On stage at Goldman Sachs event, Travis Kalanick compared his company’s woes to Ferguson.

This is what happens when people fail to get their love of flashy analogies under control.

Everybody talks about “consumer mentality” but almost nobody can provide a concrete definition. People know that consumer mentality is something vaguely bad and that the appropriate facial expression when the words are pronounced is a condescending wince. Most of them , however, have no idea what they are wincing at.

As somebody who has lived both in a society of consumers and in a pre-consumerist society, I can tell you that consumerism is vastly superior to its alternative. This is why I always proudly declare that I have a consumer mentality. 

Consumer mentality is the expectation that goods and services will be available to satisfy your needs. If you come home, turn on the lights, and there is no electricity, a person with consumer mentality immediately thinks, “WTF? I’m paying for the service, I’d better be getting it”, starts calling the electrical company and demanding to know what’s going on. And a person with pre-capitalist mentality finds a candle and sits there staring at it without protesting and trying to figure out what happened. I grew up among such people, and let me tell you, such societies suck. 

If a person with consumer mentality buys a pair of shoes and they start leaking the next day, s/he will go back to the store, return the shoes, and write an angry review online. A person with consumer mentality believes that such a situation is not normal. 

If a person with consumer mentality discovers that there are shortages of oranges or notebooks or tablet devices, s/he will not perceive such a situation as normal. The passive acquiescence and fatalism of the pre-capitalist mentality are not natural to a consumer deprived of goods.

Consumer societies get a lot of flak because their members only abandon fatalism and passivity when they want their goods and services. A consumer sees the world in terms of goods and services to be purchased and gets unhappy when anything gets between the consumer and the purchase. However, any criticism of consumerist societies arises from comparing consumers to a non-existent lofty ideal and not to actual existing alternatives. I believe that it is already an enormously big deal that human beings have abandoned the attitude of patient resignation at least in one sphere of their lives. 

People who detest consumerism the most are those who have come out from a very strong monotheistic model and are now displacing their religious feelings away from the religion they abandoned and onto the secular world. The lack of self-abnegation and modesty that consumers exhibit hurts the religious sensibilities of such recent converts to secularism. If you observe the most passionate detractors of consumerism closely, you will see that they exhibit many of the signs of religious fanaticism. However, consumerism is hard to resist. Try depriving these passionate anti-consumerist bunnies of running water for a week or of their favorite designer tea for a day, and you will see an irate consumer awaken in each one of them.

The invention of the Jewish nose.

Do you remember the scientist with a crazy shirt? And here is a response to the scandal with the shirted scientist. The whole thing is beyond hilarious.

And here is another post on the shirt debacle.  This will soon become the most important shirt in the history of humanity.

A really disgusting way to serve a cappuccino. (Work-friendly photo, in case you are wondering.)

Fifth-graders are stupid.

Gosh, wouldn’t people tell themselves to rationalize their miserable lives. Here is a guy who blames his sucky personal life on. . . his upward social mobility. Yeah, making money and moving up is a total no-no if you want to get a date.

An important observation: “Not only is your work addiction way more similar to a drug habit than you’re probably comfortable admitting, it’s probably also distressing the rest of your life just like any other addiction would.” Just like alcoholism and drug addiction, workaholism is a way to disconnect from personal pain and numb oneself to it. It’s more socially acceptable to work one self into an early grave than drink oneself into it but that’s where the differences end.

“When I think of a man being effeminate, I think of a man being the total opposite of manly. Actually, I consider him taking on all those things that should be relegated to womanhood. . . Let the women dress like women.” And how is it that “women” dress, I wonder?

“The only reason you should ever not date someone is if you are not attracted to them.” Great point! And if you are over the age of 11 and you are not attracted to anybody for more than a short period of time, it’s a reason to see a doctor.

And this is why I love Americans: “Fifty-seven percent of Americans disagree with the statement “Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control,” a considerably higher percentage than the global median of 38%. Similarly, Americans place an especially strong emphasis on the value of hard work – 73% think it is very important to work hard in order to get ahead in life, compared with a global median of 50%.”

The countries that face the highest and the lowest climate change threat.

“Vladimir Putin is the world’s corrupt policeman. He finds the seediness in every country and nurtures it. On some occasions, he exploits cynicism and paranoia at once; on others, he banks it for later use. Often he appears to fan corruption for the hell of it because that is all he knows how to do.”

A new product that empowers women’s vaginas. Somebody needs to empower the creators of the product with a bucket of cold urine poured over their idiot heads.

Ukraine: a university in exile.

On the basis of my blogging, text messaging and emails,  my phone is learning to speak my language.

