I don’t know how to say this any clearer, so I’ll just repeat myself: no matter what the US could, would, should or might have done, its relations with Russia would still be very bad. Because that’s what Russia needs at this point. The anti-US feelings meet a huge internal need in Russia.

George W. Bush could have walked on water, but this would have changed nothing in terms of the US-Russia relations. So let’s stop dumping on Bush already. On this particular issue, he is really not to blame.

Do you know this joke about a knight and a dragon?

A knight was crossing the desert. He’d been walking for a very long time and was exhausted and thirsty. On the way, he’d lost his horse and his helmet. Even his boots had fallen apart. All that he had left was his sword.

Suddenly, he saw a small lake on the horizon. The knight realized that he’d finally be able to slake his thirst, so he got over his exhaustion and ran towards the lake.

When he got there, though, he saw a three-headed dragon sitting by the side of the lake. The knight got out his sword and started battling the dragon. He fought him all day long and finally managed to cut off two of the dragon’s heads. The dragon fell onto the ground in complete exhaustion, and so did the knight.

“Why did you attack me?” the dragon asked the knight in a small voice.

“I wanted a drink of water. . .” the knight whispered.

“So why didn’t you just drink???” the dragon asked.

I’m exactly like that knight. I create insurmountable difficulties for myself, then battle them to the point of complete exhaustion, and then heroically overcome them.

Of course, none of this heroism would be needed if I didn’t create the obstacles for myself.

It’s a very stupid life strategy, and I do not recommend it.

A Russian blogger who now lives in California shared the following assignment that her daughter had been given in a Californian school (the link is in Russian):

When the students were reading A Catcher in the Rye, one of the assignments was to write a letter of an imaginary psychotherapist to Holden’s parents about the symptoms of 17 real psychiatric diagnoses that the students were expected to find by analyzing the text of the novel. The list of the diagnoses taken from the DSM was included in the assignment and contained, for example, the obsessive compulsive and bipolar depressive disorders.

I know this blogger and can assure you that she is a scrupulously honest person. She wouldn’t have invented this. So now I’m kind of confused and a little terrified. Do such schools really exist? Never again will I wonder why our students arrive in college in a state of such grievous ignorance.

I also want to propose an activity of our own where we diagnose the bizarre teacher who gave this assignment according to the DSM which s/he obviously likes so much.

1. Posts and comments now have a row of stars underneath them, so everybody can evaluate what I write and what other readers have to say. I think it’s a very good innovation that people might enjoy.

2. Patrick from Canada: your comment ended up in the Spambox for some incomprehensible reason, and I accidentally deleted it. I didn’t do that on purpose and I apologize. Sometimes, good comments end up in the Spambox, and I don’t always manage to rescue them effectively.

3. People whose comments end up in moderation every single time: if you leave an email address (even a completely spurious one) when making a comment, I will only have to approve it once and then you will be able to comment freely without having to wait until I approve every one of your comments. Reader Liz: please consider this because I want people to be able to see your great comments as soon as they appear and not as soon as I wake up and approve them. 🙂

4. My readers are the best of all blog readers I found anywhere. I know that for a fact because I’ve researched the matter.

Of course, I dislike spring and summer but even I have to recognize that spring can be beautiful. The street where I live is lined with these trees in bloom.

Berkeley is in a very deep hole in terms of its budget, and here is one of the reasons why:

A growing chorus of voices is calling for the firing of a UC Berkeley administrator who helped triple her secret sex partner’s pay over five years. Calling Diane Leite’s punishment “an affront” to the university, several UC Berkeley professors have asked the school’s provost to investigate how the matter was handled. They are aghast that, instead of firing her, the university reassigned Leite from her assistant vice chancellor post and will still pay her $175,000 a year.

The scandal was revealed Monday when this newspaper reported that Leite, 47, had given five raises in two years to Caniezo, 30, a subordinate employee with whom she had a sexual relationship. Caniezo made less than $41,000 in 2005, but his pay jumped to $120,000 in 2010.

