Opinions, art, debate
Is there anybody in Spain who hasn’t been contributing to the corruption? Even the great opera singer Montserrat Caballe has pled guilty to defrauding the government.
The singer will pay a fine of 240,000 euro and serve a 6 – month prison sentence for the crime.
Facebook and Twitter are standing up to Russia’s censorship. The really cute part, though, is that they are standing up for somebody who is a neo-Nazi.
Of course, the right to free speech is sacrosanct, even when we are talking about neo-Nazi speech. But I wish the media didn’t shy away from pointing out that the story prominently features a neo-Nazi.
Putin’s relationship with neo-Nazis has always been bizarre. At first, they hated him for making enormous payouts to the Chechens to keep Chechnya peaceful. Then, they hated him even more for introducing legislation that banned the neo-Nazi hate speech.
After Putin went to war against Ukraine, Russia’s neo-Nazis fell in love with him.
But now that Putin seems to have withdrawn his support for the Russian neo-Nazis fighting in Ukraine, they are starting to hate him all over again.
And the new wave of Putin’s struggle with the dissident Navalny, who happens to have ties to the neo-Nazi movement, begins.
In case, you have no idea who Navalny is, here is my post about him.
The racial situation is getting so charged that even intelligent people are failing to find an adequate tone. The usually brilliant Ta-Nehisi Coates has come out with the following disturbing slip of the tongue:
For activists and protesters radicalized by the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, this weekend’s killing may seem to pose a great obstacle. In fact, it merely points to the monumental task in front of them. Garner’s death, particularly, seemed to offer some hope.
I love Coates’s journalism but I can’t make myself go on reading. (I know he didn’t mean it the way it sounds but it still came out like this, and it sounds absolutely horrible.)
And then there are individuals who are trying to use tragedy to promote their writing careers by publishing screeds like the following one:
You are not going to stop. We understand that. Your inability to share and your fear of retribution goads you to try even harder to solidify your power. Making us, from America to Australia to West Papua, dependent upon you for food, (terminator seeds, anyone?) water (a commodity?), and a place to be, (What? You say you ‘control’ this land? But I live here!) Pushing your doctrine-driven education, not for the wonder of knowledge but to corral us into a self-defeating way of life that serves only you. Fomenting fear and hatred and violence because it pays so well. (And is so effectively distracting.)
I believe that it was an enormous mistake to attach the murder of Michael Brown to the very silly narrative of bad, mean, “militarized” police forces. Wafer wasn’t police, Zimmerman wasn’t police, and there are many other killers who weren’t police. This isn’t about police or anybody’s unresolved Daddy issues. This is about racism.
Now a murderer goes and kills two police officers because we were all collectively so freaked out about what was actually going on that we substituted what was happening with an extraneous narrative. Yes, the murderer would have killed no matter what anybody else did. Still, the officers are dead and we are all now engaged in a debate of how everybody feels about police, which ultimately is about nothing other than the degree of everybody’s psychological health.
Now everybody can publicly indulge in the delightful exhibition of their psychological wounds. “Police can do no wrong” and “police are all evil” are not opposing positions. They are actually exactly the same and stem from a single root. What people who are making both statements (or any variation thereof) are actually saying is, “My father complex is so problematic that it makes me want to explode from the inside!”
Trayvon Martin is dead. Michael Brown is dead. Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu are now also dead. But the esteemed public is still in the grip of its father complex and can talk of nothing else.
The academic job market is brutal nowadays, and I see no evidence that it is likely to improve. So here is a small exercise I suggest to people who are wondering if they should do a PhD. Here are some questions you need to answer if your goal is to make a decent living and have an enjoyable life as a college professor:
1. Have you done, are you now doing, or are you planning to do a Master’s degree?
If the answer is negative, stop and go away right now. Do the Master’s, come back, and then we will talk. Right now you are like a football player who breaks his own leg before going out into the field.
