A student was very excited to hear that I’ve read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and has recommended My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain by Aaron Dixon.

It makes me very happy when students recommend reading material. So obviously I’m getting the book.

An Ig Nobel Prize award has been given to a study that every single reader of my blog will find relevant:

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, UK, USA]: Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning.

REFERENCE: “Creatures of the Night: Chronotypes and the Dark Triad Traits,” Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 55, no. 5, 2013, pp. 538-541.

Maybe we should rename to blog to “Self-Admiring, Manipulative Psychopaths’ Blog.”

An article in The Atlantic makes a disturbing kind of argument for why the US should not destroy ISIS:

Apparently the kind of terrorism that’s hardest to fight is the kind that ferments at home.

And what makes it ferment? In both the Boston Marathon and the Fort Hood cases, the attackers seem to have been driven by the perception that the U.S. is at war with Islam, as evinced (in their minds) by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, if homegrown terrorism is fostered by the perception that the U.S. is at war with Islam, what should we do to counter that perception? Here’s what I don’t recommend: Declare war on an entity that calls itself the Islamic State, enmeshing yourself in combat that will last for years.

Every word of this is uninformed and stupid. Muslims are depicted as people on the verge of freaking out and becoming terrorists whenever a bizarre fantasy visits them. There is also this unhealthy need to see oneself as the center of the universe which has become really pathological among the people in this country. The terrorists of ISIS can’t tolerate modernity and want to go back to the Middle Ages. They said that a gazillion times. They would attack anybody who is dealing with modernity better than they are (and that’s pretty much everybody else.) The US is not causing ISIS’s actions or existence. Just like the US isn’t causing Putin’s actions in Ukraine. Just like the US didn’t invade the Iberian Peninsula back in 711, unlike my Freshman-level students have suggested time and again.

The US absolutely has to destroy ISIS. In the world of the crumbling nation-states, a state has to find a legitimating principle in something. If the nation-state is being destroyed by the fluidity of life in our technological society, the new form of state can only gain legitimacy through protecting citizens from fluid, mobile threats that know no borders. Today, the US needs to prove its chops, so to speak, as a functioning post-national state. And I hope it will.

“No” to nationalism won in Scotland yesterday and in Quebec earlier this year.

Now I need to see the same in Catalonia because that’s the one I really care about.

I keep hearing that Reagan and Thatcher were the last major nation-state leaders. That’s not true, though. The Thatcher / Reagan era was precisely the one when the first cracks appeared on the facade of the nation-state, and neither Reagan nor Thatcher could adapt. They were both trying to escape from the nation-state model but didn’t manage to do so fully.

Both Thatcher and Reagan relied on the idea that the state was no longer responsible for the welfare of the people. However, they still wanted to control morality through the legislative means of the state apparatus. And that’s just not going to work.

There are only two options that can possibly exist: 1. Citizens make their own choices and bear full responsibility for those choices, or 2. The state makes some of the choices for individuals (whom to marry, when and how to reproduce, etc) but then helps them deal with their misfortunes when such misfortunes arise.

The Reaganite model expected citizens to relinquish their choices to the state yet carry all of the responsibility for the results on their own. And that’s as useless as saying, “I want to be in complete control of what I do, make all of my own decisions. Yet I also expect somebody to catch me if as a result of those decisions I slip and fall.” Wishing for a system like this to come to existence is as useless as it was for Reagan to hope that one can successfully legislate morality in a fully market state.

Even with an intact Spain, the number of professorships in Spanish on this continent dropped x3 within just 15 years. If the Scots and Catalonians think anybody will start departments of Scottish and Catalonian Studies after they achieve independence, they are deranged.  Now their culture is still preserved and studied. If they become tiny new countries, nobody will. And since Americans are the only people on the planet who are still interested in preserving the world’s cultural legacy, if Americans don’t study you, you don’t exist.  The possibility that Scots and Catalonians will have resources to develop their own scholarship from scratch is non-existent.

The really funny part in all this is that Catalonians want independence because they say they are haunted by the memories of the time when Castilian-speaking Spaniards persecuted their language and culture. So to honor these memories, they will deliver a mortal blow to this very language and culture and finish the work of their long-dead oppressors.

Of course, as we all know, nationalism appeals to emotions precisely because it is so baseless and stupid that it can’t sustain the light of reason shining on to it even for 2 seconds. Nobody thinks logically when there is a slightest opportunity for joyous flag-waving. It is really curious to observe people who are willing to destroy their own culture for the sake of latching on to a state-form that is in its death throes anyway.

Who’s with me in hoping that the people of Scotland are not idiots and will make the right choice tomorrow?

Pretty much everything that is published on the super popular “feminist” websites is offensive to my sensibilities, but this post is just the limit. Just so that you prepare yourselves before going there, the tags for the post are: “bodies, body acceptance, Body Image, butts.” These freakazoids seem to think they are making some feminist statement by promoting this garbage.

And, of course, I have now lost my voice right in the middle of my last lecture of the day. I hate it when this happens, and especially when it happens in class. I begin to resemble a fish that the waves have thrown onto the beach.

Now I will go be silent at home.