What I find completely bizarre is how the recent developments in Hugo Schwyzer’s life are leading many people to say that now they doubt his sincerity. I have no idea how they even manage to connect sincerity to what is going on.

Even the sincerest among us can get sick. Even the most determined to stay healthy can end up in a hospital. Having a nervous breakdown does not in any way invalidate the sincerity of one’s political position or of one’s desire to be healthy. I mean, I recently developed gestational diabetes. Does that make you doubt the sincerity of my last week’s post on the separation of spheres as a patriarchal phenomenon? If so, then you are the one who belongs in a mental clinic.

The degree of earnestness you invest into an endeavor does not guarantee success. It is only the very immature who believe that trying very very hard will ensure that things will work out.

If one were to discover that Hugo had donated money to Mitt Romney’s campaign or collected signatures to shut down a Planned Parenthood clinic, then yes, people would be justified in suspecting that everything he had ever written on the subject of feminism was a lie. But having marital trouble and getting sick are in no way related to how honest one is about one’s political convictions. Or about trying to avoid getting sick or having marital trouble.

Everything said above can be applied to Hugo’s marital issues. How many relationships in your life have failed despite your completely earnest and sincere dedication to making them work? One? Two? Eight? Are those failures evidence that you were insincere all along? If so, then you need to reexamine the kind of magical thinking that leads you to invest sincerity with the power to make everything right.

And just so that I don’t have to start a new post on this subject: if you in any way care about the nature of Hugo’s marital problems and wonder if he cheated on his wife, who he cheated with, how many times, etc., you need to know that you have serious psychosexual issues that you’d be well-served to address. An emotional investment into the sex lives of anybody other than your own sex partners is not healthy.

I want to reiterate that a persistent desire to play the savior to others, especially to those who have not explicitly asked you for help and advocacy, is a sign of cowardice and incapacity to face your psychological issues. Saviors use other people to feel self-righteous and to bully those who are not as willing to adopt the Savior role. They thrive on misery they claim they want to assuage.

Today is the day when The Stupid rules. Do you love this kind of lists as much as I do?

However, the solution proposed to this situation by a lot of high-profile feminists with, it must be pointed out, a lot of relative privilege (including in many cases, but not limited to: cis privilege, white privilege, class privilege, urban privilege, thin privilege, religious privilege, and straight privilege). . .

Can you try to guess which specific situation elicited this list of “privileges” including the mystifying thin privilege and urban privilege? I bet you will never be able to figure this out. The “solution proposed to this situation by a lot of high-profile feminists with, it must be pointed out, a lot of relative privilege” has to do with whether Twitter should introduce a “report abuse” button.

I didn’t stick around that blog to figure out how being thin and urban makes you more (or less, who knows?) likely to want the a “report abuse” button on Twitter. You will have to discover that for yourself if you are interested.

All I can say is, really, what depravity wouldn’t those thin, urban, religiously privileged people stoop to! They need to keep their emaciated anti-countryside fingers off our Twitter accounts.

We were invited to a colleague’s place for barbecued hog’s head (for the more adventurous among us) and ribs (for the less adventurous). This was the first time in my life that I tried ribs, and you know what? They were lovely. Plus they are the best food ever for my low sugar diet.

I have this weird habit of deciding that I hate certain foods and never even trying them. I really hated Italian food, for example. I’d never tried it but I knew it was disgusting. And then colleagues practically forced me to try it, and I realized it was the best food in the world.

It’s the same with ribs. I always thought they were nasty. Today, I discovered the truth. Of course, after this huge revelation I was not ready for a new one, so I didn’t try the head. You can see it in the photo.

Many people mistakenly believe that the patriarchal system is about women being downtrodden and subjected to men 100% of the time. This is not the case at all, at least not in Christian countries.

The patriarchy is based on the concept of the separation of spheres. Women are excluded from the public sphere but are compensated for that by having control over the private sphere. Men, in the meanwhile, are disempowered in the private sphere but reign in the public sphere.

Since it’s normal for people to need both spheres to be developed in their lives, patriarchal societies offered opportunities for men and women to pretend they had access to both spheres. For instance, all of those all-male clubs for aristocratic men in European countries created an atmosphere of a home environment where men could have a sort of a private sphere of their own.

As a result, we can conclude that the goal of feminism is not only to restore the public sphere to women for their free use of it but also to restore the private sphere to men. Pushing men out of the private sphere to make oneself feel better or more competent is as anti-feminist as when men keep women out of the workplace.

The breast feeding class started with the phrase, “Breastfeeding has been around forever.”

This doesn’t sound extremely promising.

I want to use the public space of this blog to congratulate the people who operate the Madison County Transit System of the state of Illinois on the highly effective and successful public transportation system they run.

