The editors of the collections where my articles were accepted are driving me really hard to improve my work. They give oodles of suggestions, and all these suggestions are absolutely brilliant.

This is what somebody should have done for us: pushed us all the way from a final essay to an actual publication.

If I ever get to teach at a place with a graduate school, I’ll do this for my grad students. I think it would totally make sense for me to teach grad school. I mean, I’m great at teaching Beginner Spanish, but I think we can all agree I’m a tad wasted on such courses.

My dislike for the current Chancellor of the university (the one who refused to fund my Oxford trip and suggested we get bank loans to cover our health costs) has somewhat lessened. Today is the first day of classes, and students were greeted on campus by people with large “ASK ME” signs who help newcomers find their way around campus. There are also people who are distributing free hot chocolate outside to compensate for the cold weather.

Also, in the absence of a budget for 2015 (yes, 2015), the university leadership has convinced state representatives to agree to make phone calls to doctors to explain why state employees’ health insurance claims are not being covered.

And look at how easily postnational mentality has conquered all. When the Pope talks about the world’s hungry, poor and persecuted, it doesn’t even occur to him to consider any other response than transporting people from one place to another. 

The whole planet is subdivided, in this mentality, into vast “bad places” and smallish “good places” (i.e. ghettos and gated communities). Those who are capable and willing to spend their lives chasing after the good places should be assisted. Those who can’t, for whatever reason, uproot themselves as easily are screwed.

The possibility that instead of shuffling people around and dismissing large swatches of Earth as irredeemably bad it might makes sense to help more places become better never even occurs to the Pope. Or to anybody else, it seems. 

The Pope could easily contribute to the task of making some of the poverty and hunger-generating places he denounces to become better. He could, for instance, end his campaign against birth control. But that would go against the prevailing “if you don’t like what there is, move!” approach, and this approach has won the day.

And, of course, the creepy Pope is chiming in with a speech on how more refugees need to be brought to Europe. He will only be too happy to see the women he so hates locked up and terrified into submission.

Julio Llamazares is a famous Spanish writer. In Spain, writers participate a lot in public life and write for newspapers and magazines on the most pressing political issues all the time.

Today, Llamazares decided to publish a piece on mass sexual assaults in Cologne. After outlining his disgust with everybody who suggested that there might have been refugees among the rapists, Llamazares finally had to recognize that yes, actually, many of the rapists were refugees. The writer honestly and unashamedly relates what his reaction to this information was:

When the news coming from Germany begin to confirm that there were, indeed, recently arrived refugees among those who sexually assaulted women in Cologne, like many other people I feel frustration. What are we now going to say to everybody who refuses to accept in our countries the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing hunger and war?

The writer doesn’t even try to fake any concern for the victims of the assaults. Women are erased from his narrative completely, and their suffering does not touch him in the least. All he cares about is that these annoying, pesky women with their stupid little problems will now get in the way of male suffering being alleviated.

This is male solidarity in action, people. Llamazares is a talented writer, deeply sensitive to human suffering, but all that goes out of the window the second he feels that the interests of some men somewhere might be compromised for the sake of acknowledging the interests of women. Llamazares is not some raging male chauvinist. He is not even remotely one of the men who actively hate women. His readiness to sacrifice women to help out other men is simply so natural to him that he doesn’t question it.

I know that many people will feel tempted to tell me that “not all men.” Yes, I know that not all men. If you read this blog, you are probably not like this, great. But if Llamazares’s approach were not predominant, the situation in Cologne would not have even happened in the first place. The only reason why women’s rights were not the central subject of discussion when the decision was made to bring over to Germany a million men from anti-women countries is precisely that so many men (and women who interiorized the narrative of their own subservience) refused even to consider that alleviating male suffering should not be done at the cost of flushing women’s rights down the toilet.

For people who see women’s rights as important, the number one question when we had when hearing the news of open borders for refugees was, “Wait, but what will this mean for women’s rights?” For everybody else, the question doesn’t arise even after dozens of women get brutalized. And while women sit there, staring at what is happening in disbelief or constructing servile systems of excuses for the rapists, all of the achievements of the women’s movement are being thrown out into the trash.

Here is a long and interesting article on mass immigration to Great Britain. Note that even in the absence of an understanding of nation-state’s trajectory the author arrives at the same conclusion: liquid capital favors the highly mobile, educated, specialized minority (a.k.a. exterritorial elite) that is not tied to any locale. For the low-skilled, not very educated majority that is incapable and unwilling to flit around the globe easily and carelessly, liquid capital has no use. So capital discards the people who don’t follow it with ease. 

The interests of this rooted majority will be easily sacrificed to the smallest whim of the exterritorial elite. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s not something anybody does on purpose. It’s simply that capital tends to get what it needs. Capital’s needs don’t have to resonate with most or even with many. If it benefits capital to reward its exterritorial elite with slightly better eating out options, the lifestyle, the hopes and the entire culture of the less mobile minority will easily be sacrificed to that goal.

