There are layoffs at my husband’s job. It’s a very large company, and consequently there are large layoffs. Several universities in Illinois, including mine, are laying off people. We all know that “being fired” is baked into the concept of “having a job.” Who hasn’t been fired at least once? I have, including for being “too pretty” but that’s a story for another time.

During COVID, many people lost their jobs, businesses and livelihoods. My sister lost her business a week after her husband lost his job. They have two small children, and this simultaneous job loss was not enjoyable for them.

Just yesterday people at N’s job gathered to say goodbye to an engineer who’s been with the company for 18 years and got fired this week. It’s very sad, I’m very sad but there’s no drama on social media over that firing or any other firing that isn’t of these government workers.

The reason I’m saying all this is that this incessant drama over some firings but not others unnecessarily hurts people’s feelings. It’s like we have two castes, those who should be exposed to the vagaries of fate and those who should be immune.

I’m just not sure what it is we should be collectively opposing here. The idea of losing one’s job? The reality in which all jobs aren’t for life? We don’t want to live in that reality, that’s for sure. Is it that good bosses left, bad bosses came and started firing? But again, this happens constantly. The layoffs at N’s job are because the company was recently acquired and new bosses do things differently. The firings at my job gave the same genealogy. Both N and I, at the very least, provide not less value than a regular government worker. N works in cancer research, in case people don’t know. I teach kids from East St Louis and Chicago Southside. And I don’t propose that there should be national outrage over our jobs. What’s happening is unpleasant but in a mundane, not “stop the presses” kind of way.

The reason why I’m going on about this isn’t so much the tweet at the top but that I found the same approach in people I know in real life. “Yeah, it sucks that you are getting fired but wait till you hear what’s happening to Jessica. She’s actually afraid for her job! Can you imagine? Isn’t that wrong?” Jessica is 28 and childless, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why her plight is so much worse than mine. I’m not minimizing Jessica’s discomfort. This sucks for both of us. But it doesn’t suck more for her than for me.

I hope nobody says that it sucks more for Jessica than for me because her firing is politically motivated. I explained at length yesterday that mine is, as well. Every side engages in politically motivated firings. Unpleasant, but as I said, not in “the sky is falling manner”.

If the boss at your job sent an email on Friday directing people to respond by Monday, how many would manage to complete the task?

And how many wouldn’t check their emails until next Thursday because they believe they should be entitled to check their emails once a week? The reason I ask is that I wonder if it’s only in public sector jobs that it’s ok to do this kind of thing. Or decide not to show up when there’s 1,5 inch of snow on the ground. Or because—and this is a sentimental favorite—because it’s trash day. 

“I decided to teach remotely today because it’s trash day and this is just easier” is a real thing that transpired a few weeks ago.

There are tsunamis of outrage over this everywhere on social media. I must be very different from other people because I would have loved to get this email. I’d love to have this kind of accountability at my workplace. Right now I do this for myself but how wonderful would it be to work somewhere where it’s about achievement, excitement, accomplishment.

In my ideal scenario, we’d all list the books we read and the number of words we wrote each week and it would all be shared among the group. And then we’d talk about it, and what joy would that be.

Everything I read, write, publish, give talks about, etc is tolerated as a sort of an annoying hobby at my work. It’s all “well, if you absolutely have to do it, okay but how exasperating.” I’ve accepted that but still I sometimes think that other people like me must exist even if I’m far away from them. Not academics necessarily but simply people who love to work.

500,000 followers and she publishes a completely fake article that thousands of eager zombies gladly repost:

The official in question served not under Zelensky but under Yanukovich, a Putin puppet, removed from office in 2013. None of this has anything remotely to do with Zelensky as it happened 2 presidencies before him. But the post got 17 million views from low-IQ chimpanzees who now believe they received crucial information.

Just in case we have our own chimpanzees lurking around the blog, this isn’t about Zelensky. Anybody can spread absolutely any lie about anything happening domestically and millions will believe it because they are utterly ignorant of just how stupid they are.

Say what you wish about Curtis Yarvin, but one can’t avoid reaching the conclusion that putting the entire functioning of society in the hands of the chimpanzees might be a suboptimal approach.

Personality cults are cringe irrespective of the personality in question. Humans are fallible and shouldn’t be worshipped. The need to have an all-star, infallible idol is a sign of immaturity.

This is a general reminder that everybody should heed. Life becomes better when you accept everybody’s fallibility, including your own.

By the way, new video! Funny stories about my European travels. Nothing heavy at all.

Finally, I have a moment to write about the reasons why my university is being taken apart.

Our university system has two campuses, the original, older one, called C. and the newer,  called E. I work at the newer, the E.

C used to be known as a party school and it was popular because of that. It’s located in the middle of absolute nowhere and students liked that they could go there and be wild away from prying eyes. But that was the 1980s or 1990s, I don’t know, a long time ago. Students changed, the economy changed. Now students want jobs and economic prospects. C started collapsing while E, which is located 20 minutes from a large metropolitan area, began to thrive. Within our university system, over 60% of funding goes to the collapsing C. Things got so dire that a few years ago the thriving E had to dip into its strategic reserves to the tune of crazy millions of dollars to bail out C.

The administration of E saw that there was a massive opportunity to become more than a commuter school. E hired dozens of young scholars from the best schools in the country to raise its research profile. It worked. We reached all the markers for higher research rankings. We introduced new, exciting programs, like, just to give an example close to home, the ASL program that I started and that will fill 15+ sections next semester.

