So Trump did name Pence? What was all that hoopla about not naming today out of respect? The fellow has the attention span of less than 3 seconds, it seems.

It annoys me beyond belief when people propose mutually exclusive goals. When politicians do that, it normally means they will do neither. Or, in exceptionally horrible cases, it means they will actually try to do both simultaneously and have them crash into each other like trains on full speed.

You can’t have open borders coexist with a welfare system. It’s one or the other. Pick one and stick to it.

You also can’t have a massive influx of millions of immigrants coexist with a simultaneous shifting of public higher ed costs onto taxpayers. Immigrants will want to go to college, their college education will be far more expensive than that of non-immigrants because they will require enormous language remediation, public colleges that are now barred from charging tuition will not be able to carry the burden. Of course, there will be a massive surge of love for immigrants as a result of all this and collective happiness will ensue. Or not.

Yes, it would be fantastic to have all these things and free apple pie. But it’s not possible. We laugh at “I’m pro-life and pro-guns” but this kind of empty fantasizing is no better.

P.S. And since I’m at it, you also can’t make cheaper public higher ed coexist with strict government control over speech codes. Adding one after another Ethics Compliance and Multicultural Diversity centers and offices does not bring costs down. It simply does not. This isn’t even math, it’s first-grade arithmetic.

We keep hearing that these terrorists hate modernity and want to destroy it in favor of an outdated medieval model. 

But what if we are the ones who are having trouble accepting modernity and the terrorists are winning because they are far ahead of us? Today’s terrorists don’t give a hoot for passports and borders. The fuddy-duddy insistence of reporters and politicians on discussing the terrorists’ citizenship looks weak and pathetic in the  face of the terrorists’ floating allegiances that aren’t based on passports and citizenships. 

Terrorists are also enormously better at using modern mass media. The documentary on ISIS that I talked about recently showed that even government workers are laughing at the pathetic counter-propaganda efforts by the US government that are supposed to counteract the brilliant ISIS propaganda. The question is: can a government, an entity that is constrained in everything it does by a bizillion and one regulations, counteract the artistic freedom of ISIS propagandists who have no such constraints?

What would work is for the state to relinquish the power over propaganda to regular folks. Facebookers, Twitterers, bloggers, Instagrammers. They are the ones who won the propaganda war in Ukraine while the official ministry of propaganda fumbled and bumbled. 

The downfall of these terrorists will be their nation-state nostalgia. They become sad and pathetic when they try to mimic “a country”. Their desire to be an actual state is what should be exploited. It’s their weak spot.

And one last thought because I have to run: the best things about the nation-state can only be preserved if a lot of the less wonderful and crucial nation-state baggage is dumped as soon as possible. There are things about the nation-state model that we all love. Let’s keep them and ditch the rest. Right now, however, we are doing the opposite. We are ditching stuff like welfare and public education and keeping or even reinforcing things like governmental control over speech codes (which is one of the reasons for why the government can’t relinquish its control over propaganda, for instance). 

Modern-day terrorism is another problem that cannot be solved by appealing to outdated nation-state methods. People whose brains are hopelessly stuck in the past suggest invading and / or closing borders. They resist the realization that there is no country to bomb and no borders to close because the threat exists on an entirely different plane. The threat isn’t constrained by borders and countries and the solution can’t be either.

We will waste precious time on discussing these nation era fantasies instead of looking for solutions that might work in our fluid times. Anybody who turns to nation-state rhetoric to discuss these issues is wasting our time. 

The solution will only be found once we all collectively adopt a new way of thinking that breaks with the old nation-state model. 

Another act of terror in France took place this evening. This is extremely disturbing. As the French are celebrating the birth of modernity, the greatest freedoms that the Bastille Day stands for are at risk.

It’s the feeling you get when observing the bizarre contortions of post-Soviet Jews who are trying to explain away Trump’s anti-semitic comments and tweets and argue that Hillary and Bernie are the real anti-semites.

It would be great if criticism of Trump didn’t slip into puritanical pearl clutching. First, there were scandalized shrieks over Trump’s entirely innocuous comment about breasts. Now, there is an even more idiotic trend of describing Trump’s son as “a perv” for saying that his sister is beautiful. I say that my sister is beautiful all the time because she is and I not only already discussed breasts with Klara but also told her where she came from. So what? What’s the big deal? Is there no legitimate reasons to criticize Trump that we have to fake ridiculous puritanism that we don’t apply to any other situation?

Our university paid $40,000 to the clickers makers just a couple of years ago. And now it turns out that the company is ditching the whole shebang we paid for and wants us to start paying all over again for the digital model. Which many of our students will not even be able to use because it requires Internet access. And we have a significant number of classrooms with no such access. 
So those $40,000 were effectively flushed down the toilet on clunky hardware that is now unusable. 

If Rauner – or anybody- really wanted to trim the budget and remove these idiotic “technological solutions” while closing down the multicultural diversity and leadership networking operations on campus, that would be a great idea. But no, this kind of shit is funded by the bucketful while I’m not in any way confident that my Texas conference will be funded. 

OK, that’s it for clickers for this week, I promise.

I hate hiring because it reminds me of dating. I spent 9 years dating and enjoyed none of it.

In both hiring and dating, people conceal their real goals for entirely unfathomable reasons. They claim to be looking for a casual relationship  (full-time job) when they actually desperately want to get married (work part-time).

People demonstrate complete lack of self-awareness. Everything they say about themselves is the exact opposite of who they are. The messiest person in the world sincerely considers himself a meticulous neat freak. A person who needs endless micromanagement insists she is a free spirit and an independent thinker.
In both activities, people are known to disappear without an explanation after a few great dates (blissful work days) only to resurface two months later in order to inform you that you are the love of their lives / employer of their dreams.

I will have to start interviewing graduate assistants tomorrow and I dread the prospect. Hiring and dating both suck.

At the clickers committee, people started ranting against the subscription model that the clicker company is trying to force us into.

“This sucks but it’s unavoidable. We can’t do anything,” people were saying. “This is what predatory capitalism is like. It aims to squeeze every penny out of you. There is nothing we can do.”

The whole thing is quite risible because there is absolutely something we can do to avoid being trapped into the clicker subscription model.

It’s called teaching.

We can finally let go of the pernicious notion that in order to be good teaching needs to be gimmicky. Teaching existed for millennia before clickers were invented, and I don’t think anybody can argue that an enormous breakthrough in teaching has happened since clickers came into existence. I never had them sued on me when I was a student, and I’m sure nobody here can say that I’m lacking in education.

We will now spend at least a year discussing alternatives to clickers, interviewing vendors, and wondering how to pay for in-class polling technologies. The possibility that we can simply not do in-class polling is not even being discussed because people make big scared eyes when one timidly suggests this option.