Everybody needs to read this article by the War Nerd right now. It’s absolutely his best.

“You can’t believe everything you read, especially when it’s a memoir. They’re not the most reliable narrators, the people who pen their life stories based on recollections. Sometimes they have an agenda and the whole, unvarnished truth just doesn’t fit in as neatly as a writer would like.” It’s a sign of a severely deficient education system that adult people need to be reminded of this but, sadly, they do. First-person narrators are unreliable by default. So yelling, “This autobiography is based on lies” is kind of childish.

I don’t know if anybody here is following the great “It’s Probably PhD Me” blog but I highly recommend if you don’t. The author is a really admirable person and a talented writer. The posts form a very Austenesque narrative and should be read as novel chapters rather than stand-alone pieces. I hope the author considers publishing them as a novel one day.

“Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s school, announced in a campus-wide email that the Theatre Board has cancelled its annual production of the “Vagina Monologues.” The board has decided to retire the feminist classic as it is not “inclusive” enough to those who identify as women but do not have vaginas.”

The invention we have all been waiting for: in-bed computer desks.

[Spanish.] A very interesting article on the Muslim community of the French city of Marseilles. Read this instead of the endless discussions on the “no-go zones.”

“Marriage, at its core, is about recognition. Recognition is why we put on the fancy tuxes and beautiful gowns. It’s why we publish marriage announcements in newspapers. It’s why we invite friends and family to witness—to recognize—the relationship. Recognition is why we wear engagement rings and wedding bands.” Seriously? Neurotypicals are too bizarre. It  would have never occur to me that this is why they do all of it. But yay for same-sex marriage right, of course.

You’ve totally got to know that the weird people who believe Sarah Palin’s youngest child is not really hers are still going on with their investigation. I’ve been following their travails for years and they are a very funny bunch.

“An Alabama middle-school principal has asked students to bring in cans of food they could use as projectiles against school shooters.” Well, we should all be happy the kids weren’t asked to bring in hand grenades. This is progress already.

It’s seriously insane but check it out: “With these GIFs, Boehner aims to explain to Millennials and sub-Millennials why President Obama’s tuition-free community college proposal is a very bad idea.” If I were a “sub-Millenial”, I’d be very offended.

“The rise of the right-wing echo chamber is not simply a sign that our education system has failed — though it is also that — but for those who have ears to hear, it represents people crying out for the real satisfactions of the intellectual life. The fact that they’ve had to make do with a cheap substitute is not an indictment of them personally so much as of the forces that prey on their intellectual curiosity and the society that rendered them so vulnerable to that predation in the first place.” I don’t agree with anything in this post but it’s very well-written and engaging. Highly recommended.

“John Ellis “Jeb” Bush? Mitt “Mitt” Romney? Uh-uh. It’s Fred Thompson’s nomination for the taking. .” I agree that this is very bizarre. With all his massive faults, Putin, at least, is not introducing himself as “Vova.”

“Pretty soon your mom might not be the only one nagging you to quit smoking or lose weight—and it won’t stop at nagging.” This is a very powerful and concise explanation of why people overeat and smoke. The rest of the article is a lot less interesting.

“I also think it’s interesting that so many people seem to be reacting with the kind of hysteria we saw after 9/11 to the Charlie Hebdo killings but managed to keep their wits about them after the Boston bombing.” Because it’s cartoonists, you fool. Quiet, nerdy people with a geeky sense of humor. How much easier it is to identify with them than with the weirdos who ran marathons, seriously?

How to ruin a date with an academic.

Does Putin have a future in the Balkans? “The Balkans are weak states, have considerable sympathy for Putin’s agenda, and in several cases already have pro-Russian groups just waiting for an extra push to turn into rebel movements.”

A great explanation of why evolutionary ethics is stupid.

“There is necessarily going to be something arbitrary about fruitful education, because the whole point of it is for young minds to learn that there is such a thing as objective fact; that their feelings are not fact.  The content of what it taught is much less important than the necessity for young minds to internalize this lesson.  Otherwise, they really do become trapped in their own minds and unable to find avenues to liberate themselves.”

Great portraits of naked men.

Gun owners participate in a simulation of the Paris massacre.

A small excerpt from a rant of a person who confuses having mental disease with having a political opinion: “Given the growing swaths of destruction, brutality and murder that are the product of State power in recent years, and of Western State power in particular, one might have thought that moral approval and encouragement is the last thing one would choose to gift to the monsters who lead those States, at least if one seeks a better world that is significantly more compassionate and caring than the world in which we now live. And note how cheaply the States in question purchased this gift.”

“You know I used to believe that the Right was utterly fucking crazy when they talked about how the liberals tend to embrace objective evil if it’s cloaked in the veil of oppression. But now that I’ve seen the liberal reactions to Muslim oppression of women and now Charlie Hebdo and secularism, you know what? The Right was fucking, well, right  — a little, at least.” Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Russians are planning to erect a monument to Stalin in the Crimea (link in Russian). Of course, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars are finding this extremely offensive but that’s kind of the whole point.

A middle-aged black man in a battered old truck stops his car by the sidewalk in a beautiful all-white suburb. Big shiny SUVs and sedans filled with white people also stop. Now the movement is blocked in both directions. White pedestrians stop to stare.

“I apologize, is this the right way to Walmart?” the black driver asks leaning out of the window. 

The white drivers and pedestrians remain completely silent. Nobody moves.

