I have very brilliant readers and commenters. Here is how one of them, musteryou, has explained the nature of trolldom with one concise and beautiful definition:

The structure of a troll’s consciousness is the same as that of a sado-masochist. He lacks access to emotion, so he tries to get others to exude it for him, so that he can feel emotion. This is a dependency structure.

I think this is absolutely spot-on. Trolls’ emotions are blocked, so they try to provoke others to feel anger, frustration, annoyance – anything, in short – on their account in order to experience at least some form of emotional life.

When I think about the trolls I’ve had stalk my blog, I recognize that all of them seemed to beg for an emotional response like their life depended on it. They also had a variety of tricks at their disposal that never varied from one troll to another. And they all figured out very soon what would bug their interlocutor the most. For me, for example, the most annoying thing in the world is when people repeat the same thing like brain-damaged parrots. It’s actually very traumatic for reasons I don;t want to go into right now. So my trolls would soon slip into the broken-record mode.

For the longest time, I was sure that the trolls are socially inept and simply have no idea how to communicate productively. For obvious reasons, I feel very compassionate towards people with poor communication skills, so I tried helping the trolls to be better communicators. After musteryou’s explanation, however, I realize that this is a very conscious strategy on the part of the trolls.

When are people are going to get tired of saccharine puns already? They are stupid and common, so let’s just stop with the puns.

I just got an invitation to a “cupcake fundraiser” called “Baking a Difference.” Can you get more annoyingly precious than that? Besides, it sounds like a person with a sinus infection is trying to say the word “making.”

You, too, can be O.K. without pork.

That’s the message of Michael J. Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College in Dallas. Well, part of the message at least – after all, Sorrell didn’t ban pork from his campus dining facilities arbitrarily. No – the decision to stop offering any pork products was based in a much broader institutional philosophy, the president says.

“When you come to college, you come to be educated,” Sorrell said. “We thought we could do more in the area of promoting healthy lifestyle choices and healthy eating habits.”

In a brief statement announcing the decision Tuesday, Sorrell put it like this: “Eating pork can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cancer, sodium retention and heart problems, not to mention weight gain and obesity. Therefore, as a part of our continued effort to improve the lives and health of our students, Paul Quinn College and its food service partner Perkins Management have collaborated to create a pork-free cafeteria.”

Why can’t these officious do-gooders try to get at least a minuscule portion of brain matter? In itself, pork is not bad for anybody’s health. You can make it unhealthy by cooking it a certain way. Just like you can render beef, chicken, fish, potatoes and even zucchini extremely unhealthy by rolling them in oversalted bread crumbs, deep frying them, and chugging down an enormous portion of them in one sitting. Eating pork doesn’t lead to weight gain if you cook it in a healthy way and eat moderate portions.

I don’t even eat pork because I don’t enjoy the taste (unless a Spanish person made it because they really know how to do it) but it annoys me to see people trying to pass their weird food foibles for “institutional philosophy”.

Leaving the nutritional value of pork aside, for the moment, let’s look at the following egregious quote from the same unintelligent college president:

“We told our students that we’re going to promote healthy living. We told them that we wanted them to have long, productive and healthy lives,” Sorrell said. “Now, if one or two people don’t like that…. then they aren’t being true to the institutional ethos.”

It’s really sad to see that such a responsible position is occupied by a person who doesn’t realize that it’s not his place to want anything in other people’s lives. All this blabber about institutional this and institutional that only demonstrates that Mr. Sorrell is incapable of respecting his students and seeing them as valid human beings.

Reader luna asks:

I am a big fan of your posts about life in the FSU and would like to know more!

Particularly, what was math and science education like in the FSU? You have said earlier that education in general was quite crappy. But scientific hearsay is that a lot of good physics and mathematics was done in the USSR, take sending humans to space for example. If the science education was also crappy, what would you say is the reason for this success?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer this question because this is always a subject of heated discussions between me and N. He got his first degree at one of the most prestigious math programs in the FSU and is the product of the (post) Soviet science education. Naturally, he has  very good things to say about that system of education while I don’t, to put it very mildly.

