On a positive note, it’s becoming unfashionable in Ukraine to be anti-feminist, homophobic or racist. These attitudes are associated with the Russians, and nobody wants to be like the Eastern neighbor any longer.

“Why are you saying this racist shit?” people ask. “What are you, a Putinoid?”

“In Ukrainian, female forms of nouns denoting professions don’t carry a pejorative meaning like they do in Russian, so just use them. Or are you a Putinoid who despises women?”

And that’s a great development.

Trump is surging in the polls with 1 in 10 people actively supporting him.

Something is so deeply wrong with people that I don’t even know what to say. I have no idea what sort of severe neurological damage one has to sustain to begin taking Trump seriously.

Russian police will from now on be allowed to stop and frisk anybody they want at any time. Police officers will also be allowed to enter private residences at will whenever they like and conduct searches of people, property, and vehicles without due cause. The state is investing the police with “the presumption that every action they commit in the course of performing their duties is justified.”

The Russian police will now be allowed to fire into the crowd whenever they feel it’s justified.

Recently, two Russian police officers brutalized a “black”* man because he laughed while talking on the phone and that annoyed them.

The Russian police are also known for the extraordinarily brutal ways they treat peaceful protesters and journalists. Several passersby who had the misfortune of walking past a political protest back in May of 2012 are still in jail for subversive activities.

* This was a man from the Caucasus region. In Russia, people from that region are referred to as “black”, even though they are obviously not, and are treated in a very vicious, racist way. This just goes to show that even when there are no black people in sight to hate, they are invented.

“They are probably on a beach somewhere, sipping vodka,” the narrator  of the TV show Greed: The Fugitives enunciated, and N and I doubled over with laughter. The idea that somebody might sip vodka is too bizarre.

The only correct way to drink vodka is to inhale deeply, then exhale and throw the entire shot inside on the inhale. Vodka is not savored. It is drunk for the effect, not for the taste. If you want to savor, get a cognac or something of the kind.

“And how about all those flavored vodkas?” you might ask.

Those are weird inventions of weird people that have nothing to do with the art of drinking vodka.

If there ever was a disappointing book of literary criticism, it’s this one. It has a really great introduction that promises a lot, builds up your expectations, offers tons of interesting questions, and all this only to deliver the earth – shattering idea that. . . the characters of the late 18th – early 19th century Spanish literature don’t examine their privilege. The bastards.

I’d think it would be much were worthy of attention if the early Romantics did examine privilege (because anything so out of character and so misplaced should definitely be analyzed) but this scholar chooses to reduce his analysis of the most prominent Romantics of Spain to the ridiculously obvious conclusion that they didn’t. The conclusion to Properties of Modernity just repeats the word “privilege” as many times as possible without even trying to venture into any other subject of inquiry.

I’m wondering if we are to expect a book of literary criticism that chides Renaissance artists for not placing trigger warnings on their art.

And hey, I know this scholar. I’ve met him, we belong to the same intellectual tradition within Hispanic Studies that places the beginning of the Spanish Romanticism in the 1780s. He was a very promising scholar but then he went to Berkeley and that was the end of him. It all became about privilege – scratching and real literary analysis died.

Author: Michael Iarocci
Title: Properties of Modernity
Language: English
My rating: 2 out of 10 because the intro is very good

There are different and inventive forms of prostitution. For instance, here is a woman who is selling her abortion.

Russians discovered that an American is working as an administrator of one of Russia’s provincial universities. And he has even had the gall to put up portraits of a couple of American scientists on the university’s hallowed walls. And of course now the American has to be fired.

The poor fellow has been there for 20 years, loves Russia, has done a lot for the university, hasn’t had a single complaint filed against him, but now he’s being vilified in the Russian media and kicked out of his job.

All of the companies that hire a significant number of part-time workers should be heavily fined. They push a huge number of their business costs on taxpayers who end up feeding the workers, paying for their medical care and pensions. And that’s just ridiculous.

Are you middle class in your area of the US?

Find out here.

I’m not, it seems.

If an idea is picked up by many people, integrated by them into their worldview and passionately defended, this can only mean that it serves some important purpose for them.

So all of these ultra – sensitive creatures who want trigger warnings, who are traumatized by absolutely everything, who demand emotionally safe environments, and who are hysterically dedicated to the idea that no discomfort whatsoever is to be tolerated – what goal are they pursuing when they adopt this way of being?

People who are not willing to tolerate even the slightest discomfort in their relationships with others will never form profound connections. Profound relationships cannot be built and maintained without experiencing all kinds of uncomfortable emotions at least every once in a while. Deep connections don’t exist in sanitized, “safe”, trigger – warned formats.

So why are all these people trying so hard to amputate their capacity to form profound relationships? Well, remember what we discussed about the fluid lifestyles that accompany the dissolution of the nation-state? Profound connections stand in the way of heightened fluidity, so connections have got to go.

In order to signal that one has become fully immune from profound relationships, one needs to develop the capacity to freak out as publicly as possible, presenting oneself to the world as such a sensitive snowflake that nobody would even attempt to approach.

So when snowflakes freak out about syllabi or the occasional swear word in the classroom? That’s just their way of offering themselves to the market.