The mayor of Paris has been deluged with checks for just a few cents each after complaining about damage that protesters opposed to a law legalizing same-sex marriage did to one of the French capital’s most exclusive parks. Demonstrators opposed to “marriage for all” legislation must have guessed the chaos they would cause when they sent donations of just 10 cents to help settle the $132,000 bill for repairs to the lawns of the Champ-de-Mars near the Eiffel Tower.

In fact, their petty cash protest looks set to cost Parisian taxpayers even more money, after Mayor Bertrand Delanoe revealed it could cost more to issue receipts for the money than the amount of cash he had received. Opponents of the gay marriage bill passed by the lower House of Parliament on Feb. 2 had gathered on the Champ-de-Mars on Jan. 13 in a demonstration that saw about 350,000 protesters trample  lawns that were closed off to the public and “resting” for the winter.

I don’t know what they were trying to achieve but engaging in a series of actions so idiotic and so irredeemably stupid is a sign that the anti-gay movement is on its last breath. The childish tantrum with the small checks proves that homophobes have no idea how to make anybody interested in their barbaric worldview except by these stupid stunts.

It is really great to observe the agony of a hateful movement.

It is mind-boggling how many blathering idiots think they should be squeaking instead of just chewing silently. I opened my blogroll, and here is what I immediately saw:

If feminism were about gender equality and not just about changing women’s positions in society, feminists would have chosen a word for their movement that had no connection to the concept of female or feminine.

The freak who wrote this probably congratulated himself on being super smart when he came up with this idiocy. It doesn’t occur to him that the things he lists are not mutually exclusive. Feminists work to change women’s positions in society in a way that would promote gender equality.

What a tragedy it is when people are so intellectually limited that they can’t make such a basic logical connection.

 

I’m watching a Russian match-making TV show while grading papers and peeing myself with laughter.

TV show host: Why did you love this man so much? Was he beautiful?

Woman: Yes, he was very beautiful.

TV show host: Tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged?

Woman: No, he wasn’t an alcoholic and he didn’t smoke or swear. That’s beautiful! And he was a very good person. He had minor imperfections, just like anybody.

TV show host: Like what?

Woman: When I was 7 months pregnant, he stole a ring of mine and gave it to his mistress. But he was a nice person.

TV show host: Isn’t it true that this nice person also stole the money you had been saving to buy an apartment?

Woman: Yes, but we had such a nice family, he was so good to me.

TV show host: And what about your second and third husbands? Were they as nice and beautiful?

Woman (completely seriously): No, they were even better.

I’ve been insisting that my students create original and meaningful titles for their essays. This backfired in a really big way when I received an essay titled, “Erotic Love Destroys Relationships.”

Woe be unto me.

. . . Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules–for Now? Is it any good?

A friend has been on my case for me to read it.

 

Here  is the link.

If Ahmadinejad and his wife were not so extremely ugly, a fun response would be to photoshop them into pornographic poses and broadcast the images all over the world.

Somebody very unintelligent (well, what can you expect from Inside Higher Ed?) wrote an article praising the idea of taxing the Internet. Of course, this is the kind of person who writes things like “a sharp stratification of economic strata” and “the Internet may now be expected to assume more obligations to give back to global society at large a measure of its collective wealth”, so there is no need to take this person seriously.

However, it is curious how the slogan of “just tax the bastards” is so attractive to certain folks as a way to solve any and all problems that they don’t even stop to consider where encouraging greater governmental regulations of the Internet would leave us all. While some people are bravely fighting off all attempts at Internet censorship, some pseudo-Liberals are so enthralled by the word “taxes” that they don’t stop to evaluate the consequences of the measures they support. Once the government begins to punish certain completely legal online behaviors, censorship will be one step away. And the entities that will suffer as a result will not be Google, Amazon and Facebook. It will be me and you.

Liberals like to consider themselves much smarter than the perennially childish Libertarians. Still, there is no real difference between believing that all taxes are good all of the time and being convinced that all taxes are bad all of the time. Life is a little more complicated than that.

