To my earlier point, I just saw on Twitter that in America it’s the Right that demands to drag “children from Gaza” into this country for “lifesaving surgeries.” In those same words. It’s extraordinary.
We have the left and the right promoting the exact same measures that lead to the exact same result of undermining the nation-state.
It’s got to be all sorts of funny that the left and the right both clobber the nation-state with these utterly imaginary “children from Gaza who need surgeries.” It’s like they are reading from the same script. Couldn’t even be assed to come up with something original. Fascinating.
Tomorrow I will be posting suggestions on how successfully to neoliberalize ourselves because it’s now clearly inevitable.
I think that the main difference between “the left” and “liberals” is that “the left” thinks America is bad. There are other differences but the main one is that operating thesis of “the left” is that America is bad and should be sorry. For what? Glad you asked. Everything.
It’s not only the left. A significant portion of the right is like this, too. Helping hasten the collapse of the USSR was bad. Why? Because America did it. Winning World War 2 was bad. Because America did it. Listen to Tucker Carlson. His interpretation of the US history in the twentieth century is identical to that of a Berkeley professor. I mean this in a literal sense, having talked to several Berkeley professors. There’s nothing that America did well in these people’s opinion. Every bastard dictator on the planet is better than the US.
Since people are talking about libraries, I want to post these photos I took at our university library last week. This is since books were ejected:
I didn’t choose a particularly weird corner for the photos. It’s all like this now.
This entire idea that young people can’t survive if they aren’t horizontal much of the time is counterproductive. A young man in his late twenties came to my office completely winded because he walked 3 flights of stairs to get there. He remained winded and heaving for the next 15 minutes of our conversation. I’m… not in my late twenties, let’s put it that way, but I walk these stairs all the time and don’t notice it.
Nothing illustrates the difference in worldview around the nation-state than this exchange. There cannot be a national healthcare system that provides services to everybody on the planet. There cannot be a nation-state that guarantees rights and protections to everybody on the planet. The nation-state is by definition exclusionary.
But this exchange reveals much more than that.
Remember how I recently wrote that a healthy relationship is one that tolerates ambiguity? This is true not only for individuals but groups and countries. Aaron Bell, whoever he is, is incapable of tolerating the ambiguity of wanting to provide healthcare to British children but not to any others. His love is unhealthy because it will ultimately destroy healthcare for everybody except the wealthy who can pay out of pocket.
Aaron Bell doesn’t want to live in reality. He can’t accept that reality is imperfect. He will destroy the imperfect real in search for an impossible perfection. In interpersonal relationships, this kind of an individual will go to pieces if the object of his affections is not 100% attentive to him 100% of the time. The ambiguity of any love, profound as it might be, is that, unless you are an infant, the object of your love will not always be completely available and completely devoid of boundaries all the time. In a healthy loving relationship, you say to yourself, “today, I can see that he’s tired, distracted, needs some space. That is fine. I will respect his boundaries and step back.” In an unhealthy relationship, you throw a fit because you interpret the normal human ambiguity of “I love you to pieces but right now I want to be alone” as lack of love.
Love that doesn’t accept boundaries is not love at all. It’s a destructive, consumerist force that will eat everything in its way. If Aaron Bell really cared about the sick children of Gaza, he’d start a charitable campaign, donate, organize, find money and pay for it. I, for example, care deeply about the plight of the lonely elderly people in Ukraine. I found a group of volunteers who provide food packages and lamps to them. I donate, I help the group (@JuliaSubbotina1 on Twitter) get the cause known. I didn’t privatize the benefits while socializing the costs of my love for these elderly. I assumed the costs. That’s true, healthy love.
We live in a mentality where accepting any form of boundary is intolerable to people. Their self becomes so big that it squeezes out everything around them. There’s no space left for anything else. We need to rehabilitate such concepts as boundaries, borders, and ambiguity.
One of the editors to whom I proposed publishing my Ukrainian book sent me an offer. It’s a good offer but the book came out 16 months ago, so it’s kind of beyond the point now.
It’s nice, though, because I can now boast that I had offers from 5 publishers.
Of course, I had to discover the best book of the year, 672 glorious pages long, the day before the beginning of the semester. Now I stare in mute resentment at anybody who wants me to do anything except read this book.
Details to follow but American literature is alive and thriving.
I very sincerely could never understand this. Maybe it’s the autistic thing. But Taylor Swift’s audience isn’t male. Her fans are very young girls. How is this on target?
Also, and again, maybe it’s the autistic thing, but I can’t understand why a rich woman would want to do this. Isn’t the whole point of having money not to have to do this?
And finally, let’s say you do want to show your butt at age 35 for reasons beyond my comprehension. Why does it have to be shown against the background that reads like a truck stop toilet?
It is simply cruel to post this without giving the slightest hint as to where these centrist professors can be found. My friends in academia have cut contact after I mildly criticized Pritzker on FB. I’d love to meet a few centrist profs who can survive an occasional criticism of Pritzker.
I was helping my Fulbrighter select courses for this semester, and it’s shocking. There are no courses. A lot of intro stuff but that’s it. I never come in contact with other departments’ offerings, so I didn’t know how dire things were.
Nobody is filling the vacated tenure lines, so there’s nobody to teach. I felt embarrassed. In the end, I set her up with courses at my own department but her contract specifies that she must take a course in something related to US culture, and there’s nothing. US-related stuff is limited to African Americans and immigrants. We tried history, English, political science. Bupkes. The Fulbrighter is from Ukraine, and if there’s one thing that’s not in short supply in Ukraine, it’s college courses about the country, its people, history, literature, culture.
The only course we found on US politics is titled “Political Scandals in the US.” In history, there’s nothing about independence, the Vietnam War, or anything at all.
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