From $41,000 to $120,000 in just two years. College administrators get very shameless because all of the unearned money they are getting perverts them. Here is a useless administrator who goes and buys herself a sex toy that costs the university $120K per year. And the really scary thing is that this woman’s superiors are not even trying to punish her for wasting the university’s money to mitigate her huge sexual problems. There is no doubt in my mind that the rest of the administrators at Berkeley have no problems with Leite’s stealing from the university because they also get humongous salaries for doing nothing and promote all kinds of nasty nepotism.

I have got to wonder how much Berkeley pays it growing pool of exploited adjuncts.

Shame on you, Berkeley!

What I find even more bizarre than this entire situation, though, is the way the very dense author of the article that describes this situation at Berkeley concludes the piece:

“If (Leite’s violation) doesn’t rise to the level of significant punishment, what do you have to do to get fired?” Nadler said. “At a corporation, I think it’s pretty clear this wouldn’t be tolerated.”

Erm, really? Wouldn’t be tolerated by whom, exactly? When a Vice-President of Finance, for example, decides to buy some fresh young meat on the company dime, the rest of the employees sit there very quietly, not daring to make a peep. At a university where there is still some academic freedom, people protest and make their opinions known.

It is egregious that anybody would try to use this situation to suggest that a university should be turned into a corporation.

Echidne’s Blog just disappointed me in a way I couldn’t have imagined was even possible. I understand that the on-going assault on women’s rights in this country is traumatic. But insulting the feminist advances of other cultures is not the way. Echidne, who is normally a brilliant and insightful progressive blogger, has published a post titled “Mother Russia Finally Waking Up?” The point of the post is that Russia is a horrible patriarchal country and the stupid money-hungry Pussy Riot group is somehow Russia’s only feminist hope:

They are brave women, given what the Russian state can do to them. And yes, Russia is a stiflingly macho and conservative society. Of course the list of such societies on this earth is a very long one. Much feminist work remains to be done.

I so wish that people just stayed away from making proclamations concerning cultures they know nothing whatsoever about. Echidne will certainly be shocked to know that starting from 1917, all women in Russia (and Ukraine, of course) had the right to vote. They all worked and had brilliant careers. While the generation of Echidne’s mother and grandmother excelled in housewifery and wrapped itself in Saran wrap to look good for the lord and master, their Russian-speaking sisters got educated, worked, made their own decisions, and had their own lives.

Yes, I realize that most women did not Saran-wrap themselves in the US. Still, you’ve got to recognize that there is a huge difference between growing up in a society where the Saran-wrap philosophy arises as opposed to being raised in a place where nobody could ever suggest anything of the kind anywhere in any format.

I grew up on books and movies that, with absolutely no exceptions, depicted strong, resourceful, powerful women who were never visited by the idea that they needed to make themselves easy to consume by men or by children. And here comes Echidne (raised on movies and TV shows depicting brainless, eyelash-batting, stupidly pouting, apron-clad housewives) and pities me for being such a victim of the patriarchal society.

Russian-speaking countries are not, in any way, a feminist paradise. However, I can guarantee that, in terms of having a voice, defending ourselves and our opinions, standing up to any kind of authority, not allowing men to speak over us, etc., Russian-speaking women have a lot they can teach to those of their sisters who are still struggling with the inane “how can a woman have it all” (“all” meaning nothing more than work and family) dilemma.

People who condescend to other cultures because they baselessly imagine themselves as superior annoy me. It would be extremely easy for Echidne to educate herself about the long and heroic history of the Russian-speaking feminist movement. Who needs to educate oneself, though, when one can just hear some stupid soundbite about some stupid self-promoting music group somewhere and invent a whole new history for a huge country on the basis of that?

I have now realized that reading a person’s blog on a regular basis can give one very deep insights into the author’s personality. Here is an example.

