Let’s have fun with this, people.

Who can guess which was the first department at my university to get slated for elimination as unnecessary?

Let’s see how well you understand neoliberal bureaucrats.

Just to make it easier, it’s not mine.

I expressed myself regarding TPS visas many times. I very strongly believe that the TPS visa should not exist. I won’t repeat the whole story again but TPS is the absolute worst thing that happened to Central America in the past 30 years. Use the search function on this blog to find my posts about Salvadoran gangs and how they came into existence.

Regarding specifically Ukrainian refugees, I assume people are unaware that one of the most controversial policies of the Zelensky government is that it wants the countries who took in Ukrainian refugees to return them. Last year, a new ministry was created in Ukraine to look into ways of bringing back these refugees. Two days ago, a large sum was appropriated in the Ukrainian budget to support these policies. One of the main complaints about the Zelensky government in Ukraine is precisely that it’s too aggressive in trying to bring back the refugees. There’s endless talk that the government is exercising pressure on European allies to start revoking the refugee status. This is controversial in Ukraine but it’s a big subject of discussion.

There are two, I’d say, schools of thought in Ukraine regarding what to do about the population collapse that happened because of the war. One school of thought advocates bringing in millions of migrants from Asia. The competing school of thought wants to bring back the existing Ukrainians. This is debated hotly, and I’ve participated in many a discussion regarding whether to embrace the neoliberal theory of people as interchangeable widgets or not. Its the perennial neoliberals versus nationalists debate. Zelensky was originally elected because people thought he’d be more globalist and less nationalistic. And he disappointed many (and charmed many others) by moving rapidly and dramatically towards nationalism.

I hope this context helps people figure out the situation.

I’m now a managing editor of a scholarly journal. I send submitted articles to reviewers and make the recommendation to publish or not based on their feedback. It’s a modern languages journal, so almost no articles are in my own field.

We received an article recently that was written by a young, inexperienced scholar with very conservative beliefs. I didn’t need to Google him to know that he’s young and inexperienced because it was clear from the writing. But it’s somebody with an original, unusual point of view. Somebody who is trying to engage with theory and big ideas instead of applying somebody else’s ideas to yet another “diverse” author. If I were the reviewer, I’d guide him to rewrite for clarity and coherence and I’d definitely publish the piece.

The first blind peer reviewer recommended exactly what I would have. He didn’t engage with how “correct” the author’s thoughts are but whether they are clearly expressed and coherently argued. The second reviewer, however, went into a full-on ideological mode. Her main argument was that these questions have all been settled, structural racism is indisputable, fluid identities are great, saying that identity labels can be used to seek victim status in a competitive economy is insulting to a long list of identity holders, and so on.

Of course, I recommended that we go with the first reviewer’s approach. It is not our business to judge which ideas are correct but to facilitate a free exchange of thought. We cannot take an ideological role of promoting “correct” ideas, I said. We’ll see how the two editors-in-chief respond but this is a heartening development. It’s time to see theory that is free from the shackles of the politically correct and the ideologically permissible.

It looks like Democrats are making an effort to dial down the far-left fervor that engulfed them in recent years:

The problem is, simply not mentioning ‘women’ with penises and George Floyd is not enough. There needs to be an open, clear and collective disavowal of these superstitions. “We were wrong. We made a mistake. We did a lot of harm.” Once this is said, Democrats can have a real comeback.

I’m not saying they can come back with me. I’m so done with them. But they should come back in general and start doing useful stuff. There should be a new generation of Democrats who are tired of all the identity-nitpicking, paroxysms of outrage, censorship and illogic. It’s time for them to start showing up.

I saw a video of a guy taking down a large portrait of a Ukrainian war hero:

I got really mad until I realized that he was removing a picture of himself from the alley of soldiers missing in action. Because he came back.

It’s not always what it looks like. Anybody can be duped or confused.

I checked. It’s a real article.

They really don’t get it. The cultural divide gaped at me like never before.

