The reason why the young people today are so preoccupied with safety is that they are the generation that will experience the workplace as a succession of part-time gigs. These gigs will carry no benefits or long-term employment prospects and all of them will be about instability and insecurity. This is the reason why the young people feel so unsafe but they don’t know how to articulate it.

We have not taught the young people to discuss these issues in any other language than that of personal trauma. Aside from a vulgar pop psych jargon, we haven’t given them any vocabulary to explain the world. This is why the crucial discussions about precarious employment and the changing nature of work are not happening. Instead, we are looking for “individual solutions to global problems” and aggressively colonizing the public spaces with mattresses and spillovers of private woes.

This is from yet another article on the increasingly helicoptering role that people are trying to force colleges to assume:

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.

The private is gushing out into the public space, colonizing it and destroying all of the remnants of what used to be a robust public sphere. The public, the political, the intellectual is constantly presented as dangerous and encroaching on the private, the personal, and the emotional.

The reality, however, is different.

Public spaces are forced to restructure themselves in a way that will make them as similar as possible to families. 

Political activism is substituted with pop-psych rhetoric.

Colleges are told to protect helpless and emotionally damaged children instead of educating adults.

It’s easier to find a space to emote than to debate.

The linked article fixates on colleges, refusing to see that they are just a tiny little part of a much larger phenomenon. I guess it’s easier to emote about hypersensitive kids than to look at how one contributes to the colonization of the public by the private. It is as if these kids came to college from a different planet instead of being brought up by the same adults who are complaining about their hypersensitivity.

So this is the painting I bought in Ukraine. It has finally been framed and put under non-reflective glass, and I will see it every time I come down the stairs.

The painting was obviously inspired by the 2013 Revolution of Dignity.

Russia has threatened to target Denmark’s warships with nuclear weapons if the Scandinavian nation becomes a member of Nato’s missile defence shield. Russian ambassador to Denmark said a move towards better integration with the Western alliance would make it a “threat to Russia”, and that it would have to accept the consequences.

Mikhail Vanin told the told Jyllands-Posten newspaper: “I do not think that the Danes fully understand the consequences if Denmark joins the US-led missile defence shield. If that happens, Danish warships become targets for Russian nuclear missiles.”

Maybe now somebody will start paying attention. Russia makes threats of nuclear attacks pretty much every day now. As a philologist, I can tell you that words create reality. Saying “I will nuke you!” over and over again makes the probability of a nuclear attack soar. People soon get used to the idea that nuclear weaponry is not the horrifying force that, if unleashed, will destroy the planet (as the Cold War philosophy suggested) but something that can and should be used whenever you are mildly dissatisfied with something.

Cold War was enormously better than this because I can absolutely guarantee to you that the Soviet people were as terrified of a nuclear Holocaust as you were. The nuclear option was not really an option. Nobody suggested that nuclear weapons should be used. And nuclear strikes were definitely not a subject of light banter or regular, everyday way of addressing reality. 

I know I’m turning into a bore, harping on this all the time, but I used to think that the danger of nuclear weapons was self-evident to everybody on the planet. But younger Russians don’t know anything about Hiroshima and have no idea what nuclear weapons are, really. Most people in Russia seem convinced that you can deliver nuclear strikes and not suffer any consequences. Nobody is educating them on the dangers. 

And by the way:

The Russian authorities are hosting tomorrow a meeting of Europe’s neo-Nazis, extreme nationalists, and anti-Semites who share one thing in common – their unqualified support for Vladimir Putin.

Putin needs to make sure that no Western leader will come to Russia in May to attend the celebration of the victory over Nazism. He does all he can to make it impossible for anyone to show up. This meeting is one useful trick that will promote this goal.

And when nobody comes to the celebration, he will be able to exclaim in triumph, “See? Nobody wants to celebrate the victory over Nazism. That’s because the West is Nazi! And it is up to us to defend the legacy of anti-Nazism. Let’s do our grandfathers proud and continue their sacred fight against Nazism.”

The people of Russia will lap it all up, and the Russian troops will move on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

Another benefit of supporting European neo-Nazis is that their success at the polls will justify Russia’s hostility towards their countries.

P.S. Russia’s Twitter users were told today that any tweet that mentions the word “Nazism” will leave its author open to charges of promoting Nazism.

Mainstream journalism keeps getting more and more disgusting. The Washington Post interviews Navalny, presenting him as a “top Kremlin critic” and forgetting to mention his neo-Nazi leanings.

It’s extremely irresponsible not to do at least a cursory research of your subject. The newspaper has been dragged into legitimizing the views of a neo-Nazi because a journalist is too lazy to do run a couple of Google searches.

The funniest thing at the conference was a comment made by a woman from the audience. There were so many questions and comments, so many raised hands in the audience, and so much interest from so many people that everybody tried to be brief. Not this person, though.

“My brother and I are very different,” she began. “Our mother decided to redesign her kitchen because, I mean, in a house that was built back in the 1950s, you’ve got to be ready to do some redecorating at least every half-century or so, if you know what I mean. So my brother decided to build a counter top for her, and he went to Home Depot. . .”

As she rambled on and on and on about the counter top, we sat there in astonishment trying to figure out how the story related to the subject of online learning.

Details about the counter top-building efforts of her brother poured out of the woman for a while longer. Some people looked like they were starting to doze off. 

