By the way, all of the workers quoted in the story make more money than I do. And my benefits all died during the budget crisis.

The author of the article is desperately trying to put a crowd-pleasing political slant on the story but facts speak for themselves. This is an issue that is really big, especially among the younger generation, and in well-paying jobs, too. Now let’s imagine what effect bringing UBI, “safe passage,*” and a federal job guarantee into this situation might have.

What Trump did to save the factory should have been done decades ago by Bill Clinton and everybody else since him. Right now, it might be way too late.

* For those who are overseas, a suddenly famous young politician recently declared that the goal of an immigration enforcement agency is to ensure “safe passage” into the country.

I haven’t finished reading Illouz’s book yet because I never just read scholarly books. I annotate them in a very detailed way because it’s very useful for my work. Plus, I have the shittiest memory and need to revise constantly to remember what I read. So here are some interesting quotes.

On the suffering Olympics:

“Modern identity has. . . become increasingly publicly performed in a variety of social sites through a narrative which combines the aspiration to self-realization with the claim to emotional suffering” (4).

On gender roles:

“Because capitalism demands and creates networks of interdependence, and has affect within the very heart of its transactions, it has also brought about a destructuring of the very gender identities it helped establish in the first place. . . The ethos of communication blurs gender divisions by inviting men and women to control their negative emotions, be friendly, view themselves through others’ eyes, and empathize with others” (23).

And my favorite:

“Such emotional ontology has made intimate relationships commensurate, that is, susceptible to depersonalization, or likely to be emptied of their particularity and to be evaluated according to abstract criteria. This in turn suggests that relationships have been transformed into cognitive objects that can be compared with each other and are susceptible to cost-benefit analysis. . . The process of commensuration makes intimate relationships more likely to be fungibles, that is, objects which can be traded and exchanged” (36).

This is very much in the vein of Bauman. The argument is identical to his, but the explanation of the causes is more interesting, I believe. Plus, she has a rare sophisticated understanding of Freud that I have not encountered in any other theorist. She actually read the guy, which is rare.

The point everybody needs to take away from the book is that we have developed “a cognitive style which empties relationships of their particularity and transforms them into objects which. . . become more likely to know the fate of commodities traded” (38).

I’m reading Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, and it’s surprisingly good. It’s an analysis of how our emotional lives are conditioned by the system of economic relations we live in. Illouz works in the same vein as Zygmunt Bauman in his Liquid Love, but her analysis is much stronger because she talks, in a very honest and strong way, about the ways in which feminism shores up neoliberalism.

It’s very fashionable to write research about emotions these days. The so-called “emotional turn” in scholarship produced a crapload of gushy, silly books and articles about emotions. Illouz’s book is extremely refreshing in contrast because she is strangely uninterested in any of the dogmatic pieties that academics usually emit when trying to say something about gender, feminism, psychology, and capitalism.

I wondered why Illouz was so sane and wrote with such freedom until I looked at the book’s back flap and discovered that she is an Israeli scholar. As a result, I now support the boycott of Israeli scholars to protect them from being drowned by the tsunami wave of idiocy that exists in the American academia.

I’ll post a few quotes from Illouz later today so that everybody can see what I mean.

I’m trying to convince Klara to take a shower.

“If you don’t wash your feet, they are going to stink.”

“Well, don’t smell them, Mommy,” she says reasonably. “They are not flowers.”

We are offered guest speakers to come to our classrooms and speak on the following topics:

– healthy relationships

– healthy masculinity

– domestic violence

– sexual violence

– healthy sexuality

– bystander intervention.

Note that healthy femininity is not there. The topic would sound vaguely offensive if it did. I wonder if any of the listeners think of asking who all those unhealthy males are in relationships with if unhealthy femininity doesn’t exist.

Yesterday, I actually found a form of cultural appropriation I detest.

“Borscht is Russian soup, Mommy?” Klara asked. So I had to teach her the word щи, which is the Russian equivalent of borscht but absolutely hideous. I never tried it but I studied the recipes because I wanted to cook it and it sounds disgusting. It bugs me enormously when people say borscht is Russian. Traditional Russian cuisine is a lot more healthier and delicious than Ukrainian food. Borscht is the only good thing Ukrainians have contributed to the culinary repertoire of humanity, and we are not giving up credit for that.

The traditional Russian cuisine is so healthy that in the 19th century gastrointestinal patients were sent from all over Europe to eat in Russia. I often read the recipes and weep because they sound out of this world amazing. Reading Ukrainian recipes, on the other hand, makes my blood pressure rise because that seems the only goal of this food.

I also studied Polish recipes for borscht, and they sound horrible, too. Putting smoked sausage into borscht instead of potatoes is just weird.

On the positive side, Klara now likes pelmeni. I gave her some exactly a year ago, and she hated them. So I tried again yesterday, and she finally loved them. This is good news because they are so easy to make. (If you use the store-bought ones like I do.)

It’s especially sad that an immigrant from my part of the world would feel the need to parrot these idiotic ideas about “discriminatory dating.” Attraction is discriminatory by nature. If you are equally attracted to everybody on the planet, it means you haven’t experienced any attraction to anybody yet. Berating people for their physiological responses is rooted in the fear of the body. Some folks truly can’t accept that anything about our physiology can definite us, so they discuss bodily responses in ideological terms. They are assisted in this endeavor by the neoliberal mentality that everything is a choice of freely selecting individuals.

It’s sad to see a person from my culture get roped into this idiocy.

In the United States about 70 percent of meals are consumed outside the home, and about 20 percent are eaten in the car.

This is absolutely incredible. We eat 0% of meals in the car (I never knew this was even a possibility) and I’d say about 20% outside the home or 5% if you don’t count the home cooked lunches and snacks. Klara’s daycare doesn’t even serve dinner because kids are supposed to have dinner with parents.

I just read a scholarly essay that describes Gloria from Modern Family as “filled with commonsense ethnic wisdom.” According to the article, the show is successful because it “alleviates white resentment.” Still, it’s not all bad because the character of Gloria (a garishly dressed, loud and vulgar Colombian prostitute) represents “a nuanced and complex vision of wise and nurturing Latinidad.”

How did I come across this flying circus, you’ll ask? This was supposed to be a collection of critical essays on the ways the Recession of 2008 was portrayed in entertainment.