Opinions, art, debate
The posts that were hacked by trolls are:
My bet is that it all started with Naked Men, which is bad because that’s seriously the title of the novel I’m working on in my research right now. What, I can’t mention my research now?
Strangely, this never happened with my very popular post on naked Israeli soldiers.
Turns out women were avoiding peanuts during pregnancy in order to prevent the baby from developing a peanut allergy. Now this practice has been debunked as counterproductive. This is good news because I was eating peanuts by the trainload in pregnancy. It was the only way not to feel hungry on the severe diabetic diet.
One thing that wasn’t easy was finding unsalted peanuts and sunflower seeds. I find it absolutely bizarre that people would drown nuts and seeds in salt.
And by the way, guess who went to a real restaurant for a 3-course dinner and whose 11-week-old baby behaved perfectly throughout the outing?
Oh yes.
The waiters looked a bit shell-shocked and kept trying to dispatch us fast (“I don’t think you’ll be interested in dessert, right?” – with a scared look at the baby) but we held firm. Especially since Klara made not a peep unlike a very fidgety 11 – year-old at another table whose voice still rings in my ears.
It was really great to dress up, go out, and feel like ourselves.
My friends, some idiot troll has reported the blog as a phishing site, and now it will take a while to get it back to normal. I’m working on it and I thank you for your patience.
Here is a funny story to entertain you in the meanwhile. I was loudly and indignantly expressing my dislike of vile Putinoid trolls when I noticed that Klara was staring at me with a look of clear enjoyment and a huge smile.
A couple of hours later, I was loudly and indignantly expressing myself on a different subject when once again I noticed that Klara – who is not a very smiley baby – was looking at me with a huge happy grin.
Later on, we were in the car and Klara started fussing. Right at that moment I started loudly and indignantly to hold forth on the subject of the elections. Klara immediately became happy and giggly.
If this child enjoys listening to loud, indignant diatribes, she’s in for a very happy life because I produce a steady stream of them all day long.
It’s really fascinating how she knows that this is not real anger and that I’m trying to be funny with the diatribes. The only time I was seriously frustrated around her, she knew what I was feeling and started crying.
. . . is, I believe, simply that he isn’t well-known nationally. As late as last month, a friend who is a lifelong Democrat asked me, “So who is this Bernie Sanders? Can you explain why you like him?”
Before this election cycle, I knew Bernie existed – the only Socialist in the Senate, how curious! – but that was the extent of my familiarity with him. And as you probably realize, most people are not as interested in the political process as I am, so they knew even less.
I’m convinced that if voters had been aware of Bernie for longer, we’d see very different numbers now. The fellow clearly defeats all of the candidates combined and multiplied by eleven thousand in terms of character and integrity. And that’s an enormous advantage.
Gender is visible manifestation of biological sex. Biological sex is the structure of our reproductive apparatus and is not observable in regular daily activities because socialized humans keep sex organs covered up.
The visible manifestations of sex are called gender and can be of two kinds:
1. Consumerist
2. Conceptual
Consumerist manifestations have to do with how people signal their biological sex to the world through consumption choices. Clothes, makeup, hairstyles, shoes, accessories – all this is the consumerist manifestation of sex. The consumerist manifestation simplifies life because it allows us to know the biological sex of others with no or next to know difficulty. This is a great aid to mating. It’s pretty inoffensive because it’s entirely superficial and very adaptable to the needs of an individual consumer.
Conceptual manifestations of sex are the ideas, behaviors, ways of being, and personal qualities we idiotically and baselessly assign to our reproductive apparatuses. Unlike the inoffensive consumerist manifestations, the conceptual ones can have devastating effects because they force people into behaviors that might be entirely alien to them, create inequality, impoverish people’s lives and cripple their capacity to mate as successfully as they would otherwise. Compared to the consumerist manifestations, the conceptual ones are thus maladaptive.
Sadly, in a consumerist society people tend to believe that nothing is more important than consumption. They easily accept the conceptual manifestations of sex but militate against the consumerist ones.
An example: an acquaintance who keeps telling me she can’t understand how I can be a feminist and dress Klara in pink can’t have a single conversation about her 18-month-old son without mentioning how “you can see he’s a boy in how aggressive he is!” Everybody but the mother sees the kid as the sweetest, quietest human being ever but it’s obvious his vision of self will come from Mommy and not from strangers. Not dressing the little tyke in blue seems quite trivial in comparison to dooming him to aggressiveness because of the shape of his reproductive organs.
Consumerist manifestations of sex are carried out through the exchange of money and goods and don’t influence behaviors.
Conceptual manifestations are carried out through words and influence behaviors.
Let’s relax our fixation on what we buy and concentrate on what we say. In the beginning was the Word, not the credit card.
I can see that there is still a couple of Putinoids lurking around the blog. They downvoted the “Ukraine Keeps Winning” post and are seething in impotent rage.
What is really curious, though, is how Ukrainians are manufacturing diversity in a pretty monolithic society. They keep inviting people from other countries to help run the country. The idea is to fill the government with folks who haven’t been touched by the truly outrageous Ukrainian corruption. The battle against corruption is extremely hard but there have already been some notable successes.
So suck on this, stupid Putinoids.
I have discovered Jello. And happiness ensued.
Why did the universe conceal this great thing from me until now?
Here is the worst part of the Sanders plan, however:
The plan Sanders proposed in Congress calls for providing “an assurance that not later than five years after the date of enactment of this act, not less than 75 percent of instruction at public institutions of higher education in the state is provided by tenured or tenure-track faculty.”
What is the meaning of tenure? Why is it needed? Tenure exists so that people who generate ideas are not punished for advancing new knowledge and demolishing old certainties. Today’s Galileos should not be persecuted for saying that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
In the past 30 years, higher education stopped being limited to the elites. Today, more and more students from non-elite backgrounds enter institutions of higher education. They haven’t attended fancy private high schools and need quite a bit of remediation before they are ready to take higher-level college courses. This is why there is an explosive growth in non-tenured and part-time educators who teach Beginners Spanish, Calculus I, English Composition 101, etc. These people do crucial work. Still, the idea of giving them tenure cannot be justified. If they are not generating new knowledge that might disturb old certainties, what is the justification for giving them tenure? There is none.
What these workers need instead is a union. They need to be unionized, get a good contract, serious benefits, decent salary, and respectable working conditions. Tenure, for them, entirely misses the point. Instead of benefits and a contract, we’d be giving them a promise that they will be protected from firing in case they anger the academic or administrative authorities with the research they don’t really do? That’s insane!
Do you know who employs research scholars and refuses to give them tenure? No, it’s not a community college or a public university like mine. Harvard and Yale do this shit. Once again, Bernie’s plan assumes that everybody is Yale and tries to cure Yale’s ills on the body of completely different schools. This is what happens when people try to micromanage fields they are not familiar with.
Great news! Leszek Balcerowicz, the author of Poland’s successful shock therapy, has been invited to join the Ukrainian government.
Unlike Poland, former Soviet republics never had the actual shock therapy. The transformation of their economy was flaccid and insufficient. 25 years later, the standard of living in the countries that were deprived of real economic reforms still stinks.
Changes are coming slowly to Ukraine but they are coming. This is very heartening.
Clarissa's Blog 