Opinions, art, debate
Somebody alighted on my blog via the following search:
link between deodorants and autism
My response to this weird creature is: just get a grip, buddy. As somebody from a family with generations of hereditary autism and absolutely no deodorants till very recently, I can tell you there is no link.
What next, autism being “caused” by vaccines?
There is all kinds of stupid in the world.
People who suck in bed. And not in a good way.
These are the folks who don’t want their partners to have the freedom of running away as fast as their lousy bed skills warrant. This is why they whine that nobody will buy their cow when the milk is free. To develop the ugly cow metaphor, the problem with the milk isn’t really that it’s free. The problem is that it’s of really low quality. The lousy lovers, however, want to get as many guarantees as possible that people will come back for their rancid milk and pay a good price for it before dispensing their worthless wares.
Of course, nobody wants to recognize that their hook-ups evaporate from their beds the first chance they get because sex with them is bad. It’s easier to blame the permissive society for that.
This is not a gender issue, in case anybody is confused about it. There is an equal number of men and women who complain about the fact that, nowadays, you can’t tie down a partner and obligate them to tolerate you in perpetuity just because you offered them some lousy sex at some point in time.
P.S. Note that the post title says “hates” and not “doesn’t feel like participating.” Please take a moment to consider the difference before leaving angry comments about there being nothing wrong with being in an exclusive committed relationship.
I don’t know if people noticed the uncharacteristic dearth of posts on this blog today and yesterday. In case you are wondering whom or what to blame for it, the answer is my office. Or, rather, lack thereof.
Normally, I have at least an hour and a half before classes start, 2,5 hours between lectures and 45 minutes after lectures end (and before my bus arrives). That comes to 11 hours per week (Fridays are short days for me) of office time. This is the time I use to do all of my teaching and service stuff. Then, I never have to do any grading, class preparation, exam creation, paperwork, etc. at home.
Without an office, however, I spend all of that time wandering around campus and being completely useless. And the 11 hours of work I could have done in the office have to be pushed back to the weekends. Which, of course, is very annoying because who wants to spend all Sunday grading and preparing classes for the week?
The good news is that, in all probability, I will be able to share photos of my refurbished office with you by the end of next week.
Yet again, I have to engage in the supremely boring discussion that crops up with a daunting regularity on this blog. “Oh, these are just your subjective opinions,” people exclaim triumphantly.
Really? You don’t say. What a huge revelation. Because the header of this blog hasn’t said from day one of its existence, “An academic’s opinions. . .” Oh, wait, though. Yes, it has.
People come here to read my opinions on a variety of subjects and to express their opinions. They don’t come here to read my academic research. So questions of the “what kind of an academic you are if you are just expressing your subjective opinions?” variety make absolutely no sense. I’m the kind of academic who decided to start a blog to express her subjective opinions and made it crystal clear from the start that this was her only intention. Seriously, either just deal with this already or move on.
If anybody has any suggestions on how I can make it even clearer than I already have that this blog contains my opinions, feel free to share. Because I’ve written a variation on this very post so many times that I’m losing count.
“A special collection of problems that were given to select applicants during oral entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. These problems were designed to prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade.” I am useless at math so I have no idea what these problems mean. Thank you, the nice person who tweeted the link to me, anyways.
An absolutely essential post on stimulant medication use among the US children. I think everybody needs to read it. Hopefully, twice.
A post on performing masculinity by the very talented Noah Brand. And here is part two.
A man who loves a transwoman isn’t gay. An important wakeup call for the transphobic folks.
A powerful post on the horrible and barbaric practice of bride kidnapping.
A first-hand account of the Occupy Toronto protests.
Prudishness masquerading as feminism: “This whole scene, from when we the viewer enter through the door until fade lasts 30 seconds with 16 instances of objectification. A woman is being objectified literally every two seconds.” And yes, this seems to have been written completely in earnest.
Another brilliant post on Occupy protests from Maha. I agree with everything except the last paragraph.
Even more disturbing news from the “let’s medicate people into submission since the moment they are born” front:
Children as young as 4 years old may now be treated with medications such as Novartis AG (NOVN)’s Ritalin for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, under new guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
So the American Academy of Pediatrics has been bought off by pharmaceutical companies in the most egregious and shameless manner imaginable. I get that. Money is tight, so why not sell the last sad remnants of your conscience to the highest bidder?
But what I don’t get is what kind of a total monster would shove these drugs into their own 4-year-old child? How do such people live with themselves? Please read the list of side effects that such drugs produce and tell me what is going on in the so-called brain of the so-called people who put their own children on this poison. If you hate children so much, then why have them at all?
