In Moscow, people carrying umbrellas are being dragged away and thrown into prison transportation vehicles by police officers. Go see the photo at the link, if you don’t believe me. (The link is in Russian, of course.)

The reason why Russian police is hunting down people who use umbrellas is that an umbrella has come to symbolize resistance to Putin’s regime. Carrying an umbrella on a rainy day is quite a tiny and insignificant act of defiance (especially compared to what real protesters are exposing themselves to in Ukraine) but even this is not countenanced in Putin’s Russia.

Last week, the only TV channel in the country that is not transmitting 100% of news and shows that are sponsored by the government and approved by Putin gave the authorities an excuse to close it down. The channel posted a question on its discussion board that asked the viewers whether they believe that during WWII it would have made more sense not to defend the city of Leningrad. As you know, the blockade of Leningrad lasted 872 days and led to massive starvation of the civilian population of the city.

The TV channel in question suggested that viewers discuss whether the human cost of the blockade could have been lowered if the city had been ceded to the Germans. The government used this as a pretext to start a massive campaign against this TV channel for desecrating the memory of the defenders of Leningrad.

Now the channel is being closed down. The channel in question is called “Dozhd'” which means “Rain.” So the channel asked its supporters to signal their support by carrying an umbrella in one of the squares of Moscow. And now the umbrella owners are being arrested.

I’n writing all this because I keep seeing posts of the “Maybe Putin is not that bad” variety. People, wake up, he’s arresting people for carrying umbrellas in public and closing down TV channels for suggesting people discuss WWII. Yes, he is that bad and and worse. Jeez.

So it’s that time of the year again and we just spent two hours with our accountant. Altogether, we are paying 19,9% of our total income in taxes. I’m not talking about tax brackets, exemptions, state or federal. Just actual amounts.

To me, anything that is over 15% in taxes is unfair. Over 30% would constitute a gross injustice in my eyes. So we are a little bit into the unfair territory but not a whole lot. I can live with a little under 20% in taxes. Anything over it would start making me antsy.

So the news is neither good or bad in our case.

After reading my post about the death of Fordism, David Bellamy asked:

On of the reasons for attracting immigrants to first world countries is precisely – as I suspected – because their presence is likely to dilute the resistance to post-Fordism.

Then why are Repubenrons trying so fiercely to limit immigration?

I was going to address this later, but since the question has been asked – and it’s an absolutely crucial question – I will discuss this now.

David is absolutely right: the trend of admitting (thank you for the correction, reader V) immigrants into a country in order to dilute any possibility of resistance or discontent with the advent of post-Fordism belongs to Western Europe and Canada much more than to the US.

The reason for this is that there is already within the US a large group of people who are the emotional equivalent of immigrants.

Deeply alienated from the mainstream culture in the US, incapable of understanding the TV shows the majority watches, the books on the best-seller lists and the laws governing the majority’s lives, speaking its own language, clinging desperately to outdated ultra-patriarchal structures common to Third World countries, suspicious of any governmental institution, insular, isolated, confused, often very angry at the incomprehensible world that is so different from everything they find familiar and comforting – I could be describing an immigrant* or an ultra-conservative American Evangelical.

As long as it is possible to keep this group as isolated, confused and scared as it is right now, there will be no need to look for any other group to dilute social resistance to post-Fordism.

Of course, the question here is the following: is the death of Fordism a fully negative phenomenon? Is post-Fordism a regressive trend?

Or – and this is the most interesting issue to ponder – are these ultra-conservative forces unwittingly assisting the advent of a more progressive era?

Isn’t it fascinating to consider whether, ultimately, the Occupy movement is defending an outdated, hierarchical, socially very conservative system while the Evangelicals are smoothing the way for a system that is more flexible, less hierarchical, and explosively progressive socially?

*Yes, not immigrants are like that. Some learn the language (and I obviously don’t mean this literally), go to Yale, and become part of the American mainstream. Just like some people who grow up in ultra-oppressive Evangelical environments become professors of mathematics, adopt deeply progressive beliefs, and start using the word “Repubenrons.”

So it turns out that the system whose demise we are witnessing has a name: Fordism. Fordism is

mass production of standardized products, mass consumption, internal job ladders, relative employment security, and a government system of social security and income maintenance (Kitty Calavita, Law & Society Review.)

In place of Fordism, we are getting post-Fordism, which is

an emphasis on “just-in-time” production inputs, labor cost reductions, flexibility in hiring and firing, an increase in contingent or part-time jobs, and gradual retrenchments of the welfare state (ibid).

Michael Moore’s documentaries are finally starting to become comprehensible. I know everybody else already knows all this but I wasn’t born in a capitalist country, so I’ve been mystified by a deep emotional attachment to a system whose name was unknown to me.

