I just met somebody who teaches public speaking online. And being a smart person, she laughs and says, “Yeah, I know. But if people want to pay for this load of BS, then who am I to argue?”

 

A group of armed men have stormed and occupied the building of the Crimean parliament and put up the flag of the Russian Federation.

Putin has ordered military maneuvers he is calling “regular practice” at the border between Russia and Ukraine. The war ships of the Baltic fleet are moving in the direction of the Crimea.

The ousted President Yanukovich has come out of hiding and declared that he’s the legitimate president and his administration needs to be defended.

I just heard something curious from a colleague in social sciences. She says that in the US the percentage of children in the foster system is heavily skewed towards Muslim children. I don’t understand ow this can be.

Christianity denies the value of the extended family and exalts the nuclear family. The positive result of this is that the patriarchal family structure is undermined. The negative result is that orphans don’t have anywhere to go and end up abandoned by their relatives.

Islam and Judaism, however, don’t have this absolute denial of the extended family. Hence, the patriarchal model is extremely strong and orphaned children are always cared for by the extended family.

But this scholar’s data seems to contradict this. Does anybody have any insight? What am I missing?

The CNN is stupid, of course, but sometimes it invites interesting people to utter a couple of sentences. On Sunday, there was this gentleman with the unfortunate last name of Gopnik who spoke very well about the Humanities.

Gopnik said that Obama’s tiresome spiel about not everybody needing a college degree because for some folks learning mechanical skills will be enough to make a living is profoundly classist.

“This will place everybody in their own box, like streamline everything,” Fareed Zakaria whelped happily. “Like in Germany where everybody is in their own class and there is no unemployment as a result.”

The intelligent Gopnik fellow whose last name tells us that his family line benefited enormously from the cocnept of social mobility explained that locking some people into a box where nothing but their physical strength and their stomachs will ever be utilized is hardly fair.

It is, indeed, curious that people who assure us that one can do perfectly well in life based on nothing more than mechanical skills all go to Harvard, live in mansions, and wouldn’t know a hammer from their elbow. Something tells me that Obama is not making the same “not everybody needs college” speeches to his daughters.

I really hope Rebecca Schuman doesn’t mind me quoting her Facebook post here but I just had to share. I will remove it if the author objects and I don’t plan on posting anything from her Facebook here again.

Schuman started a status update with the words, “My husband’s Saturn. . .”

My instant reaction was, “Oh Got, not astrology, I can’t take this crap any longer. And here I thought she was an intellectual.”

And then I read some more and realized she was talking about a car.

I really should stop watching so much Russian television* or I will start seeing astrologists everywhere.

* FSU countries have been indulging an obsession with all kinds of occult, superstitious garbage since the late 1980s.

There is no “brown threat” in Ukraine. However, quite a few political forces and private individuals are interested in persuading the world that Ukrainians are Jew-hating neo-Nazis whose main goal in overthrowing the corrupt government was to get a chance to slaughter Jews.

Putin’s propaganda machine spreads these lies to justify the possible annexation of parts of the country. Putin is used to justifying his invasions into other countries by claiming that he only does so to protect somebody. Thus, a group in need of protection will be manufactured.

At the same time, Israeli organizations are also stoking the fears with the goal of trapping the few Jews who remain in Ukraine into making the mistake of their lives and moving to Israel.

The third group that is interested in creating an image of anti-Semitic Ukraine are, of course, anti-Semites. What better way to pretend that one is not an anti-Semite than by projecting the unacceptable quality onto a group of strangers?

This blog’s reader gave me a link to the following article from Al Jazeera, a news outlet that I always despised and now despise even more:

My sources point to a calm, adamant, confident Kremlin that will act to protect the millions of Ukrainians and Russian citizens who are at risk from the fascists and anarchists in general. The Jews are part of the population that Moscow will move to protect. My sources indicate that Russia will move to reinforce the military installations in Crimea and then prepare adequate means to help other regions where Russian citizens are concentrated, like Odessa.

Just as I’m saying: Putin will “protect” Ukrainians by invading their country, and the idiot Westerners will stand around, cheering this as a victory over fascism.

And on page 116 of Lamont’s book I realized that she is an irredeemable idiot. See the following quote:

A more aggressive masculine style may have been more acceptable a generation ago.

So Michele Lamont, if you ever chance upon this post, I want you to know that:

You are a brainless idiots who has zero intelligence and who perpetuates idiotic gender stereotypes because you have nothing of value to offer to the world. All you can produce is stupid gossip and ridiculous opinions of an uneducated semi-literate fool. 

Is my style aggressive and masculine enough for you, you stupid piece of chauvinistic garbage? If not, there is a lot more “masculine” aggression within me, so just ask.

Sincerely yours,

Clarissa who is sick to death of brainless broads who keep telling her that her way of being makes her a man.

And please, whatever you do, spare me the argument that “but it isn’t Lamont’s fault if aggression is perceived as a masculine trait.” In the quoted statement, the person doing the perceiving is Lamont. And she never signals any disagreement with this perception. Is it OK to say, “A greedy Jewish style may have been. . .”? Or “this Ukrainian-style laziness is outdated”? Or “the lecherously Mexican style is out of fashion”? No? Why not? Because it promotes a nasty stereotype while presenting it as something the author doesn’t dispute? Well, that’s my objection to Lamont’s text.

Sandra Heine Merchant asked about Crimea. This is an important but also a very sad issue.

