At first, I was very puzzled by the following news item:

A student was riding the Red Line from the Central Square MBTA stop to Park Street around 11 p.m. Friday when an unknown passenger involuntarily kissed the student, according to Carole McFall, a spokeswoman for the college.

I tried to imagine how this unknown passenger could have kissed the student without wanting to. Since the definition of “involuntary” is “1. not done or made consciously; 2. not done by choice”, it seemed like the passenger lost consciousness and still somehow managed to deliver a kiss. This made no sense at all because non-intentional kissing does not seem to be possible.

Then I realized that “involuntary” was used in lieu of “by force” or “against the student’s will.”

I know that a philosopher’s life is tough, but is it really necessary for professors and grad students to get drunk together and go to mountain retreats as a group?

Here is a witty and powerful discussion of what is happening at CU-Boulder by Rebecca Schuman. Just a little quote:

Don’t get me wrong, I love Quebec but it has this tendency towards weirdness that often gets disturbing. Consider the following news item:

A local sex shop hoping to be allowed extended hours of operation because it sells “hygienic or sanitary” products has been rebuffed in Quebec Court.

This sounds very confusing until you remember that stores have to close by 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday and at 9 p.m. on weekdays. This creates constant annoyance to people who want to buy something after 5 pm on a week-end.

As a result, store owners have to go to great lengths to demonstrate that what they are selling is crucial:

The company argued it was entitled to the legal dispensation for businesses that principally sell products that are pharmaceutical, hygienic or sanitary.

Psychologist and sexologist Dr. Michael Campbell, testifying for the defence, said the word “sanitary” means health and can apply to merchandise that contributes to sexual health, including magazines and erotic birthday cards.

Truth be told, what Dr. Campbell said is incontrovertible. But Quebec is turning towards puritanism, which is why this was the court’s response to the sexologist’s convincing argument:

Justice of the peace White said that, while the law didn’t specify the products covered by the exemption, she didn’t think the broader interpretation was “plausible” and in line with what lawmakers intended. . .

“Even in 2014,” it’s doubtful that most people would consider sex toys a product that needs to be available outside of regular commercial hours, she said.

She conceded her ruling against the store could have an impact on its financial health, but “the court does not believe that public health will be any worse for it.”

Maybe Justice White should hop into her time-travel machine and go back to her Victorian era where “most people” are as terrified of sex toys as she is.

OK, I know I have blogged about this on numerous occasions but this really, really, really bugs me, and I have reached the point of complete saturation with this topic in everybody I know in RL.

So my department has decided that we will proceed with the name change in a way that will mollify both the PC idiots and the Anthropology losers. We will now transform from a nobly and beautifully named “Department of Foreign Languages and Literature” to the idiotically and kookily named “Department of World Languages.”

I can’t imagine introducing myself as somebody from “World Languages.” I also fear that signing an article submission with this departmental name will make people decide I’m an idiot from a department of New-Agey fools who do nothing but create language textbooks.

If somebody has two identical job offers and one is from a “Department of World Languages” while another one is from a department with a normal name, would anybody choose “World Languages”? I wouldn’t have even applied to this university if this had been the departmental name in 2008!

This will be an expensive change at a time when we constantly have our funding for legitimate research and teaching expenses frozen. We couldn’t even afford to buy a Christmas-time pizza to show our gratitude to our lab workers. But servicing people’s weird PC needs can always be funded.

Yes, PC police exists but it is located exclusively inside people’s heads. And I guess I’m just too foreign ever to stop feeling annoyed by this sad fact.

I kept wondering why there were so many references to Romanian immigrants in recent Spanish literature. And then I discovered the following information:

The top three immigrant groups in the EU are Turkish
(2.4 million), Moroccan (1.7 million), and Romanian (1.6 million).

Does anybody know why Romanians emigrate in such large numbers and not, say, Ukrainians, Poles, Slovenians, etc.?

I’ve been trying to understand the concept of corporatism, but I’m kind of stuck. I’m good on the differences between fascist and liberal corporatism but what I don’t get is why corporatism is “a system of permanent, structured inequality.” This always is mentioned as a given but I’m not getting what is especially unequal about corporatism that is not present in the alternatives. I also am not sure what the alternatives are.

Does anybody know anything about this? Please don’t give me links, though. All I want is a simple short explanation for dummies. What do you associate with the word “corporatism”?

My father told me over Skype that political freedom is starting to be felt in Cuba. I asked him what he was referring to.

“Animators are dancing in very frivolous ways,” he said. “Patriotism is dead, and all people care about is money.”

I’m not as opposed as many of my colleagues to using translation in language teaching, so I asked students to translate a few paragraphs from Benjamin Prado’s 2013 novel Ajuste de cuentas. One of the sentences is:

Money works like an axe that splits society in two. On the one side, there are those who have it and on the other, those who dream of having it.

One student came up with the following translation:

Money is an axe that splits society in two: the right-wingers who have money and the left-wingers who want to have it but can only keep fantasizing about it.

A 16-year-old boy walked into his school in Moscow with a rifle and started shooting. He only had a small-caliber weapon so the number of people he killed is limited to 2. The description of the killer and his history of behavior reads like a translation from an article about the Columbine.

People who keep repeating that kids shooting up schools is a uniquely American phenomenon are idiots. This is something likely to happen anywhere where there are kids with an easy access to guns. The stronger is the tradition of socially approved child abuse in a country, the more likely it is to happen.

What is really funny in this tragic story is that now crowds of people in Russia are vociferating that they need to get armed ASAP to protect themselves from killers.

Sometimes there are cultural differences, but then sometimes there aren’t.

STARTING THE DAY RIGHT

We all know how important it is to start the day right. However, when people talk about starting the day right, they somehow automatically slip into a discussion of food and drink. We don’t normally start our days by eating and drinking, though, do we? We start them by waking up.

The very first weekly challenge of our 13-week plan will help us awaken in a self-loving and psychologically healthy way.

Assignment: go over your night clothes and underwear. Get rid of anything that is tattered, ratty, threadbare, yellowing, stained, looks worn, faded, unattractive, or sad. Just throw it all out.

It’s better to sleep naked than in an ugly, threadbare night dress with a yellowing piece of lace that is torn in one place or pajamas that are missing a button. It’s better to have 2 pairs of underwear and wash them by hand every evening than to wear ugly old pieces that you’d never want other people to see.

The good way to judge if a specific piece is acceptable is to ask: would I wear this set to the hottest, most romantic date of my life that I want to end with a lot of happy nakedness?

Nothing is sadder than people who say things like, “Nobody will see my underwear or night clothes, so who cares what they are like?” They consider themselves nobody, how tragic is that?

If getting rid of all this stuff at once is too harsh, it’s OK to do small steps and throw out one ratty piece a day until the end of the week.