I have no words.

Why didn’t Trump do the same thing with the BLM money? Why is this always so one-sided? If it’s ok to steal the opposition’s money and give it to your own supporters, everybody should do it.

N started shoveling out the driveway but I begged him to let me do it. I love shoveling out driveways. I’m not very good at it but the activity gives me the illusion of living in a cold and snowy place. Also, I’m going stir-crazy and I’m in need of some physical activity. At work I’m always on my feet (I read while I walk. I also can’t talk on the phone unless I’m on the move. And I never sit down when I teach.)

Finally, N ceded the shovel and I headed out. But it wasn’t meant to be. After two shovelfuls, several men with scandalized facial expressions descended on the driveway and started going at it. Obviously, I wasn’t going to get rude and start explaining about physical activity and all that. They shoveled it all out in five minutes.

I’m very grateful and touched (chivalry is not dead!) but I’m afraid they will now go post on social media about terrible husbands who force their wives to shovel our driveways.

This is quite stunning because these are teachers with the mildest, most mainstream positions anybody could imagine. And not that many followers.

The only explanation I have is that they were banned for not being raging lunatics. I always read @GoingGodward for her calm, sweet, non-polemic “peace, love, bubble gum” takes.

The teacher Twitter is being culled down very aggressively. More aggressively than most other fields. It’s quite disturbing.

If you are a teacher who tweets about the wonderfulness of sexualizing 5-year-olds, you are never banned. But if you tweet about helping at-risk kids succeed and school (like Going Godward did), you are gone. Apparently, the only acceptable kind of teacher anymore is a mentally ill, child-hating Maoist.

Today I discovered that there’s now a translation of the expression “cancel culture” into Russian. It’s an ugly, stupid calque that sounds extremely tortured (“культура отмены.” Brrr, ridiculous. Each word means something different than the English original, and together they simply don’t work.)

In the past 10 years (the decade that passed since the massive anti-Putin protests that were organized on social media), the formerly great Russian-speaking online space has been destroyed. Livejournal was eviscerated, and people had to move to Facebook. Of course, Facebook censors anybody who makes the tiniest anti-Putin peep. As a result, only the type of idiot who is into all these stupid American fads – the cancel culture, the #MeTooting, the vaxx fanaticism – were allowed to keep their social media presence.

It’s so sad. The Russian-speaking internet space in 2012 was what the Anglo online space had been in 2002. And now it’s all a bunch of terrified robots, reciting their pro-vaccine pro-cancel culture mantras. And badly translated ones, at that.