I have to confess that I’m failing this week’s challenge miserably, people. April is insane for academics, and all I do is prepare final exams, finish my article, and read my news feed obsessively for news about Ukraine.

I don’t even have anything planned for my birthday on Friday, except for yet another departmental meeting.

This sucks, I suck, I’m underachieving in the relaxation department. I need to force myself to relax and take it easy! I said, relax and take it easy, stupid Clarissa! And go do some self-love now!

And here is one more very cute example of projection:

Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.

Obviously, I’m not saying women won’t date or marry a lower-earning men, only that they probably prefer not to. If a higher-earning man is not available, many women are more likely not to marry at all.

I really love it when people betray themselves and confess their darkest secrets as a result of projection. The poor lady practically screams, “I won’t have sex unless I get paid!” It’s too funny for words.

The identity riddle is proving to be very hard, so I have a hint. Here is an excerpt from the article “What You Need to Know About People from Group X” that made me exclaim, “But this is ME!”

But no Googling because that’s cheating:

The voice in their heads is louder than every other voice they hear. Others may doubt. Others may criticize. Others may judge and disparage and disapprove.

You don’t care. You see all those opinions for what they are: not right, not wrong, just data. So you sift through that data for the actual nuggets you can use. The rest you ignore.

Why? You may respect the opinions of others but you believe in your ideas, your abilities, your will and perseverance and dedication. You believe in yourself. And that makes you want to live your life your way and not anyone else’s way.

That’s totally me, folks. I decided that I needed to uproot my whole family and move across the ocean because I just needed to do a PhD in a field I knew nothing about. So I did. This is a description of a fanatic, and that’s what I am, a fanatic.

Another article from the same blog advises people to “actively seek out conflict” and engage in aggressive verbal fights with others to promote their own original thinking.

So you know how I always say I hate identities and communities because I’m so different and unusual and just don’t fit in anywhere, right?

I just discovered that I’m not in any way special or unusual. I was simply looking for a community in all the wrong places. It turns out that there is a large community with blogs, magazines, books and a subculture of its own that thinks as I do, organizes reality in a way very similar to mine, and finds answers to the questions that interest me. What I can’t find among academics or the feminist community, this group has in spades.

I found this community as I was lying in bed last night, battling a fresh round of insomnia. Before you imagine anything exciting, I was scrolling down my news feed when I saw an article from a blog I’d just added on a lark. It was titled something like “What You Need to Know About Members of Group X.” The description of said group fitted me perfectly. As I kept reading articles published by this group I discovered that they offered really useful advice to assist me in teaching, research, workplace politics, and even in my interactions outside of work.

It’s a very interesting new experience for me to realize that I’m not in the least unique and there is a crowd of people just like me. That community is where I should have gone to find kindred spirits and get advice on how to be the best academic I can be.

So the riddle is: what is this exciting community I discovered?

I just read a really phenomenal article on the Ukraine crisis and, uncharacteristically, it is even written in English. The author’s name is Lidia Shevtsova. I have no idea who she is but she really knows what she is talking about.

In case you are ideologically opposed to reading anything but Clarissa’s Blog, here are some highlights. First of all, Shevtsova dispels the myth that Putin has suddenly gone insane and explains who promotes this myth and why:

I suspect that all the explanations aiming at provoking doubt as to Putin’s rationality and inadequacy have their origins in something other than dispassionate analysis. If Putin just suddenly lost his mind, this lets the political and expert community off the hook for failing to alert us to what was coming. If the West is dealing with an unexpected deviation from the norm, this means that the previous policy toward Russia was essentially correct. The theory of Putin’s “insanity” or “irrationality” would save so many analytical reputations.

Shevtsova is right. If people act in ways you didn’t expect, it makes more sense to analyze your own expectations than diagnose them to make yourself feel better. And among the many people who refuse to accept what is really happening in Russia and Ukraine, Germans take pride of place (and they are the most active in advancing the theory of Putin’s insanity):

200 German intellectuals signed a letter addressed to Vladimir Putin expressing “their understanding of the Russian reaction to the Ukrainian developments” and wishing him “strength, resilience, and luck.” The letter can only give further ammunition to the critics of the West who argue that the liberals democracies have forgotten their principles.

