Hey, folks, I just heard about this right now and I don’t know if it’s true. Is it true that questions from the CNN debate were passed to Hillary’s campaign in advance?? Or is it a clumsy?

Because if it’s true, that’s the kind of thing that would make me stay home on election day (if I were a voter.?

Conservatives are acting embarrassingly, too. When they don’t lash out in inexplicable rage, they whine and moan that they need safe spaces and that their fee-fees are hurt by somebody else not organizing celebrations for them.

There is so much anger and pouting going on among Trump supporters that you’d think their candidate lost. It’s weird when people whose side lost go to pieces but when those who won do it, that’s just bizarre.

Will we spend the next 8 years hearing conservatives flip out and ask for safe spaces?

A fantastic article on academic publishing. If you are thinking of going into academia, look at the list as a test. If the list doesn’t excite and energize you, you won’t be happy in academia.

Read the comments as a kind of test, too. These whiny, pouty, self-pitying folks will be your colleagues. Is your excitement about the list big enough to carry you through the horror of their company? 

Just 3 days in, and I’m already mortified by the ridiculous, self-important and often simply offensive ways in which my side is reacting to the election. Here is an example:

On Election Night, I heard several people say they’d left their bodies and felt like they couldn’t get back in. I’ve heard rape victims talk about leaving their bodies to shield themselves from the full impact of the attack. The association with a President Trump is natural and horrifying.

This is nothing short of disgusting. Rape is a horrible crime. It’s not OK to call every annoyance or disappointment “rape” in order to self-aggrandize.

Folks, an absolutely brilliant essay on the real failing of academics. The part about multilingualism is the best:

We should be beautifully multilingual in a range of nested, situated ways of talking and being–a good humanist should be able to walk into a room of advertisers, a room of Hell’s Angels, a room of soldiers, a room of drag performers, a room of hiphop artists, a room of soybean farmers, a room of car salesmen, and adapt to the conversation given time and opportunity. Not master it, not own it, not remake it as a knowledge product–but to understand what flies and what doesn’t, what’s being said and unsaid, what’s sayable and unsayable. We’re plainly not able. Perhaps less able than an advertiser, a Hell’s Angel, a soldier, a hiphop artist. 

Sorry for a long quote but I want to save it here for myself. The author is so right when he says that we often forget to wonder how we sound to anybody outside the bubble and that leads to tragic consequences.

We get together and recite a litany of talking points we all know by heart at each other. And then we call it intellectual conversation. 

People who seriously use the expression “flyover country” are limited, small-minded, parochial fools. If they got over their terror of Otherness and drove or, better yet, took a Greyhound bus, through the small towns of the Rust Belt and the Midwest, they’d enrich themselves intellectually and emotionally. And if you find such places boring, it’s because you project your own emptiness on them.

Talking about clowns, a bunch of folks started a petition for California to secede. I’m sure it’s the same people who ridiculed Texas secessionists for years.

One thing has become clear in this election: the traditional way of running campaigns – raising money, building a good ground game, putting headquarters and phone banks all over the place, filming ads, etc – is dead. Today is all about grabbing as many twitter and FB space with any means at your disposal. Outrageous statements that make for good memes, attention  grabbing insults, hysterical outbursts on Twitter that give pundits a chance to talk about nothing else for days – this is the new winning strategy.

For 2020 Democrats need a clown.

From a Kremlin propagandist:

Trump was sent to us by God as a weapon that Putin will use to destroy all evil in the world, once and for all.

The very first Uber driver I get in Houston tells me that his family lives next door to me and his nephews attend my university.

It’s uncanny.