Of course, E started trying to re-negotiate the financing split. We argued that E should get at least half of the funding because that’s fair. We have more students, we do more research, we have a lot of exciting stuff going on.

But here’s the rub. In the area where C is located, there are no big entities providing jobs. C is the only reason that the area is kind of scraping by economically. You lose a lot of voters if you stop feeding C that requires more and more.

The Board of Trustees removed the E Chancellor who believed in helping E grow. Incidentally, he was the guy who saved E from forced vaccinations and made it possible for those of us tho wanted to teach in person all through COVID. He was removed and a new, utterly inexperienced Chancellor with a PhD in “Educational Leadership” was installed. If you are not in academia, you might not know that it’s enough to say the words “Educational Leadership” to a group of academics to have them explode with laughter. It’s not a real degree, it’s an embarrassment.

The new Chancellor is like Obama without charm or the gift of gab. A bureaucratic drone who’s aggressively incompetent but has a sky-high opinion if himself. Smug, self-righteous, and rude.

The new Chancellor started to dismantle E. The libraries were emptied. I’m sure many of you remember the photos I posted when it was happening. Admissions office and student recruitment programs were sabotaged and no longer work. I’ve been giving examples for the past couple of years and don’t want to repeat myself. Just yesterday we had an embarrassingly mishandled recruitment activity that makes me blush at how disrespectful it was to prospective students.

As expected, our enrollments dropped. We stopped hiring and filling empty tenure lines. Stopped offering tutoring to students. Stopped subscribing to anything. Stopped buying new equipment. If a piece of equipment dies of old age in a chemistry lab, we are told there’s no money to buy a new one, so suck it up. Now we are firing professors. None of this will send any students to C because they are too far away and there are great schools nearby. But nobody is left at E to ask for reallocation of resources. Plus, every reason to raise our research ranking will be gone, so that problem is solved.

Three years ago, a close friend of mine who is a professor in a STEM field and very mega MAGA told me that this was a conscious plan to bring down E and save C. I thought it was a conspiracy theory, for which I am now embarrassed. Next time we meet, I will apologize to my friend for my hubris of suspecting her of being a loon when in reality I was the hopelessly naive one.

The part of Illinois where E is located defied the Governor’s orders on lockdowns. It’s highly probable that this is an additional factor in Pritzker’s efforts to dismantle E and impoverish the region that votes solid red.

I love capitalism and I respect the free market. But only when it’s really free. A successful business should thrive without the government putting its finger on the scale and punishing it for political reasons. What we are seeing in this story isn’t old-school capitalism. It’s neoliberalism where the government plays on the side of failure and punishes success.

I am literally the only person on campus (aside from the top levels of the administration) who thinks tenured faculty will be fired.

I have forced myself to talk to many people. Not a single one of them takes seriously the administration’s very open promises to do this. They think the union will protect us. The Governor will protect us. The newspapers will protect us. It can’t happen because we are so good and indispensable. It just can’t happen, they say.

What I need to know, is this: am I a paranoiac or is everybody else in denial? I try to live according to the maxim that if everybody else around you looks like a lunatic, the only lunatic around is probably yourself. I have literally not found anybody who thinks about this as I do or really thinks about this, period.

Am I nuts? I hope I don’t need to explain that I very much want to be totally nuts in this situation. I’ll accept my complete nuttiness with gratitude and joy.

During COVID, I had Alex Berenson to keep me from thinking that I lost the plot and needed psychiatric care. On this issue, there’s no Berenson and I don’t know how to determine if everybody else is insane or if I am.

This is Yarvin writing about the revolution he himself brought into existence:

The best populist ideas seldom prevail—nor do the best populist candidates. Populism does not work. Its accuracy
rate is not zero, but nor is it quite at nuclear-safety levels. And it is not strong enough. It can win symbolic victories, but not take and hold power. It quickly tires out, gets hungry, goes home and grills. Its main effect is just to scare progressivism
and keep it in fighting shape, while arguably sometimes slowing it down. Or at least, damming it up to burst forth later.

Another fascinating thought in the book is how, without any authoritarian regime or dictatorship, we have an extraordinary uniformity of opinion across all Western and Western wannabe societies. Moreover, when we collectively change our minds, we do it extremely fast and in absolute unison. Overnight, we all turn the page and tacitly agree that the page on which we all were not an hour ago was shameful and terrible.

One example (mine, not Yarvin’s) is gay marriage. One day, Obama couldn’t get elected without condemning the idea. Then, in a dramatic reversal, he couldn’t get elected without passionately supporting it.

Yarvin asks, who presses the button that triggers this global turning of the page? Are we certain they know what they were doing? Are we completely confident that they should have that power?

In case people don’t know who Curtis Yarvin is, he’s the intellectual engineer of what became the Trump revolution. He created the philosophical underpinnings of a massive turn away from the reigning liberal consensus long before Trump came onto the political scene. If Trump never existed , there would be somebody else to play his role because the ground was prepared. Paradoxically, Yarvin is the most influential American thinker of the past 20 years whose name is completely unknown in the American mainstream even when the mainstream now inhabits the reality that his thought brought into existence.

Regardless with whether one “agrees” with Yarvin, if this is not a phenomenon deserving study and interest, I don’t know what is. We are kind of behind on paying attention in the US but I was in an indie bookstore in Spain last month and as I was randomly opening books by contemporary thinkers (including very Marxist and very centrist ones), I kept running across quotes from Yarvin. I’ll talk about a couple of these European thinkers in the nearest future but first I need to introduce Yarvin because otherwise it’s confusing what people are responding to.