People are as dumb as door nails. 

“What is it with Hillary and emails?” fusses a brain dead chirper on my blog roll. It’s easier for this proud Liberal to accept that there is not an insensitive or downright criminal email associated with Trump’s campaign than to acknowledge that the owner of all these Snowdens, Wiki leaks and hackers unlimited is using the only means at his disposal to get his debtor elected. 

How do you feel about being friended on Facebook by people you know solely in your professional capacity? I don’t mean coworkers or people you like who work in the same field. I’m talking about the kind of people you never had even a shadow of any but the strictly professional relationship or never even met. For instance, the editor of the publishing house where you submitted your manuscript, the Dean of the department where you applied for a job, the organizer of the session at a conference where you plan to go (as opposed to somebody you met at a conference and had a chance to hang out with socially).

I’m much more of a reader than a poster on Facebook, so I have no fear that anybody would read something intimate about me there. But I do fear finding out things I don’t need to know about such strictly professional contacts. From bizarrely sexist cartoons to gushy pro-Rauner posts to cutesy little kitties to love letters directed to Trump to bizarre Putin adoration, I’m finding things about people that make me feel weird. 

And it’s not like one reject a Facebook friend ingredients request from somebody you kind of depend on professionally. 

Being irreligious was daring and rebellious for the longest time in history. But with the advent of capitalism, religion became an obstacle in the capital’s way. Religion places restrictions on consumption  (fasting is one obvious example) and positions the non-material as more important than material and ready for purchase. So capital killed religion. 

What’s really funny, though, is that many still see the decision not to allow any religious obstacle to stand in capital’s way as some sort of a brave choice. 

A 21-year-old Syrian refugee killed a woman with a machete and injured two other people on Sunday before being arrested in the southern German city of Reutlingen, a police spokesman said. The asylum-seeking man had been involved in previous incidents causing injuries to other people, he said.

Obviously, only a very disturbed person would run around with a machete. Immigration is traumatic for absolutely everybody, and people who come from a war zone or a troubled society are doubly traumatized. They need serious psychological rehabilitation. 

This time I truly outdid myself. In an endlessly proofed article, I managed to make a typo even before the article’s very first sentence. The typo appears in the word “Illinois” that I wrote as “Illnoise.” My typos are always deeply Freudian.

And a propos the preceding post, people, please spare me hearing “but the quote is from a bad book and the post is from a person with different politics.” 

If one wants to develop intellectually, one doesn’t seek out people and texts who say what one already knows. Instead, one looks for sources that challenge what one believes. 

And since I’m at it, please no more “I don’t agree with you about everything but. . .” Of course, you don’t agree with everything. If we are both alive and have functioning brains, there is zero chance we will agree about everything. 

From a great post on methodological individualism:

As I’ve said, our political regime and our way of life invite us to reduce all spiritual masses to the individuals that constitute them. Finally, however, however much we may desire to see everywhere only rights-bearing subjects and individuals seeking their own interests, we run into a number of great collective facts that are decisive for world affairs.

People tend to refuse to see that the total is bigger than the sum of its parts. I run into this problem all the time whenever I talk about capitalism or the nation-state. People balk at hearing me say things like “whatever capital wants, capital gets.” 

The resistance to the idea that there exists anything but a collection of individual wills of individual people all of whom do and want exactly what they say comes, I believe, from the vulgarized American sociology with its insistence that “studies” asking people about their motivations and desires are actually a source of truth. 

What people say, however, is evidence of nothing but that they chose to emit these particular sounds at this particular time for no reason outsiders are aware of. How these people are and how their actions will contribute to collective forces that are larger than any individual’s stated desires remains unaddressed. 

This is the death of actual social sciences that never doubted the existence of unstated motives and collective forces that go against the stated wishes of individuals. However much people might be saying that they want to retain the nation-state model or however much it might be in their interest to save it, collectively they are busily taking it apart. It’s only methodological individualism that prevents us from seeing this.

P.S. It’s very rewarding to find a post that actually says something valuable and contributes to my analysis after 15 minutes of sifting through the breathy posts by covert Trump admirers like all those Corey Robins, Mahan, Eschatology, and the rest of these shallow, gushy folks. But they illustrate the point of the main post perfectly. Whatever they say they want, they are part of a larger force that is working to get Trump elected. 

As I predicted, Sophie Hannah’s narrative skills are growing. A Game for All the Family is not part of the Zailer / Waterhouse series but a standalone novel. And it’s a lot more complex in terms of narrative structures and its openness to different interpretations than anything Hannah has written up to now. 

This novel is not a murder mystery stricto sensu but, rather, a book about a woman who decides to dedicate her life to doing nothing and descends into madness. Very well-done, spot-on in terms of psychology, and as engrossing as anything by Hannah. It’s as if Ruth Rendell came back but in a more contemporary version. 💟💟💟

Trump’s foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you’re not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom’s role in the Russia political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin’s policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

The next logical step will be to hire the leader of ISIS to advise Trump on terrorism. 

I have no words. 

People keep asking me this, so I’ll just write a post about it. 

We all know that I have strong opinions on education. I don’t like multiple choice, projects, book reports, homework, and learning foreign languages by talking about them in English. I’m very particular and often quite crabby about all this stuff. 
However, when Klara goes to school, she is likely to encounter all of these things. This means that I have a few years to learn to be wildly enthusiastic about them. And the enthusiasm has to be entirely sincere. 

A child is completely defenceless against a parent’s worldview. Transmitting to a child the belief that things are wrong, unfair, miserable and bad creates deep and life-altering anxieties. It is immoral and self-indulgent to sacrifice a child’s urgent need to live in a world where everything is good and right to an adult’s lazy grumpiness. But a child can’t be tricked. Children see past what you say to what you really feel. You can’t transmit to them the joy you don’t feel. 
So to promote my personal growth, I will be administering a multiple choice exam in my own classroom this year, and I will love it.