Iowa State Representative Bobby Kaufmann, a Republican, plans to propose legislation that would charge public universities $2 for every $1 in state funds spent on programs to comfort students upset about the presidential election results.

I say, they are all idiots. Bobby for making a big deal out of something so small and silly. And the universities for participating in the silliness and feeding the narrative of public universities being freak factories that do nothing but waste public money.   

Who wants to join a movement where these kinds of freaks abound?

Women are not liberated because we can be forced to have babies (by rape and restrictions on birth control) and then forced into marriage or the workplace while we are still doing the 24×7 job of caring for these babies. Short of a universal basic wage or gift economy, I don’t see how that can be fixed.

She lives in Seattle, not in Iran. Blabs stupidly about privilege and intersectionality but has no idea how absolutely disgusting this ridiculous self-pity looks in somebody who has known nothing but coddling and opulence her whole life. 

People like this have absolutely no idea how repellent they look to most of the world. There are women who are really raped, really forced to give birth, really denied access to money. But they don’t live in Seattle and don’t write about intersectionality.

The only places where the Democrats were very successful in this election cycle are the ones where unions did an enormous amount of work, organizing and getting out the vote. The Dem leadership should ditch its entire GOTV operation, get rid of everything and everybody involved, and invite young union organizers to mount a completely new system from the ground up. There is very little time left before the 2018 election. This needs to be done now. Plus, the organizers of Bernie’s campaign should be brought in to share their expertise because their campaign was fantastic. In most cases, they were these very same union people, so that won’t be too hard.

I’ve had over 4 million hits on this blog (on both platforms combined) but what I’m most proud of is that there are people who have been reading it for years and there are even those who remember it from its old Blogger platform. I’m also proud that idiots, creeps and superficial chirpers don’t even have to be moderated. They fall off on their own.

Another thing I’m proud of is that we don’t have a commenting policy here. Every once in a while, WordPress acts up and sticks somebody (usually reader Dreidel) in moderation for some reason, and I’ve got to rescue them from the Spam box, but that’s about all the moderation the blog requires these days. This just goes to show that you can have a popular blog with a wide readership that maintains a high level of discourse without any special efforts at policing the commenters. 

Thank you, everybody, for reading and / or participating.

An op-ed in the NY TIMES suggests 12 steps for voter despair, one of which is the following:

I’ll do my part to support the society I’d like to see. I’ll eat Chobani yogurt because its owner has been subjected to racist attacks, etc.

The statement is followed by “I will support the Southern Poverty Law Center”, so it’s got to be serious. People have had their brain so devoured by consumerism that they don’t realize how deranged they sound. 

Voters in despair will be better off realizing that this irreflective consumerism is the reason why our politics looks this pathetic.

Amother thing I hate is the idea that if a work of literature narrates the experiences of a victimized group, it cannot possibly be of a low artistic quality. 

There are crowds of writers who do veritable torture porn of pathetic literary quality on the subject of Spain’s Civil War Republicans. The crap they churn out is commercially successful because everybody loves a good tear-jerker but I’m tired of the idea that any criticism of this swill means you sympathize with fascists. 

Spain’s protest movement failed to achieve anything worthwhile. The same party of austerity is in power, and its leadership is as proud of austerity measures as ever. Protest movements have failed in all countries of advanced consumerism because consumers make for disengaged, indifferent citizens.

You’ve all heard me say this before but the reason why I’m repeating it is that I can’t say this in my research. In Humanities, we have a severe censorship that doesn’t allow us to depart from the accepted line of thought on many issues. For instance, anything that departs even a bit from a complete, slavish idealization of protest movements (refugees, ETA, Catalan independence seekers, etc) is censored out. 

Maybe one can publish something a bit diverging from the party line in Spain if one finds an ideologically less leftist academic journal. Maybe one can publish something like this in the UK if one finds a quirky editor. On this continent, however, this options don’t exist. 

The censorship exists because people are sincerely convinced that questioning the party line and saying, even in a casual conversation, things like “Don Quixote is a work of art and Justin Bieber’s songs aren’t” or “there is a lot more sexism in Latin America than in the US” cannot possibly come from a place of reason. I saw a group of academics flatly refuse to accept the story of a colleague who had lived in the Basque Country and experienced terror because of ETA’s activities. The accepted line is that the etarras walk on water and evil Civil Guards unfairly victimize them. Good luck to that colleague with publishing her research on the subject in North America.

So John Bolton might become Trump’s secretary of state?

But that Hillary was such a hawk. It’s great that we are rid of her and will now get the super dovish Bolton.

Dumb asswipes.

During a deep-tissue massage at the spa, I was disturbed by an extremely loud and obnoxious sound.

“What kind of a spa is this,” I thought, feeling very annoyed, “that allows this infernal ruckus to occur when people are trying to relax?”

And then I realized that the infernal ruckus was the sound of my snoring.

Some dumbass on Fox News:

If Russia wants to have a better relationship with the US, they have to become a real democracy

No, loser, you will have to become a real autocracy. And hey, you are not choosing the Russian president while Russians hand-picked yours. Your time to dictate what people have got to do is over. Now you take orders and lick Russian boots. Good luck with that fun endeavor.