What next? Medicating newborns to stop all that annoying crying?
So first the protesters congregated on Wall Street, which made absolutely no sense to me since Wall Street employees have no obligation of any kind to protesters. They are private citizens who have not been elected by the protesters or by anybody else to any public office.
Now, in an even more bizarre turn of events, the protesters are marching on Times Square. Whenever I visited Times Square, I saw a multitude of things there. Except one. A building housing elected public officials who are in charge of making political decisions. I understand that Times Square is pretty, albeit in a really vulgar sort of way. But that seems to be the only reason why anybody would choose it as a spot for a political protest. If it is still a political protest, which I’m beginning to doubt very seriously.
What’s next? Marching on Hollywood and the Disney Land?
I’m reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel The Marriage Plot. I’m not a fan of this writer’s work but this novel is surprisingly good. It is the kind of light, highly entertaining reading that gives you endless pleasure when your brain is on the fritz from reading serious literature. I have a lot to say about the novel and will write a more detailed review after I finish it.
For now, however, I wanted to share that books like this one are to blame for me having such a lousy time in grad school. The characters in the novel are students at Brown who live and breathe literature, philosophy, and literary criticism. I was completely sure that once I arrived at my fancy grad school I would encounter these people I used to read about who walk around quoting Judith Butler and Derrida, arguing about whose reading of Cervantes makes the most sense, and sharing the amazing fogotten writers of the XIXth century they just found at the library.
The Marriage Plot is set in the early 1980ies, which was the high moment of literary criticism and feminist theory in North America. The characters are discovering deconstruction, semiotics, Lacan, Kristeva, Gilbert and Gubar, Derrida. The protagonist of the novel has her entire life transformed by the reading of Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse at the age of 20.
Of course, a naive youngish creature like myself read these descriptions of Ivy grad school life for years and became convinced that they were more than a figment of the writers’ imagination. So I set out on a very quixotic (in the literal sense of the word) quest to find this magical world of books in real life. Discovering how things really are was a huge letdown.
Writers have a lot to answer for.
And this is why I never will join Facebook and will do everything I can to prevent people at work from pushing me into it:
Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues have set things up so that anyone on Facebook can create a “group,” and can sign you up to the group without asking your permission. You then get the discussions at the group by email, and if you want to opt out, you have to go to the group page and ask to be removed or adjust the settings so that you don’t get email from it.
Juan Cole is right, this is ridiculous. Anybody can just sign you into any group of their choice without asking your permission, and then you’ll have to make efforts to unsubscribe and offer explanations as to why you don’t want to be included.
I understand that Facebook is a useful resource that many people like and use all the time. However, I find it appalling that so many efforts are being made, both inside and outside of Facebook, to make sure that people join.
This is precisely the kind of attitude to rude offensive jerks that I will never understand:
The other day, I had to gather my social skills (such as they are), brush my hair, and put on my most stylish socks to attend a socioprofessional event that required me to be super-nice to everyone I met there. As I was claiming my name tag from a table near the entrance, I asked the table-attendant what the “1” on my name tag signified; the other name tags that I could see did not have any numbers. The answer to that particular question is not important to my story. But this is relevant: when I asked my question, a 70-something man standing nearby said “It means this”, and he made an obscene gesture.
I thought to myself, “This is a test.” And I was determined to pass that test. I decided to practice being super-nice to him. I figured: if I can be nice to him, then I can be nice to almost anyone.
Does anybody want to venture a guess what was the result of this experiment in trying to be nice and understanding to an idiot?
Right you are, it was not very inspiring, to put it mildly:
I asked him another question about himself and his interests (I will not give myself points for these because they were rather routine), and then he said, “All you professors only care about yourselves and other professors.”
To me, that’s even ruder than the obscene gesture, but I was not willing to give up. I was determined to continue to withstand the onslaught of aggressively jerkish behavior. So I said “That’s not true. Many of us care about our students.”
His reply: “So what? Same thing. You only care about students because you want them to be professors one day so that is just like only caring about professors.”
After which, the super-nice professor congratulated herself silently with a victory and left. Yes, that was a resounding win for the good guys. The jerk will surely remember that lesson for a long time to come and will spread his discovery to all of the losers in his circle: you can insult female scientists as much as you want and they will just smile and be kind and patient to you in response.
What a huge achievement for feminism! We have now demonstrated that no matter which heights a woman reaches professionally and intellectually, any random idiot can insult her and she will meekly stick around to provide further opportunities for the jerk to offend her. Yippee!
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