And to people who are about to inform me that they did a PhD without a Master’s twenty years ago and have been happy ever since, I’ve got to say: we are not talking about 20 years ago. We are talking about 10 years from now. Please go read my posts on the collapse of the nation-state if you don’t see the difference.
If the answer is positive, please proceed.
2. Once you are in the process of getting your MA, here is what you should do. Apply only to the most famous and prestigious grad schools in the country where you plan to work. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown. If they don’t accept you, forget the whole thing and go do something else.
The method I outlined here doesn’t guarantee anybody a job worthy of the name in academia. But it does cut down somewhat your chances of wasting 15 years of your life pursuing a dream that you had no chance of making come true. A PhD from Harvard doesn’t secure a tenure-track job for anybody. But it does give hope. A PhD from the University of Rimouski* doesn’t.
Sadly, if you are not good enough for Harvard as a grad student, you will not be good enough for U of Rimouski as a tenure-track professor.
If you do the Master’s, then do a PhD at Princeton or someplace comparable, manage to get at least 5 publications before getting awarded the PhD (not in any graduate or open-access journals, obviously), acquire extensive teaching experience, and don’t believe that any of the following entitles you to despise Rimouski as a prospective employer – then you will at least have a fighting chance on the job market.
*Sorry, Rimouski, I’ve been using you as my way of saying “the boondocks” for many years and I’m not ready to let go of you.
Who’s with me in thinking that Ian Welsh is a Putinbot blogger who gets paid to write his hysterical posts? Because if he doesn’t even get paid for producing this idiocy, I will lose all faith in humanity.
“People are beginning to compare Illinois to a country famous for things beginning with S: Sophocles, Socrates, and sovereign debt. That’s right; according to the Economist, Illinois may be the Greece of America.” Not that anybody should trust the Economist, a magazine that publishes only the people who don’t understand anything about the economy, but there is a problem in Illinois: its new governor is very openly and shamelessly trying to rob the state to enrich his private companies two seconds after being elected.
[Spanish.] If this is the architecture of the future, why does it look so much like the butt-ugly architecture of the 1960s?
[Spanish.] The surprisingly nationalistic rhetoric of the new and popular radical-Left party of Spain. I’m really, really hoping that the entire Leftist program isn’t reduced to resisting the collapse of the nation-state. If that happens, progressives will become conservatives because trying to conserve the outdated models of the past is precisely what conservatives do. Are the conservatives and the progressives about to swap seats?
A great insight into the concept of “white privilege.” I will be a happy person if I never hear the stupid word “privilege” again in any context.
“Russian prosecutors are seeking a 10-year sentence for Alexei Navalny, a leading opponent of Vladimir Putin and a Western media darling. Navalny, who has focused on exposing state corruption, is already under house arrest for a previous charge that many claim is trumped up, and now he stands accused of corruption himself.” I don’t know about “a Western media darling.” Have you heard of Navalny anywhere but on my blog? But this trial is worth following.
I find it absolutely terrifying that people over the age of 9 can actually write such stuff in deadly earnestness: “Gilchrist, I think — like many other people who have always lived in that bubble of wealth — is truly convinced that virtue and success are inevitably connected. Hard work, really, and toughness are all you need. Do your job and wealth, beauty, and good things will come raining down on you. I mean, that’s how winner happen, right? They work hard and make good choices and don’t whine? Right? And therefore it follows, ipso facto, that anyone who does not have success, who is not a brilliant winner, living in a lovely three-bedroom house with hardwood floors (paid off, of course) and a tenure-track job, I mean obviously, just did not work hard and make good choices and should stop whining, because all your fault, loser.”
[Spanish.] The real tragedy of the Cuban people comes out in their own words. They are about to experience a very rude awakening when they start finding the truth about “the best country in the world” that they believe Cuba to be.
[Russian.] Gosh, I so wish everybody could read the post by this refugee from the war zone in Ukraine. Everything about the region and its problems becomes crystal clear from this author’s post.
