Anonymous questions keep coming in, and here is one I like:

The posts I enjoy most of all are where you tell anecdotes from your daily life. Please share an endearing story or a happy memory. I could use reading it today!

The story that immediately comes to mind is when N and I were moving to our house back in 2014. N worked in St Louis back then and had a long commute, so I was supervising the process. On the day of the actual move, I wanted to surprise him and greet him with a completely ready new house, with no boxes, piles of stuff, or “projects”.

When he came to the new home in the evening, it looked completely lived in, and there was a small table in front of the open window, beautifully laid with a 3-course dinner. Of course, the dinner wasn’t home-cooked because there had been no time. But it was still a great surprise because N had missed the whole move. It was like magic.

Of course, it had taken almost a month to plan and effectuate this surprise little by little. But it was totally worth it.

The reason behind this endearing surprise is not exactly sunny. When N was a kid, his family moved to a larger apartment. The process was so fraught for his parents that they almost murdered each other. Literally. They used weapons and inflicted grave bodily damage. As a result, N was terrified of moving because he thought we’d end up chasing each other with cleavers, and I wanted to make it painless for him.

At work, I have friends on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the one side, I have pro-Muslim friends who condemn Israel for baselessly attacking peaceful Palestine. And on the other, I have Jewish friends who call on Israel to stop baselessly attacking peaceful Palestine.

Both groups have issued public statements and published open letters in support of their positions.

It’s great to see such spirited debate on campus!

No, there are no typos in my post.

True. The Right are the new pinko-commie America-hater. Always trailing in the footsteps of the Left. Always playing the sad wannabe game.

But it’s not one-directional. The Left has become pro-Big Pharma and pro-Wall Street. The people who wanted to Occupy Wall Street have been occupied by Wall Street.

After the Christmas concert, I’m in a festive mood and I want to share this famous Ukrainian Christmas carol where the singer imitates the tolling of the bells of an Orthodox cathedral:

The carol was adapted into English by another famous Ukrainian artist but the English version mostly moves the bells out of the singing and into the lyrics.

Yes, Anglos will talk anything to death.

It’s a joke.

Enjoy the Christmas season.

Putting Klara in a Christian school was an inspired decision. Today we went to the Christmas concert that the kids put on, and I was completely relaxed. I knew there wasn’t going to be any gender silliness, no social experiments were going to be conducted on children or parents, and nobody was going to shit on our good cheer and try to make us feel like garbage.

The children sang, the organ played, the hymns were beautiful, and there was even some singing in Latin.

The last thing one needs in life is to be constantly worried that somebody at school is going to say some unnecessary crap to one’s child.

Readers point out that surrogacy and adoption have similarities, and it’s true that in both cases babies are separated from their mothers. Of course, the crucial moral difference is that adoption is the response to a tragic set of circumstances, whereas surrogacy is the deliberate design of tragic circumstances. It is the difference between selflessness after the fact and premeditated selfishness.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/surrogacy-vs-adoption/

Exactly. I wouldn’t consider surrogacy for myself, even though I’d love another child, because it’s immoral. It’s a terrible thing to separate a child from its mother. Nobody is entitled to another human being. If you are incapable of giving birth and aren’t big enough to adopt, that sucks, and don’t I know it. But that’s life. You don’t create somebody else’s tragedy to alleviate your own.

Democrats could get a deal to send in aid to Ukraine this afternoon if they compromised and agreed to Republican border-security proposals. President Biden could get a huge win — funding for Ukraine, funding for Taiwan, funding for Israel, and funding for border security — but apparently keeping the status quo in the backlogged system of processing asylum claims is more important to him.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/how-democrats-are-holding-up-a-ukraine-aid-deal/

It’s exactly what I’m saying. This isn’t something that the Democrats want to give to their voters because the voters demand it. No. The Dem voters want funding for Ukraine and Israel. Even more so, they want less illegal immigration. Every poll since the 1980s shows that.

