. . . are also the most politically active ones. Today, most of the successful responsible students in my classes have pins proving that they voted in the primaries. And the more. . . erm, relaxed students had no idea there were going to be any presidential elections this year.

P.S. Students are writing tests in all of my courses today, hence the abundance of posts.

P.P.S. Why is it always the worst students who get mortally sick two hours before the midterm?

I especially love it when people start trying to educate me about the USSR.

“But there were good things in the Soviet Union,” they say.

“No, there weren’t.”

“But the medical care was great.”

“No, it was horrible and barbaric.”

“But the education was wonderful.”

“No, it was really worthless.”

“But I read in a book how the Soviet Union was good.”

“And while you were reading that book, I was actually living in that horrible system.”

I have to say that the general ignorance on the subject of the Soviet Union is daunting. I have a friend – a very intelligent, highly educated guy – who shared with me how much his friend, who is a single mother, struggles in Canada.

“She’d be treated like a hero and offered every kind of support in the Soviet Union,” he announced to me.

I almost fell off my chair because of the sheer idiocy of this statement.

And since we are talking about socialism, I wanted to mention that whenever the government begins to have a stronger control over business, goods and services immediately diminish in quantity and quality. Whenever my sister travels from Canada to the US, that’s the first thing she notices. The same kind of stores in the US carry a much wider selection and the goods are significantly cheaper than in Canada. Furniture, baby clothes, shoes – everything is much better and much cheaper in the US. I guess we all know why that is and what exactly the Canadian government is doing to squeeze the entrepreneurial spirit out of the country. (This is a very sore point for me right now, so please tread gently.)

It really annoys me when people bully or shame pregnant women and treat them like stupid sheep incapable of making their own decisions. Here is an example of such an attitude:

This is in addition to the shamefully high cesarean section rates of most hospitals, which carries all the risks of any major abdominal surgery.

Got it? A woman chooses a method of delivering a child that suits her best and that is shameful. I have once witnessed a woman being bullied – and I mean really bullied – as she was carted into the delivery ward by a bunch of officious, uneducated, stupid doulas who thought they knew better than this woman and her doctor what she needed to do with her body. You have to be a real jerkwad to bully a person who is on her way to give birth.

I am getting pretty damn sick of seeing women subjected to unnecessary surgery. Plastic surgery, bariatric surgery, FGM, episiotomy, c sections. It means real pain and injury, sometimes death, for women. The popularity of c-section births has a relationship to some popular anti-woman ideas.

And I’m getting pretty damn sick of people who don’t realize how disgusting and anti-woman this need to police women’s reproductive choices is. I’ve got to wonder why it is that we never see any kind of questioning of the choices men make about their bodies. Is that because, for some people, any choice that a woman makes is by definition suspect? Is that because such people simply cannot accept the idea that women have brains and can be allowed to make their own choices about their own bodies?

In North America today, you have to be a very strong and resilient woman to choose a C-section. Even people who know you very well and have no reason to suspect that you’d make such a decision lightly, immediately get into a hectoring mode whenever you mention this choice. Just the other day, I’ve been talking to a friend who’s known me for the better part of a decade. When I mentioned that, for me, an elective C-section would be my method of choice to give birth, he immediately started delivering this very didactic speech on how “natural birth is best and are you even planning to breastfeed.” In the past 8 years, there has never been a single occasion when he’d taken such a tone with me. Of course, when he saw horror on my face, he stopped and apologized profusely. (If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know what scared my friend.)

I suggest that we just shut the fuck up about how the choices that women make about their own bodies make us feel. If you believe that vaginal birth is best, then, by all means, go have one. Or fifteen, if that’s your pleasure. Just stop criticizing the choices other people make and assuming that you know best what’s good for them.

If you experience any need to criticize the delivery, pregnancy, contraception, and abortion choices of other people, you need to analyze where this deep-seated aggression towards others comes from. And if a discussion of people’s reproductive choices makes you start using words like “shameful,” the only person who needs to be ashamed is you.

My sister has spent a week in Austin, Texas, and she loved it. So she called a friend and asked, “Is it really wrong that I like Texas?”

“Yes!” the friend responded adamantly.

My sister got so much into the whole Texas mode that she even bought little cowboy boots for her daughter. She says that the thing that struck her the most about Texas is how nice, kind, polite and relaxed the people are. She lives in Montreal, which is why the trademark American politeness surprises her.

One thing that made her uncomfortable, she says, is that everybody in the service industry is either black or Hispanic. You see the racial divide much more strongly than in Montreal.

She got so into Texas that she says she could imagine herself relocating there. I’m now very curious about Texas where I’ve never been.