My colleague, the political scientist, says she has resigned herself to the possibility that the Crimea will be annexed by Russia within two weeks under the pretext of “protecting” Russians.

All I see on the subject of the Crimea in Western media is the boring and idiotic discussion of “whose land this was initially.” As I always say on the subject of Israel, such conversations drive me up a wall. Which ethnic group “owns” land by right of original settlement is beyond irrelevant. None of us will ever figure out where we should go if we start reorganizing the world on this basis.

So let’s move away from this silliness and discuss what is really at stake. When Ukraine agreed to relinquish its nuclear arsenal, this was done on one enormously important condition. The condition is that if Ukraine agrees to live by the side of a huge nuclear power without any nuclear weapons of its own, the international community will guarantee that it will protect the sovereignty of Ukraine within its borders such as they were at the time of the signing of Budapest accords.

After the fall of the USSR, Ukraine was the third largest nuclear power in the world. Its nuclear arsenal was bigger than those of China, UK and France combined. And you know what Ukraine did with all those weapons? It send them to Russia. In 1994, the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances guaranteed, in exchange, that Ukraine’s 1994 borders would be respected. The United States offered to uphold that guarantee.

Handing over your entire nuclear arsenal to the country that has always been and is now the greatest aggressor against your sovereignty is a pretty big sacrifice, don’t you think? And Ukraine made this sacrifice to ensure global peace and stability. If the guarantors of this deal did not think that the Crimea region legitimately belonged to Ukraine, they should have raised that issue before the country relinquished all means of defending itself from Russia. It is an absolute mockery of the very idea of international law and the diplomatic process to start now discussing that well, maybe the Crimea should not be Ukrainian after all.

It is absolutely appalling that a country should enter into diplomatic agreements in good faith, fulfill everything it took upon itself to do, and then be abandoned to its fate. This is unconscionable.

As the resident authority on Ukraine, I’m happy to answer any questions people have on the subject.

Reader Stille asks about Yulia Timoshenko’s speech. Timoshenko is a Ukrainian politician who was jailed by the corrupt president Yanukovich. She was very popular as a politician and he feared her popularity. In jail, she was denied medical care, and as a result, has been incapacitated.

Timoshenko was let out of jail two days ago. She can’t walk, so she was speaking out of a wheel-chair. I sympathize with Timoshenko and am prepared to make huge allowances to her fragile mental and physical state after what she underwent in jail and what amounts to torture. And you know that I do not use such words lightly.

However, the speech she made in front of the protesters in the Maidan was a disaster. This speech has effectively buried her chances to win the presidency of the country. Which is very sad since she is the only politician strong and charismatic enough to play that role at the moment.

The biggest mistake Yulia made was yelling (in a very emotional and, as much as I hate to say it, hysterical voice), “Protesters! You don’t have the right to leave the Maidan!” The problem with this statement is that the people have been protesting precisely because they want to defend the right to decide to come out into the Maidan or leave it when they want to. They don’t want to swap one politician who dictates their right to gather or not gather peacefully for more of the same. As we say in Russian, “these are the same testicles but in profile.”

Ukrainians are not as opposed to public displays of emotion as Russians culturally are. We are known for going from laughter to tears and back in a highly charged, dramatic manner. As I mentioned before, when I go out for dinner with my family, waiters keep asking us if we are OK because our discussions of the weather sound like a quarrel. However, even with all that, Timoshenko sounded way too emotional even for the drama-queenish Ukrainians (of whom I am obviously one.) Even for me, her speech was too much. And I’m the “I hate the vile freakazoids” person.

There is still time for Timoshenko to get in a better physical and emotional shape but, for now, the general reaction to her speech in Ukraine is that of deep disappointment (this is confirmed by my Ukrainian colleague, the political scientist.)

I’m running to my book club but I will definitely answer the rest of the questions after that. Thank you for asking, people. Your questions are very intelligent and important.

So I just had a long conversation with a colleague who is a scholar of political sciences and specializes in Ukraine. And I’m happy to report that everything I have been offering on this blog in terms of the analysis of the situation in Ukraine was echoed 100% by somebody who studies this as a scholar. She doesn’t know I have a blog but she pretty much repeated verbatim some of the things I have been saying here. (E.g. That if she hears once again about the pro-Russian East and pro-EU West, she will have a conniption. And that the protests are not about the EU. Nobody cares about the EU any longer. What are Ukrainians, stupid, to die for the stupid EU? Many people in the Maidan are very critical of EU and want nothing to do with it.)

Sister: I know you are otherwise occupied right now (and wow, man, congratulations!), but if you are reading this, you will be glad to know that my colleague coincides with you 100% in your analysis of Yulia Timoshenko’s speech. She told me about it using the exact same words you used and quoting the exact same parts of the speech. So yay, we both rock.

V.: My colleague also agrees with you that the attempts to mess with the language laws on the part of the new interim government are wackadoodle. (This is my term, the colleague used more scholarly expressions.) She says that futzing with the language laws is not and has never been one of the demands of the protesters in the Maidan. She also says that the nationalists are widely appalled by this development and see it as pig-headed. For instance, a venerable publishing house in Lviv (located in the Western part of the country) that is famous for never having published a single book in Russian has now announced that it will start publishing Russian-language books to signal its disagreement with these ridiculous legislative attempts to manufacture discord between Ukrainians.

I’m going to the colleague’s talk on Ukraine this Friday, so more is to follow. In the meanwhile, I put the poster for her talk on the door of my office and attached it with blue and yellow tacks.