“You now come to see me every few days,” the pharmacist says. “And before this year, you’d only ever come here to get you contraceptive pill. What happened to you?”

“I stopped taking my contraceptive pill,” I explain.

In a two-year field experiment, researchers found that self-employed individuals who sought company jobs scored significantly fewer interviews than peers who were employed by companies.

I’ve worked with people who were self-employed and then gotten corporate jobs. They are far, far less likely to just take corporate bullshit handed to them on a platter and pretend it’s filet mignon. That’s why corporations don’t want them – they are no longer fully zombies.

No, the real reason is that people who have been away from a regular workplace for over 6 months find it extremely hard to reintegrate themselves into an environment where they have to work with colleagues, be part of a group, control their moods, etc. They work more slowly and less effectively, they are more likely to have emotional outbursts in front of colleagues, they get distracted more easily, they get tired very fast.

I’m going to be working at home because of my maternity leave until January and I know I will have to take measures to reintegrate myself into the workplace after all that time. I’m really good at working at home but after the year I was writing my dissertation and not teaching, I had such intense difficulties with reintegrating myself into the work I love that I thought I was losing my mind. There was weight gain, depression, nightmares, etc. And nobody had warned me I would encounter these difficulties.

So let’s all keep in mind that coming back to the workplace after an absence of over 6 months requires intense psychological hygiene.

There is, however, a ray of blogging sunshine among all the poorly written posts I have shared with you. Do read the enlightening and intelligent post:

But you can’t be autistic… you’re such a good teacher!.

I could have written this post word-for-word because it reflects my own experience completely.

My PUPPS treatment is not working, and it’s the second treatment that has failed to work. We have finally found a doctor who has seen PUPPS before but he is saying he has never encountered a case nearly as bad as mine. So obviously I’m in a vile mood, and a plethora of idiotic posts that have suddenly invaded my blogroll is not helping. Let me share the pain of everybody’s stupidity with you.

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Case Study 1. When Pseudo-Feminist Discourse Reveals a Sad Personal Life

The normally not completely stupid Echidne has decided to transform into a chirpy air-head for a while with the following: “All the arguments for a bald vulva seem to me to equally apply to men’s pubic hair. The skin would be softer, the experience of intercourse would be more powerful, with less hairy padding, and so on. But do women shame men into shaving down there?” Leaving aside the childish language of shaming (and when are people going to get through their thick skulls that nobody can shame anybody into anything?), Echidne should stop undressing yokels who live in caves and meet some civilized men. Then she will discover that people who care about hygiene control the “hairy padding” irrespective of their gender. It’s always very cute when people try to pontificate about gender and end up revealing the limitations of their personal experience.

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Case Study 2. A Silly Momma’s Boy Demonstrates How Pathetic Toronto Academia Has Become

This silly little twerp with zero brains and non-existent writing skills has been entertaining me for years. He is so proud of getting hits on his stupid blog and doesn’t realize that people only read him because he is the most stupid blogger in the world. See this, for instance: “The dogmatic assumption that the Bolsheviks simply seized power in 1917 due to one magical moment of insurrection has caused serious problems for the theory of revolutionary strategy.  Here, then, is a simplistic formula resulting from this dogma: a party just needs to be a tiny organization that agitates for revolution, waits for the time to be “right”, and then conveniently appears to take the reigns of the popular uprising it agitated for––a cabal of militants accepted by the masses who have finally learned the truth.” See how the loser is talking to voices in his small, empty head? You have got to love these over-fed Momma’s boys who entertain themselves with fantasies of revolutions.

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Case Study 3. The Queen of Poor Writing Makes the Murder of Trayvon Martin Sound Ridiculous

“This crime was an act of terrorism. The verdict was an act of terrorism. People are terrified because of it.” She seems to be completely serious about it. I have read many stupid excretions written by losers who want to milk Martin’s tragedy for blog hits but this one is just the best. Whatever makes you terrified, is an act of terrorism, got it? I’m terrified of dogs (I am, and it’s not funny, I have a serious phobia), so the neighboring kid who keeps letting his ugly pooch run around unleashed should have Homeland Security on his case right now.

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Case Study 4. A Pompous Fool Justifies the Zimmerman Verdict.

“Six people who spent every day for a month intensely studying the evidence probably have a better chance of getting the right answer to the first question than I do.” Anybody has a better chance of getting the right answer to any question than this meathead (seriously, I’ve been reading him for a while) but that’s only because he is even more stupid than the brainless fools on that jury.

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Stop reading the blogroll, you’ll say. Yes, I would if I had energy for anything else at this point.

A very important and insightful post on MOOCs. Everybody talks about them but who has actually taken the trouble to analyze them at length, like this blogger did: “A well thought out MOOC costs and does not save money. It is clear to me that in order to move forward on the creation well-tempered MOOCs, we should at least for the moment decouple the discussion of cost-cutting from that of extending access to education to people who have none. These are two issues, not one, and it is my distinct impression that they have been conflated to one by the language of neoliberalism.”