It is true that there were never any attempts to bring ideology into the study of physics and mathematics in the USSR. As a result, these fields were left free of ideological conditioning and many people used them as a respite from the endless Communist slogans that were hammered into their brains at every step. Mathematics was  an international language that made one feel part of the world instead of a terrified little creature separated from the rest of humanity by the Iron Curtain. Many brilliant mathematicians and physicists came out of this education system.

However, what they received cannot possibly be called a university education. The reason why people go to college is to become well-rounded individuals who have a number of skills and a stock of knowledge in a variety of disciplines. In the American system of higher education – which, I insist, still offers the best higher education in the world- all students have to take a significant number of General Education courses outside of their Major concentration. You can’t come to college, take 40 courses in math, and graduate without ever taking a peek outside of your calculus textbook.

In the USSR, students of all disciplines also had to take a variety of Gen Ed courses (foreign languages, the history of the Communist Party, something called “Scientific Atheism,” etc.) but the value of those courses was non-existent. There were, of course, people who worked on developing their non-mathematical interests outside of the classroom. They were not the majority, however. I can’t tell you how many brilliant programmers and mathematicians I have met who were as intellectually stimulating to talk to as 5-year-olds. They knew their equations, programming languages, and logarithms, but that was all they knew.

The difference between a university and a vocational school is precisely that a university offers you more than an insight into a single discipline. This is why I always say that there was good vocational training in the sciences in the USSR but there was no education.

“I was going to hit on you,” a man at the store says conversationally, “but then I saw your wedding ring and decided not to. Of course, there are guys who hit on married women but I don’t want to be one of them.”

“Than you for sharing this story,” I respond.

“Any time,” the man beams at me.

I have a feeling that the heat is melting everybody’s brains. Including mine.

I’ve spent the summer hidden at home and I can’t say I’m looking forward to rejoining the world all that much.

Everybody says that student evaluations for online courses are more negative  than the ones for traditional courses. This stands to reason because students don’t get to meet the professor in the online format, can’t establish a personal connection, end up feeling somewhat isolated and lonely.

Still, I just got my online evals and they are beautiful. Here are some quotes:

She was awesome!!

She was very well organized, planned her lectures well, responded to questions quickly, and had homework graded and returned almost immediately. Great online class. Her first hand knowledge of the material was a plus too.

The instructor’s strength was her ability to respond rapidly and deliver the course material in an interesting fashion.

Made the information very easy to understand and interesting.

The instructor offered great insight with questions I may have had and always responded to emails very quickly.

The course couldn’t be improved because it was great just as it was!!

There was just one negative response. It was from the student I blogged about before who used to regale me with the following kind of writing:

It should be taken into consideration that the fact that Latin America is a big and important nation is a crucial fact that is perceived by everybody on a variety of occasions that are frequently discussed, however they might say that it is not true and deny everything. Which I find wrong. Completely.

“But, Clarissa,” you’d say, “if the evaluations are supposed to be anonymous, then how do you know that the negative response came from this particular student?”

Well, my friend, if you’d been exposed to the above-quoted writing style every day for five weeks, do you think you might be able to identify it if you saw it in an evaluation?

On the positive side, the people who will read the evaluations have not received the same extensive training in deciphering the outpourings of this student’s verbal diarrhea. As a result, they will probably never manage to find out what she was trying to say about me in the evaluation.

And if you are wondering what this student criticized about my teaching, then I’ll tell you. It was that I spent too much time teaching basic writing skills to people who already had great writing styles. Curiously, the students who do write well never found it necessary to complain about that part of the course.

I profoundly admire these three brave scholars in India:

The tug-of-war between the management of National College and the Association of University Teachers over the former’s scrapping of philosophy as a course of study peaked on Friday as one of the three fasting philosophy professors of the college fainted. The three philosophy professors of the college – Dr T Seshasayee, 56, professor S Gunasekharan, 51, and Dr R Prabhakar, 49 – sat in what they called an indefinite fast three days ago demanding that the college not do away with the aided philosophy courses. . .

