Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don’t agree, because I’ve been there. Let me tell you something else some of you might not agree with, it wasn’t that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election.

I didn’t say it (this time.) Bernie Sanders did. I should have supported him more than I did because he’s being very courageous in saying this and very principled. 

But I’m also thankful to Hillary for disappearing from public life. I hope she’s done with it for good.

We just got an email telling us that Rauner will make us pay double in healthcare premiums. For the healthcare we are not getting. 

In 26 days I can finally get off the state healthcare plan. Rauner has achieved his goal with me. He wants to make it so intolerable that we’ll all get off this plan, which means taking a big pay cut. But I can’t keep endangering my health and our credit rating. So I give up. Rauner wins. 

The Diversity Office is conducting an activity where participants walk in high heels “to symbolize what it feels like to be a victim of sexual assault.”

Has anybody here read The Clash of Civilizations? I heard such horrible things about it that I never read it or considered doing so but Bauman ends his last book quoting extensively from it and praising it. Have I been foolish in dismissing the book because there is negative talk about it?

It’s fashionable to fantasize about all sorts of campus horrors. I think we all know why such fantasies are increasingly attractive to many people. 

In order to cater to these needs, “data” is manufactured to unleash regular bouts of media frenzy. One of the subjects of college-related horror fantasies is the supposedly high incidence of rape on college campuses. The stats for this brand of fantasizing are manufactured in a particularly shameless way. 

There’s been, for instance, a lot of outrage over the survey that “proves” that 15% of female students at University of Austin have been raped. The makers of the survey went out of their way to expand the definition of rape into the infinity:

This is shameless fishing for a predetermined result, yet the narrative remains popular because there’s demand for it. 

I don’t want to be a nag, but colleagues are fretting on the university email service that some dumb survey we had to fill out on workplace satisfaction only gives “binary gender options.” Not surprisingly, these are the same people who have been ranting against the poor schmucks at the sister institution for being “wasteful” and had not a word of condemnation for Rauner.