“Pro-life advocates are rabid in their supposed desire to protect the unborn. They are not so moved to protect the welfare of a living child, especially if it might cost the government money. I cannot reconcile these positions and I have yet to gain any answers to this paradox from those that so violently advocate for life.” The only answer that makes sense is that not a single anti-choicer has any actual interest in any actual fetuses. All they really want is to express their rage against women. Let’s just accept this simple reality and move on already.

It is really really disturbing to discover that a blogger I never met has been having the same dream I have for about 20 years.  But it isn’t that weird for people from my part of the world to have this dream. We were all traumatized by airplanes falling out of the sky on residential buildings. (The link is in Russian.)

The greatest problem with the jury system is that jurors are often intensely stupid: “The juror said that she initially found the law surrounding the case “very confusing,” specifically referring to the last-minute addition of manslaughter to the charges they were to consider against Zimmerman. “there was a couple in there who wanted to find him guilty of something,” she said, but that neither of the options on the table, second-degree murder or manslaughter, were feasibly options given the way they read state law.” Just think about it: if they could stay sequestered for a trial, this means nobody required their presence anywhere else.

“Richard Cohen, I am a 39-year-old white woman married to a 37-year-old white man, and between us we own at least five hoodies. No one—no one—looks at either one of us wearing a hoodie and imagines that we are wearing “a uniform” of “urban crime.” The only reason anyone would look at Trayvon Martin and call a hoodie “a uniform” is because he was a black kid.” Exactly. My sister lived for hoodies when she was Trayvon’s age, and somehow nobody thought she was a criminal of any kind.

We have the same kind of stupid racists preventing Metrolink from coming to my town: “Another woman, who would not give her name, put it more explicitly: “If somebody can’t get to King of Prussia by car, they shouldn’t be coming at all.”

You’d think that nobody would be able to find anything wrong with the great initiative to offer access to stairwells to people who don’t want to take the elevator, but there are preachy drama queens who believe their self-pity is a good reason to prevent other people from taking care of their health.

And this is how I discovered that my current state school is one of the most elite universities in the country: “I believe the scientific term is FUBAR. Over three-quarters of instruction is conducted by non-tenure-track faculty (likemeeeeeeeeeeee), and the compensation and work structure for tenure-track faculty is also no picnic these days anywhere but at the most elite institutions.” I didn’t go to campus for a week and the university managed to join the ranks of the super-elite in that short period of time. Good for us!

“During the past thirty years conservatives have worked to dismantle the institutions that produced the prosperous middle class after WW2.” Of course, this fictitious “prosperous middle class” was actually a class of prosperous men who owned indigent and completely dependent women and were served by indigent and debased blacks. But who cares, as long as men had enough money to stomp on women as much as they wanted? I know everybody is sick and tired of me saying this but I will keep saying it for as long as I have to if people are not getting how offensive their slobbering over the golden age of the 1950s is.

Choosing abortion over child abuse: the most poignant, honest and powerful piece on reproductive rights I have seen in a while.

Whenever I visit the Women’s Pavilion of our local hospital, I feel both very happy and very sad. What I see there is so different from how the women of my mother’s generation had to give birth back in the Soviet Union. As I explained before, every experience of a human being in the USSR was fashioned in a sense that would break his or her spirit and sever the connections between family members. This was a process that began while one was still in the mother’s womb.

When a woman went into labor, she would be brought into the hospital and separated from the child’s father for the next 10 days that the stay at the maternity ward usually lasted. Women were kept together in large wards irrespective of what had actually brought them to the hospital. If a woman had a still-birth, for instance, she’d be kept in the same ward with a bunch of women who delivered healthy babies. Imagine the emotional state of a woman who’d have to look at other people’s happiness and think of her own dead baby for 10 days.

For some mysterious reason, underwear was strictly banned in maternity wards and the nurses – who always made an impression of having been trained by the Gestapo – hunted after every pair of panties. Women were assigned a time slot when they were supposed to give birth, and nobody cared if labor proceeded on a different schedule. When my mother went into labor with my sister, she had to schlep all the way to the nurses’ station and ask for somebody to help her deliver.

“No, you are not scheduled to give birth for the next 4 hours,” the nurse barked.

“I’ve given birth before,” my mother. “I know what is going on, and this baby is coming now. Please help me.”

“I told you to go back to your bed, you stupid broad!” the nurse hollered.

Later, the doctors told us that we were very fortunate that my sister came out alive and unharmed.

The worst part of delivery was having to get into the delivery chair. It was very high, and for a pregnant woman in labor getting into it unassisted (and, of course, nobody was willing to assist women) was torture.

After the birth, the baby would be removed from the mother’s side immediately. Fathers were banned from the event altogether, and had to roam the area where the hospital was located for the next 10 days, hoping to get a glimpse of their wives through the window.

Babies were brought to their mothers to be breast-fed on schedule and then removed immediately. Of course, nobody cared that babies might not be hungry according to the schedule. The rest of the time, babies were kept in a big room far away from their mothers and could scream their little heads off in loneliness and abandonment. If you’ve ever been around a baby, you probably know that hunger, loneliness and being separated from their parents are the most traumatic, horrible things a newborn can experience. This is precisely why all of this was done.