For the past 4 years, I have been using MCT on a regular basis. I use it at least several times a week and rely on different bus lines to meet my needs of a person who doesn’t drive. I can say that this is the most punctual, well-organized public transportation system I have ever seen. The drivers are extremely polite, professional, and caring.

These days, I have to go to the hospital twice a week for pregnancy-related tests. There is no direct line because the hospital is located in another town, so I need to transfer between two bus lines. And you should see how the drivers look out for me and cooperate to make sure I’m as safe and comfortable as possible. I travel at different times, so I always meet different drivers, all of whom are fantastic.

“No, I’m not letting you get off here,” a driver says. “This is a very busy intersection; it might be dangerous.”

Then the driver gets in touch with a colleague over the radio and tells me, “I will let you off over there instead. Now cross the road on the crossing and go stand in the shade under that big tree. Make sure you stay out of the sun! The other bus will pick you up in exactly one minute and a half.”

Now, the driver doesn’t have to care whether I cross the street at a dangerous intersection or stay out of the sun. But how great is it to see people who do care!

The standard of living in any area depends, to a significant degree, on the availability of a reliable and accessible public transportation system. We are supremely fortunate in Madison County to have MCT serve our needs. It is very cheap, so anybody can afford it but the standard of service is extremely high. Among other things, MCT offers a door-to-door service for the disabled and the elderly. Just imagine what a difference a service like this can make in the life of a disabled person.

Thank you, MCT, you are the best!

Valuable observations:

I’ve noticed that a deli where we routinely get sandwiches has switched to using cheaper, flimsier paper to wrap them.

To compensate for the flimsy paper, the sandwich makers have started using two sheets of it.

I am sure an executive somewhere got a bonus for that. Saving money, donthca know.

And yet no money is being saved and customers aren’t any happier. Instead, time is wasted, processes are less efficient and everyone is unhappy.

That sums up the imperatives and manias of modern American business in one example.

We have the same problem at our university. Some genius decided to “save” money by buying substandard, dry, and brittle chalk that was cheaper than our regular brand. As a result, we use two whole sticks to write a very simple text on the blackboard. The floor is covered with chalk dust. Chalk sticks crumble in your hands the moment you touch them. We now get through a packet of chalk in 3 days as opposed to about two weeks that good chalk lasted. Plus everybody is annoyed and frustrated. Plus asthmatic and allergic people wheeze and cough in the clouds of chalk dust.

The bad chalk proved more expensive than the good, high-quality kind. Yet nobody has addressed this ridiculous situation in spite of endless complaints from faculty members and students. Because, you know, SAVINGS. They only exist on paper, but who cares, right?

Oh, God! Did you see this:

Recent events, including my breakdown and hospitalization and revelation of multiple affairs (for the record, none with students, and including more woman than Christina) have revealed me to be broken, a fraud.

I am not who I claimed to be, not who I tried to be. I need to work on getting sober again, seeing if my marriage can be repaired, and staying alive for my beautiful precious children. That’s the real truth. I am not well but I will be. I am on heavy meds, including (ironically) Klonopin, the very drug that is mentioned in the story below. I am certainly not fit for a public role.

Poor Hugo Schwyzer! Yes, he was often annoying, and he has been obnoxious to me personally, so I probably have more reasons to dislike him than  you do. However, when the crowd of holier-than-though bullies started persecuting him, I felt horrible for the guy. It was especially shocking to see how the pseudo-feminists who bullied him slipped into the rhetoric of religious fanaticism to aid them in their efforts.

Now the guy has suffered a breakdown and the self-righteous are placing bets on whether he will kill himself. My disgust with these freaks knows no bounds. Bullying people with mental illness is just wrong. Bullying anybody is wrong. We can disagree with what Schwyzer had to say when he was still writing, but kicking a person who is down is just low.

There are many reasons to dislike Hugo, but I want to point out one of the equally many reasons to like him. Here is his last statement in the most recent interview he gave:

I wish Hugo Schwyzer a safe and prompt recovery. I also wish him safety from bullies both in RL and online.

And why does he have to add Russia to the list of subjects he is stupid about?

In the first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation suffered so horribly that it lost millions in population, because people stopped having children out of apprehension for the future while others drank themselves to death out of depression.

If this faux Liberal had any respect for people’s agency, he would not see the perfectly legitimate decision not to have children for a while as “horrible suffering.” The only folks who do “suffer horribly” as a result of this completely imaginary demographic crisis that supposedly plagues Russia are the Russian racists who are terrified of the non-lily-white immigrants coming to the country.

And as for drinking, that is not something hugely new for Russia. People definitely did not start boozing themselves to death in huge numbers in 1991. This trend began a few centuries earlier. As they say, it’s the climate, stupid!