Shevtsova does not believe we are witnessing the revival of the Cold War. No, she says, what Putin is doing is a lot worse:

We are witnessing a much more complex phenomenon than the return of the Cold War. Vladimir Putin isn’t just attempting to dismantle the post-Cold War settlement; he is undermining the remaining elements of the post-Yalta order. This order was devised by the winners of World War II to prevent certain kinds of wars from happening again (specifically, to dismantle any potential justification for annexations or violations of another country’s borders). Putin is trying to assert his right to interpret the global rules of the game in such a way that Russia may violate them with impunity. The Cold War, by contrast, was marked by both sides’ adherence to the rules.

This entire time I believed this was the Cold War coming back but Shevtsova’s analysis makes too much sense for me to disagree. Here is the ultimate goal of Putin’s actions, she says:

The Soviet Union offered communist ideology to the world; Vladimir Putin offers the world something much more exciting than ideology: his services as interpreter of basic legal principles like legitimacy, legality, self-determination, and territorial integrity. 

And here is the strategy Putin will employ to get to his goal:

Putin apparently hopes that the West will eventually be ready to grasp at his outstretched hand and embark on a new reset. The West is expected to legitimate Putin’s status quo, which will not in any case bind the Russian leader in any way. On the contrary: International acceptance of the new status quo will give Putin carte blanche to violate it again.

This whole situation has demonstrated something really crucial to the world:

We have to give Vladimir Putin credit for doing something positive. He has swept the cobwebs off the current world order. However, we still don’t know whether this has been enough to shock the liberal democracies into beginning the process of rethinking things. Maybe another shock is in order…

Brilliant article, people, the best I read on the crisis anywhere.

 

After I published the last post, I spent the next hour ranting about how I’m worried that some Russian idiot is going to take a shot or drop a bomb at Americans and we’ll all be in deep shit, and N still has a Russian passport, and we should all take my father’s Jewish last name because remember Japanese interment camps?

“Don’t worry,” N says. “If the Russians start shooting, Obama will just apologize for a while and it will all be fine.”

Shit’s more serious than I thought:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Russian fighter jet made multiple, close-range passes near an American warship in the Black Sea for more than 90 minutes Saturday amid escalating tensions in the region, U.S. military officials said Monday.

In the first public account of the incident, the officials said the Russian Fencer made 12 passes, and flew within 1,000 yards of the USS Donald Cook, a Navy destroyer, at about 500 feet above sea level.

The U.S. warship issued several radio queries and warnings using international emergency circuits, but the Russian aircraft did not respond.

They actually want to provoke Americans into taking a shot.

This is not good.

I want to believe this was just a drunk pilot being goofy.

So is the difference between esta and ésta and Co still observed or has the RAE canned it together with solo/sólo?

The Crimeans were promised that if they supported the annexation of the peninsula by Russia, Putin would raise salaries.

Putin is an honest guy and today he announced that salaries will, indeed, be raised by 2,6 times. The salaries being raised are his own and Medvedev’s.

I mean, it isn’t like he ever specified whose salaries would be raised, and if people assumed he meant anybody but himself and Medvedev, that’s their misfortune.

 

I don’t see Iran as a nuclear threat to the world right now. And I’m not usually wrong in my political analysis.

However.

There is a great danger that Russia will push Iran in the direction of aggression and heavy militarization. This would be straight from Comrade Stalin’s bag of tricks. Use Iran to start hostilities, then pretend you need to save the world and interfere.

This is why I believe that the US’s best course of actions right now would be to lift all embargoes and restrictions from Iran and work hard to improve Iran’s economy and standard of living. It wasn’t done in Ukraine when there was still time. Now there is still time to do it in Iran.

This leaves North Korea, where Russia might employ the same strategy as I prognosticate for Iran. Here I don’t know what can be done, so I’m worried.