So guess where I’m staying in London? Right next to the Freud museum, of course!  It’s also very close to the Hampstead Heath.

It’s quite far from the center but I’m not that into the center anyway. I just want to walk around and see something authentically London-like (meaning, something that doesn’t remind me of New York.)

I just got an email urging me to sign a petition asking Amazon and eBay to remove merchandise that features the Confederate flag. I’m not signing the petition. Neither would I sign a petition urging to remove merchandise with a swastika or with the symbols of the Russian terrorists in Ukraine. 

Of course, it makes me feel like I’m being punched in the gut every time I enter “Ukraine” in the search box at eBay and have “Novorossia” symbols thrust into my face. But there are things that are more important than my feelings, and freedom of expression is one such thing.

And because I know somebody will ask: if a student came into my classroom in a T-shirt featuring a swastika or a Confederate flag, I’d ask them to leave. But I wouldn’t do that if a student came in wearing the Russian terrorist symbols. My job in my classroom is not to protect myself from the discomfort that only I am likely to experience.

People are so weird:

The UK government [has] promised to put psychologists into job centres “to provide integrated employment and mental health support to claimants with common mental health conditions” but with the potential threat of having assistance removed if people do not attend treatment.

It has been criticised as ‘treating unemployment as a mental problem’ or an attempt to ‘psychologically reprogramme the unemployed’ and has triggered an upcoming march on a London job centre.

What kind of a freak marches against assistance to the unemployed? Long-term unemployed desperately need a psychologist. After 7-8 months of unemployment, workers need psychological assistance to re-inscribe themselves into the workplace. Long-term unemployment is both an effect and a cause of psychological issues. And if the UK government wants to rehabilitate the unemployed, this is a great thing that is to be applauded.

Reader Steve says a propos of national symbols:

[In South Africa] people seem to fixate on historic statues rather than flags, but the same principle applies. Removing a statue of a long-dead politician does nothing to transform education, but much student rhetoric suggests that students think it does.

This reminds me of a funny true story. In 1958, the statue of the founder of the Soviet secret police was erected in front of the secret police building in Moscow.

In 1991, the statue was pulled down and everything associated with the Soviet secret police was repudiated on a state and popular levels.

And now the statue is being taken out of storage and dragged back to its old place because now the Soviet legacy is considered prestigious in Russia again. It will cost an enormous sum to restore the statue but nobody seems to mind.

It’s just really funny to imagine the Russians running there and back, there and back with the stupid statue.