In my Hispanic Civ class, we discussed the horrors visited by the Spanish conquistadors on the indigenous populations. We read texts, talked, did review. During the next class meeting I asked the students to talk about the consequences of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. That was when I discovered that all my students had retained from the discussion was that “the conquerors murdered unborn babies.”

“What unborn babies?” I asked.

“Well, didn’t they kill pregnant women?” was the response.

So I just discovered that our Vice-Chancellor is going to retire next summer. This makes me kind of sad because he is a very good leader for our university and I really like him. He is always very attentive and respectful to junior faculty members, never pulls rank on us or makes us feel ike we are insignificant if we don’t have tenure. He learned my name before I ever learned his, which is impressive given that I was one of 55 new hires the year I came here.

As we say in my culture, a fish starts to rot from its head. A bad leader can have a very negative impact on the entire institution. I hope that the person who substitutes our Vice-Chancellor is at least half as good as he is.

Thank you everybody who has been participating in the most recent semi-open thread.

What I have to say about the story is that “Katie” is a passive-agressive manipulator. This kind of manipulation has nothing to do specifically with sex. It can be used in a variety of contexts to generate feelings of guilt in one’s interlocutor.

To give an example: I cooked borscht yesterday. Today, I could have told my husband, “I didn’t really feel like cooking but I didn’t want to say it and disappoint you. So I tried to send non-verbal clues to you which you ignored. I’m not saying that you are a male chauvinist pig who exploits my labor but. . .” One could have a lot of fun this way, guilt-tripping everybody in sight for not deciphering clues effectively.

My suggestion to anybody who has the misfortune of meeting a passive-aggressive manipulator is to walk away as fast as you can.

In terms of consent to sex, I have to say that I am not happy about the suggestion that a non-impaired non-disabled adult woman should expect a man to be more aware of and protective towards her emotional state than she is herself. This is yet again the annoying trend of infantilizing women we see in today’s pseudo-feminism.

I used to know a woman who had an abortion and blamed her husband for it. “He told me that he would respect any decision I made because it was my body!” she would complain. “I kept hoping he would guess I didn’t want to abort and stop me but he didn’t. Now I just can’t forgive him for that.”

If we want to have the right to our own bodies, we need to assume all the attendant responsibilities and not expect people to decide for us and read our minds.

I received your Twitter messages but I can’t answer them right now because I have been displaced from my office and don’t have access to a computer while I’m on campus.

I can blog from my phone but it isn’t letting me respond on Twitter for some reason.

Thank you for your tweets. I will respond to them as soon as I can.

I also want to use this opportunity to thank those of you who retweet my blog posts. You rock!

The following was written by one of my favorite bloggers Nominatissima:

I have a confession: I have a much deeper-seated fear of Christians/Gentiles who suck up to Jews, wax poetic about Israel being some type of great holy land, and talk about their “sacred duty” to protect Jews, and I personally find them to be a lot more frightening and disturbing than any openly hateful antisemite I ever met. . . I have a lifetime, hell, an entire cultural history of dealing with antisemites, I’m practically an expert at bringing them down at this point, and they’re about as annoying as ticks in the summer. But I have no idea how to disengage these weirdos and have them go back to that Dead Sea scroll they crawled out of.

Can you believe that this is a 21-year-old student writing? This is so good I want to weep.

If you ever feel the need to dump on the younger generation, do read Nominatissima’s blog. It will restore your faith in humanity. And if you believe that younger people are immature, I have to tell you that I hope I achieve this blogger’s level of maturity by the age of 41. I still have time, so I’m not too hopeless. 🙂

My niece Klubnikis who is not yet two years old always invents funny new names for everything. For example, she says “armies” instead of “arms.” So now we all know that when Klubnikis says “armies”, this means she needs to be taken in one’s arms and hugged. I got so used to this that now whenever I hear the word “armies”, I feel the need to hug my niece.

Today in class, I started saying, “And then Napoleon’s armies. . .” Then I cut myself short and looked around for a child to hug. Sadly, there was none.

I miss Klubnikis, people. I try to control the cute baby posts but they keep spilling out of me. Sorry!

Mikhail Gorbachev will be giving a talk in Montreal on October 21. I can’t believe I can’t be there! The cheapest ticket is, of course, $350 but I would have totally found the money. It would be great to hear what Gorbachev has to say about Russia’s future now that Putin has voted himself back into the presidency of the Russian Federation.

Gorbachev turned 80 this year, which is 24 years longer than an average life expectancy for a male in his country. I hope he lives for at least 80 more years but you just never know.

So if you are in Montreal, consider going and then telling me all about it.

We all know this hackneyed response that a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, a xenophobe, etc. offer the moment you accuse them of racism, bigotry, and homophobia.

Sparky at Womanist Musings published a brilliant post about people who evoke “absent friends” to excuse their own bigotry. Here is a comment I left to that post:

I can’t tell you how many times I tried to stop people from referring to Ukrainians with a certain offensive term only to have the offender tell me, “Oh, I know someone who is Ukrainian and she is perfectly fine with me calling her that.”

The most egregious instance of this was when the Ukrainian who was “perfectly fine” with being referred to with this term turned out to be the offender’s cleaning woman. I wonder how empowered the cleaning woman was to consent freely to being called that way.

What I really don’t understand is why it is so difficult for some people to respect the wishes of a member of a certain ethnic group not to use certain terminology when referring to said ethnic group.

“But I don’t get it!” such people often whine. “What’s wrong with this particular word?”

What’s wrong with it, you insensitive and rude jerk, is that it offends me. Oh, you don’t like being called a jerk? That’s weird. What’s so wrong about this particular word?