This is what happens to a university that places no value on research. Let this story serve as a warning to all of us.

It takes a Dutchman to make a box of American peanuts sound hilarious.

Even ramps are beautiful in Montreal.

Who but a housewife would throw a hissy fit about a child seeing a condom wrapper? Some people should really try to get a life because being scandalized by condom wrappers is kind of insane.

A small but important victory for a responsible academic. Let’s all follow her example and perform the same small feat next week.

A very insightful post on why many people refuse to read.

Psychoanalysis leads to neurobiological changes in the depressed patients’ brains. (The link is in German.)

“Another layer of intrigue has been revealed in the saga of the downfall of conservative academic and rising Evangelical star Dinesh D’Souza, who resigned from his perch atop King’s College today after it was revealed that he had a fiancee while also having a wife. Right Wing Watchreports that his mistress/fiancée, Denise Odie Joseph II, was also married, and said in April that she was going to vote for Mitt Romney, “because [her] husband told her to.” We all have to be grateful to fundamentalist preachers of virtue for providing us with so much entertainment.

“Most complementarian evangelical Christian leaders use rape to control women. . . Complementarian leaders, despite their personal feelings about rape, need rape to exist and for it to be a serious threat.”

“Just like the existence of rape is convenient for complementarians and patriarchalists, even so the existence of homeless people is convenient for corporate America. What I mean is that encountering a homeless person can make someone like me, a grad student raising two children, feel wealthy beyond measure.”

Ukrainian pseudo-feminists descend on Paris.

“Christian culture isolates men and women, trains them to think and act differently, then presents this training as a marriage problem to be solved. Communication is hard, they say. Marriage is hard. After five years of a committed relationship, I can safely say this: it’s not hard. Not at all. It’s way easier!”

The many breaches of ethics that lactivist bullies engage in.

“Using DSM-4 criteria for mental disorders, almost half the people in the US are getting a diagnosis of a mental disorder in their lifetime – and other countries aren’t far behind.”

There is nothing funny about raping men.

Missouri has been trying to pass a tax hike on cigarettes for a very long time. This year, the state will hold yet another vote on Prop B that will raise taxes significantly on cigarettes with the goal of lowering the state’s high number of smokers (26% of the state’s population.) The money collected through the tax hike will be invested into education and research.

So far the story sounds quite boring. But here is where the hilarity begins. There is an organization called Missouri Right to Life. As you can guess from its name, this is an anti-choice group that “opposes the killing of innocent human life at any stage, even the single cell stage.” 

Missouri Right to Life also opposes the state’s anti-smoking measures. Apparently, the killing of innocent human life through smoking doesn’t bother the group a whole lot. For some bizarre reason, the organization decided that the money the state of Missouri gains from this tax hike will not be invested into education and research and will be diverted to cloning instead. Cloning is prohibited in Missouri, but who cares? Missouri Right to Life, which would be more aptly called “Missouri Right to Die of Lung Cancer”, still insists that the anti-smoking bill is introduced to promote cloning.

The leaps of logic that religious fanatics are capable of are truly bizarre.

P.S. I personally oppose the special tax rates on cigarettes in any society that doesn’t offer free comprehensive state health insurance to every citizen. This isn’t the point of the post, though. The post is about the hypocrisy of anti-choice religious fanatics.

N and I look like alcoholic vegetarians at the check-out counter.

An anonymous commenter says:

This is what happens when you say anything that is not wildly enthusiastic about Jane Austen. I don’t know any other author who provokes this obsessive protectiveness.

I know one such other writer.

It’s Ken Follett. I once wrote a critical review of his most recent novel and people got simply rabid. I’m a passionate reader but it would never occur to me to get so worked up because somebody didn’t like the same book I did.

The culmination of that debate was when one of my detractors discovered that I also once wrote a positive review for Tampax tampons.

“See, she writes good reviews for something so nasty,” he exclaimed gleefully. “Of course, she is incapable of understanding Follett!”

I still haven’t found a connection between tampons and Follett’s book, but people’s minds work in strange ways.

When asked if they respect people less for having sex with many partners, American college students ended up in the following groups:

48 per cent: “Egalitarian conservatives” who lost equal respect for men and women they believed were hooking up too much (54 per cent of women surveyed fell into this category, compared with 35 per cent of men).

27 per cent: “Egalitarian libertarians” who do not lose respect for men or women, no matter how much they sleep around.

12 per cent: “Traditional double standard” holders who lost respect for women, but not men, for hooking up too much.

13 per cent: “Reverse double standard” holders who lost respect for men, but not women, for having casual sex with too many partners.

