As I’ve been saying, things have been weird with students since COVID. In the course I’m teaching now, a little over half of the students have dropped out. The rest will all get As. It’s going in the direction of the only grades possible being A and W (withdrawal).

What’s really unusual is this:

1. How easily many students give up. I know these students. They could have been successful in the course with just a bit of effort. Yet they chose to give up completely and very early. And it’s not just any course. It’s our gateway into the program. Dropping out means dropping out of the entire program, which is a big decision.

2. How extraordinarily hard the remaining students work. I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire career.

This is an enormous stratification happening right in front of us. I’m seeing something like it among adult colleagues, too. Some people have just given up while others have been propelled into the stratosphere.

This is not a phenomenon that’s specific to academia. If you’ve heard about the current fad of “quiet quitting”, you know that it’s happening everywhere.

The debate about the terror attack on Israel has reached the academic social media site academia.edu. Here is a tiny portion of it:

I’m particularly impressed by the exceptional rhetorical and linguistic skills of the purported academics.

I have no idea why the website put this on my home page since I never did any searches or had any publications on the subject of Israel. They never put anything Ukraine-related on my page, even though my most widely read article was published in Ukraine and is accessed many times a day from Ukraine.

Russian propagandists must have solved all of their own problems because they are now actively criticizing how Israel is conducting its response to the terror attack on Saturday.

It’s actually fascinating to observe how the public sentiment in Ukraine immediately and completely turned to support Israel while public sentiment in Russia as immediately and completely went against Israel. This doesn’t mean that anybody in Russia (other than the leader of Chechnya Kadyrov) is expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments. I’m not seeing any of that at all. It’s just that there’s a lot of vitriol or Schadenfreude against Israel with no attendant compassion for Palestinians.

It’s interesting because Israel never did anything against Russia or for Ukraine. These are sentiments that existed long before the war. I heard some interesting explanations of this from several leading Ukrainian Jewish pundits but I don’t know how correct they are.

Adjectives aside, Russian officials aren’t denying that Russia did strike the village in the Kharkiv region last week, killing 52 out of its 200 inhabitants. The only people who are denying that Russia fired that missile all live in the US and speak not a word of either Ukrainian or Russian.

Similarly, nobody in Russia is denying that Russia is conducting military operations in Ukraine. Nobody there is denying there’s a war going on. The only people who insist there’s no war (because they didn’t see videos or whatever) live in the United States.

Thanks to social media we can now observe all day how extraordinarily stupid many people are. They were always stupid but one didn’t have to know about it. And now it’s all on display.

Australia, of all places. God. Did Australia really need all that?

The free press continues to be free with facts:

The could have just went ahead and said “dirty Jewish swine” but they are showing amazing restraint.

There has also been speculation on social media of Russian involvement in the Hamas operation, though there is no evidence indicating Moscow’s alleged role. Newsweek has contacted the Russian foreign ministry by email to request comment.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/russia-behind-hamas-attack-israel-what-we-know-iran-gaza-1832999%3famp=1

Ah, well, in that case.

Are these journalists congenitally stupid or what?

I can’t wait to find out how Tucker will massage reality into blaming Ukraine for the Hamas’ attack on Israel. For now, the main narrative among his crowd has been that the war in Ukraine isn’t real because the fantasists have seen fewer videos of the war in Ukraine than they have of Hamas’ attack. But I believe in Tucker and I’m confident he can invent something even more stupid.

What was she doing, walking outside so late wearing a short skirt?

They could have taken a couple of days to sit silently out of sheer politeness before starting with the propaganda.

My Ukrainian instructor is in Chicago right now. I really talked up the place. “You should go! There’s always something going on!”

I feel kind of stupid now.