Wednesday Link Encyclopedia

~ Clarissa

Here is a great example of a sentence that begs for the passive voice to be dropped and an active agent to be put in: “As a fat woman, I have been taught that there is an order of operations for love: First, you get thin; then, you can date who you want.” This is no way to make progress in working on one’s issues.

[Russian] This is an absolutely beautiful post on the Ukrainian Revolution. If you happen to read Russian, you need to read it now. NOW, I said!

I have no idea how this blogger got on my blogroll but s/he says really smart, well-informed things about Russia. Which is extremely rare.

Scott Walker compared ISIS with. . . the teachers of Wisconsin. I still don’t understand what possessed the people of Wisconsin to vote for this dumbass.

“A university graduating people unable to make basic distinctions between valid and invalid beliefs creates a safe space for fanatics.” Very true.

“Man gets life in prison for selling $20 worth of weed to undercover cop.” This is just wrong, folks.

[Russian] A very important post on why it’s much harder to separate from bad parents than it is from good ones.

Why does Stanford waste money on pathetic and shallow MOOCs?

[Spanish] Franco lives on in Spain’s pathetic insistence to pay the money it doesn’t have to promote religious classes in secular schools.

A very interesting post on why the Middle East doesn’t matter any more.

[Russian] Boris Nemtsov was not killed on the bridge.

“House Republicans abandoned their futile effort to tie funding for the Department of Homeland Security to the rollback of Obama’s immigration policies on Tuesday, approving its budget for the full year.” And everybody just died of boredom. This show has really lost its punch the umpteenth time around. Can’t these clowns learn a new trick or two?

Idiots bash Common Core for teaching kids that facts and opinions do not have the same value.

If people wonder why I despise mainstream journalists, here is a great example of one such useless blabberer: “The problem with Nemtsov’s politics wasn’t so much his adherence to radical neoliberalism, but his shallowness, his grotesque elitism, and his authoritarianism. Nemtsov is one of the top-down Russian liberals, cut from the same authoritarian cloth as Chubais.” His framework is so pathetically parochial that the poor freak can’t even conceive of stepping back from it to look at the world.

The idea of students as “victims of laptops” sounds extraordinarily funny to me.

I’m as sick and tired as the linked blogger of “people who make even me not want to be associated with feminism, because if you don’t prepare for every sensitivity, every different category, and every contingency in life when you make a comment, then you are bashed from here to eternity.”

“We need more teachers who are rooted in the community where they teach. To actually teach a student, it’s not just enough to believe in that student’s ability and potential– you have to be able to understand their world, their life, their background, their culture well enough to see past all of that to where their potential lies and what odds and ends it’s hiding behind.” And this is precisely why I’m a lot more effective as a teacher here than at any of my previous schools. I’m not rooted in this community geographically but there are things that are much bigger than geography. I get the students’ reality, that’s what matters.

The post of the week is this brilliant post on higher education. I rarely agree with anything as fully and completely as I agreed with this post.

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Published by Clarissa

25 thoughts on “Wednesday Link Encyclopedia”

  1. Saw this, and thought it could be a good novel:

    History: A Novel by Elsa Morante

    History was written nearly thirty years after Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia spent a year in hiding among remote farming villages in the mountains south of Rome. There she witnessed the full impact of the war and first formed the ambition to write an account of what history – the great political events driven by men of power, wealth, and ambition – does when it reaches the realm of ordinary people struggling for life and bread.

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  2. // I have no idea how this blogger got on my blogroll but s/he says really smart, well-informed things about Russia. Which is extremely rare.

    The blog looks interesting. Now I’ll follow it too.
    When I asked you once about good English blogs, I hoped for something like that.

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    1. Ha, my friend discovered this phenomenon a long time ago and it has become a standard joke between us. You know how some dishes have that something-something that really ties the dish together? A ‘magic’ ingredient, if you will. Like nutmeg in creamed spinach.

      His joke is that in Indian cuisine, there are so many fucking ingredients that the ‘magic’ ingredient is the one you don’t add.

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  5. \ “A university graduating people unable to make basic distinctions between valid and invalid beliefs creates a safe space for fanatics.” Very true.

    Read a horrifying comment about this university:

    The University of Westminster is probably the place that radicalised this chap.

    I speak from experience having attended Westminster in the 90s. The place was crawling with students in long gowns and hijabs, carrying placards and distributing leaflets – sporting Hizb-ut-Tahrir and other names – and having temporary stalls on the steps in the New Cavendish St campus in particular. In fact they would at times corner students they suspected were not Mulsims and encouraged them to convert, warning against remaining an infidel. The atomsphere was regularly quite scary for many students

    I know a student who repeatedly raised this matter with the admin office as well the student union (which was then in Bolsover street) – he was told to shut up and mind his own business. When he began an online campaign through what was then “social media” – Usenet groups – protesting such a seemingly hostile environment.

    He was kicked out of the university!