As we can see, the double standard is dying out. But the prudishness is still alive and kicking. Please notice that women are much more likely to impose and uphold prudish judgments about sexuality than men. This is what I’ve been saying for as long as I’ve been blogging and now we have proof that, as usual, I’m absolutely right. Sexual liberation prevents the traditionally-minded women from selling a few lousy sex acts in exchange for a lifetime of financial security. Of course, such people resent the sexual freedom of others because that freedom makes the goods they are trying to peddle meet with very little demand.

OK, just one more quote from Gissing’s The Odd Women and I promise to stop bugging you with this:

Women had individual characters; that discovery, though not a very profound one, impressed him with the force of something arrived at by independent observation. Monica often puzzled him gravely; he could not find the key to her satisfactions and discontents. To regard her simply as a human being was beyond the reach of his intelligence.

Isn’t this brilliant? I know quite a few men and women who believe the patriarchal myth of the profound differences between the sexes and who drive themselves to distraction trying to figure out what these mysterious creatures want. The idea that men and women are all simply different individuals is completely alien to them. They ruin their lives, live in misery, go from one unhappy relationship to another, obsessed with the hope of finding some guiding principle, some great law that governs the behavior of all men or all women.

I didn’t know much about Tammy Baldwin before The Washington Times informed me of how amazing she is:

She is a radical feminist who champions gay marriage, abortion on demand, government-funded contraception and war on religious freedom. She is the Sandra Fluke of Wisconsin politics — a postmodern socialist who wants government to underwrite birth control pills and homosexual unions. Ms. Baldwin is the antithesis of the working-class liberalism embodied by Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Ms. Baldwin has made no secret of her lesbian lifestyle. She is a vocal supporter of gay pride and the LGBT community. She told the liberal Huffington Post that her Senate candidacy is historic. Ms. Baldwin stressed that “breaking through these glass ceilings has a ripple effect.” In other words, her election would — and should — encourage other avowed gays and lesbians to enter high office. She sees herself as the tip of the spear for the LGBT community — a relentless advocate for homosexual issues. She attacks traditional marriage. She led the fight to repeal the ban on gays openly serving in the military. She consistently assaults our Judeo-Christian heritage.

This sounds like a phenomenal candidate. I understand that in the warped mind of the article’s author all of these wonderful things somehow make Bladwin a bad candidate but The Washington Times managed to convince me that Baldwin is sensationally great and should be elected. If even her worst enemies can’t say anything negative about her, then she must be really good.

Let’s help Tammy get elected!

P.S. I’m still giggling over “postmodern socialist”, “homosexual issues” and “avowed gays and lesbians.” I think I need to subscribe to this paper because it’s too good to pass up.

We always mold our partners to make them conform to the definition of what a partner is that we carry with us since childhood. It isn’t something people do consciously, of course. Without having the slightest clue that we are doing it, we create a relationship pattern where our partner has no choice but to slip into the role we have created for him or her.

Here is a funny illustration of what I mean. My father has very curly hair. When he was younger, he had a mass of pitch-black tightly wound small curls on his head. When he was deep in thought, reading, or writing, he would slip a finger into one of these ringlets and start twirling it.

This habit drove my mother crazy.

“Misha, stop twirling your hair already!” She would sigh. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

I never told this story to N because it didn’t have an interesting punchline. And then I noticed that after living with me for years N started twirling his own hair when he was deep in thought. And he did it on the same side of his head as my father.

N’s hair is not curly which makes it pretty hard to twirl. So he takes a straight strand of hair and worries it to the point where it becomes matted and impossible to untangle.

N has no idea why he started doing it and what compels him to continue. He doesn’t know that he is recreating my childhood memory of my father for me.

Paul Ryan decided not to trail behind Obama and Romney in making extremely weird and offensive remarks about women:

Now it’s a war on women tomorrow it’s going to be a war on left-handed Irishmen or something like that.

I spend so much time with highly educated feminist men, academics, scholars, intellectuals, etc. that I had no idea things were so bad in terms of gender issues among other groups of population. These remarks don’t come from a vacuum. There is a whole culture behind them. And that’s kind of scary.

From Gissing’s The Odd Women comes this beautiful quote:

In no woman on earth could he have put perfect confidence. He regarded them as born to perpetual pupilage. Not that their inclinations were necessarily wanton; they were simply incapable of attaining maturity, remained throughout their life imperfect beings, at the mercy of craft, ever liable to be misled by childish misconceptions. Of course he was right; he himself represented the guardian male, the wife-proprietor, who from the dawn of civilization has taken abundant care that woman shall not outgrow her nonage. The bitterness of his situation lay in the fact that he had wedded a woman who irresistibly proved to him her claims as a human being. Reason and tradition contended in him, to his ceaseless torment.

Gissing’s words remain more than relevant still. His character allows the patriarchal mythology to destroy his life. Haven’t we all met such people?