The Modern Language Association’s Executive Council has issued a statement criticizing growing anti-Muslim bias as well as bias against those who teach about Islam.

The MLA (my professional association) is so pathetic. This year, the number of job offerings in languages dropped off a cliff. The number of positions offered is back to the levels of the horrible 2009-10 job cycle which was at the height of the recession and saw 40% of job searches in foreign languages canceled or frozen.

The economy is no longer in recession, the job offerings have been doing much better, but then this year the numbers of positions across all fields have collapsed again.  Nobody knows why but instead of discussing this really serious crisis, the MLA is issuing ridiculous statements about the non-existent persecution of “those who teach about Islam.”

There was a situation with somebody who ran afoul of her religious institution’s Statement of Faith with a discussion of Islam in the classroom. But does that mean that we should all drop everything and start worrying about how evangelicals resolve their doctrinal concerns?

Another equally idiotic initiative is MLA’s statement “on the exclusion of refugees.” Playing the noble savior of non-existent refugees is, of course, much more pleasing than figuring out what the hell is happening with the job market. Let’s dispense imaginary bounty and pretend we are powerful and magnanimous.

Obviously, the MLA can and will do nothing for any refugees but the association just can’t pass up the chance to get some sweet “white man’s burden” thrills out of mentioning them.

I keep wondering if people are genuinely incapable of retaining any memories of the not-so-distant past or if their desire to be crabby old farts overpowers all reason. See, for instance, the following preachy peace about the horrible, gadget – dependent youngsters:

Every day, I see two people having lunch with one another, both glued to their cellphones, not talking. And I cannot help but think: something valuable is being lost. What is the point of scheduling a lunch date with a friend when your attention is somewhere in digital la-la land?

Working on a college campus, I see many situations like this. Someone forgets their cellphone at home and suddenly it seems as if the earth is crashing down. Cellphones have become the new-age security blankets.

And the judgmental old lady proceeds to inform us that “authentic in-person conversations” are now less frequent. I’m sure she had tons of authentic conversations as she trudged to school barefoot in the snow but anybody with either the memory of pre-cell phone times or a capacity to read knows that absence of gadgets does not guarantee either authenticity or in-person conversations.

The number of works of literature depicting people’s incapacity to have a conversation is enormous. If we are talking specifically about lunchtime conversations, I can recommend Dorothy Parker’s great short story “Too Bad” whose protagonists get divorced because they can’t think of anything to say to each other at mealtime. As we all know, Parker wrote long before cell phones came into existence.

The saddest kind of New Year’s resolutions are those that are repeated from one year to the next. They point either to stagnation and lack of personal growth or to accepting goals because they are socially approved and not because they are relevant to one’s life.

Goals need to change dramatically from one year to the next. I used to have a lot of goals aimed at increasing my academic productivity. But that problem has been solved. I’m now more productive than what I could ever imagine being and can move on to other goals.

I have no goals for 2016 because I’m planning to change my life completely and live in a way I never had before. Obviously, I can’t set goals for the unknown. But when I do go back to goal-setting in 2017, the goals will be new and fresh instead of stale and repetitive.

A rambling yet still valuable article on why the #Occupy movement failed so spectacularly: “We insist on perfect politics and perfect language, to the exclusion of experimentation, learning, or constructive critique. We wear our outsiderness as a badge of pride, knowing that saying the right thing trumps doing anything at all. No one is ever good enough for us — not progressive celebrities who don’t get the whole picture, not your Facebook friend who doesn’t quite get why we say Black Lives Matter instead of All Lives Matter, not your cousin who mourned the deaths in Paris without saying an equal number of words about those in Beirut. Instead of organizing these people, we attack them.”

We all know I hate the word “privilege” but I can’t stop wondering what it must feel like to be so incredibly privileged, fortunate and carefree that one can worry about stuff like this: “January is the season to truly hate our bodies. We come out of the holidays with all of those INDULGE messages and then suddenly in January, we’re supposed to set a resolution to work out, eat “better,” lose weight–and generally feel shameful about our flabby, doughy, *DISGUSTING* bodies while torturing ourselves into thinness just in time for “bathing suit season.” It’s enough to make even the most body positive bitch, like yours truly, get a case of the January blues.” I’d love to be this person for just two minutes to know what it feels like to have such an easy life and a burden so light.

