There’s nothing I dislike more in people than helplessness and self-infantilization. This is why I write obsessively about it in my research.
Unlikeable Traits
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
There’s nothing I dislike more in people than helplessness and self-infantilization. This is why I write obsessively about it in my research.
Clarissa's Blog 
Apparently Quentin Deranque not the first to die at the hands of the Lyon leftists:
https://www.lyoncapitale.fr/actualite/les-faits-se-sont-deroules-dans-la-nuit-de-mercredi-a-jeudi-22-fevrier-dans-le-quartier-de-la-guillotiere-a-lyon-lhomme-tue-portait-des-tatouages-extremistes
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These people are truly evil;
https://x.com/i/status/2024420063722291621
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Why do you dislike them so much? You write about these topics so often, it feels like there must be something personal there, like you associate them with something intensely negative you were once subjected to (family life growing up, USSR, first husband, etc). Or it’s your shadow self (makes me think of your thoughts on Emma Cline’s The Guest and the inner Alex – “we are horrified by her because we know deep inside that we are all originally her”) and you’re proud of your success at not giving in to the temptation to be helpless and self-infantilizing.
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Thank you for asking! Now the bitching fest can begin. 😁😁
I was teaching yesterday. I teach on overload. It’s a difficult course. Difficult material, I’m doing something experimental, it’s working but requires a lot of focus.
My class lasts 50 minutes. Do you know how many people hovered in the doorway, interrupting my teaching with very trivial needs?
Four. Four people couldn’t figure out some utterly inane shit and had to interrupt my teaching.
Also yesterday, two people informed me that yet again they “forgot” to do the timesheets we do every month. As always, I told them that there’s nothing I can do and they should contact the HR. One of them immediately emailed me to ask HOW TO CONTACT THE HR. These are not students. These are adult people. Professors.
I’ve spent 6 years rescuing them from bus stations and clinics because they can’t figure out how to get home. Issuing dozens of reminders for the yearly Ethics training. Answering questions like “do you know in which classroom I’m supposed to be teaching?” and even “should I teach grammar topic X before Y” in a language I don’t speak. Explaining to the Dean why a professor with 15 years of experience suddenly forgot to enter all of the final grades in all courses and is not answering messages or phone calls. Having people who are 8-10 months overdue on each IRS report that we do every semester and that takes 3 minutes to complete.
Yes, the USSR. I would have been cured of the USSR a long time ago. But I’ve been doing this for 6 years.
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My kid who turned 10 last week is performing in an operetta. Two weeks before the performance she told me exactly what she needs in terms of her costume. I got it for her and we are ready to go. But neither at the journal I’m editing, in my edited volume, on any of my committees or in any endeavor at work have I found colleagues capable of understanding the concept of a due date. The last issue of the journal is 18 MONTHS overdue because the issuing editor couldn’t sent automated acceptance emails to the authors. I had to conduct a coup and displace her from the position or the journal would still not come out. Now she hates me. People need these publications for tenure and promotion. We are letting them down irrevocably because the journal dated 2024 is coming out in 2026. But still she can’t be assed to press 3 buttons to get things going. And I’m the evildoer.
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A can of worms has been opened, and now I can’t close it.
Before I became department Chair, I was a treasurer for a scholarly organization of – get this – feminist scholars. The previous treasurer and her associate wired 1/3 of the entire endowment of the association to international scammers. For two years I couldn’t get them on a call to explain what happened or give me the accounting logs. I was contacted by the bloody FBI about this. I had to give explanations about how come I’m listed as the treasurer but I have zero paperwork regarding the funds.
At least, the FBI dudes were professional and understood the situation. Maybe it’s because they aren’t professional feminists.
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“people couldn’t figure out some utterly inane shit”
Hey… I resemble that remark!
Well…. not entirely, I am likely to blow off bureaucratic stuff until it gets to be a problem* but once I know about something I don’t have to keep pestering people about it and I would never interrupt someone’s class for that or interrupt them when they seem busy with something else… Sometimes I genuinely can’t figure out where to start (see below) but once I have that I’m okay….
Just now, I’m supposed to do some bureaucratic stuff but none of it made sense, an email would contain a link that a normal person might think is a link to get the thing done but it’s not…. it’s a link with the names of a bunch of laws (and when they were passed) so I have to hunt around to find the right site.
When I did find the link (with an extraordinarily unfriendly interface) the form for me wasn’t there (it said I’m not on the list of people that had to do thing) I wrote my (new) immediate supervisor and they’ll look into it.
*because for years the pattern was, that if I ignored it then it very often just went away on its own… that happens much less often now, unfortunately…
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Yours is normal. I wouldn’t get sore over that. But here’s what gets to me. We do leave reporting every month. And every month, the same three people “forget” to do it in spite of at least two reminders from the secretary. I’m mystified by how an adult person can manage to forget something every month with all the technology we have available. These are not old people. One of them is 32. I’m trying very hard not to get annoyed. I’m failing and getting very annoyed.
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We all forget stuff.
The difference is: were we embarrassed enough by it to make sure it didn’t happen again?
-ethyl
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I have a terrible memory. It’s a lifelong problem where I get very lost in my thoughts. This is why I developed a system of reminders, both digital and handwritten. It works great.
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it seems to me that there must be an incentive problem. There is nothing unpleasant that they experience when they don’t do the thing. Is that the case? Can there be?
Amanda
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No, unfortunately, I have zero punitive mechanisms at my disposal.
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“why a professor with 15 years of experience suddenly forgot to enter all of the final grades”
I don’t think it’s infantilism precisely….