France keeps coming up with weird ideas on how to tax everybody into the ground:

“Personal data are the fuel of the digital economy,” Edouard Geffray, the agency’s secretary general, told the French version of the online magazine Slate. “Given that, it would seem like a natural idea to envision taxing the use of them.”

While business plans built on mining consumers’ personal information from the Internet are proliferating, so are concerns about the use of the data. . . Mr. Colin said the main goal of his tax plan would be to reward companies for providing their customers with useful information, while penalizing those that did not do so.

Taxation as means of social control is a very slippery slope. It might seem like a cute idea while the policies promoted are the ones you like. But how long before taxation is used to punish you for perfectly legal behavior that is not deemed acceptable by an elected official du jour?

Amazon is confusing me with somebody. The list of books recommended based on my history of purchases is suddenly overrun by Westerns. I have never seen so many pictures of men on horses in my life.

This feels creepy. Like I got a peek into somebody else’s inner life all of a sudden.

Rob F. brought me this very interesting link. Thank you, Rob F.

A new study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that being overly involved in your grownup kids’ lives can do more harm than good.

What is sad is that studies are needed to prove the patently obvious.

The research was conducted by the same scientists who showed last year that intensive parenting — constantly stimulating your children — can make moms more depressed.

The causation here is all wrong. Housewives suffer from depression more than any group of population (irrespective of country, culture, socio-economic status, age, etc.) These are precisely the women who micromanage their children because they have nothing else to do with their lives. They micromanage as a result of the rage and depression they experience on a daily basis.

You may think you’re helping out by phoning your kids’ college professors to haggle over the difference between a B+ and an A–, but that interference may be undermining young adults’ ability to problem-solve and fend for themselves.

Parents don’t do this to help their children. They do it because:

1. They are bored.

2. Control is a socially acceptable form of aggression.

They are more than happy to undermine their children’s ability “to problem-solve and fend for themselves.” This is the entire goal of such parents’ existence because it will allow them to use their children as helpless puppets for ever and ever.

Constantly texting adult children and friending them on Facebook — letting them fly the coop but still demanding daily check-ins — is not exactly building a generation of confident and resilient grownups.

Well, duh! The last thing such parents want is to see their children become confident and resilient. To the contrary, they want them dependent and malleable.

“Parents are sending an unintentional message to their children that they are not competent,” says Holly Schiffrin, lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington. “When adult children don’t get to practice problem-solving skills, they can’t solve these problems in the future.”

 

This is the level of psychological discourse in this country. An unintentional message, indeed. There are thousands of little tricks controlling parents use to make their children completely incompetent. Fostering incompetence in a growing individual is a labor-intensive life-long project. If you undertake a series of consistent measures over the course of several decades, how unintentional can such actions possibly be?

To reach this conclusion, Schiffrin and colleagues surveyed 297 college-age children about their parents . . . Their answers showed that helicopter parenting decreased adult children’s feelings of autonomy, competence and connection.

And this is EXACTLY what controlling parents want. Note that this is what happens in every abusive situation: the victim of abuse is isolated, made dependent, and rendered helpless.

In turn, feeling incompetent led to increased reports of feeling depressed and dissatisfied. “These parents have the best intentions,” says Schiffrin.

Yes, the best intentions in the world, such as preventing them from ever growing up and having a life, a will, or a single breath that is their own and nobody else’s.

But her work should help moms to shift that perspective. Perhaps by choosing to watch Downton Abbey reruns instead of playing Candyland with a tot or editing college essays for a high-schooler, they’re actually building their offspring’s independence and confidence.

Yeah, ’cause “moms” are such brainless idiots that they have no idea what they are doing and why they are doing it. Can you get any more condescending? There is that much Downton Abbey even the most hard-core fan can stomach. And then what? How will cannibalizing parents entertain themselves if their child actually gets a life? This is the real problem of controlling parenting.

What is the use of publishing an article on a subject when you have zero insight in why helicoptering takes place and what purposes it serves? Do people who write these articles really believe that helicoptering parents are so stupid that they have no idea they are breaking their children’s backbone and turning them into lifeless dolls? Of course, they know exactly what they are doing. This is not a goal anybody confesses out loud or even quietly to themselves but it is, indeed, the only goal of overbearing, controlling parenting.