When I write “go to”, the phone suggests the following words to continue the phrase:

1. Fuck yourself
2. Hell in a basket
3. Psychologist

When I write “crazy, the phone suggests:

1. Russians
2. As fuck
3. Expensive

When I write “stupid, the phone suggests:

1. Sheep
2. As fuck
3. Russians

Everybody makes fun of George W. Bush because of the following quote but the guy is totally right:

He’s right, nothing is ever given to us. Because it all went to him.

King Midas turned everything he touched to gold. Bureaucrat busybodies turn everything they touch into a pile of steamy, fragrant cowshit.

An example. The most recent craze in higher ed is “sustainability.” Nobody knows what it is but there is a sort of a game we (meaning, institutions of higher learning) are obligated to play. In the game, each school plays for points. You accumulate points by forcing as many educators as possible to mention the word “sustainability” (in any context) on their syllabi, by making professors prove that every class they teach is “a living laboratory,” and demonstrating that 10% of all class time goes to teaching students about sustainability. I’m sure that will be super easy to do in my Spanish 101 class. And obviously, my graduate course on the Short Form will make us a bunch of points. Shorter means more sustainable, right?

Today I discovered a really phenomenal music group called Nirvana. Wow, people,  that’s really good music.

Of course, 30 minutes later I discovered that the lead singer died a bizillion years ago. And got very sad. I had already started planning to go to a concert.

Please,  don’t laugh. I have a weird relationship with music.

Reader n8chz (whose great blog you can’t find here) left some good questions about psychoanalysis that I want to address sin a separate post:

Psychoanalysis somehow seems expensive, but that’s because I’ve been told (perhaps by people I shouldn’t listen to) that real psychoanalysis is at least three 50-minute hours a week for something like five years, at with a practitioner with an MD, plus psychiatry residency, plus being psychoanalyzed, plus training in psychoanalsyis.

Today, most analysts refuse to do more than one hour-long session per week. I could go into details as to why they have departed from the Freudian model of four 40-minute sessions per week but I don’t want to bore. Suffice it to say, that these days hardly anybody practices this way. In extreme cases, an analyst might offer (and reluctantly, at that) two sessions per week for a short period of time. This is normally done when the analysand is in an acute stage. Four sessions per week are maybe suggested for people with terminal cancer or something as tragic and urgent.

Psychoanalysts don’t hold MDs, they don’t study psychiatry, they can’t and don’t want to prescribe drugs. The very words “doctor” and “psychiatry” make them wince. Psychoanalysis was born out of a rejection of psychiatry. Of course, there are analysts who follow Freud’s journey of studying psychiatry, getting massively disillusioned with it for obvious reasons, and switching to psychoanalysis. 

Here is the kind of training a psychoanalyst needs to get to be considered one: 

1. full personal psychoanalysis (at least once but often twice.)

2. assisting a practicing analyst.

3. constant and ongoing supervision.

The number of hours any individual analysand will require depends on:

1. the goal s/he wants to achieve. 

2. the readiness of the analysand to solve his or her problems.

3. the analysand’s capacity to relinquish control and break out of the intellectual rut.

4. the analysand’s familiarity with the procedure. 

Usually, the first 6 months of analysis are all about breaking through the very typical resistance structures. As we discussed before, psyche values nothing above stability and will cling to what is bad but familiar. 

The technique of psychoanalysis is “supportive frustration.” While a psychotherapist consoles and comforts, an analyst will gently try to frustrate you during every session (except when you are in extreme distress.) If you don’t feel the need to say, “Oh my God, my analyst is so annoying!”, something is not going right.

The economy of the US recovered from the global economic crisis of 2007-9 brilliantly. Unemployment rates dropped off a cliff, Western Europe is enviously eyeing “the American economic miracle,” the most underdeveloped regions of the US have gone back to full-scale constructions, expensive chic restaurants started mushrooming even in our small town in the middle of nowhere, job recruitment agencies are overworked and overwhelmed, etc.

However, the American people don’t seem to be happy. They went to the polls two weeks ago to show their discontent to the president who walked the country out of a crisis that is still ravaging other developed countries. There are constant reports that the general public believes we are still in a recession and does not notice any improvements in the economy.

Are the American people simply stupid? Can they not see how different today’s economy is from what we were all experiencing in 2008 and 2009?

No, of course, they are not stupid. The American people have a deep-seated and completely justified suspicion that the old world order is gone for good. The economic crisis of the 2008 is gone in terms of the economy but it is still very much here in every other sense. The Great Recession coincided with the moment in time when it became completely clear to everybody that there was a massive transformation underway of both the global world order and the structure of the nation-state. Since there is no public discussion of this enormous tectonic shift, people are verbalizing their preoccupation through the familiar language of recession and unbalanced budgets. 

The conscience of crisis remains even after the unemployment rates have climbed down. This would be a great time to talk about what is really going on and why we feel like the crisis is only beginning. However, what is the likelihood that anybody will put aside the comforting party slogans to look for new terminology that will be relevant to the new reality?