Workers these days don’t know how to protest against economic exploitation, so they turn out to strike against cultural appropriation and penis jokes.

The perfect example of somebody who projects his personal misery onto the rest of the world. If you know anybody like that, please avoid them. Just remove them from your life entirely because these people will sabotage you and grind you down until there is nothing left. After which, they will patter along, happy and sated.

Just one of the endless numbers of example of companies destroying their own product because reason and profit are always easily sacrificed to the need to fulfill a social mandate.

The brutal world of college chess. Well, at least it’s an intellectual game, so a college is justified in spending money on it.

I did not know about this and I am appalled: “Early last year, [Obama] made an effort to levy some taxes on college savings accounts, given that 70 percent of account balances in those and similar accounts are owned by families who make more than $200,000. The revenue from the tax would have been plowed into college subsidies that would reach low- and middle-income Americans.” Trying to raid people’s college funds is nothing short of disgusting. 

Washington Post published a very poorly written and superficial article on the crucial subject of poverty. The text sucks but look at the photos. They are a reminder that American poverty is obese, not emaciated. But it’s still poverty! It still needs to be addressed! Let’s stop judging indigent people based on our Dickensian fantasies about poverty.

The psychological trigger for serious illness. Let’s remember how easy it is to talk ourselves into being ill.

A really fantastic preschool. It’s so amazing that it makes me want to weep. In my area, we have beautiful, fantastic nature, yet all of our preschools are located in ugly little buildings invariably stuck on busy highways. While the kids play on sun-beaten concrete slabs with not a single tree or flower in sight, cars and trucks are bathing them in gas fumes. 

One of the gifts N gave me for New Year’s is a new wallet. It’s beautiful, red but I just noticed that credit cards slide out of it very, very reluctantly. To the point where it might be easier not to buy anything at all.

Unsurprisingly, Canada’s Justin Trudeau has already raised taxes on my sister who’s the epitome of the middle class. And obviously on all hard-working Canadians like her. Aside from posing for endless photo ops and raising taxes, Trudeau hasn’t done anything. And I see no reason to hope he will.

The manner of waging war transforms with every transformation of the state model (Many people say that it’s the other way round: the state form follows the changes in the ways of waging war. Ultimately, the warfare methods are indissolubly linked to the state model, no matter what “comes first.”)

As we discussed before, the nation-state model arose, to a significant degree, in response to a need to find a less costly way than any that had existed before to wage war on an unprecedented scale. This goal was achieved in full, as we all know from the example of the two world wars. Without the nation-state, this kind of warfare would not be possible.

As the nation-state withers away and a new state form comes to replace it, warfare changes as well. Today we are seeing a gradual consolidation of what I call “consumerist warfare.” (This is just my own term. Other people use different terminology. In Ukraine, for instance, it is called “hybrid warfare.”) Here are some of the characteristics of consumerist warfare:

• every attempt is made to take the warfare as far away from the consumer-citizens as possible. (Russians, for instance, first brought the war to Ukraine, where the Russian citizens would not see it and then took it even farther away, to Syria.) Of course, this is a luxury that only some states can afford. There will be a huge stratification among the states that can take their warfare far away and those who have to host the battlefield. As you know, this was not the case for the nation-state, which saw the greatest casualties to the civilians of the warring countries in human history. 
• warfare is made as impersonal as possible through the use of technology (drones, airstrikes, terror attacks, etc.)
• the success of war effort hinges on the warring parties’ capacity to deploy non-military resources (economy, propaganda, social media.) A country that is much weaker in military terms can now win the war if it uses these non-military resources effectively. 
• the surveillance state model flourishes because it’s easy to justify it by the fear that outsourced warfare can come back in the form of terror attacks;
• consumer-citizens participate in the warfare through safe, sanitized long-distance means. They can experience the benefits of the war (adrenaline, excitement, a legitimate way of releasing their aggressive impulses, feelings of heroic abnegation) without having to risk their lives. Once again, this is something that citizens of more advanced consumer societies can afford better than citizens of less advanced consumer societies. 
• societies that cannot afford to export their wars far away can assign the status of a permanent war zone to a territory within the state or close by. Consumer-citizens will use it in the same way as I described in the preceding point but, of course, it will not be as safe and cheap for them.
• since mass conscription is not needed in this model, both the state’s interest in regulating the morality of consumer-citizens and its interest in guaranteeing their welfare will diminish. A state that outsources war also outsources its welfare system (to private companies, beneficent individuals, collective efforts by volunteers, etc.).

