I read the following argument that we are experiencing the second Great Depression but it didn’t convince me:

But that doesn’t mean we’re not in another Great Depression, either. As you know, I think we are, based on the misery visited on the vast majority of the population since the recession began in 2007. What I’m thinking about are the following: the high level and long duration of unemployment (and the length of time over which both have persisted), the extraordinary number of home foreclosures, the difficulty in obtaining adequate medical care, the unprecedented rise in student debt, the growing ranks of poor people (and near-poor people), and so on. So, in my view, while there’s been a recovery for a tiny minority of the population (based on the return to record profits for U.S. corporations, the resurgence of the stock market, and the high salaries and growing wealth of those at the top), the best characterization for the situation in which the working classes find themselves is the Second Great Depression.

I’m always bothered by the tendency that many people have to stretch analogies way too far. This always leads to the complete erosion of significant concepts. As a result, we end up in a situation where “Nazi” is synonymous with “bad person” and “Holocaust” is a description of a dieting choice.

What do you think? Do you see the current economic crisis as the Second Great Depression?

P.S. I just read the Wikipedia article on the Great Depression and found the following insulting statement in it:

The fall of communism in the Soviet Union led to a severe economic crisis and catastrophic fall in the standards of living in the 1990s in the former Eastern Bloc, most notably, in post-Soviet states, that was almost twice as intense as the Great Depression had been in the countries of Western Europe and the U.S. in the 1930s.

The idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a fall in the standards of living is just too bizarre. Every person who has even remotely been around during the 1990ies has to know that living standards soared after the Soviet empire broke down. And the comparison between the post-Soviet transition to capitalism and the Great Depression? The author of this article has no shame. This will now be one more example that I will use to teach my students about why using Wikipedia makes no sense.

Does anybody have an explanation for why WordPress is trying to force people to go to its Homepage so desperately?

The following policy has been protested by crowds of bloggers, yet WordPress insists on inconveniencing many of its faithful users for some mysterious reason.

It happens only too often that a company creates an amazing product and then can’t stop futzing with it. I’ve been thinking about this today as I tried to dig out two lone cans of the original Hunts tomato paste from the huge selection of inferior new-fangled variations on the perfect original.

Some things don’t need to be improved because they are perfect as they are.

First of all, what a disgusting ad. Please don’t watch it if you are likely to be triggered for domestic violence. If you are sure you can deal with it (and once again, it’s very disturbing if I had to put in a trigger warning), here it is:

There are two things that I can’t understand about this ad. One, how is it possible for anybody to argue that this is not a domestic abuse ad but a happy sexuality ad? Have such people even seen sexually fulfilled women? A newsflash: we do not look miserable, downtrodden and beaten like the woman in the ad. We look glowing, happy and our eyes sparkle.

And another question that might seem frivolous in this context but I still need to ask it because I’m confused. How are the people in this ad making a connection between a vegan diet and a greater capacity to perform in men? I have nothing against veganism, but this just makes no sense. Everybody has their own experiences, of course, but the formula I have observed for as long as I have been sexually active is “lots of beef = tons of sex, less beef = less sex, no beef = very little sex.”

I understand that in very warm climates vegan diets make a lot of sense, but the ad is obviously not set in the tropics. In that kind of a climate, one’s sexual performance will not improve, to put it mildly, as a result of this kind of eating regimen.

N and I decided to have lunch at a local restaurant today. It turned out that half of the waiters at that place are my students. This made it impossible for me to have an enjoyable meal because I felt that I needed to set a good example with everything I did.

I was going to have a hamburger but, instead, chose a salad.

I did not even consider having a glass of wine.

I kept my elbows off the table.

And I paid the check even though it was N.’s turn because that was an important feminist lesson.

I also had to answer the question that haunts me in nightmares: “So how do you say. . . in Spanish?”

As much as I love eating out, a quiet meal at home where I can eat all I want, drop food all over myself and avoid translating everything into Spanish seems quite attractive.

When I first heard that my university administrators tried to force students and professors to sacrifice a weekend for some collective cemetery cleaning, I experienced a strong feeling of deja vu. I knew that I’d seen this before somewhere.

And then I realized: this was one of the favorite “educational” activities of Soviet bureaucrats. Soviet academics and students were routinely forced to pick cucumbers, stomp on rotten cabbage (as a way of getting it to pickle), cleaning the streets, etc. They were forced to do it on weekends and even instead of classes.

Now, in the USSR this was done in order to humiliate intellectuals (who were considered the greatest enemy of the proletarian state) and lower the prestige of education.

