I’m reading about the history of the Basque Country, and more specifically, the enormous efforts that the French state apparatus made between 1870 and 1910 to integrate – often with great violence – the rural populations into the nationalist ideology of a linguistically and culturally uniform France. This France, just like any other nation-state, was quite fictitious. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, most of its inhabitants didn’t even speak French, let alone see themselves as “French.”

But it worked. France was fashioned into a model nation-state, and the rural masses eventually came on board.

Today, just a blink of an eye later, the descendants of these rural folks who had to give up everything for the nation-state are told they are ridiculous and antiquated losers for wanting to hold on to it.

It’s just that it was all so recent. It’s not something that happened in a remote past. 1910, 1920 – there are people who are still alive who were born then. It’s a weird feeling to read about the swiftness of this process.

Every year I look for the best image that symbolizes the International Women’s Day.

Here is this year’s winner:

At least #MeToo has inspired women in countries where there is a real rape culture to start realizing it’s not ok and they don’t deserve it. I’ve been reading beautiful articles by women in Russia who are finally arriving at a conclusion that the violence and the humiliation they experience on a daily basis is wrong.

What’s really interesting is that women in Russia have changed the narcissistic hashtag #MeToo to the collective #WomenTogether.

So it’s not all inanities and navel-gazing. Some people are putting this to good use.

In private colkeges

students who don’t fall into the “athlete,” “legacy,” or “diversity” slots are called “over the transom.”

There is this story on the news about a woman in the UK who is protesting against the subway ads that say obesity causes cancer. She says the ads make her feel guilty for being fat and that’s intolerable.

We can rag on the woman because yes, her complaints are silly. It’s true that obesity elevates cancer risks, and denying that is not a rational thing to do.

However, we can also look at the reasons why so many people perceive shaming or guilt-tripping in all kinds of things and react as strongly as this woman did to the most obvious, inoffensive statements.

All of the precariousness and risk of neoliberal societies is for individuals to deal with. If you are not successful, that’s your fault for not being a good entrepreneur of the self. You need to manage yourself better. And whenever anything bad happens, it’s your fault for not running fast enough, for not processing the change well enough, for not managing yourself better. That’s the essence of the neoliberal ideology I keep talking about.

People get tired of the constant interiorization of guilt for everything, so they freak out over the seemingly insignificant, trivial things like that subway ad about obesity. The woman who is protesting chose this particular innocent ad to concentrate on but what actually causes her discomfort is the larger environment of the constant recitation of the idea that there is nothing but isolated individuals who are completely responsible for everything that happens to them.

We all know how I feel about organized labor. It is crucially, crucially important to have strong, functioning labor unions.

Look at the teacher strike in West Virginia. Isn’t it a wonderful, inspiring thing? The teachers refused to be further mistreated and abused. They organized, stuck together, and achieved a victory.

If you have ever done any organizing, you know that it’s not about making a logical argument, showing the numbers, and proving points. What’s a lot more important are human relationships, emotions, trust, feeling comfortable with people in your unit.

It’s a lot harder to organize in an environment of mistrust, suspicion, and mutual dislike between workers. Any collective action requires an enormous amount of trust between participants because getting atomized, alienated consumers to do any collective action at all is ridiculously hard.

The vision of self as an island that is better off outside of any collective process is formed slowly and by means we don’t even notice. Those people who tell me, “I don’t need a union. I can negotiate on my own behalf” or “and how do I know you won’t tell the dean what we’ve been talking about here?” are guided towards this vision of self and others. There’s a million strategies to make workers fear and avoid each other.

All of these microaggressions seminars, ethics trainings, gender parity tutorials – their whole point is to make workers detest each other. We tell ourselves they have no effect on us but that’s delusional and well in line with thinking that an exceptional individual can bootstrap themselves out of ideological and intellectual processes that everybody is subject to.

It does have an effect. All of these exhortations to suspect and fear our fellow worker have an effect. Nobody is an exceptional cookie that can rise above this. This is poisoning the workplace for all of us. This is what we need to resist.

Unless we have a clear vision of all the anti-labor strategies employed against us, we won’t win.

I’m baffled by this FB advice:

Never struggle peeling a banana again with this simple tip: turn it upside down! If you watch chimps peeling bananas, you’ll notice they start from the bottom.

Does anybody truly struggle peeling a banana?? More importantly, who on Earth tries to peel it from the top? That’s so weird.

In the blink of an eye, the most rabid of progressives have turned into free trade fanatics. It’s like they’ve been practicing for this their whole lives while sitting deep in a free trade closet.

Finally, the NYTimes is getting over it’s attack of prissiness and is managing to squeeze out a report that is at least not completely bullshit:

A Belarusian escort with close ties to a powerful Russian oligarch said from behind bars in Bangkok on Monday that she had more than 16 hours of audio recordings that could help shed light on Russian meddling in United States elections.

The “close ties” part is still hilarious. And the recordings that “could shed light” have been already published a million times. There’s nothing new here. Everybody who wanted to find out about this, already has. The Russians are going out of their way to make Mueller notice this.

Unbelievable. The next episode of Dr Phil will feature Anthony Scaramucci. Maybe I should start watching the cartoon channel for my escape from all this.

What’s next, Ivanka Trump on Shark Tank? God, I just realized that it’s actually quite possible.