something so that all those people I accidentally harassed at least get something out of it.
When did transgenderism become a working-class fad?
It’s very shocking to see how eagerly the working people embraced it even though they have zero financial means to buy even a sliver of freedom from its worst consequences.
In the US academia is becoming unviable outside the R1 environment. And soon it will be unviable outside the ultra-elite tier of R1s. The UK is in a similar situation. The few European institutions in the global/Anglo R1 game are holding up for now, but it’s scary. pic.twitter.com/c3pWX3QvE0
As I said the other day, it’s so sweet and quaint when people denounce general education requirements in college as if anybody outside of a shrinking elite will ever get a chance of experiencing them. Or anything like what we understand as college.
A small group of people will go to university as it was historically conceived. They’ll live the life of the mind and their inner world will have enough depth to sustain it.
The rest of college education will consist of screen-dependent, emotionally dysregulated people with a bouquet of identity labels and diagnoses being trained by their class equals to spend even more time staring at screens.
Here’s more evidence of the wall being built between the small elite and the proles:
File this under: LONG OVERDUE
The @DeptWar is formally ending ALL Professional Military Education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard University.
Why does progressivism hate libertarianism so much? They have a lot in common. Open borders, freedom of migration, unconstrained freedom for capital, no policing, no nation-state, no army, no war on drugs. So many affinities, yet progressives detest libertarians.
The reason, I believe, is that libertarians support all these things on principle. They don’t see themselves as morally superior. And for progressives, moral superiority is the entirety of the game. Libertarians spoil the whole deal for progressives. If you can be for all these things and not constantly point out to everybody how exceptionally virtuous you are, then why do progressives do it so much? Like a woman with Botox, fillers and hair extensions who despises a naturally pretty woman, progressives hate libertarians for giving the game away.
Feliza Bursztyn was a Colombian sculptress, and this book is her novelized biography. Poor Juan Gabriel Vásquez. He wants to get published, and who doesn’t? For a South American writer, it means managing to please the Spanish editors who are almost invariably female and politically far to the left of AOC. One ends up doing the most bizarre things to please them.
Vásquez did his darndest to give Feliza Bursztyn a positive portrayal. The woman was a monster but try saying that and see how fast your chances to get published evaporate. Vásquez made enormous efforts to humanize this horrible person but even his uncommon literary gift was unable to mask how despicable Feliza was.
Bursztyn dumped her 3 tiny daughters, simply walked out on them, because she wanted to sit in cafés prattling about the need for a Communist revolution and whore around with random dudes. She got the very first one she picked up to call her by the name of her own infant daughter whom she’d abandoned. This is all so perverted that one wants to pretend one never heard about it.
Of course, if Bursztyn hadn’t abandoned her children, humanity might have been deprived of her art, so there’s that. Here’s her art, just in case you are wondering what all the sacrifices were for:
Vásquez’s book brings to life an entire generation of Latin American intellectuals who admired the Cuban revolution and despised America. Most of them were probably less horrid than Bursztyn because it’s hard to be quite as nasty but Vásquez depicts them as an indifferentiated mass of prattly, vapid morons with boutique beliefs. I haven’t looked into it but I’m certain Vásquez himself is very lefty. But he’s also talented and the truth comes through in his writing in spite of what he might believe.
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