Opinions, art, debate
I do, yes. On days when I appear in public, I do it about once a day. Small random comments about weather, local happenings, kids, outfits if I talk to women. For a while, the inflation was a regular topic. When I’m somewhere with Klara, then many people make friendly comments and it’s easy to establish a short conversation.
Talking to strangers is great. It’s lightweight, small-dose sociability that requires very low effort.
Text, schmext. Why is nobody questioning whether we need yet another Yemen war? The previous one brought absolutely nothing but a tsunami of migration and a burning need for yet another war. Are we going to be playing this game forever?
The reason why libs are fixated on the texts and not the war is because they support the war. But where are the conservatives? Have they also accepted that “Yemen war” is a normal and necessary thing to have? Is anybody questioning this or have we all drowned in the details of whether it’s best to plan the war on this platform or that?
There’s always a crucial reason for the US to bomb the Middle East. It always leads to more problems and more powerful reasons to bomb the Middle East.
There seems absolutely nothing whatsoever that can prevent the US political establishment from being obsessed with waging war in the Middle East.
This image perfectly symbolizes me today because Klara’s on spring break, and I brought her to work with me. Writing a book while running a department while occupying, feeding, and supervising an active, gregarious 9-year-old is a balancing act of major proportions.
I did great, really enjoyed myself. Feel free to share important news updates that I missed while doing all this.
We spent Sunday doing sporty activities, and decided to treat ourselves to a visit to the local poke bowl place. These are $12-$18 bowls but really delicious and totally worth it.
The guy in line in front of us bought a $17 bowl. He didn’t have enough money on his card to cover it and had to run out to his car for the remaining $2 in cash.
Every US administration since 1991 has tried a Russia reset. Every single one. The idea seems to be that it’s possible to make Russians peaceful by being nice to them. Every single effort in this direction ended up with Russians getting ever angrier and invading somebody. Yet every new US administration does the exact same thing as the previous one and hopes for a different result.
Trump is doing exactly what Obama did with his Hillary-led Russia reset. And what GW Bush did with his. And what Bill Clinton and Bush Sr did. Why does he want to repeat the same failed policies of every single one of his predecessors of the past 3 decades? Because the American political establishment is senile. There are no fresh brains, no interesting ideas. Nobody has the energy to try something new or even to conclude that something new is possible.
I predicted that Trump was going to try another Russia reset and would make friendly overtures to Putin. I also predicted Putin would spit in his face. It was easy for me to predict all this not because I’m some sort of a clairvoyant but because it’s exactly what happens every single time. A monkey would be able to figure this out after 3 decades of repetition.
What I didn’t predict was that Trump would eat up Putin’s mockery and pretend it didn’t happen. I misjudged Trump’s age and energy level. I tend to want to be optimistic, and while often a great trait, it can also lead to mistaken judgment. I was hoping Trump would surprise me by being different from every preceding US president. In this specific area, he didn’t. He’s still obviously enormously better than Kamala but we are still stuck with the same old foreign policy of the US being obsessed with the Middle East and dumb about everywhere else.
Yes, I can give some suggestions even though there’s zero chance anybody will listen to them.
Rule #1.
If you catch a source in a lie, never access it again.
Examples: “police officers were killed on J6”, “children are at the same risk from COVID as elderly people”, “COVID didn’t come from a lab.” Now that we know that these were not mistakes but lies and were spread by people who knew these were lies, there’s no excuse ever to listen to these information outlets again.
Rule #2.
If you hear the same turn of phrase repeated by different people verbatim, it’s propaganda. Avoid anybody who uses these ready-made phrases and never trust them about anything.
Examples: “walking us straight into WWIII”, “Russia wasn’t going to tolerate NATO military bases on its doorstep”, “CIA organized color revolutions”, etc.
These are good, simple rules that people could use to avoid getting duped. But they won’t. Emotional dysregulation feels good. It’s destructive but it’s very enjoyable in the process. These propagandistic lies are like heroin. They soothe and lower anxiety. People will come again and again to get their hit.
This is a completely bipartisan affliction. Self-indulgent, undisciplined behavior is the norm. It’s normalized because people who indulge in it are easy to dupe, deprive, control, lock up, and rob. And it’s hard to argue that they don’t deserve it if they can’t get their emotions under control enough not to repeat every slogan they are fed.
While we argue about the nation-state and neoliberalism, there are people who want to pay for their DoorDash with payday loans. There are many of them, and we depend on their voting choices.
If that’s not disturbing to you, I need to hear about your meditation routine.
The funny thing about our administrators is that they honestly don’t see a difference between humans and robots. After
– a month of telling faculty members and staff they would be, at worst, fired and, at best, carrying the workload of the fired colleagues for free,
– censoring a student newspaper,
– hijacking an open forum where workers were supposed to discuss their reaction to these plans,
– antagonizing everybody on campus to an extreme degree
they decided to hold a large event welcoming prospective students. On a Saturday.
Understandably, the atmosphere at the event was funereal. The word “prospective” stinks like old, dirty socks after people were told they have no prospects at this university.
I find it very entertaining that the administrators honestly think that they can abuse employees and still have a good, positive event as a result.
This is very dishonest. They didn’t just follow the rules. They hounded people based on sex and race excitedly, enthusiastically, and with glee. This was not a top-down revolution. This was – and still is – a phenomenon in which the most educated, credentialed, intelligent and privileged people participate completely sincerely. The percentage of scholars who do not passionately believe in DEI is maybe 2%, and I’m being very optimistic.
DEI was created in academia and then exported as a neoliberal cudgel everywhere else. Since Trump’s inauguration, the administration of my university has not used racist language. Even though we aren’t dependent on federal funding, the administration stepped away from this. I did, however, hear a colleague mockingly go on about “mediocre white men getting jobs because they are mediocre and white” to a white male academic who looked very uncomfortable but terrified to say anything. We lived for years amidst this kind of bullying where it was OK to insult people most outrageously based on their innate characteristics. Nobody took responsibility for this. Nobody indicated in any way that they understood why this was wrong and why this shouldn’t happen again.
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