A scandalous Russian politician known for his pro-fascist, anti-Ukrainian and woman-hating statements visited Ukraine and was happily sharing his extreme views at a press conference when a woman in the audience threw pickled cabbage at him and yelled, “You hate Ukrainians!” This politician hates pretty much everybody in sight but Ukrainians have been an object of his particularly  virulent statements. And Ukrainians have always been known for carnavalesque forms of political activism.

This Russian politician was created as a political project by the Kremlin and the KGB in 1990 when it became clear that the rapid transformations the country was undergoing had produced a very large group of people who weren’t mentally equipped to handle the stress. These people were experiencing a psychotic break with reality and were too many to be dismissed. In order to provide them with an outlet for their rage and resentment, this “politician” (called Vladimir Zhirinovsky) was put in charge of voicing in very loud and obnoxious ways the most outrageous ideas anybody could think of.

The Russian leadership has been extremely good at organizing fake protest movements that absorb the votes of the discontented groups, create an impression that there is a variety of political parties in the country, and maintain the status quo.

This is why I always have fits of roaring laughter whenever people in the West try to inform me that there is democracy in Russia.

Let’s proceed from the assumption that most human beings are rational creatures guided by a healthy self-interest.

If that is so, then what makes people invest inordinate amounts of time and energy into petty squabbles that could be resolved within minutes through the medium of a frank discussion? There has to be something they get from crating a quagmire of meaningless little intrigues that poison their lives for decades.

Obviously, one part of it must be a profound need for a high level of stress. Still, they choose this specific way of maintaining a stressful environment so there must be some sort of a pay-off in it for them.

True story. There are these two academics who have been engaged in a vendetta for over 20 years. The number of nasty things they have done to each other (and each other’s friends, and each other’s graduate students) is staggering. The initial reason for the animosity between them was that when they were newly hired Assistant Profs, the Chair of the department invited one of them to a party at his house but failed to invite another one.

Instead of getting together for a beer and sharing a kindly joke about the older academic getting all dotty and trying to play favorites, the young professors conceived a profound mutual hatred and have been persecuting each other ever since. The rift-causing Chair has been dead for over a decade, yet the drama does not abate. It is sad to think of all the articles these very talented scholars could have published, all of the students they could have mentored, and all of the parties they could have organized as friends had they not been so dedicated to wasting their lives on this idiotic squabble.

I see one person after another get bogged down in the muddle of their own making. Good, intelligent people they all are. Yet the need to get into a huff over something completely trivial and blow it out of all proportion seems overpowering. This mystifies me because of how useless and un-productive this is. For me, the best-case scenario is: I come to work, do my job, like everybody, everybody likes me, peace, love, bubble gum.

Only too often, however, I discover that many people can’t tolerate a peaceful environment and need to taint it with petty intrigues. If you have any insights why people do that, please share.

P.S. I would like to keep this discussion intelligent, which means that silly suggestions that this is somehow more ubiquitous in academia than anywhere else are not welcome. I’ve had enough of dealing with people’s immaturity this month to last me until May. And if you insist, I will regale you with a story from the world of business which is even worse than the one you just read about.

It is very easy for malicious people to manipulate a person like me who is honest and sincere to the point of simple-mindedness.

Bad, bad, evil manipulators.

They only put their own health at risk, though, because nothing undermines it more than guilt.

It’s +17C right now. That is what summer is like in Ukraine. Or almost. I’m wearing my favorite summer dress (the one you can see in the Angry Clarissa photo) and high boots. They cost a packet, and there is no chance I will let this weather trick me out of getting my money’s worth out of it.

P.S. I’m about to initiate a very unpleasant confrontation which is why I publish all these posts to distract myself.

This is SO true:

Team-building exercises usually make intelligent people despise each other.  This is because intelligent people resent being manipulated into a false feeling of camaraderie, and would rather remain wary and uncooperative with one another than prove a person that would initiate team-building exercises is actually capable of making us into a team. Brown-nosers that cooperate cheerfully (also known as the Education faculty, who love this sort of shit) are looked upon with the same malice as the collaborators in Vichy France. In the end, the only way we will coalesce into a team is if we decide to burn you in effigy.  Or for real.

This is the best paragraph I have read in a while. The Education faculty are, indeed, always at the forefront of every idiotic and humiliating group activity.

Yet again, the Russian Parliament is embroiled in trying to advance a bill that will prohibit “the propaganda of homosexuality.”

There is no bill prohibiting the propaganda of Stalinism but there is a bill prohibiting something that cannot be advanced through propaganda no matter how hard you try. Because if propaganda could influence human sexuality, there would be no gay people by now.

God, what a brainless jerk she is:

“As a child, I never heard one woman say to me I love my body. Not my mother, my elder sister, my best friend. No one woman has ever said, I am so proud of my body. So I make sure to say it to Mia, because a positive physical outlook has to start at an early age.” ~ Kate Winslet

Yes, it will totally help the kid to develop a healthy body image to have a stick-thin anorexic chirp about how she is proud of her body all day long.

Reader Steve says he does not associate me with a Chrysler PT-Cruiser and says this car is not in the least in my style. Here goes my fantasy of myself, getting out of a PT-cruiser in a huge black hat and a silver fox boa. . .

What car do you think would suit me?

Gosh, it is so sad to see people who know absolutely nothing about teenagers and have somehow managed to forget how they were in adolescence work with teenage kids:

What about the girl who tells me on a daily basis that she despises reading and writing (and can’t do much of either) but plans on going to college to be a lawyer? Would it not be wise for me to inform her that she’d be wasting her money and she should also consider other roads?

Oh but what about the young lady who plays nail salon in the back of the classroom, and refuses to do any work? Could I not suggest that she get a cosmetology license and maybe learn how to run a salon as opposed to wasting her time and money in college?

I was both of these girls in adolescence. I would go on long and intense rants about the uselessness of studying  literature and about how the only pursuit worthy of engaging in was the one that would be likely to bring in big amounts of money. I drove my high school literature teacher to distraction with my arsenal of inventive strategies aimed at demonstrating how much I despised her class. And if you asked me at 14 or 15 what was more important, painting one’s nails or doing work, I can guarantee to you that “work” would not have been the answer.

Still, I ended up teaching literature at a university instead of painting nails at a salon.

Teenagers’ main task in life is developing their identity. It is a long and painful process that, for a while, obscures pretty much anything else for them. In this search for an identity, adolescents try on a variety of behaviors, personas, ways of being. Their attempts to shock and outrage serve the purpose of distinguishing themselves as owners of an actual identity of their own. This is why it would be extremely stupid to take a teenager’s “I hate books and want literature to crawl into a corner and die” seriously.

The response to a teenage student that the author of the linked post is considering (“Would it not be wise for me to inform her that she’d be wasting her money and she should also consider other roads?”) is pretty much the worst response you can give to a kid at this age. If you get into a snark contest with a teenager, you are done for.

It would be very good if people who worked with kids familiarized themselves at least with the basics of the different stages of human development.

“We must stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican party that talks like adults. It’s time for us to articulate our plans and visions for America in real terms. We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. We’ve had enough of that. We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters. We need to trust the smarts of the American people. We have to stop dumbing down our ideas and stop reducing everything to mindless slogans and tag lines for 30-second ads. We must be willing to provide details in describing our views.”—Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R), in a speech to the Republican National Committee.

Good plan. Also, dump the religion. That ship has sailed, seriously.