The first reason to get a degree (or several) in the Humanities is if you have certain needs that can only be addressed by getting this sort of education. I know that this sounds confusing, so I will give a real-life example to illustrate my point.

When I was 20 years old and still living in Ukraine, I invited an acquaintance (let’s call her Anya) to come over to my place. Anya was from a very poor family that lived in the country-side. She was one of 4 siblings. Her father was a violent alcoholic who boozed all day long and never even tried to make a single dime. Her mother worked day and night to feed the family and then struggled to fight off the violent husband who beat her and stole the money she made to buy booze.

Anya was a very bright young woman who didn’t want to live this way. She came to the city to get an education and create a different kind of existence for herself. In short, she is a very admirable, self-made sort of person.

When Anya saw my huge apartment (and when I say “my”, I mean that it was really mine, not some bank’s), my book-lined study, and my gentle, adoring husband who served us a beautiful meal he’d been creating and decorating for three hours (I didn’t know how to boil water at that time. Cooking became my hobby much later), she gasped.

“You are the luckiest person in the world,” she said. “You are living the life of my dreams.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not happy. I feel like none of this has any meaning. My life is empty and useless.”

Anya looked at me like I was a raving maniac. After that visit, she started avoiding me, and we never talked again.

In this situation, Anya and I could have never found a common ground. She was trying to address issues that, for me, had already been solved by the previous generations of people in my family. What for her was an important goal she was going to achieve after years of struggling was something I saw as a given.

Let’s look at this issue from a different perspective now. My North American friends are always very baffled by my unwavering love of capitalism. They like me, so they have learned to accept it as a strange quirk. The difference between us is that they grew up surrounded by all kinds of goods and services anybody could possibly wish for. And so did their parents, grandparents, etc. For them, being able to go out and just buy toilet paper is not a big deal. For me, however, it’s something I did not experience as a child, so the joy of having things available for consumption is still very fresh.

My North American friends never had to figure out what to do when you cannot buy basic goods for any amount of money because such basic goods do not exist in your society. This is why now they can concentrate on the disadvantages of capitalism. I would need a couple of generations of living in a capitalist society to get to that stage.

The professional and financial success, the husband who adored me and never tasted alcohol were not my achievements. They were my mother’s, and she’d handed them to me when I was born. (My mother’s origins were not as tragic as Anya’s but, still, very similar to hers.)

I needed my own set of challenges to feel like my life wasn’t simply a replay of my mother’s existence. This is why I could now dedicate all of my energies to thinking about the meaning of life, studying philosophy and Latin, and analyzing Spanish literature.

When you develop such a set of needs, a degree in the Humanities becomes indispensable to you. It is not the only way, of course, but it’s one of the most logical ones.

In his book, Aaron Clarey says:

In majoring in a good [meaning, STEM] field you increase your earnings potential, begetting a bevvy of financial benefits. . . With high incomes and increased wealth, you can go and enjoy a better life. You can afford better food, live in a better neighborhood, drive a nicer car, and do not have to go into debt to do it. You can send your kids to private schools, get them better educations, and ensure a better future for them. You can also retire earlier, travel more, and just have more leisure time in general.

If you create a list of priorities for yourself and the ones Aaron enumerates in this quote make the top slots on that list, then you probably should think long and hard before getting a degree in Literature, Classics, or Philosophy. If, however, things like “reading huge numbers of books and discussing them for hours with like-minded individuals” make the top of the list, my colleagues and I are eagerly awaiting you in our classes.

[To be continued. . .]

Aaron Clarey, whose blog you can find here, sent me his book titled Worthless. The book’s title refers to the kind of college degrees that the writer deems to be worthless. Among them, are of course all of the Humanities and Liberal Arts degrees. Aaron is a talented guy with a really great sense of humor. Even if you disagree with what he has to say, you have to recognize that he is hilarious.

Here, for example, is Aaron’s explanation as to why Kinesiology is a useless degree:

Kinesiology is nothing more than a euphemism for “Advanced Gym Teacher” or “Overly-Educated Masseuse.”

And here is what he has to say about bankers:

Bankers are, in general, people who were too lazy to go into engineering, let alone accounting, but still wanted to make a ton of money. But since they have no tangible skills and were too intellectually lazy to go and develop some, they rely on corruption, nepotosm, cronyism, connections and “networking” to make money.

This is very well-said, in my opinion.

The reason why I’m discussing Aaron’s book is not that I simply want to share a couple of funny quotes, of course. Worthless raises a very important question that I want to address. Why should people get degrees in the Humanities, Aaron asks, if those degrees do not help them to make money?

