If a method of life improvement (quitting smoking, maintaining a workout schedule, controlling a gaming or alcohol addiction, working on research, losing weight, etc.) requires you to engage with the completely meaningless concept of “willpower” in any way, you need to know that all you are doing is feeding your masochistic streak.

Solve the problems that prevent you from quitting smoking, maintaining a workout schedule, controlling a gaming or alcohol addiction, working on research, losing weight, etc. and the need for these behaviors will disappear without any kind of self-torture masking as an exercise of “willpower” being necessary.

Contrary to what you have been hearing, life is not a vale of tears and constant suffering is not the norm.

P.S. I’m spending all day today visiting doctors, hence a multitude of short posts.

If we see a woman’s life as being subservient to the need to save money, I can propose a variety of great money-saving strategies:

1. Feed her dog food.
2. Refuse her all medical care and dental care.
3. Chain her to a radiator to save on clothes and shoes.
4. Don’t give her a car or any pocket money. Why does she need to go anywhere anyways?
5. One can even save on a doormat if the woman is placed strategically in front of the doorway where real human beings can wipe their feet on her.

There is a ton of savings to be had here. Why are we so fixated exclusively on the value that can be extracted from her in terms of child care?

For those (dirty rotten liars) who swear that they only police other people’s beds because marital infidelity is a sign of one’s general dishonesty as a person:

Have you noticed the complete, iron-clad loyalty of Presidents Bush Jr and Obama to their wives? And how much trust do you have for either of these guys?

So it seems like Obama is trying to scale back the war on drugs somewhat through lowering the sentences people get for drug-related crimes.

However, after his declarations about the end of the War on Terror turned out to conceal a growing effort to spy on citizens, I’m not sure this initiative doesn’t conceal some nasty new twist in the scourge that is the war on drugs.

College Misery is running this curious questionnaire on the state of higher education in the US.

What’s wrong with the current crop of undergrad students?

They were let down by the broken-down system of secondary education that prepares them for nothing but stupid multiple choice tests and by irresponsible, lazy parents who don’t want to invest any time or effort into helping their children develop.

What’s wrong with the current state of higher education in America?

Colleges have to sacrifice too much time, resources, money, and effort to conduct the remedial learning of barely literate students. This is the root of every problem in the American higher education system.

What could regular faculty do locally to improve things?

Come up with inventive ways to ensure that the remedial learning doesn’t substitute the college education entirely. For instance, one can do remedial stuff in the Freshman year but stop doing it after that.

What could part-time faculty do to not only improve their working conditions, but also the fate of our students?

Get organized, form a union. We have a labor union for contingent workers at our university, and it is a great asset to them.

Finally, somebody (other than me, I mean) managed to articulate one of the reasons why centering the current progressive discourse around the meaningless concept of privilege is a mistake:

For me, though, the biggest problem is that little word “privilege.” Why should precisely tha tbe the key term? A privilege is something extra — and from a very young age, I knew that when something was referred to as a privilege, I was in danger of losing it. How does that make sense, for instance, with something like being free from fear of police harrassment? Undoubtedly, that is part of my privilege as a white, straight, cis, well-dressed man. But when it is called a “privilege,” my initial thought is that it is something unjustified that should be taken away — i.e., we should all have to be stopped and frisked. Something similar came up in my post about how I had some degree of autonomy and dignity in my work — do we really want to say that that’s a “privilege”? In both cases, aren’t we dealing with something more like a right that’s been denied to a great many people?

Think about it, folks. All that this privilege-scratching achieves is justifying austerity policies and making you feel all noble and superior. That’s hardly hugely productive. Let’s stop already with examining privileges because that is a waste of time.

Today the Western progressives are outraged about the persecution of gay people in Russia. They are protesting, boycotting, and denouncing. And it’s something that definitely should be done because Putin’s anti-gay initiatives are disgusting, dangerous, and vile.

However, it would be nice if these same Western activists stopped to consider their own contribution to the absence of any legitimate human rights activism within Russia. How come that 22 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union there is a big gaping hole in the FSU countries where one would expect to see local human rights watches and progressive activists?

After 1991, hordes of Western activists descended on the FSU countries. They had no patience with the local needs and peculiarities. They didn’t want to invest a second of their time into figuring out what was going on in the FSU in terms of feminism, gay rights, politics, and economy. Instead, they started throwing around massive (from the point of view of a post-Soviet person in the 1990s) amounts of money to get the locals to parrot Western discourses they could neither understand nor use. With 100% of women integrated into the workforce since 1917, I is obvious that post-Soviet feminism will be quite different from the Western feminism that still battles the problem of women being interrupted too often by men when they speak. Yet, the issues that Western feminists were using to organize the FSU activism were all of the kind that the local people couldn’t relate to.

Nothing much has changed since 1991. The progressive Western circles still can only relate to the rest of the world by trying to fit alien realities into the Procrustean bed of their limited worldview. As a result, many people in the FSU countries realized that if you say what the Westerners want you to say, you will get a good handout. The Ukrainian group FEMEN is the perfect example of such pseudo-activism whose only goal is to milk the silly, gullible Westerners for money and popularity (which can then be converted into more money.)

The pseudo-activists are, of course, afraid that the silly, gullible Westerners might finally clock on to what is really happening. So they make sure that no legitimate activist gets to speak out. Anybody who tries to engage in creating the kind of progressive change that the FSU countries really need is stomped by a crowd of “professional activists” who want to keep getting paid by the Westerners. A human rights activist in the FSU countries is a completely unprincipled, profoundly corrupt individual who will say and do anything to get paid.

Had the Western activists kept their money and their inane speechifying to themselves in the past 22 years, today we would be seeing a completely different picture in terms of the defense of human rights in the FSU countries.

Another question is what makes some cities become not real cities? Why is there a massive migration out of some cities but not out of others?

Toronto, for instance, even undertook a reverse migration where people got fed up with living in the city’s butt ugly and hugely overpriced suburbs and massively moved back to the city.

Why did St. Louis become a not real city while Chicago didn’t? What is the big difference between the two? Chicago has a higher crime rate, the climate is intolerable to many people, yet it is alive. St. Louis has a much better climate (from the conventional point of view) but it stands empty.

“I’m a big city guy,” a colleague said. “But I have no interest in moving St. Louis because it isn’t a real city.”

This was the first time I heard that North American cities can be subdivided into real and not real ones. The real cities are the ones whose inhabitants have not moved out to the suburbs and continue to live their lives in the city. They sleep, eat, work, and do everything in the city and only visit the suburbs if they have a specific goal.

The not real cities are the ones that people only visit if they have a specific goal: working at one of the downtown offices, watching a baseball game or a music show, etc. Otherwise, the city just stands empty.

According to this classification, the real cities include Montreal, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and since quite recently Toronto.

The not real cities are St. Louis, Phoenix, and Detroit.

Which other real and not real cities do you know in North America?

It is very curious how the same people who decry objectification find it impossible to believe that when you respond to their posts you are engaging with them on an intellectual level and addressing their ideas. Instead, they choose to believe that you must have something personal against them.