Republicans aren’t asking for a border wall. They are asking for extremely reasonable, easy to implement changes to the way asylum claims are processed. We need to start asking, why is it so important for Dems in Congress to deny this request? Why are they willing to sacrifice Ukraine in order to make sure that every migrant gets into this country?

A university president is by definition not a scholar. A scholar reads and thinks all day. Or stares into a microscope and thinks. Or stares at equations and thinks. You can’t spend all day in meetings and at events and be a scholar. When are you going to think? Your whole life is going to be about sitting in rooms with uninteresting people and saying uninteresting things.

These academic bureaucrats are dime-a-dozen paper-pushers, so it’s not surprising they get chosen on the basis of how they look. They’ve got nothing else to offer. Several years ago, I told on this blog the story of my university’s equivalent of Claudine Gay who once regaled me with a story of how she went to China to a “Women in Leadership” conference and was shocked to discover that people there speak Chinese. “The whole country!” the woman in leadership chirped excitedly. “They all speak Chinese! We needed an interpreter because the people there? They speak like a whole different language!”

I was supposed to be particularly appreciative of this story because I’d said I was in foreign languages. We called this administrator “the Botox lady.” Out of sheer kindness, I spared the poor woman what would have been crushing news about Mandarin and Cantonese. She had degrees in “Community Building and Educational Leadership” and quoted Sheryl Sandberg. You can’t overload brains of this caliber with too much information.

Another top-level university administrator responded to my proposal that we teach American Sign Language with a story about a former boyfriend who once had a foot injury and had to use crutches. The point of the story was to illustrate that this administrator was very aware of the plight of the disabled. As the story progressed, I developed very strong eye muscles trying to keep my eyes from rolling all the way into the back of my head.

Yet another administrator listened to an angry question from a representative of the janitorial stuff who said that most workers are so underpaid they need a second job to make ends meet and responded with, “So on Sunday I was meeting with another university president and we went for breakfast to this restaurant – it was really fancy, like, a really good, expensive restaurant. . .” The story went on and on and I kind of lost the thread of what the administrator was trying to say. Janitorial workers didn’t like the story either. They heckled the fancy admin and the student newspaper branded them as racists the next day.

I mean, the fellow stands up in his $3,000 shoes in front of a bunch of angry janitors and chirps excitedly about going to a fancy Sunday breakfast with another rich dude. These are stupid people, my friends, stupid.

In short, nothing will surprise me when it comes from university presidents.

I’m back to writing in English, and oy vey, whenever I think on the direction of something un-PC, I get terribly blocked. I’ve been struggling with a 200-word excerpt on neoliberal masculinity since morning because what I want to say (and what the textual evidence shows) is wrongthink.

So I’ll try to think it through here to see if it helps.

OK, so how do we describe positive masculinity normally? What words do we use? We say, he’s strong, dependable, reliable, solid, he’s a rock.

Nobody ever described the masculine ideal as changeable and malleable, right?

And what is solid? It’s the opposite of fluid. The fluid changeability of neoliberalism is the opposite of masculinity.

At the same time, neoliberalism expects ultra-productivity and competitiveness, which are traditional masculine traits.

So there’s an unresolvable conflict in that you have to dissolve yourself in feminine traits while enhancing the very masculine ones.

And it works exactly the same for women but in the opposite direction.

That’s why the neoliberal ideal is both “gender-fluid” and asexual. It’s something that’s always in-between, engrossed in refashioning a barren self. It is always in the process of becoming and never actually becomes.

Does it make sense so far?

When people tell you they want you dead, believe them.

What’s funny is that the same people who mock “queers for Palestine” idolize Russians who hate them. Yesterday, for instance, I read a long article on a conservative website, arguing that Russia is great because… it has no mass migration. This is the right’s version of “Palestinians defend gay rights”.

What can you do with those absolute simpletons on both sides who want to kiss the boot that stomps on them?