“But there was, of course, one thing my brother forgot to do,” the speaker declared triumphantly, and we all perked up, hoping she was about to tell us that her brother had forgotten to submit homework in his online course on counter tops. “He forgot to ask our mother what color she preferred! Seriously, my brother is somewhat challenged in the sociability department, if you know what I mean. He just never knows what’s appropriate in the way he relates to people.”

The speaker guffawed loudly, finally giving the moderator an opportunity to come in with a desperately loud, “Thank you! And now for the next question, please!”

The next question was from my colleague who asked whether we were bothered by the possibility that online learning would make good communication skills even more rare.

I read the following comment on a blog I follow last week and felt intrigued:

A lot of women’s writing that’s considered subversive falls within acceptable parameters —  she’s not really bad, her circumstances made her that way — and usually comes with a lack of power. The last book I read that subverts many of those tropes was Alissa Nutting’s Tampa, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me uncomfortable because it was so unrecognizable.

I spent years studying female Bildungsromane, so I’m desperate – just literally, desperate – for a novel with a female protagonist who has any other goal in life than infantilizing herself. The problem is, as the linked blogger points out, any female characters in contemporary fiction who are not totally pathetic, only manage to find some strength as a result of trauma or something bad happening to them. So I decided to check out this novel to see if it was, indeed, unrecognizable.

The bad news: the novel is the opposite of unrecognizable. For those of you who are fellow Hispanists, I have 4 words: The Ages of Lulu. And now that my Spanish-speaking readers have already died of boredom and switched to another window in their densely populated browsers, I can tell everybody else what I mean.

There is this trend in contemporary novels about women where the female protagonist goes to extreme lengths in order to infantilize herself. Many people don’t notice that about these books, however, and consider it hugely subversive, “empowering”, and all kinds of sad crap because the heroine engages in tons of very outrageous sex. It’s like “has lots of sex” translates into “is powerful, feminist, and subversive” in many people’s heads. This is so 1960s that it bores me even to talk about it. 

So in Tampa, we see a character who is a pedophile and engages in endless, and very graphically and painstakingly described sex acts with 14-year-old boys. The reason why she does it is because she is terrified of growing up. Just like every other boring heroine of every other boring Bildungsroman from the past 3 decades. And so that’s what the novel is about. 268 pages of sex with boys. And then the novel mercifully ends.

I’m not unhappy I checked it out because I keep being told that my discipline is not real science because my conclusions are not falsifiable. And it’s not true. I don’t trade in “subjective opeeenions.” The only reason why I picked up the book was to see if it was going to prove me wrong. It didn’t but it’s not outside the realm of probability that it could. 

If you do decide to read the book, please do not tell me that it hurts the feelings of the pedophile community because of the incorrectness of its depictions of pedophiliac sex. I’ve faced my fair share of that argument in the discussions of 50 Shades of Grey.

Author: Alissa Nutting

Title: Tampa

Year of publication: 2014

My rating: 2 out of 10 (because it proved me right and there were a couple of apt observations about boredom that I enjoyed)

The conference was a massive success, folks. The presentations were fantastic, there was a million questions, and I had a mighty good time. The presentations were not read, which is the best. We delivered them in a conversational manner without any props or technology. Which is ironic, given the subject.

First of all, I want to tell you about the presentation that I found the most impressive. It was delivered by a colleague who specializes in online learning. He had taught his first fully online course back in 1997. Today, not only does he teach online but his research consists of theorizing online education. When he spoke, it was obvious that the guy is a brilliant pedagogue. The way he speaks, calculates his time, modulates his voice, pauses, keeps the audience’s attention, makes it impossible not to listen, strategizes his delivery, never trails off, finishes every sentence as strongly as he began it, and forces everybody to forget that cell phones exist – all of this testifies to his enormous pedagogical experience. Fuck it, the guy is a better teacher than me, which is not something I find myself saying often.

So here is what he had to say:

1. It is possible to deliver a good online course, but only if we remember the following:

            a. A good online course costs MORE to design and administer than a regular course.

                  b. Enrollment caps (i.e. the number of students in the course) should be LOWER in an online course than in a regular course.

                         c. The professor should be online, administering the course in an active way 7 days a week, at least 3-4 times during the day.

2. Having a PhD in a discipline does not qualify you to teach that discipline. Instead of content authority, we should rely on pedagogical authority.

3. Striving to create a psychologically and emotionally comfortable environment in the classroom is a MISTAKE. In order for learning to happen, there should be a degree of productive anxiety (God, I love this phrase) in both the students and the teachers. To put it bluntly, learning should be uncomfortable. 

4. A professor should not be the person who awards grades. It’s a good idea not to reveal any grades until the end of the course. [This is something I’m already doing, in part, in my courses. Students resist but I don’t give way.] Instead of numbers (grades, percentages, etc.), we should provide verbal feedback (“Good, excellent, etc. because. . . since. . . however. . .).

He wasn’t allowed any more time to speak, which is a pity because I could have stayed there hearing what he has to say all day long.

Just talked to some locals and discovered that all of them know every single version of Putin ‘ s disappearance but not a single one is even remotely aware that the day after Putin reappeared he discussed, openly and in detail, that he was preparing to deliver a nuclear strike a year ago (BEFORE THE WAR) in case he was thwarted in the annexation of the Crimea.

Mainstream reporting,  my ass.