“My daughter is 32 and she’s my best friend!” the Uber driver told me.

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “A tale of dysfunction extraordinaire is forthcoming.”

It turned out that the daughter can’t hold down a job or a boyfriend, lives with the mother, and the retired mother has to go out to work Uber to support them both. Of course, there are also two sons with jobs, families and normal lives. They were fortunate enough to remain sons and not be turned into “friends.”

Catholics and the Orthodox are opposed to in-vitro. It’s their right, of course, and far be it from me to tell them they shouldn’t be opposed. What I don’t get is the logic. They don’t accept in-vitro because some embryos get discarded. But without in-vitro, all follicles just go to waste and are eventually discarded by the body anyways. With in-vitro, at least some follicles get to turn into babies.

Or is it all about investing a follicle that has met a spermatozoon with a meaning that is different from the follicle that hasn’t yet met one?

I’m not getting an in-vitro or anything. I’m just wondering.

I’m tired of the obsession with the stupid El Chapo Guzmán. This gangster, that gangster, who cares? It’s kind of disgusting that all this fuss is being made over this nasty little prick as if he were a movie star.

Honestly, the American glorification of gangsters is infantile, sheltered and annoying.

The editors of the collections where my articles were accepted are driving me really hard to improve my work. They give oodles of suggestions, and all these suggestions are absolutely brilliant.

This is what somebody should have done for us: pushed us all the way from a final essay to an actual publication.

If I ever get to teach at a place with a graduate school, I’ll do this for my grad students. I think it would totally make sense for me to teach grad school. I mean, I’m great at teaching Beginner Spanish, but I think we can all agree I’m a tad wasted on such courses.

My dislike for the current Chancellor of the university (the one who refused to fund my Oxford trip and suggested we get bank loans to cover our health costs) has somewhat lessened. Today is the first day of classes, and students were greeted on campus by people with large “ASK ME” signs who help newcomers find their way around campus. There are also people who are distributing free hot chocolate outside to compensate for the cold weather.

Also, in the absence of a budget for 2015 (yes, 2015), the university leadership has convinced state representatives to agree to make phone calls to doctors to explain why state employees’ health insurance claims are not being covered.

And look at how easily postnational mentality has conquered all. When the Pope talks about the world’s hungry, poor and persecuted, it doesn’t even occur to him to consider any other response than transporting people from one place to another. 

The whole planet is subdivided, in this mentality, into vast “bad places” and smallish “good places” (i.e. ghettos and gated communities). Those who are capable and willing to spend their lives chasing after the good places should be assisted. Those who can’t, for whatever reason, uproot themselves as easily are screwed.

The possibility that instead of shuffling people around and dismissing large swatches of Earth as irredeemably bad it might makes sense to help more places become better never even occurs to the Pope. Or to anybody else, it seems. 

The Pope could easily contribute to the task of making some of the poverty and hunger-generating places he denounces to become better. He could, for instance, end his campaign against birth control. But that would go against the prevailing “if you don’t like what there is, move!” approach, and this approach has won the day.

And, of course, the creepy Pope is chiming in with a speech on how more refugees need to be brought to Europe. He will only be too happy to see the women he so hates locked up and terrified into submission.

Julio Llamazares is a famous Spanish writer. In Spain, writers participate a lot in public life and write for newspapers and magazines on the most pressing political issues all the time.

Today, Llamazares decided to publish a piece on mass sexual assaults in Cologne. After outlining his disgust with everybody who suggested that there might have been refugees among the rapists, Llamazares finally had to recognize that yes, actually, many of the rapists were refugees. The writer honestly and unashamedly relates what his reaction to this information was:

When the news coming from Germany begin to confirm that there were, indeed, recently arrived refugees among those who sexually assaulted women in Cologne, like many other people I feel frustration. What are we now going to say to everybody who refuses to accept in our countries the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing hunger and war?

The writer doesn’t even try to fake any concern for the victims of the assaults. Women are erased from his narrative completely, and their suffering does not touch him in the least. All he cares about is that these annoying, pesky women with their stupid little problems will now get in the way of male suffering being alleviated.

This is male solidarity in action, people. Llamazares is a talented writer, deeply sensitive to human suffering, but all that goes out of the window the second he feels that the interests of some men somewhere might be compromised for the sake of acknowledging the interests of women. Llamazares is not some raging male chauvinist. He is not even remotely one of the men who actively hate women. His readiness to sacrifice women to help out other men is simply so natural to him that he doesn’t question it.

I know that many people will feel tempted to tell me that “not all men.” Yes, I know that not all men. If you read this blog, you are probably not like this, great. But if Llamazares’s approach were not predominant, the situation in Cologne would not have even happened in the first place. The only reason why women’s rights were not the central subject of discussion when the decision was made to bring over to Germany a million men from anti-women countries is precisely that so many men (and women who interiorized the narrative of their own subservience) refused even to consider that alleviating male suffering should not be done at the cost of flushing women’s rights down the toilet.

For people who see women’s rights as important, the number one question when we had when hearing the news of open borders for refugees was, “Wait, but what will this mean for women’s rights?” For everybody else, the question doesn’t arise even after dozens of women get brutalized. And while women sit there, staring at what is happening in disbelief or constructing servile systems of excuses for the rapists, all of the achievements of the women’s movement are being thrown out into the trash.

Here is a long and interesting article on mass immigration to Great Britain. Note that even in the absence of an understanding of nation-state’s trajectory the author arrives at the same conclusion: liquid capital favors the highly mobile, educated, specialized minority (a.k.a. exterritorial elite) that is not tied to any locale. For the low-skilled, not very educated majority that is incapable and unwilling to flit around the globe easily and carelessly, liquid capital has no use. So capital discards the people who don’t follow it with ease. 

The interests of this rooted majority will be easily sacrificed to the smallest whim of the exterritorial elite. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s not something anybody does on purpose. It’s simply that capital tends to get what it needs. Capital’s needs don’t have to resonate with most or even with many. If it benefits capital to reward its exterritorial elite with slightly better eating out options, the lifestyle, the hopes and the entire culture of the less mobile minority will easily be sacrificed to that goal.

Gosh, can a border guard or two throw this wanker’s passport into his stupid face like they did to me and help him get over his pathetic white guilt?

The linked article belongs to the swelling “I went to a Trump rally and felt superior, here is every boring detail of that inane experience” genre. The author tries to liven up his soporific piece with a dose of racial self-flagellation that is embarrassing to observe.