What I find deeply annoying is that 100% of theorists believe there is some sort of a subversive potential in the impotent, embarrassing and silly protests that have been occurring in pretty much all rich countries since 2007. Nobody has even tried to analyze them realistically without yelping “Yay! Rrrrrevolution!” like excited puppies. 

By the way, male colleagues are welcome at the AILCFH. I’m looking at you, Ol. It’s Santo Domingo, hello. 

Hey, colleagues, are you going to the AILCFH conference in Santo Domingo? I mean, it’s Santo Domingo in November, so who doesn’t want to be there?

The call for papers can be found here. The list of topics is incomprehensible to make it possible for more people to apply. If a conference is about nothing in particular, everybody can go.

Hispanic students do better in class depending on how peaceful and stable the country they come from is. For instance, Costa Rican students tend to do very well because it’s a relatively prosperous (for Latin America) country.

I’m not good at teaching Hispanic students because I don’t know how to get them to stick with it, not get distracted, not get bored, keep plodding. I want more Hispanic students because they are great for the Anglo students who get to practice in an immersive way and improve their language skills massively. But I can’t say I’m managing to do anything all that useful for the Hispanic students themselves. 

People say that our program is unfair because it gives a natural advantage to native speakers, but that’s such a load of bull. Things couldn’t be more different. 

Maybe what I should answer to yet another obnoxious person who is asking me, “But why don’t you teach Russian instead?” is that it’s an unattractive language with an unimpressive literature, a hopeless history of the language-speaking community, and an impoverished culture. Maybe that will shut them up.

The best part of this particular conversation came when I asked my Korean interlocutor what she did and the response was that she teaches German.

There is a school district that teaches moral relativism and makes students justify the Holocaust. I hope this is an exception, not a rule.

Three popes and a patriarch.  A unique event gets no coverage. 

[Russian] Fear and hatred in America’s most famous Russian ghetto. I’ve never been but I’ve been to others, and they are all pretty much the same. 

 A long and detailed article on the horrors of FGM. I’m glad that FGM is beginning to receive some attention. Not everybody wants to waste their lives on the inane discussions if Ivanka is worse than Chelsea. 

I wish people could just report on interesting stories without having to spoil them by attaching a dumb, chirpy moral to them. 

Professors give the same idiotic excuses as students. It’s the end of the academic year, so I’m really over excuses. 

This is how everybody will occupy their time after robotization does away with work. 

Infantile idiots grieve graduation. I detest this kind of people. 

Thank you, Quebec, for sparing us a Canadian Trump. 

Ridiculous at Yale. 

Wow, McGuigan even recognizes – albeit grudgingly and with an awkward nod towards the whiny Melissa McEwan types – that neoliberalism clearly benefited women in developed countries. 

This is unheard of among contemporary theorists. They are usually hysterically attached to the Howard Zinnian delusion that the heights of female liberation were achieved in the pre-colombian Americas. 

In 1989, there were about 270-300,000,000 Russian-speakers in the world. 

Today, there are about 170,000,000.

Languages that don’t find an expression in a valuable, attractive culture fade away. 

Yes, Bauman is dead. But the good news is that I have a new favorite theorist, Jim McGuigan. He writes about the many ways in which neoliberalism seduces by hiding behind the mask of coolness. 

I like McGuigan because he doesn’t schizophrenically refuse to notice the patently obvious, like pretty much all the rest of Marxist (and there is no other kind) theorists do, and recognizes openly that capitalism has delivered for an enormous number of people. 

In the 1st-world countries, young people don’t fight for bare survival. They have needs of a higher order, if we want to go Maslowian for a second. It’s normal for such young people to be attracted by the glamor of Hollywood, Vegas, YouTube and reality TV. 

Artistic professions have always been precarious. 

So how do you get young people to embrace and eagerly seek out precariousness? By investing all jobs they can get with an aura of pseudo-artistic, Hollywoodian creativity. They’ll think the precarious lifestyle is cool and non-conformist, and you’ll be able to milk them cheaply. 

By the way, one after another young chronicler of precarious, part-time job markets reports that there is a great sense of excitement and exhilaration that one gets from this sort of life. There is also fear and anxiety, of course. But the intensity of pleasure is part of it, too. I’ve observed this in Spanish literature of the crisis, and McGuigan confirms, in these very words. 

It is naive to expect that the redistribution of wealth from you and me to the very rich will be stopped on the initiative of the very rich, whether they are called Trump or Obama.

If there is any hope of stopping – or maybe just reducing a bit – this redistribution that’s been going on for 40 years, it will arise from our efforts. We need to build a dam, and it will have to start out by being an emotional dam that will prevent our energy and feelings from flowing towards the very people who are our class enemy. 

Because they have already built such a one-way dam that prevents them from even noticing the humanity of somebody like me and you.