I think we can all agree that much of this is already happening. 

I don’t like the expression “people of color.” I see in it an attempt to appropriate the uniquely tragic history of African Americans for the self-pitying  needs of willing and eager immigrants or their descendants.

Curiously, the only people I ever hear use this expression are quite comfortable economically. An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who washes dishes for $3.50 an hour will not refer to himself as “a person of color.” What would that even sound like in Spanish? At most, he might refer to himself as “latino” but even then would ensure that nobody conflate his experience with that of a Mexican or a Dominican (let alone a Pakistani or a Singaporean.)

Anything positive that might come out of the expression “people of color” is, I believe, erased by the damage created as a result of refusing to acknowledge the unparalleled nature, in both its history and today’s consequences, of African American suffering.

I understand that those who use the expression have no intention of strengthening racist discourses, but ultimately that’s the result. Everybody in their right mind has to acknowledge that the level of poverty, criminality, drug addiction and hopelessness is extremely high in African American communities. There are two narratives that explain this:

1. The racist narrative of black people being genetically predisposed, etc. etc.

2. The narrative that acknowledges that the unequaled violence inflicted on African Americans throughout their history as a group creates these effects.

The moment you reject the narrative of the unparalleled history of African Americans by collapsing them into the vague “people of color”, you automatically slip into the racist narrative of genetic predispositions because that’s all that there is left.

The favorite argument of all racists, by the way, is “But why do Asians do so well academically and economically while African Americans don’t?” This enormously annoying argument is based precisely on a refusal to see a difference between groups with the past and the present that don’t overlap.

Reader Crystallizing Chaos asks a crucial question: is there such a thing as love at first sight?

The answer is that there is nothing but love at first sight.  Sexually and psychologically healthy people know if they are attracted or not immediately. Of course, there are cultures where this powerful instinctive pull towards a person is stigmatized as “not really love.” People only allow themselves to name their feelings “love” if the feelings pass the muster of being socially acceptable.

The belief that sex is dirty and robs people of their full humanity by making them “like animals” generates the tortured distinctions between “in lust but not in love but not love.” The easier a culture finds it to name the powerful initial attraction “love”, the more sexually healthy it is. The longer people feel they need to wait until their feelings will qualify for the name of “love” and the more ritualized the process of renaming “lust” into “love” is, the weaker is their capacity to defend their personal space from the colonization by the social mandate. 

People who can’t accept first – sight attraction as love because it’s “just sex” will be comforted by knowing that it really isn’t. Our brain processes information a lot faster than we can verbalize it. Within the very first few minutes of an encounter (but a real encounter, not an on-screen one), we know on a non-verbal level whether this person fits our relationship scenario. The need to bury this knowledge under a mountain of words and social codes betrays the desire to hand over the control over and responsibility for one’s personal life to the authority of one’s peer group.

For Soviet people, the New Year’s celebration was so enormously significant because people couldn’t just go out and buy all of the ingredients that went into their massive food spreads on December 31.

The ingredients had to be sought out, amassed and jealously guarded throughout the year. The entire year would be like a treasure hunt driven by the vision of that opulent, overflowing New Year’s table. When people sat down to eat on December 31, they wouldn’t just be eating food. They’d be symbolically consuming the reminders of their own greatest achievements throughout the year.

The consumption of the food was accompanied by a prayer-like recitation of these crucial milestones:

“This can of sprats I found back in July, completely by accident. And this chunk of cheese is from all the way back in February. I had to stand in line for 4 hours in the cold to get it!”

The traditional end-of-year list of achievements would transform into “My Greatest Victories in the Art of Food Hunting.”

The overwhelming majority of the food thus treasured obviously had to be canned, smoked, salted or otherwise preserved or it wouldn’t keep. People had to invest a lot of ingenuity into making this food look attractive and stand out from the similar spreads of their acquaintances.