I started participating in a research group with 30+ scholars from Spain and France. We met on Zoom yesterday to discuss our research projects. The meeting started with everybody introducing themselves. People said their name, where they worked, and what their current research project was. Because that’s what we gathered for. To do research. So everybody explained their research.

Except me.

I said my name and that I’m department Chair. Nothing about research. The scholar who organized the group and invited me gave me a bemused look because he knows my scholarship. I have significantly more publications and of greater weight than anybody else in the group. Including him. He’s somebody who develops my ideas in his writing, which is how we met.

But I couldn’t squeeze it out. Sixteen years of keeping it all in at work, pretending I’m very small, that I’m just like everybody else. I was attending the meeting from my office, and my work persona took over. And at work I’m not somebody who reads, writes, and publishes.

Please understand that I’m not blaming anyone for this. This is an issue of my personal psychology and my own individual responsibility. I’m sharing this because this is my sharing space and because I want people to know that the opposite of the imposter syndrome exists. I don’t fear that others will think I’m not good enough. I fear they will notice that I am.

The Supreme Court has unfrozen USAID, so there goes that. Of course, it’s the fault of evil Commie justices because it’s not remotely possible that Trump can’t be assed to find competent lawyers to argue the case convincingly. That’s something that never happened before.

Hey, maybe Trump asked the Kraken lady to do it again. ‘Tis the season for second chances for the congenitally stupid.

I don’t know if Trump’s tariffs will be good or bad. It’s impossible to be a specialist in everything, and on this topic I confess that I have zero knowledge.

Is it possible that the tariffs will have disastrous consequences? For all I know (which is nothing whatsoever), yes, absolutely.

Is it possible that they will have great consequences? Just as possible.

I don’t know where to find a good, reasonable explanation of tariffs other than acquiring an additional degree in Economics. I have already spent more time than I ever wanted to learn the basics of virology, and there’s a limit to how much I can do to compensate for the information vacuum we live in.

There’s a lot of wailing about tariffs in the media but it’s the same media that told us there was an epidemic of police killing unarmed black men and all the rest of it. So that’s worth bupkes.

The problem is, nobody has those policies because they don’t exist. Africa is experiencing a population boom and Finland isn’t. That tells you all you need to know about the connection between policy and population growth. There’s policy to stop people from reproducing but no policy in reverse.

I have a friend from Benin who grew up with 11 siblings in a dirt-floor hut in Africa. Now she’s an American mother, and she says that she’s a mother in a completely different way than her own mom in Africa was. Her children are children in a completely different way. Our subjectivity is different in the West. We experience ourselves in the world in a radically different way. We are not a Fordist model of conveyor belt production of children. We are the artisanal model. The only way to go back to the subjectivity we left behind 200 years ago is through a cataclysm of extinction-level proportions. Obviously, we don’t want that. But what’s the problem, anyway? Why should we pursue quantity over quality at this point? Yes, it’s a good thing for people to have children. It’s normal and happy-making. But why does it need to be 10 children and not 2 or 3? Look at Elon Musk with his 14 kids that have to beg on social media for his attention. How is that better than having a real father, who’s there to play baseball with you, take you to the arcade, and make cringey but endearing Dad jokes? What is the purpose, to crunch out numbers or have an experience that brings together two different subjectivities (the parent’s and the child’s) in the most fulfilling, deep, pleasurable and enlightening manner possible? I know without a shadow of a doubt that N, for example, is enormously happier in his fatherhood than Musk because he has time and energy to build a nuanced, profound relationship with his child. Any man (but obviously almost no woman) can father a crowd of children all over the place and never care that they exist. But for what purpose? Yes, yes, I mean a man with money but you’ll notice that it’s usually the men with money who treat their fatherhood much more carefully than lazy layabouts.

So my conservative advice is let’s have children and concentrate on being good, attentive, loving parents to them. Or good, attentive, loving aunts and uncles if we don’t have kids of our own.