So who’s with me on watching the Schadenfreude debate tonight? Seven lame ducks, pouty and aggrieved, trying to look relevant. This will be fun.

It’s hard not to be grateful to Trump for doing this to the Republican party.

There is a simple answer to the question of whether there is such a thing as Trumpism or Trump is a fluke. That answer is Bruce Rauner.

The Governor of Illinois is a millionaire with a ditzy, brainless wife. He is extremely narcissistic and lazy and is known to hold ridiculous childish grudges against people he believes didn’t give him his full measure of respect.

Rauner is unstable, given to unprovoked fits of rage, and sports an ugly little comb over. Rauner enjoys a very lavish lifestyle on the taxpayers’ dime and fakes being religious in an unconvincing sort of way. He also loves to rant about Muslims.

Just like his combover is a tiny version of Trump’s more flamboyant thing, Rauner himself is a miniature Trump. This incompetent and angry fellow offers a preview of what we should expect from Trump.

I find it extremely bizarre when people refer to Marco Rubio as “ethnic.” They probably don’t think they are being jerk wads of massive proportions but they are. In their minds, Rubio’s ethnicity is somehow qualitatively different from that of Jeb Bush or John McCain.

By the way, is Carly Fiorina considered “ethnic”? Is Bernie Sanders? Am I?

Or is the ethnic thing reserved for the cases when one needs to point out that even lily-white Hispanics are “not really white”?

There have been several dozen recorded cases of flu in Russia this winter. Russian politicians are claiming the US infected Russia.

There is approximately the same number of cases of flu every year but this is in no way influencing the Russians’ belief that this year’s flu is inflicted on them by evil Americans.

One stupid term is “the West.” There’s obviously no counterpoint, no “the East” that anybody ever mentions.

A better alternative is “Global North and Global South.” At least, these are two terms, so that’s already more nuanced than “the West.” But this alternative is still very imperfect because it’s emotional a lot more than it is intellectual. It’s all about hunches and vague feelings.

Plus, what about Russia, China, Australia? Global South has the emotional connotation of “pathetic and exploited”, but Australia obviously doesn’t fit in. And Russia and China just complicate everything altogether. What’s Bahrain? Do we feel sorry for it or not?

And so on.

The reason why the overwhelming majority of divorces is initiated by women is that men are socialized not to consider themselves competent to manage their personal lives. They simply don’t know how to determine whether it’s time to get divorced.

Men who initiate divorces are usually better educated and / or more comfortable with managing their emotions.

Pure femininity is passivity, weakness and submission, while pure masculinity is aggression, strength and dominance. It is simply impossible to be all of these things at the same time. (If you don’t agree with me – if you’re angry right now about my “femmephobia”, because I’ve defined femininity as weakness and submission – feel free to give me alternative definitions of masculinity and femininity. Whatever you come up with, they’re going to represent opposites of one another.)

I, for one, am uncharacteristically not angry, I’m disappointed. People don’t even try to think past the crap they read in glossy magazines.

Being female means nothing other than having a female body. Being male means nothing other than having a male body. Consequently, “pure femininity” is pure, undiluted comfort with one’s female body entirely irrespective of one’s aggression, etc or lack thereof. “Pure masculinity” is pure, undiluted comfort with one’s male body entirely irrespective of one’s aggression, etc or lack thereof.

An extremely angry, domineering woman will be perceived as ultra-feminine by everyone if she is clearly comfortable with her body. An extremely passive, weak woman will be perceived as very unfeminine if she’s visibly uncomfortable with her body. And it’s exactly the same for men. We can all think of a million and one examples of this.

The reason why people so often slip into the language of personal characteristics when discussing physiological realities is their puritanical fear of the body. They observe and react to bodies but can’t admit this. As a result, they try to push the purely physiological into the realm of the ideological. This is nothing but the tired old belief in the mind / body split that should have be abandoned a long time ago.

As you can see, pure femininity and pure masculinity are not “opposites of one another”, as the linked author states. They are exactly the same in nature. All that is needed to recognize this is to lose the fear of the word “body.” We are not female or male in the head. We are female or male much lower down. Which is precisely the reason why transgender people never seek brain surgery and the intersex are people with unusual genitals, not unusual brains.

And. . . weirdness continues. I just saw a commercial for my university on MSNBC. Although it would surely be nice to have a bit of political diversity on our uniformly Fox-Newsified campus, the likelihood that prospective students or their families are watching MSNBC is negligible.

But yes, the idea that the new generation of students would include at least a few people from families that watch Sex and the City and MSNBC is very attractive. You have no idea how hard it is to foment discussions in a classroom where everybody is exactly the same ideologically, politically and culturally.

It’s also frustrating that everybody keeps pretending that uniformly conservative campuses like ours do not exist. “Academia is in the hands of Liberals” is a ridiculous myth created by people who have no experience of the actual US academia. The only myth that is more bizarre is “Ivy League schools are in the hands of Liberal administrators.”

The very expression “Liberal college administrators” makes no sense whatsoever. Probably people confuse administrators with support staff (all those bureaucratic grunts who sit in Diversity and Multiculturalism offices, issuing endless memos.) But those people don’t really have political opinions. Their only motivation is to create as much paperwork as possible so that their jobs are not made redundant. The day when I meet an actual Liberal administrator will be a day to remember because they are more rare than unicorns. 

The Berlin police continues to investigate the alleged rape of a 13 – year-old Russian girl.

Martin Steltner, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, happily assured the public that there was no rape. The girl, he said, had had consensual sex with two adult men of Turkish descent.

At 13. Consensual sex with adults.

Makes total sense.

In any case, Steltner said, it was the girl’s fault for falling in with a bad crowd.

Tomorrow we might hear that the child raped these adults.

Steltner, by the way, is the same fellow who back in October dismissed the overwhelming evidence that male refugees were posting selfies with stolen goods they acquired in the course of criminal activities. These male refugees were, for Steltner, “just kids.”

Here’s the link. And here is another.

Trump got so scared of Megyn Kelly that he wimped out of the debate? Seriously?

Gosh, he’s so ready to be Commander in Chief.