Though the condition of the three professors deteriorated on Friday, they refused to accept medical care. The medical team, police and revenue officials were waiting helplessly at the college premises as a solution evaded them. “We want a categorical assurance from the government that the courses will be revived this academic year, or else we have no other option but to continue the agitation,” Pandiyan said.

We could learn a lesson or two from our colleagues in India. While we sit here, batting our eyelashes helplessly as entire departments are being destroyed to feed more football teams and a growing army of bureaucrats, some people show that they truly have the courage to defend their disciplines.

This is so intensely brilliant that I had to reblog it:

I think the reason women say they need big blocks of time to get work done in is not that they do not know how to work efficiently. As I keep saying, anyone who got a PhD and a job does know how to work efficiently.

Where the front time goes, the first half of the four hour block of which only the last two will really be used for work, is to thinking oneself back into the identity of the person that does that work.

Because if in the rest of life, including professional life, that identity is being attacked, undermined and eroded, the first thing one must do to get work done is to put oneself back together, remember who one is or was.

That is why it is important to remain in that identity at all times, not become the one that is being projected into you, even if survival, in the moment, seems to depend upon not resisting the projection.

I don’t even know what to add to this flash of brilliance. It is SO TRUE that it scares me.

If you are in academia, you need to read and follow this blogger, people. She routinely publishes some of the most insightful things on academic life I have read anywhere.

P.S. Read the discussion after the post, too. It contains more brilliance. I don’t refer to my own comments. I’m just trying to figure things out.

I made this list so that everybody can start working on the way they participate in discussions. Normally, people on my blog are not in need of such basic advice, but sometimes folks come by who have very poor debating skills but who are unaware of how worthless they make themselves as discussion partners.

So here are some suggestions as to how one can become a better discussion partner:

1. Try to read or listen to what people are saying carefully. Then think about what they said. And only then respond.

2. If a comment confuses you, don’t protect yourself by rolling out some stock response. Ask questions. Try to link the comment to its context.

3. Lecture less and ask more. Unless people have specifically solicited your opinion on a subject, don’t lecture them about it. It antagonizes people every single time.

4. Avoid triviality. When you say self-evident things in a pompous long-winded manner, people do not tend to respond well. They think you are suggesting they are idiots.

5. If people exhibit an emotional response to your words, you need to make an attempt to understand the nature and the vector of their affect.

6. Avoid the “It is, too” discussion strategy because it’s childish. A discussion is supposed to progress. If you respond to every argument from your opponent with the same statement, you will soon start sounding like a petulant 2-year-old. Either try to take your arguments further or abandon them if they are failing to convince. Simply repeating something will not convince anybody of anything.

7. Try to be tactful. Don’t lecture autistics on autism, Jews on anti-semitism, gays on homophobia, blacks on racism, and women on gynecological visits unless you are autistic, Jewish, gay, black, or female. Doing this makes you sound like a douche of major proportions. It doesn’t matter if you read an article on autism. That didn’t make you an expert overnight.

8. Avoid retelling to people what you think they said. Avoid “so are you saying. . .” as much as possible. Either quote the exact words you are responding to or simply ask your discussion partner to clarify what s/he said.

9. Stop assuming and start asking.

10. And the most important rule: People don’t normally choose to engage in activities if they get nothing out of them. Ask yourself, “what it is that I offer to others as a discussion partner?” A hint: if your answer is “I’m educating them about. . .”, you are probably really bad at debating. Now ask yourself again, “What it is that I offer to others that they actually want? How do I know that they want this?”

Of course, if your one and only goal is to antagonize people and make them avoid you (which is quite a worthy goal and one I can understand very well), then feel free to disregard this advice. In all other situations, take it to heart.

I have participated in discussions both online and in RL that have literally transformed my life. My discussion partners have enriched me in ways they probably are not even aware of. But it only happened because I allowed myself to be reached by new information and different points of view.

Happy discussion times, everybody!

P.S. Feel free to add if I missed anything.

[Warning: this might make you barf.]

You will find your answer in this video:

No, you are neither drunk nor have suffered a brain aneurysm. This Russian priest did actually kiss Putin’s hand.