Opinions, art, debate
I also eat lunch very much alone because I work with people and it gets tiresome. Eating with co-workers is like continuing to work even on my break, so I understand these white construction workers.
I don’t know what “little Debbies” are but sandwiches sound less disgusting than tacos to me. I’d eat sandwiches over tacos or pozole. I get what point the author is trying to make but Mexicans don’t eat healthy. Their obesity rates are worse than the US.
So remember the neoliberal administrator at my school I’ve been talking about for several years? Because that’s when he was hired, several years ago. For these several years, we’ve been discussing his austerity measures and neoliberal lunacy with colleagues.
Today, I was out and met a colleague. “Have you heard that loon’s latest?” I asked. “He’s turning our university into an expensive community college.”
“This is the new normal of the Trump administration!” the colleague exclaimed.
I stared in confusion.
“Why the Trump administration?” I asked. “This dude is a far-left BLM hire who came on-board in 2021.”
“Yeah, but the Trump election made everything completely crazy!”
Strangely, the only person I end up being in agreement with and vice versa during faculty meetings is our wokest professor. We have the worst round of austerity so far coming up. Departments will be closed, tenured people fired, Humanities completely eviscerated. And the only two people who had something of value to say at the meeting today were me and the BLM dude. Everybody else was in the “these are such important measures and I’d accept them if they came accompanied by praise for how hard I’ve worked” mode.
What is this, the horseshoe theory? Far left and far right being kind of the same? The dude and I are political opposites but on practical matters we are scarily in sync.
Friends, I’ve made changes to commenting to see if we can solve the glitch that appeared recently. Please leave a comment and let me see if anything improved.
My daughter is so American it’s funny. For her birthday, she doesn’t want a party. Instead, she wants me to take her and her best friend to the mall, and then zip lining, and then laser tag, bowling and the arcade. And the menu will consist of pizza, Mac and cheese, and dot ice cream.
This is dot ice cream, in case you aren’t local:
NYC Democrats are trying to pass a measure to allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections. They propose that anybody who has resided in the city for over a month should be able to vote.
“In five City Council districts, non-U.S. citizens make up about a third of the adult population,” attorneys for the city’s lawmaking body wrote in a legal filing. . . Most estimates suggest the new law would make an additional 800,000 people eligible to vote. Not all of them would register, but even if a fraction do, that’s still a major expansion of the electorate.
This is a nifty trick. Flood the city (county, state, etc) with foreigners and then argue that the sheer number of them means citizenship should be abandoned as a functioning concept.
This is exactly what I was told by the administrators at my school: there’s no federal funding for anything that’s not BLM. It wasn’t even DEI. It was specifically BLM.
Well, I mean, of course you can’t change physiology. I’m never going to be calm like a Swede or excitable like a Brazilian. After everything we’ve witnessed, I break out in hives when people suggest changing physiological attributes. Earlier today a UK doctor testified it’s not true that you need a man and a woman to make a baby.
Moving on from my trauma over this insanity, an enormous lot in life depends on the functioning of our nervous system. We think it’s our personality and see its workings as either virtue or moral flaw but it’s often simply physical stuff that exists outside of our volitional purposes.
Just one more quote, and I’ll lay off Han for the time being:
Porn kills off sexuality and eroticism more effectively than moral repression ever could have hoped to.
The Disappearance of Rituals
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as that, my friend. Professional associations in the Humanities aren’t funded federally. Our funding comes 100% from annual memberships. This means, we are private individuals who associate in a freely chosen way and can issue any statements we want. There is such a thing as institutional memberships but, in the age of budget cuts, they are extremely rare and financially trivial.
As for the university, again, we aren’t federally funded. We are funded by the state of Illinois. If the Governor of Illinois opposed DEI statements, we’d take them down ASAP and pretend they never existed. Unfortunately, the Illinois GOP is for some reason incapable of running anybody not completely demented, so we are stuck.
At my university, there is a couple of people who get federal funding but that’s as close as we get to federal money. Our mission is to provide free (or extremely cheap) higher education to the residents of Illinois. This is a good, noble mission but we exist outside of any federal interests. The only way that we could be impacted on the federal level is through the accreditation commissions. If the existing ACs were dismantled and new ones were created with a completely different set of accreditation criteria, that would help. These commissions come by once every 7 years, and we won’t have another until 2032 (there’s one currently accrediting us). So even if accreditation commissions change, for it to impact us, it would take the better part of a decade.
I’m sorry this is not the fun response everybody wanted. It’s not one I want myself. But DEI will exist for as long as people want it to exist. You can’t flip a switch and make it go away. The steps where we got to make an appearance in the marketplace of ideas, argue our case, and win can’t be skipped.
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