Why it has become very hard to teach rape law. I don’t teach rape law but I know exactly what this educator is talking about. The number of complaints about the”discomfort” that my (and everybody else’s, really) teaching creates is growing. I have no idea how to teach about art, history, and life “comfortably.” But the “happy pill” culture doesn’t accept the possibility that there might be any discomfort in life.
[Spanish.] And this is a post on the attempts to make Don Quijote more comfortable and easy to consume.
[Russian.] A great collection of photos from my native city of Kharkiv.
An interesting interview with Jeff Bezos.
A housing bubble in San Francisco.
Soon law schools will pay people to enroll. I wish students read more of these articles to find out that their strange dream of attending law school is extremely misguided.
The shamanistic origin of Santa Claus.
[Russian.] What Hunger Games mean to Ukrainians.
Did I mention how much I hate Uber? And people who are using it should remember: tomorrow an unqualified bored amateur will come for your job. And everybody will drop you and use the amateur because it’s just so convenient. Think about it.
I’m scrolling down my blogroll in search of posts for my link encyclopedia and finding a plethora of posts on Cuba, all of them mind-bogglingly stupid.
People, the US embargo has caused 0% of Cuba’s problems. Zero per cent. Cuba’s problems are so not about the embargo. The US is not the center of the universe. Sometimes things happen that are not about you. Cubans created this mess on their own. It would all have been just as bad without the embargo.
The great tragedy of the Cuban people is that they handed themselves over to the Soviets. In return for a crooked dime or two, they agreed to dismantle their entire great civilization. And now they are nothing but a degraded province of Russia. Travel to Cuba (it is going to start being possible soon) and then travel to the DR right after that. The shocking and absolutely heart-wrenching difference you will see in the people is not about the economy. Let’s drop this cheap form of Marxism. The difference you will see is one between people who have been mangled by the Soviets and those who haven’t.
This is the real tragedy of the Cuban people, and no embargo or absence thereof can touch it.
Christmas decorations are so popular that they are seen from the outer space. I love driving around and looking at the inventive ways people decorate.
I don’t know who Hunny is but he is surely having fun.
This one looks more imposing in real life:
From a distance, it looks like a big, pulsating phallic symbol.
Here is our local mansion:
We couldn’t come closer but I wanted you to see how our rich people live. The owner of the mansion has a lumber shop in town. He built all of the newer houses around here, including mine. Seriously, if anyone deserves a mansion, it’s this guy. It always makes me very happy to see this huge building. Although I like my own house more.
Angels and nativity scenes are popular:
The most curious decoration is this antique car covered with Christmas lights:
I wonder what these people do with the car between the Christmas seasons. Do they keep it specifically for those occasions?
They all look a lot brighter and prettier in real life. Now all we need is some snow.
Merry Christmas!
Risotto with wild mushrooms and edible flowers. And some pico de gallo for me, as well.
When I filled my bird-feeder with the expensive $2-per-pound bird-seed, I had crowds of birds visiting the feeder.
But when I ran out and filled it with the cheaper $0,99-per-pound seed, birds refused to come.
This is society of consumer at its worst. Even birds understand brands and despise the cheaper offerings. Maybe I should put a copy of Naomi Klein’s book outside. These spoiled birds might be interested.
And I used to kind of like her for two minutes:
Dystopian fiction is hot right now, with countless books and movies featuring decadent oligarchs, brutal police states, ecological collapse, and ordinary citizens biting and clawing just to survive. For bestselling author Naomi Klein, all this gloom is a worrying sign. “I think what these films tell us is that we’re taking a future of environmental catastrophe for granted,” Klein says in Episode 129 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
Actually, the movies tell us nothing of the kind. Opulent, over-fed societies love titillating themselves with scary fantasies. Poor, starving societies invent Cinderella and worship Shirley Temple. The current dystopia craze shows that we are over the recession and are celebrating it in style, that’s all.
Guess who’s not reading Naomi Klein’s new book?
Clarissa's Blog 