IME…. academics tend to regard themselves as a kind of aristocracy and think of everyday bookkeeping and/or bureaucratic tasks as being below someone of their exalted station. I’ve come across that attitude in both the US and in Poland (differently expressed but the same underlying mentality).
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Well yeah. Where do you think it comes from? Parents overindulging children, or not letting them do stuff because they’re too slow and make mistakes (carried right through the teen years)? There’s a rule one hears thrown about in both childhood education and elder care contexts: never do something for (child or elder) that they can do for themselves: it robs them of independence and dignity. One assumes there wouldn’t need to be a rule if it wasn’t a problem…
It weirdly seems to be part of the feminine ideal, which is why so many women in particular feel free– proud, even– to advertise an exaggerated fear of spiders, an ignorance of basic tools, not knowing anything about cars (even though they drive), etc. Heaps of classic American literature idealizing skilled, resourceful can-do mothers have not overcome this.
The “OMG SPIDER” posts get me. I’m torn between horror at people who can’t kill a bug themselves, and horror at people wanting to kill spiders without so much as identifying them first. I regard a few of them in the corners as congenial (they control the insect population, usually moths), and when they get to be a few too many, or take up residence in a bad spot, I catch them in a glass and move them outdoors– no need to kill them!
It’s often a humble brag: “I have a man who does this for me”
But on the dark side, it’s the ultimate excuse for not leaving a man who is a total bastard: “I can’t do anything by myself.”
Met one of those. Helped her with a sink leak. And by helped I mean, I looked in the kitchen cabinet, pulled out all the soaked stuff, saw where the water was coming from, and figured out how to prevent more water leaking until it could be fixed, then mopped up the water. You could see the leak. Not rocket science. She needed help because she couldn’t be arsed to even open the cabinet and look. I loathed the woman after that. She didn’t seem retarded. She had a husband who beat the crap out of her regularly, two little kids who got to witness that. The sink leak was emblematic of her whole life: stuff just happened to her. Nothing she could do about it. A few years later we saw in the news that he’d been arrested for her murder. Totally inevitable.
-ethyl
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What a horrible story.
I’ve seen a lot of helplessness but truly the worst was at that feminist organization. The amount of helpless clucking over the most trivial stuff was off the charts. Then they would give talks about female empowerment, driving me up a wall with the utter ridiculousness of it all.
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Part of it’s class signaling.
One of the (many) ways in which I continually trip up, socially, is that when I learn a new skill, fix something myself, save money by doing something I *could* have paid someone else to do… I’m proud of it. It makes me feel good. Achievement!
But I have been informed by the Social Police that this is unwomanly. Working on my own car is not an achievement: it’s a sign that I failed to attract a high-quality husband. The implication there is, I guess, that it’s OK to marry a gearhead, and it’s OK to marry a guy who makes enough $$ that every minor automotive and household repair can be farmed out to professionals, but no other type of man is acceptable, no other financial priorities are acceptable, and if you settle for any such, you are a failure, maybe a worse failure than if you’d just been a single childless career woman.
I file this under the same heading as giant acrylic fingernails: uselessness-signaling. I have no idea why it’s ever, in any context or class, OK to deliberately signal that you are useless. Does not compute. That doesn’t stop people from doing it all the time.
-ethyl
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methylethyl
Hmmm, I suspect that many humans are wary about snakes and spiders, it might even be an ancient evolutionary advantage to simply avoid venomous critters. The island has no dangerous snakes, but there are at least two spiders that pose some risk. Most people are aware of Black Widows, but few even know about the Brown Recluse. As the name suggests the adults of the latter are shy and avoid us, but some, especially the young, sometimes hide in clothing on or near a floor. The problem is the bite is seldom even noticed for several hours, but it is venomous, and can cause necrotic damage to surrounding tissue.
If my wife was sure of the identity of the beast, like yourself, she would catch them and throw them out. If not, she vacuumed them up. And she had her own tool kit upstairs, and my old Readers Disgust(?) handibook, she wasn’t helpless ;-D
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We have Black Widows and Brown Recluses here also. My mother’s been bitten by the brown kind *twice* now– requires antibiotics, very painful. She’s still alive, no permanent damage (and just fyi, those did not live in her house or mine– that happened getting stuff out of seldom-disturbed storage helping other people move). You don’t let those go untreated, but the danger is very exaggerated. We used to clean black widows out of the kayaks semi-regularly in the spring. They’re not aggressive.
We were trained very young to identify those, and identify the bullseye bite appearance. I’m not cuddly with spiders– no need to pet them or anything. But haven’t got anything against them, and my parents put some small effort into raising us *not* to be squeamish about that sort of thing. Spiders are God’s creatures too, you know, and every animal has its purpose. Unlike, say, roaches or flies, spiders don’t carry disease, aren’t an indication of poor housekeeping, and most are easy to catch and relocate when needed (we had one set up house in our mailbox and evade us all summer!).
-ethyl
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I also don’t understand why people hate on spiders. We consider it a bad omen to kill a spider, and always make an effort to save them by taking them outside. When I first showed Klara how to do it, she was very little. She created a whole imaginary life around that saved spider. It was so cool. She would tell people it sat on her little hand and was her true friend.
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Was pretty sure that you had both Black and Brown Widows, but wasn’t sure about the Recluse. Only personally know two instances of Recluse bites, both in guy’s legs in jeans. Both lost flesh, in the worse case, doctors were worried about losing the leg. I doubt either got treatment immediately. In the better case, my nurse recognised the bite on her Dad’s leg.
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The bite makes a distinctive red-white-blue bullseye pattern. We were drilled early and often on what to watch for, as you rarely see the spider that bit you.
-ethyl
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