“Am I going in the right direction?” the black man asks again and again. His voice becomes pleading. “Is this how I go to Walmart? Please? Does anybody know?”

The drivers and the pedestrians stare straight ahead. Nobody moves. Now the black driver looks like a scared bird trapped in his truck. 

“I just wanted to. . . Am I in the right. . .” his voice trails off. After a few moments of complete silence, he drives off. 

The movement and the chatter of a warm sunny day that just happens to be a holiday resumes.

It’s hilarious that the people who are freaking out about American Sniper and writing screeds on how evil it is are so often the same ones who loved Imitation Game. Both movies are about exactly the same thing: the transformation of warfare and the changing discourses on war. The protagonists are tortured by the same questions arising from the same power to kill from a distance when your victim doesn’t know you exist and might have done nothing wrong whatsoever.

War is leaving the realm of massification and is becoming individualized. That’s what these movies are about.

I hate discussions about inequality because they are so useless. All that anybody ever says about the issue is, “Tax somebody who isn’t me.” And then there is a bunch of very silly arithmetic exercises to carve out that somebody so that it doesn’t touch me and leaves me feeling self-righteous.

47%, 1%, 10% of imaginary evildoers who just have to be taxed to make everything magically right are simply a fantasy that many people mistake for political convictions.

Abortion rights, an issue that has long been at the center of the feminist struggle, has been utterly transformed by today’s realities. Government is no longer an institution that guarantees this basic human right.

Today, the main guarantor of abortion rights is the website cheapairtickets.com.

“It’s a tragedy, a human tragedy, that the middle class in this country by and large doesn’t believe that the future will be better than the past,” he said. “We haven’t seen rising incomes over decades.”

 “The rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before under this president,” he added.

I can’t tell you, folks, how tired I am of always being so right. How many times did I say that the correct message to be pushing was “Obama dramatically improved the economy”? First of all, because that’s the truth. And second of all, because the message you so adore and that I quoted above is very easily co-opted by the Republicans in 2016. Is there any doubt in anybody’s mind that if a Republican president achieved, in terms of the economy, what Obama has in his presidency we would be hearing it celebrated and yelled from the rooftops all day and every day?

In case there are people who have been asleep for the past two days, the “he” in the quote above is Mitt Romney. Prepare to hear more of the same in the coming two years from overfed billionaires who have suddenly discovered the words that will make the entire country go weak in the knees.

We could have avoided this if we had gotten over our profound need constantly to feel sorry for ourselves and accepted that the recession was over and it was cause for celebration. It is highly likely that your love of apocalyptic thinking guaranteed us a Republican in the White House come 2016.

We had the 2016 election in our collective pockets until you had to go and piss it all away with your insistence that anything short of paradise is beneath you and any achievement that doesn’t bring your directly into heaven on Earth is not an achievement but an offense to your sensibilities. And now this wave of infantile resentment will be exploited to carry a Bush or a Romney into the White House. Good job! The enjoyment you must have derived from ridiculing any suggestion that the economy was improving must have totally been worth it.

Oh well. At least, it will be good for Ukrainians. 

The fighting has intensified in Ukraine this week. The Russians are using Obama’s obvious reluctance to act on the bill adopted by Congress that promised aid to Ukraine. At the same time, everybody is distracted right now by the massacre in Paris, and the Russians are using this to conduct a full-scale offensive.

Yesterday and the day before there was another big battle for the Donetsk Airport. The Russians brought fresh troops and sophisticated weaponry to the airport. After a long and exhausting battle, Ukrainians won yet again.

This is the worst type of warfare for Ukraine: a simmering low-intensity conflict that flares up every once in a while. The whole point of the Ukrainian revolution of 2013 was to conduct reforms and transform the country from a corrupt, sleepy mafia haven to a vibrant European state. This is precisely what the Russians don’t want. They sabotage Ukraine ‘ s project of reform by slowly draining the country of resources through an endless simmering conflict. It’s easy for Russia to do that since it isn’t pursuing any creative project of its own. Its entire creative agenda right now is limited to “Let’s stick it to the Americans.” So they can go on and on fighting. There’s nothing else to do in Russia that’s fun.

Realistically, the only hope for Ukraine right now is to resist until 2016 and then hope that a Republican gets elected in the US.

Imitation Game is a very good movie that follows a very traditional Hollywood model. Many changes might take place in the world but it’s comforting to know that Hollywood movies will not deviate even by a hair’s breadth from the tested and true model.  I’m not entirely happy that I went, though, because N had no idea why Turing had killed himself and now that he’s found out he is extremely sad.

On the positive side, the actor who plays teenage Turing is truly talented. I hope he sticks with acting because he has a great future in it.

In what relates to the collapse of the nation-state  (what, did you think it wasn’t going to make an appearance?), the film offers a very curious retelling of WWII from today’s understanding of war not as a series of grand battles but, rather, as a game played by complex
machines operated by nerds who never see any military action. The actual soldiers have descended from their pedestal of heroes and have become unimportant pawns who will only live if the nerds allow them to. The true war heroes are now gadgets and those who know how to use them.

Of course, in order for such a plot to make any sense at all it has to be pinned together rather inelegantly from very incongruous elements. The Soviet spy crammed into the middle of everything in quite a jarring manner allows the story to remain somewhat believable  (but only if you flunked history in high school). It doesn’t matter, however, because the movie isn’t about history. It’s about a new vision of warfare trying to colonize the past and impose itself over previous narratives.

Highly recommended but with a warning that the ending is very tragic.