I just heard the news that yet another university mortally afraid of the word “foreign” has renamed its foreign languages department into “International Languages and Literatures Department.” Mind you, English has a separate department, so it doesn’t fall under “international languages.”

In other news, a tenure-line at our department has been cancelled. In the meanwhile, there is insistent talk that it isn’t enough to have a single “Diversity and Multiculturalism Officer” on campus. Now there are rumors we will have an entire “Diversity and Multiculturalism Center.” Of course, a group of stupid, monolingual bureaucrats that will populate said center will do SO much more to promote diversity and multuculturalism on campus than an actual professor who can teach actual courses about other cultures.

 

It is very useful to hear people describe themselves. When they say things like, “My most important quality is. . .” or “I’m the kind of person who. . .”, in 49 cases out of 50 you can rest assured that the exact opposite is true.

When people name their central characteristic they usually talk about the quality they perceive as important and desirable precisely because they lack it.

For the past few days, Ukraine has been terrorized by the news of a convoy of trucks moving towards the country from Russia. The Russians are claiming that the trucks are carrying “humanitarian aid” but said aid looks scarily similar to very sophisticated weaponry:

Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov has stated that the convoy carrying humanitarian aid from Russia will not be allowed into Ukraine. “No ‘humanitarian convoy’ from Putin will be allowed to pass into the Kharkiv region,” which is on the route from Moscow to the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. He called the convoy a “provocation” and noted that the convoy could enter through an uncontrolled border in the Luhansk region.

Russians have been begged by the International Red Cross and by the Ukrainian leadership to stop the convoy but they are resolute in their desire to inflict even more of their help on their neighbors.

OK, people, something really strange just happened. I read a good, intelligent article in English about Ukraine. Does it mean I’m only thinking I have waken up and this is still just a dream?

Here is an excerpt from the article:

This crisis is not about an American power play in the former Soviet Union— indeed, it often seems as if President Barack Obama privately wishes Ukraine’s democracy revolution would just fade away. This is entirely about the Ukrainian people’s decision that they were no longer willing to live in an authoritarian kleptocracy—and the annexation and invasion of their territory that was the Kremlin’s response. Ukraine could only have avoided this struggle by not choosing democracy, or by failing in the effort to build it.

And it is well-written, too. What is happening all of a sudden? Of course, the author of the piece is a Canadian journalist who has a Ukrainian mother, but still it was published at Politico, which is a very popular resource. Might things not be as bad as I thought? Might there be not entirely brain-dead people outside of this blog?

Here is some more:

Ukraine’s second success is its unprecedented degree of national unity. That reality is obscured by the lazy shorthand that often frames the conflict in eastern Ukraine as a Yugoslav-style civil war, driven by ancient cultural, linguistic and religious divisions. In fact, the fight in Ukraine is almost entirely a political and even ideological struggle. This isn’t about Russian speakers vs. Ukrainian speakers—an absurd idea in a country so at ease with its nearly universal bilingualism that everything from television interviews to jokes to parliamentary debates are conducted in an easy back-and-forth between Ukrainian and Russian.

The dividing line in what Ukrainians call their “dignity revolution” is instead the choice between Western liberal democracy and the Kremlin’s neo-authoritarianism.

Thank God, and it has only taken forever to see a North American media outlet manage to find a journalist capable of writing intelligently about Ukraine. And this is a journalist who actually lived in Ukraine and speaks the language, unlike all of the little shits who can’t find the country on the map yet blab stupidly and incessantly like the vicious losers they are about matters they would never understand.

Of course, the comments to the piece are populated by illiterate Putinbots who get paid by the word to spam intelligent articles about Ukraine.

A new colleague from the Palestinian Authority is coming to work at my department. I’m thinking of asking him to grant an interview to this blog. I don’t know if he will agree but in case he does, are there any questions you want me to ask? I think this is a great opportunity for all of us to get informed and educated.

Please leave suggestions about possible questions in the comment section.

And since we are on the topic of race relations anyway, can anybody guess who said “I don’t trust the kind of whites who love having Negroes always hanging around them”?

No Googling!

I’ve been watching Michael Brown’s story on the news, and it’s much worse than we even thought. The police left the kid’s dead body just lying outside for a long time. Now the police are refusing to take the statement of the only witness to the shooting, Michael’s friend. And he has a lot to say.

It seems that Michael and his friend were walking in the street in broad daylight when the police officer started hassling them and finally shot Michael who had his hands up in the air at the time of shooting. There is also a possibility Michael was shot in the back but the autopsy report has not been released.

Sorry, people, I know everybody is tired of the pictures of the house but this is a post for a friend from back in Ukraine who now lives in New Jersey:

 

As I told you in the previous post, police in Ferguson, MO shot an unarmed black kid, an 18-year-old high school graduate about to start college. The residents of the area are rioting in protest over this horrible crime. 

What would you think of me if I told you that the residents of Ferguson are rioting because Putin bribed them to do so? Putin is extremely interested in destabilizing the situation in the United States and making the world see Americans as hypocritical, out-of-control thugs, so he sent his agents to bribe and talk St. Louisans into rioting. How would you feel if I offered you this story?

You’d think I’m an unhinged freak whose poor excuse for a brain has been consumed by her diseased patriotism to the point where there is nothing left, wouldn’t you?

And you’d be right. 

However, it is perfectly acceptable for American Lefties to do this every day to wide popular acclaim. Their diseased patriotism is so out of control that they come up with these insane scenarios every day and it doesn’t seem to bother anybody.

Last winter, police in Ukraine started shooting at unarmed kids, students who are just like Ferguson’s Mike Brown. They were not breaking any law, they were just protesting some minor issue nobody remembers any longer. They have a constitutionally protected right to congregate peacefully in the streets. You’ll be shocked, but other countries also have constitutions, imagine that. And now prepare for the greatest shock of all: these animal-like creatures who just climbed down from their pine-trees three days ago are actually proud of their constitutional rights. Wild, I know!

So when Ukrainians – the descendants of slaves who were kept in artificially created poverty and denied their basic rights for as long as they can remember, who saw their activists murdered, tortured and have their heads cut off by the government, who have been persecuted by the corrupt, vicious police for decades – took to the streets and rioted to protest the murder by the government of unarmed kids, students, for some curious reason American and Canadian Lefties simply cannot accept that this is possible.

Every day, I read some self-aggrandizing, deeply offensive shit like the following: 

Russia let us run until we came up to their borders in Ukraine. Then came the 2014 Ukraine coup. We don’t know the degree of western involvement. We seldom do in such things, until years or decades later (only last year did the CIA admit its role in the 1953 Iran Coup). However, it fits the pattern of past coups run with assistance of the UK’s SIS and US CIA. Then the new friendly government is invited into NATO.

For these pseudo-Lefties, people who don’t speak the same language as they do and, most importantly, don’t carry the same deified passport as they do are subhuman. They worship at the altar of their passports, driving themselves into such a frenzy that they can’t recognize the basic humanity of anybody else. 

I had no idea that riots are taking place in St. Louis. This is how segregation works: the black area is like a different world. Seeing a white suburb and a black township next to each other is devastating because it’s like they are from different planets.

People ask why I’m in favor of affirmative action and reparations. I’m in favor of absolutely anything that has even the slightest chance to change the current racial situation in the United States because it is absolutely, completely, totally horrible and shameful to witness.

Come on, folks, you can’t really believe that something like this is OK.