Gosh, can a border guard or two throw this wanker’s passport into his stupid face like they did to me and help him get over his pathetic white guilt?

The linked article belongs to the swelling “I went to a Trump rally and felt superior, here is every boring detail of that inane experience” genre. The author tries to liven up his soporific piece with a dose of racial self-flagellation that is embarrassing to observe.

N and I started watching Netflix’s Making a Murderer. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend. If you have, please no spoilers. We only saw the first two episodes so far.

One observation I wanted to make is how extraordinarily manipulative the absent narrator is. This is a lesson we can all learn from 19th-century realist literature: if the author / narrator is going to great lengths to make themselves imperceptible in the story, some massive manipulation is about to be perpetrated against you. And you can make your experience as a reader or viewer more fun through catching the author in the act.

In Making a Murderer there is no narrator, and the viewers are invited to believe that nobody is telling them what to think, they can make their own minds. Of course, it’s all a lie. The footage is selected and arranged in a way that pushes a single version of events very hard. Every narrative and creative vehicle is used to slam the “correct” reading down your throat while allowing you to entertain the comforting illusion that you made your own mind.

It’s a great documentary, totally worth watching.

Great news from the UK:

The prime minister will call for a revolution in child rearing this weekend by suggesting that all parents should attend classes on how to discipline their children. As part of a speech on the family, Cameron will announce plans for a parenting classes voucher scheme, claiming that all parents need help and that there is too little state-sponsored guidance on offer.

Ideally, of course, people would come to these classes of their own free will, but if one has to pay them, then for this crucial purpose, no amount is too much to spend.

For all the useless chatter about family values, nobody is all that invested into actually doing anything to achieve familial happiness. People put in a lot of effort into planning and organizing their careers, yet their family lives are supposed somehow to work out on their own. As a result, they come home from work and slide into yelling, screaming, bitterness, sourness, misery and discomfort. And if they have to be prodded into dedicating a few hours to thinking about what it is thar poisons their family lives and turns their children into sad little neurotics, then so be it.

In the early years of my blog, I used to publish a weekly “Mock Ross Douthat” post (and if you still remember those times, thank you for being such a loyal reader, you rock!). Then I got bored with his repetitive superficiality and stopped reading him. Years have passed, and today I discovered that for Douthat they have passed in vain. He is still as clueless and woman-hating as ever. Here is Douthat on the issue of European immigration:

How transformative depends on whether these men eventually find a way to bring brides and families to Europe as well. In terms of immediate civil peace, family formation or unification offers promise, since men with wives and children are less likely to grope revelers or graffiti synagogues or seek the solidarity of radicalism.

This is not only egregiously stupid, it’s also offensive. Women are not food, we are not fungible. Providing each man with his own piece of meat might prevent him from grabbing other men’s pieces of meat. But women are not pieces of meat (surprise!) and the reason men grope, poke, assault and humiliate us is not that they don’t have a willing object at home to do this to.

My mother has a friend, a Ukrainian woman who married a man from Morocco. He raped her and beat her for 20 years, in spite of being an educated, well-established, financially successful professional man.

When they emigrated to Canada, Mohammed brought both his wife and child and his contempt for women with him. Whenever they would come over to my parents’ place on a family visit, Mohammed would ogle me and my minor child sister in such a disgusting, offensive way that we would feel precisely like pieces of meat that Douthat considers us to be. The presence of his wife and our parents not 10 feet from all this in no way prevented Mohammed from acting like a pig. I am convinced that the only reason why he didn’t jump on us was not that he was married but that he was fat, clumsy and alone and we would all collectively whoop his ass if he tried. Put him at the train station in Cologne, and he’ll gladly participate in assaulting women.

If I had any temptation to wonder whether Mohammed’s piggishness was linked to his religion, that temptation evaporated the moment I met a group of Christian men from Lebanon. Their piggishness was so identical to Mohammed’s that I was cured from “my religion is better than yours” kind of hubris immediately.

The reason why Douthat doesn’t grope women against their will is not that he is Christian. It is that women from the culture to which Douthat belongs worked long and hard to spread the shocking news that women are valid human beings. And they were joined by some men who said, “Hey, this kind of makes sense.” And then more women joined and more men.

Gradually, after a lot of work by a lot of people it became possible to construct a tentative and insufficient yet still earth-shattering social consensus that everybody will be happier if women are treated like humans that we are and not pieces of meat. 

If it were possible to skip that long and painful process of building this social consensus by adopting some religion and automatically achieving non-piggish treatment of women, I’d be all for it. But I studied a lot of history and I know for a fact that no religion or lack thereof leads to creating a space where women can go out to celebrate New Year’s and not be sexually assaulted. 

Our consumerist mentality makes us want to believe that happiness resides in a correct selection of identity labels. Put the correct label on it, and joy will follow. But good things in life don’t come as a result of label switching. They come only as a consequence of long and painful labor of changing oneself and the reality that surrounds one. 

P.S. I know the post is long and people hate that but ideas that are worth being expressed don’t exist in soundbites. If it’s simple, it’s probably stupid.