As a scholar of the Humanities and a college professor, I can say the following to those who are asking themselves this question. A Bachelor’s degree in the Humanities is, in itself, definitely not aimed at helping anyone make significant amounts of money. Likewise for online masters degree programs in humanities. If your social, economic and class background are such that a house in the suburbs, a good car, three kids and a dog constitute the pinnacle of achievement for you, then, please, listen to Aaron Clarey and do not get a degree in the Humanities. Mind you, I’m not being critical of this dream. I’m just stating that there is a way to achieve it for people who start from scratch both economically and in terms of their class background, and that way is mapped out in Aaron’s book.

A degree in the Humanities becomes necessary when you have addressed the basic needs and are confronted with the two new ones that I will describe in the second part of this post.

[To be continued. . .]

My students are the best. When they read a short story where Juanita marries Pedro Martinez Gomez, it’s easier for them to conclude that Juanita married two men at the same time than that Pedro, like most Spanish speakers, calls himself by both his mother’s and his father’s last names.

As you might remember, I already had a similar problem with the Spanish philosopher who’d had the brilliant idea to go by the name “Ortega y Gasset.”

Spoons now have gender! I always knew there was something kitchen utensils were sorely missing. We now need to assign nationality to them and maybe even give out little passports.

Dick Cheney says Canada is a dangerous place.

Religious homeschoolers breed dependent doormats.The first paragraph of the post is apologetic, servile, and meaningless. But the rest of the post is very good.

Yet another sex-deprived, unpopular, miserable and lonely guy screeching about those bad, mean, “arrogant” women who dare manage their own reproductive health without asking for his opinions. My blogroll has been populated by one desperate post after another written by pathetic men with no lives of their own who are heart-broken that women are not inviting them to manage their uteri. Are they not seeing how ridiculous this makes them look?

“The claim that vaginal birth is an “achievement” or “empowering” or worthy of praise makes as much sense as believing your eye color is an achievement or empowering or worthy of praise. You have to be pretty desperate for positive attention to take credit for bodily attributes that are beyond anyone’s control.” Hear, hear!

This great post debunks the myth that more time is what you need to produce a lot of high-quality academic writing.

“I know it will never happen, but I am waiting for the dozens of “I’m sorry world, for being such a fucking idiot” posts from all of the eventheliberals who for years imagined that a Grand Bargain could be struck with the anti-choice movement if only stupid liberal bloggers would be nicer to them.” Exactly. There is no arguing, compromising, or finding common ground with unhinged, miserable people. Mollycoddling them is a losing strategy. They see your weakness and start bullying you. We need to speak their own language to them and scream them down. Nothing else will work.

Agribusiness is ruining capitalism.

Publishers turn the concept of “open access” into a joke by charging authors huge sums of money for placing their own articles into open access. The sleaziest, nastiest jerks congregate at publishing houses. The good news is that the institution of a publishing house will soon die out completely thanks to digital publishing and self-publishing.

A great post from a promising new blogger from Israel: “I’m willing to sacrifice a lot in order to make a secular, democratic, open Israel a reality. Some religious folk are willing to sacrifice a lot to see the Third Temple built on Mount Moria and the Judian kingdom re-instated, its laws firmly based on Jewish Halacha.”

The foundations of intellectual shamanism.

Will Quebec save Canada? (My personal answer would be yes, of course.)

A very valuable post for academic writers. Highly recommended.

Want to get awarded the title of the best post of the week by Clarissa’s Blog? Write a post denouncing Lloyd Blankfein and end it with the following statement: “As soon put your faith in the goodwill of  a rearing cobra, as in the soulless eyes of the CEO of Goldman Sachs.” Yes, yes, yes!

Do you agree with the statement that “some men rape, ergo all men are rapists”? I hope not because if you do, I don’t want you on my blog. I want you in a psychiatrist’s office.

If you agree with me that it is wrong to condemn an entire group based on the actions of some members of this group, then how is it OK to make the following statements:

That is perhaps the grandest irony of all this: feminism perpetuates these prejudices by painting women as only victims and men as only oppressors. Feminists peddle that message so much that many governments and political organizations accept it without question. It never occurs to any of them to ask whether men and boys are victims of rape and sexual violence.

Would it have killed the author of this piece to put the word “some” before mentioning feminists? Doesn’t he realize that this blatant and stupid generalization makes him sound just like those unhinged people who consider all men to be rapists?

Probably the author of this post was trying to make an important point. I wouldn’t be able to appreciate it, though, because I have no trust for a person capable of such sloppy and careless generalizations.