Today, American college administrators are adopting one Soviet practice after another. I have started sounding like a broken record because whenever I get an email outlining a new university policy, I always exclaim, “This feels just like home!” This isn’t a happy exclamation, you understand, since home was a pretty nasty place.

What do you think the final goal of this Sovietization of American academia is?

Among all of the mystifying things that baffle me, one has the pride of place. If there is a person who can answer this question for me, I will be eternally grateful.

After the “keep an aspirin between your knees” joke, after rape-by-government legislation, after a collective refusal by the Republicans to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, after all-male hearings on birth control, after sincere discussions of “what women are for“, I really have to ask:

What motivates women who still vote Republican? 

What is it that they hold so much more important than not being treated like a herd of cattle? What is it that Republican politicians offer them that trumps being an object of such dehumanizing and degrading attitudes?

One can have a gazillion of ideological disagreements with the Liberals (like I do), but there has to be a pyramid of priorities, right? Being treated like you are subhuman on the basis of your physiology has got to matter more than pretty much anything else.

These are not rhetorical questions. I’m honestly baffled by this. Women form more than 50% of the population of this country. This means that in order to make this climate of daily degradation of women by politicians (and during a Presidential elections campaign, at that!) possible, there needs to be a significant consensus among women that this is all completely acceptable. This, in turn, must mean that women who vote Republican are getting something quite major out of the bargain where they accept to be treated this way in return for their political support.

And as hard as I try, I can’t see what that something is.

Everybody is welcome to answer, but it would be especially great to hear from such women.

P.S. I know that people will immediately start telling me about the preference for the Republican economic policies. This, of course, must mean that all these Republican-voting women are hardcore Marxists because only a Marxist believes that economic interests trump all other concerns. Are you sure you are ready to maintain that all Republican-voting women are crypto-Marxists?

I don’t know what’s happening but I’m reading one appalling article after another today:

The reason Schiavo hurt Republicans was probably not so much because the public agreed with the husband (though they did), but because they wondered why the Republican Congress was hot-dogging the issue.

Huh? As far as I remember, nobody was on the side of this so-called husband. The entire issue had nothing to do with the right to die, euthanasia, religion, or anything of the kind. This was all about a jerkwad who was living with a woman and procreating with her as a crazed bunny but who still believed he had the right to decide whether the woman who used to be married to him should be taken off life support. If he’d had a shred of decency, he would have removed himself from the equation legally, just like he had done in every respect that mattered.

There is this guy who can have any number of wives (which he demonstrated in practice) and there are the parents who can’t dump a child in a coma and pick up a fresh one. So who should get to decide whether she should remain on life support? For the husband, she is obviously dispensable. For the parents, she is obviously not.

I was appalled by this horrible case when I first heard about it because, to me, the idea that a man could just kill off a woman because he wanted to marry somebody else was completely shocking. I fully support the right to die and euthanasia. But I don’t support this completely mechanistic and formulaic definition of marriage that considers people “married” when one of them is popping out kids with somebody else.

Loving gay couples – who have actual, living marriages – cannot get their relationships legally recognized. Yet the Schiavos of this world get to kill the women who have started to bore them because, as it turns out, marriage is nothing but a formality, an empty piece of paper.

I keep hearing how gay marriage will devalue the concept of marriage. I find the argument egregiously offensive. I also find it shocking that while this entire Schiavo debacle was going on, nobody pointed out that the real damage to marriage as an institution had been done at the point where it started being defined in terms of a meaningless piece of paper that had little to do with the actual relationship between people.

Does anybody know the answer to the following: is it legal for a state university in this country to force its employees to work on a weekend (Friday night and then full working days on Saturday and Sunday) without any warning?

It has not been specified in the contracts, it has never been done before, it hasn’t been discussed by the Faculty Senate.

In short, can an employer unilaterally choose that you work on a weekend and that’s that?

P.S. I’m not talking about every weekend. Just one or two weekends per year.

A student says: “I feel very inhibited in class because I keep thinking, “I’m a native speaker. Spanish is my language. So how come this Russian person has a richer vocabulary and understands the grammar better than I do?” I mean, I know you are not Russian. But you are not Latina either. This isn’t fair! You are not supposed to speak so well.”

I have a vague suspicion that my native speaker students enrolled in my Advanced Spanish class at least in part based on my very Slavic last name. It’s possible that they expected a stumbling and mumbling Russian person whose Spanish would be bad in comparison with theirs.

This makes me feel very good.

I came to the library to get some books and now I can’t leave because it smells so good in here.

The smell of books is magical.

P.S. This post is not an excuse for Kindle-bashing. Movies don’t cancel out the theater, the Beatles did not make opera irrelevant, computers have not destroyed paper.