Clarissa's Blog

Folks, a truly wonderful and very funny article from the talented Chris Matyszczyk on the ridiculous language that major tech companies use in their job ads. It’s priceless.

Reader el asks:

May I ask you about the situation in Donbass? Is Russia still preventing Ukrainian army from taking back the territories? Does Ukraine want them back? I suppose a few Russia-supported Ukranian criminals-terrorists in Donbass won’t be a problem for Ukrainian army? What about the people still left there?

Have stopped reading about the issue for a long time and decided to ask you for an update since you follow it closely.

Yes, I follow. Although at times it’s next to intolerable.

Things are bad over there. The war is going on. There is about 25-35 shellings a day that the Ukrainian army receives. New supplies are coming from Russia constantly. The delivery of Russian supplies has intensified recently, which seems to indicate that the Russians are preparing for a new major attack. It looks like they are looking for two things before they start a new offensive: a spike in oil prices and an indication that the US won’t mind a whole lot.

The people are in a horrible state. The occupation authorities torture, rape and maim at will, just for fun. Recently, for instance, a little girl was gang-raped by a bunch of the military officials of the occupation force. She died of the injuries sustained during the rape. When her mother complained, they cut her head off and threw her on a garbage heap.

This happens all the time in Donbass. The only way that the Ukrainian army could retake the Donbass is at an enormous human cost. These are densely populated areas, and stepping up the hostilities would be brutal on the civilians.

Of course, after the Donbass is returned back to Ukraine, it will be a major headache to integrate back to normal life the population that has spent years in the complete lawlessness of a frontline area.

The Russians will withdraw when the oil prices drop under $30 per barrel. Or if Trump offers them some grand bargain, something really big.

So yeah, it’s not good.

What I love about the academic year being over (well, it’s not officially over for the next two weeks but I’m acting as if it were already over) is that we can now spend a lot of time together as a family. Usually N and I take turns on weekends taking Klara out so that I have time to grade, etc but now we can do things together. And Klara loves that more than anything ever.

Other than a short hour-long writing session, I won’t do any work on weekends at all until September. I’ll be like a regular person who doesn’t work on weekends. I ❤️❤️❤️ summer.

I’m at a late-evening student event, and my blood sugar dropped all of a sudden, which it tends to do every once in a while since my gestational diabetes experiences. And this is where it came in handy to have a whole car filled with baby food and snacks.

We have amazing student services, by the way, that organize a million fantastic events for students. This is one more reason why in-person education is real education, and online diploma Mills should go die.

Klara picked up some acorns at the park and gave them to me.

“Hide them in the nest, Mommy,” she said.

“Where is the nest?” I asked.

“It’s in your bra,” she explained.

She has noticed, of course, that like a typical Ukrainian peasant woman, I hide small objects like her pacis, toys, and even my cell phone in my bra and decided to call it “the nest.”

The rich are truly different.

Yes, they are.

There is absolutely nothing whatsoever you can do that is more anti-Russian than trying to force the OPEC not to raise the oil prices. The oil going up to $71 per barrel is a huge lifeline for Putin. I’m not saying that this is why the OPEC is doing it. I don’t know enough to conclude that. But I do know that the only real threat to Putin’s regime is if the oil dips to under $30. Which it almost did in 2014. The closer the prices get to $100, the stronger Putin gets.

These are facts of objective reality, and whatever theory we construct needs to take them into account.

This is a really poorly written, idiotic review in which the author blames “white Liberals” for her incapacity to understand philosophical essays by Zadie Smith and claims that making fun of Justin Bieber’s Twitter fans prevents “dismantling white supremacy.”

It’s hard to decide which part of something as ridiculous as this to quote, but here is a funny one:

But social media has raised the bar for a lot of our cultural conversations. For one: Philosophers and academics on Twitter bring rigor (and brevity) to pop culture analysis, making the premise for some of Smith’s essays feel stale.

You’d think this was a parody but I see people quote this piece with reverence.

The funny aspects of the review shouldn’t obscure to us how very racist it is. Zadie Smith is condemned for being too smart, too educated, too well-read, and too successful. We can be grateful that the author doesn’t use the word “uppity” but she does everything but to make sure the readers understand her meaning. I’m guessing the author is one of those “rigorous Twitter academics” and is wounded by Smith’s success.

This is part of (a very convoluted and weird) handout we just received:

Words cannot describe how wrong this sounds. Nobody should stick their dirty fingers into the ailing psyches of distressed individuals. All of this psychobabble is downright dangerous when produced by unqualified individuals with zero medical training. This is also very hypocritical because we keep saying that mental illness is real illness, yet nobody in their right mind would advise professors to do this kind of thing for a student who is having a heart attack, experiencing a stroke or is in the midst of a hypoglycemic episode.