Back in the early nineties, Russia’s newly minted parliament started passing an assload of bills. Most of them were about transferring all of the power in the country to the parliament itself. In the end, that parliament was more powerful than most old-time monarchs. 

So of course, Yeltsin (it was still Yeltsin back then) got fed up, brought in the troops, and whooped the MPs’ asses. And then invested himself with all the power that the parliament had tried to usurp. Eventually, Putin came and completed the process. 

The moral of the story is that democracy is not about voting. Russians got voting up the wazoo. They vote constantly, so what? They still got no democracy.

Democracy is all about procedure, bureaucracy, the rules, checks and balances, if you will. It’s about everything having to go through a slow, frustrating process of being approved by a ton of different entities in a predetermined order. It’s total shit, yet it’s still better than any known alternative. The power of the people is not that everybody can go and vote. It’s that everybody is ruled by the painful and drawn-out procedure.

This is why the “referendum” in Catalonia has fuck all to do with democracy. Anybody can organize a referendum, rile up millions through the social media, and bring them out to vote because they are upset over being oppressed by Lope de Vega whom they haven’t heard about until you denounced him on Facebook yesterday. 

There is an inherent conflict between consumer mentality and democracy because there is no instant gratification in the painfully slow bureaucratic quagmire of a truly democratic process. Consumerism won in Catalonia yesterday. There’s nothing to celebrate here unless you are a fanatical adept of neoliberalism.

Despite our moans about hours of work, pay, and pensions, being an academic is still the best job in the world for those of a particular temperament and talents. It can be worth the struggle and risk simply to have a decent shot.

And not even a decent one is worth it. Yes, it’s a gamble, but what isn’t? The payoff is fantastic if you get it. And it’s not like you risk much anyways.

I honestly don’t think I would have been able to have a career in anything else. My only alternative is something like free-lance translation.

“People on TV news shows spoke significantly fewer sentences about Hurricane Maria than about Hurricanes Harvey and Irma,” he writes, and “the spike in conversation about Puerto Rico right as the hurricane hit was also much smaller than the spike in mentions of Texas and Florida.”

True. And what’s really sad is that if Trump hadn’t started tweeting about Puerto Rico, it would continue to attract no attention. Nobody gives a drat about Puerto Rico unless it can be used as an argument in the eternally boring “good Trump / bad Trump” debate.

The mayor of San Juan is very smart. She knew she had to needle Trump to get him to say something nasty. Without this, it would all be still about millionaire knees and that sort of thing.

Trump is what he’s always been. There’s nothing new here. What’s everybody else’s excuse? Why is Puerto Rico only interesting because it can be used to say something about Trump? Why is nothing of any value if it can’t be seen through the prism of Trump? Why are slivers of reports on Puerto Rico sandwiched between the huge, insane stories about how the darn athletes stood for the anthem today? Nothing happened! Nobody knelt! They all stood! There’s no story here! Why in the ever-living fuck are we still on this??

OK, I’ve vented. Now let’s discuss where we are donating. Now is a good time to donate because everybody just got their paychecks and can afford to help. I hope people realize that it’s only money donations. Donating anything else right now is a horrible idea. Nobody can get even the available stuff in there. Money isn’t going to do much either while the infrastructure is down but it will help a lot in the coming weeks. This is a long-term disaster, folks. There’s no back to business for a long time to come.

All you need to know about the Catalonian “referendum” is that the Russian propaganda machine is passionately and hysterically supportive of the independentists. The Russian news are reporting the events in Catalonia with such an emotional investment that it sounds like the newscasters are about to break down in tears. This is hilarious in a country where nobody knew the word Catalonia until yesterday.

This is a daycare in Norway. The cribs are outside, in the fresh air! I’m so loving this. The person who posted this on FB says that kids sleep there until it’s -10°C outside. 

Why is it “Which group of people was brought to the US and sold into slavery?” Shouldn’t it be the other way round? Sold into slavery and then brought to the US?

I’m glad I’m not in the sciences because then I’d have to write grants once a year instead of once every 8 years. It’s not an unhelpful process. You get to plan and all that. But I hate writing anything that I won’t publish. I have an article and a conference talk that are languishing while I’m wasting my life on this paperwork. 

Klara learned the word “fork.” Of course, in her rendition it sounds much closer to a profanity than to fork. 

She carries a little toy fork with her everywhere and drops it constantly. Passersby we very weirded out whenever she yells, “Fork!” It’s good that this is not a society where people feel entitled to communicate their reactions in any way.

I can’t believe Spain’s democracy is collapsing again. I was so sure this time it would stick. Everybody was sure. But soon after the doubts appeared as to whether it had been done right back in 1978, the whole thing began to crumble. Last year, there was a whole stretch of time, almost 10 months, when no government could be elected. And now this whole sorry debacle with Catalonia. 

One can blame Catalonians, one can blame the PP government, one can easily blame them all. But the larger reason is that it’s simply a young, weak democracy that’s collapsing under the pressure that all democracies are feeling right now.

This morning, I received 11 (eleven!) entirely inessential emails from colleagues about completely non-urgent committee stuff. I’m not responding because I have a life. 

No administrator or publisher has ever done anything like this to me. Ever. And then I’ll hear tons of moaning about how the evil outside forces are making people sacrifice their weekends to the gods of neoliberalism. Yeah, right.