The nurses were careless and indifferent. As a result, cases where babies were swapped by mistake (or even by malice) were not infrequent.

The father would finally get to touch the baby when the mother was discharged. He had to pay the traditional fee to the nurses for getting the baby: 5 rubles for a boy and 3 for a girl.

This is how very uncomplicated deliveries took place. What women who had medical complications had to experience would be characterized as torture under any definition of what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

The real tragedy of Soviet life was that every tiny detail of a person’s daily experience was rendered humiliating, painful, and intolerable.

Today, this is still pretty much how you give birth in FSU countries, except if you live in a very big city and are rich enough to pay for a stay at a private facility. The nurses at the expensive facility will still be Gestapo-like, the underwear will still be banned, and the baby will be handled like a slab of meat, but at least the father will be there and you’ll get to be close to the baby.

A preacher shares:

I have never met anyone who is actually happy about having sex before they were married. All I’ve ever seen and heard is massive regret.

I would be very careful with the “If I haven’t seen it, it doesn’t exist” argument if I were a Christian pastor.

The preacher is from Grand Rapids, Michigan, one of my favorite places in this country. It sucks that the town doesn’t get less dumb preachers. Of course, I’ve never seen less dumb preachers (I’ve never seen any, to be honest). This must mean they don’t exist.

As a new wave of protests is picking up in Russia, Western journalists have already started writing silly, uninformed things about what is going on. So I want to explain what is happening to those of my readers who want the facts and not the silly hype.

Navalny is a blogger who became famous as a result of conducting detailed and very productive investigations into the impossible corruption taking place in his country. He has done especially valuable work in uncovering evidence of corruption in Russia’s immense oil and gas industry. In this sense, Navalny is a Russian Assange of sorts who has brought to light really shocking instances of Russia’s political leaders robbing their own citizens blind.

As a result of his blogging, Navalny developed a huge following, especially among the younger generation of Internet users. However, Navalny’s greatest admirers and supporters are Russia’s neo-Nazis. The very blond and very Slavic Navalny has become their greatest hope of rising to power in the country. The neo-Nazis detest Putin and see him as a traitor to the cause of creating a state dominated completely by Russians.

A while ago, photos surfaced of Navalny marching with the neo-Nazis and raising his arm in a Heil salute.

“I was just walking by and stopped to see what was going on,” the blogger explained when questioned about his connection to the Nazis. “The sun was shining too brightly, so I raised my arm to protect my eyes from the glare.”

Later, however, he was forced to acknowledge that he had been a regular participant in neo-Nazi marches and said he was doing it to make sure there was at least one decent person there.

Another endearing characteristic of Navalny is that he is into the “stand your ground” type of behavior in a way that makes Zimmerman look like a tree-hugging peacenik of the century. Once, during a political debate held in a night-club (yeah, Russians are like that, whatever), Navalny took offense to somebody saying something to somebody else, whipped out a gun, and started shooting at the talkative stranger. Remember the riddle about the bandit wars where I asked why the music was always turned up to an unbearable volume in the FSU countries in the 1990s? It was precisely to avoid this kind of situations where bandits would overhear (or believe they overheard) something somebody said to somebody else, take offense, and shoot up the room. Apparently, the bandit war mentality is still very relevant for Navalny.

Recently, Navalny announced he was going to run for Mayor of Moscow, a position of immense power in Russia. Since all of the head offices of major companies and governmental institutions are located in Moscow, the Mayor can exercise an enormous control over them (“Don’t do what I say? Prepare to be evicted / lose your water license / your fire department approval, etc.”). Navalny has a crowd of young, energetic supporters who are willing to do anything to make sure he wins. If he does – and even if he doesn’t – this election is obviously a trial run for Navalny’s future bid for President of Russia.

Putin became understandably threatened by this young and promising candidate and decided to put him in jail. According to new legislation, a conviction would disqualify Navalny from running in the future elections. Navalny was accused of corruption (pretty hilarious considering how he rose to fame) and sentenced to five years in jail. It’s impossible to say if he is guilty of anything but it is very telling that none of the people whose really massive crimes he uncovered and publicized on his blog have been punished for their corruption.

When the sentence was announced, people got angry and took to the streets. In the meanwhile, it was announced that Navalny would not go to jail for the moment but instead would be RORed, even though his conviction was not overturned. This is probably in no way related to the protests but the protests are going on.

This situation is very much in keeping with the famous saying that has defined the history of Russia as a struggle between ignorance and injustice. On the one hand, Putin is horrible and it’s great that there has appeared at least a remote possibility of an alternative candidate. Until now, there hasn’t been anybody who could play that role. However, the hope of displacing Putin that Navalny offers comes at a price of a radicalized, Nazified Russia. With all his numerous and major faults, Putin is keeping the neo-Nazis from power. Whether Navalny will ever be able to shake his Nazi connections remains a big question.

A short post on nationalism being incapable of withstanding the light of reason made me discover a weird fetish some people have:

 

You’d be surprised at how many people want to see naked photos specifically of Israeli and Jewish men. Curiously, there hasn’t been a single search for naked Israeli or Jewish woman. I have no idea what that means, especially since the post referenced an article about naked female soldiers in Israel.