A reader of this blog traveled to a far-away country and, being an exceptionally kind and generous person, got me a gift. This gift turned out to be a beautiful scarf.

What this reader cannot possibly know (because they never met me) is that I adore scarves and shawls. I have a collection of them and special hangers to house all of them. What’s more, I’ve spent years telling everybody in sight how much I want a scarf precisely from the far-away country where this reader got me the scarf.

I just did a search of my blog and there is nothing about my scarf collection on it. So this was pure inspiration on the reader’s part.

You’ll say this is a coincidence but I think this is more than that. Careful readers perceive hidden qualities of my personality from my writing.

Thank you, dear reader! I totally dig this gift.

My university has introduced a new requirement for all of its incoming freshmen. Before the beginning of the semester, the new students are obligated to participate in a series of activities aimed at developing their feelings of responsibility as citizens. What does that mean in practice?

Freshmen will be loaded into buses and will be taken to perform community service activities. This will somehow teach them the value of responsible citizenship and communal action.

As of now, there is a total of 3 faculty members at out university who seem to be bothered by the idea of coercing community service out of students. As you might have guessed already, I’m one of them.

For one, this forced socialization bothers me on a visceral level. When people start college, they are already adults. Doesn’t it mean that they should decide for themselves when or whether they want to socialize, be charitable, do things for the benefit of the community, etc.? Isn’t it extremely patronizing to imply that they need to be forced into all of these activities?

Then you have to remember that we are a state university. Making students perform tasks that the state needs seems dangerously close to coercing free labor out of people who don’t have a choice in the matter.

Of course, there are also the autistic students who often thrive in the classroom and do extremely well academically but who, at the same time, are made intensely miserable by the forced cheerfulness of such collective public outings.

The idea that people need to be forced to spend a lot of time together as a group, involved in some sort of a collective action for the benefit of the entire society, and that it is perfectly fine for the government to force people to dedicate their weekend to provide free labor for the benefit of the state is, once again, a deeply Soviet idea.

Yes, I know that I keep repeating the words “the Soviet Union” like an obsessive parrot. But what else can I say if the bailouts, the “too big to fail,” the puritanical hysteria, the forced gynecological procedures, the war on contraception, and the coercion of community service are very familiar to me precisely because I have lived in the the Soviet Union?

We either choose to guide ourselves by the respect for the rights of an individual or we don’t. There is no middle ground and there are no other options. I strongly believe that only through cultivating the respect for the individual rights as the highest value, can we achieve a civilized society worth living in. You know why that is? Because “collective interests” do not exist. There are simply shrewd individuals who manage to sell us their own interests as somehow hugely valuable to everybody. Such people force us to sacrifice our interests for theirs because they hide behind some completely spurious collective good.

It is extremely aggravating to see deeply conservative (and not in a good sense) people dress up as Liberals and make every progressive cause look ridiculous as a result. Here is the most recent case of such annoying trickery:

A group that supports health care coverage of contraception is calling for women to withhold sex from their partners between April 28 and May 5.

“This will help people understand that contraception is for women and men, because men enjoy the benefit of women making their own choices about when and if they want to get pregnant,” Liberal Ladies who Lunch says on its website.

These people are deeply convinced that women only engage in sex to please men. It does not even occur to them that having sex is only normal, healthy and acceptable when it’s something you want to do for yourself and not to please somebody else. For these weird folks who cannot even imagine a woman as a subject, rather than an object, of sexual activity, sex is something women only engage in to get things they want out of men:

“Once congress and insurance agencies agree to cover contraception, we will then resume having sex. Until then men will have to be content with their left hand.”

Women, you see, are normally content with getting something they need in exchange for sexual services they provide. They don’t actually need sex. I’ve got to wonder why, according to this warped logic, women need contraceptives at all. To enable them to engage in an activity they are physiologically incapable of enjoying?