On of the reasons for attracting immigrants to first world countries is precisely – as I suspected – because their presence is likely to dilute the resistance to post-Fordism.

Addictions don’t destroy people. They come to people who have already been destroyed. The greater is the destroyed part of one’s personality, the heavier the addiction.

The only way of curing the addiction is through rebuilding the destroyed aspects of the addict’s individuality. As it gets rebuilt, it will push out the addiction.

And it bears repeating that anybody who uses the words “will-power” and “self-control” in the context of addiction (or actually in any context) should be avoided. These are also damaged people. Not as damaged as addicts but definitely seriously wounded.

The following drawing won the competition for the best image that should represent Ukraine on the Ukrainian Google page:

The whole thing is just offensive. I have the following questions to ask of the creators of this monstrosity:

1) Why is a church positioned right in the midst of the picture? Religion plays a very insignificant role in the lives of the absolute majority of Ukrainians.

2) Why is the church Russian Orthodox and why is its architecture so obviously Russian? Churches in Ukraine don’t look like that, not even in the heavily Russianized Eastern part of the country. Our Ukrainian churches look very different. They are not white. If one truly needed to stick a church in there, why not use an example of the amazing Ukrainian baroque in there?

Besides, among the puny number of people in Ukraine who practice a religion, many are Catholic. This isn’t a uniformly Russian Orthodox country.

3) Why is the man wearing sharovary (the traditional folk costume that obviously has not been worn by anybody in the country for centuries)? Note that the woman has modern attire. What is the message here? That Ukrainian men are outdated and women are modern?

4) Also, why is the woman kneeling in this awkward position while the man is patting her down like a household pet? Have the creators of this crappy drawing actually met any Ukrainian families? Historically, this kind of dynamic never existed in Ukraine. As long as there has been Ukraine and records of its daily life have been kept, no evidence of this pathetic female subjection to the husband, the children and the church has existed.

5) Why is Ukraine presented as exclusively agrarian? The image of Ukraine as a country of peasants was promoted heavily in the USSR. Only the works of literature that were set in the country-side were allowed to be published. If, say, a 19-century author had written 5 novels set in a city and 3 short stories set in a village, only the short stories would be reprinted in the USSR and taught to school-children. This was part of a very successful effort of convincing Ukrainians that we were backwards, uncouth country bumpkins.

In reality, however, Ukraine has been industrialized for a very long time. The price we paid for that industrialization was enormously high. Millions of peasants were starved and the Ukrainian agriculture was all but destroyed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet government made efforts to retain Ukrainians in the country-side. People were not allowed to have their passports in their possession and couldn’t leave their villages. This didn’t work, however, and people of my mother’s generation fled the country-side in massive numbers.

This drawing fails to reflect anything whatsoever about Ukraine’s reality. The author of this piece should take this sad manifestation of a diseased subconscious to his or her analyst because while it lacks any artistic merit, its analysis might help this poor person get at least somewhat more stable psychologically.

The only positive thing about the picture is the letter “G” that reflects the colors of the gay flag and probably symbolizes the orientation of the country towards gay rights.

Dr. Karen published an intimidatingly long and scarily anal post on how to be in control of every second of your campus visit.

When I try to imagine a person who would be capable of memorizing that list of recommended behaviors and would retain this degree of control over his or her conduct just to be liked by people, one word comes to mind: sociopath.

Do people really, honestly, sincerely want to work alongside such a highly manipulative, completely fake and barely human individual?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the best commenters in the world are the ones who comment on my blog. But there is value in reading comments on other blogs, too. I rarely do that and that’s a shame because look what I just found on Rebecca Schuman’s blog. A reader is shocked by the blogger’s massive output and says:

RS’s general leitmotif is outrage at the various higher ed injustices – not that there aren’t injustices out there (hell, I can think of many injustices myself! just not related to higher ed…), but I just didn’t realize there were two new injustices a week to write about!

The guy either has the greatest sense of humor ever or. . .

I don’t know who lives in Southeast Evanston but they sound very disturbed:

The Southeast Evanston Association, in an email message to its members, says neighbors need to assure that the establishment will carry “a hotel brand that will maintain a high quality of business, and not devolve into cheap housing for transient academics.”

I really wonder what that neighborhood is like if its residents are so terrified of “transient academics.” I mean, what are these scary creatures likely to do, grab innocent residents an quote Agamben at them? Yes, what a horrible menace.

Soon we will see messages posted on the gates of gated communities, “No thinking beings allowed lest they disturb our contented cud-chewing.”

Might some people consider Wikipedia too “male” because there is no pink on the website?