    It appears like the university remains toxic
    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/jihadi-john-went-to-my-university–so-what-10074983.html

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  10. Found this story:

    “In July, activist Rachel Marcuse spent 10 days in Israel as part of the Taglit-Birthright program — a fully sponsored trip for young North American Jews to learn more about the country. She went to bear witness and ask questions about the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians, and to learn about other complex issues in Israel today. After the program, she spent another 10 days elsewhere in Israel and the West Bank of Palestine talking to Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, international activists, and Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

    Those are her impressions:
    http://geoisphere.blogspot.co.il/2010/09/more-on-israel-palestine.html

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  11. I was very surprised by Rachel’s (Canadian Jew) impression that

    “- The Jewish diaspora is a lot less progressive than much of the population of Israel. Diasporic Jews are pretty fast to call each other self-hating, while asking questions and engaging in dialogue is an integral part of Israeli culture.”

    Thought it is the other way around. In Israel, if you support the Left, there are enough people who’ll call you “self-hating.”

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  12. How did Israelis get away with smuggling for Hamas?
    Dozens of Israelis helped Hamas’ rocket industry – the group’s military wing even had warehouses inside Israel; and if the defense establishment suspected, why didn’t it act?
    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4633184,00.html

    Isn’t it treason? Helping the enemy to kill your co-citizens?

    Don’t know whether to believe or not:

    Netanyahu’s secret peace offer concessions to Palestinians revealed
    During his previous tenure as prime minister, Netanyahu sent his confidant to negotiate with Palestinians and offered land swaps along the 1967 lines and limited right of return; Netanyahu’s office denies any such deal.
    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4634075,00.html

    Of course, politicians from more Right parties used the opportunity (Bayit Yehudi , “The Jewish Home,” is a religious, very pro-settlement, righter than Likud party):

    // “The masquerade is over,” said Bayit Yehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett.

    “The next disengagement is already here, and is again led by Likud and by Tzipi Livni.” According to him, “the 2015 elections have become a referendum on forming a Palestine in the ’67 borders, and Bayit Yehudi is the last stronghold preventing Ariel and Eli from being rubble.”

    “If this document had been received by the government, Yisrael Beytenu would have firmly opposed it,” said Yisrael Beytenu Chairman Avigdor Lieberman. “It’s a repetition of the serious mistakes made during disengagement without any lessons being learned and without any advantages for Israel being achieved.

    “This document does not solve the difficult problems that Israel faces: the need to bring an end to Hamas’s rule of terror in Gaza, and the problem of the Arab Israelis,” Lieberman added. He said that signing an agreement with the Palestinians alone would mean relying on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has, according to Lieberman, proven that he is not a serious partner for conversation.

    “Only a comprehensive regional solution that solves all the problems, particularly full normalization of relations between Israel and moderate Arab countries, ending the rule of Hamas, and exchanges of territory and Israeli Arab populations can bring security and peace to Israel,” Lieberman claimed.

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  13. Do you think this is complete rubbish?

    Is higher education the answer to reducing income inequality? […] Problem is, recent research finds that the demand for skilled labor appears to be on the decline.

    Research by economists Paul Beaudry and David A. Green at the University of British Columbia and Benjamin M. Sand at York University finds that the demand for skills and cognitive tasks has been on the decline since 2000. David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the key developers of the theory of skill-biased technological change, finds a similar trend. In previous research, he found that job growth across the skill spectrum was U-shaped—lots of jobs at the low- and high-end. But in a paper presented at the Federal Reserve’s economic policy symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming this past August, Autor finds the pattern in the 2000s was more of a downward ramp: lots of growth at the bottom and not much elsewhere.
    http://equitablegrowth.org/news/higher-education-answer-reducing-income-inequality/

    AND

    The Stagnating Job Market for Young Scientists
    […]
    The market for new Ph.D.s in the much obsessed-about STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—is stagnant. Over the last 20 years, employment rates are either flat or down in each major discipline, from computer science to chemistry. It’s not what you’d expect given the way companies like Microsoft talk about talent shortages.
    But the graphs don’t lie.
    http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/07/employment_rates_for_stem_ph_d_s_it_s_a_stagnant_job_market_for_young_scientists.html

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    1. If people with PhDs are not guaranteed full employment, then what awaits those with just a high school diploma, you know?
      In my region, there is now a soaring heroine addiction problem. And who do you think are the addicts? Middle aged, middle class women. Their problem started with prescription meds and then progressed. Drugs and screens, just as the quote from my most recent post says.

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      1. \ And who do you think are the addicts? Middle aged, middle class women.

        Are those women unemployed with their husbands ensuring they stay middle class?

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        1. It doesn’t really matter a whole lot. What matters is that people are numbing themselves to hide from a world that is growing too complex and confusing. They don’t see a whole lot of meaning in what they are doing and that causes them pain.

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  16. США приостановили свой проект по обучению украинских военнослужащих.
    Об этом заявил представитель американских вооруженных сил в Европе в пятницу, 6 марта.
    По его словам, администрация в Вашингтоне сначала хочет понаблюдать, как будет соблюдаться режим перемирия между сторонами вооруженного конфликта на востоке Украины.
    http://trim-c.livejournal.com/401368.html

    Why?

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  17. A Jewish Photographer’s Portrait of Arab Israeli Teenagers
    http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/04/22/natan_dvir_photographs_arab_teenagers_in_israel_for_his_series_eighteen.html

    Interesting photos, including Jewish-Ukrainian-Arab girl.

    Those 2 posts (linking the 1st part) held much information, as far as I can judge, of course:

    You Can’t Understand ISIS If You Don’t Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html

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