It’s hard to be less interested in Columbus Day than I am, but so many mellifluous fools in my blogroll whine in childish little voices about how Columbus was mean, horrible and not a Santa Claus that I feel like celebrating just to avoid being one of them. Especially since it’s the Day of Spain, also known as Hispanic Day.

As for Columbus, yes, he wasn’t extremely enlightened, which is not that weird given that the fellow was born centuries before the Enlightenment era. But if you can’t admire the tenacity and dedication of somebody who pushes on even when nobody else believes in the project, then that’s your problem, not Columbus’s.

One has got to be all sorts of stupid to condemn 15th-century folk for not sitting there, doing nothing out of worry that some overfed idiot centuries later might disapprove. And hey, how sure are you that people of the 26th century will find everything you say and do to be perfectly acceptable?

People who are wondering whether the GOP’s incapacity to choose a speaker will have an impact on the presidential elections need to get out more.

If the exact same events back in the 1990s had no such effect, today they are even less likely to have one. Voters have grown even more disaffected with the political process. The only people who follow these events are egg heads like you and me. Nobody else notices or cares.

I can coexist with people of any political beliefs as long as said beliefs are logical and consistent. I respect people who operate from a set of basic principles they can name. It’s the failure of logic that drives me nuts.

Example. Are you opposed to the state farming out its duties to private jails, military contractors, private security guards, gun carrying citizens in schools, etc? If so, then it makes zero sense for you to support the state farming out its duties to cangaroo courts constituted by private citizens who adjudicate serious violent crime on college campuses. Please note that all of the examples I gave reside in the same area of the state’s monopoly on legal violence.

Another example. Are you opposed to unpaid internships? Have you ranted and raved against using the idea that work should be enjoyable to deprive workers of compensation? Then where the fuck do you get off condemning me for running ads on my blog?

And it’s not the specific criticism of me that I find so annoying. It’s the incapacity to see the glaring contradictions in one’s position.

Turns out there was an important Obama interview on foreign policy today, and I missed it.

The really funny thing is that I missed it because I was reading one of the fellows who invented this foreign policy strategy back in the times of H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

A kerfuffle at Air France is a fitting punishment for the worst, most ineffective airline in the world. The only response that Air France ‘ s managers give to complaints about the egregious abuses at the airline is, “We don’t care where you write about it or who finds out. We are not invested in our image.”

This is an airline where everybody sucks, from management to flight attendants. I hope it finally falls apart and France will have to get itself together. It’s an absolute disgrace to treat people the way this airline does.

“In the society of consumers no one can become a subject without first turning himself into a commodity and no one can keep his or her subjectness secure without perpetually resuscitating, resurrecting and replenishing the capacities expected and required of a sellable commodity”  (Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life 12).

This would be less intolerable if people abstained from used-car sales techniques both in their professional and personal lives.

The obnoxious and tiresome networking does nothing but scare away potential purchasers of one’s professional self. And on the dating market, men botch their chances at a personal life because of their anxiety-driven need to pester, nag, beg, and whine. (I was never approached romantically by women, so I don;t know if they try to sell themselves as if they were defective vehicles to get rid of as soon as possible.)

If there is no escaping from the need to sell oneself, I wish people would at least find more elegant sales strategies.

This is a Russian cartoon from almost a hundred years ago (1917):

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OK, so remember how we discussed why words are important? And how no word is uttered accidentally? And how it’s my profession to analyze words? Right?

Good. Now let’s look at a quote from a fellow who tries to explain why he’s bothered by the Trans-Pacific trade deal:

In other words, if you’re accused of downloading anime in America, the Japanese government can force your American ISP to hand over all of your parents’ online records.

Anime? Parents? Of all the words he could have chosen, he went with these. I checked, he’s a middle-aged man. Here, however, he speaks in a voice of a 13-year-old boy. And it’s not just this excerpt. The whole text is like that.

I find this very curious. 

And by the way, this is why China is not a superpower. It doesn’t export ideas, a lifestyle that anybody wants to imitate, or technology. All it has to offer is products of cheap labor. And that doesn’t a superpower make.

India has a higher potential in this regard. It has the ideas and the tech. Now all that’s left is exporting an attractive lifestyle.

The favorite argument of every Putinoid on the planet is this:

“If Americans can interfere in conflicts all over the world and impose their will on faraway countries, why can’t Russia? Americans are not even that good at it! They’ve made mistakes, huge ones! Isn’t it time for somebody else to offer alternatives to the flawed American approach?”

Whenever I hear a variation on this argument, I always have this fantasy of hoisting myself onto the scene of the Bolshoi Theater and starting to whine, “But why can’t I dance here if these other women can? I want to dance, too! They are not perfect! I read an article by a famous ballet critic last week who said these ballerinas made mistakes in their rendering of the Swan Lake! It’s my turn to try! We need an alternative to their flawed performance!”

On the world arena, Russians are as prepared to act as I am to perform in the Bolshoi. Nobody who is utterly inept at managing things at home can make a legitimate bid to teach others. Russians have nothing anybody in the world wants.

And what are their achievements at home? Russians haven’t even managed to prevent a quarter – that’s 25% – of Russian men from dying before reaching the age of 55. Their stats on violence against children and on rape are sky-high. They have elderly people starving to death – in the literal sense and not in the American sense of “I’m totally starving for a burger” – and hospitals that are stocked with neither the IV fluid nor even the most basic painkillers. The standard of living is abysmally poor. The inequality levels make all of the prattle about American inequality sound like a joke. All of the media are state-owned and 8 – graders are taught that the mentally ill are subhuman. There is no literature, none at all. No science, no scholarship, no literary criticism even!

When the US made its first bid for the role of the world’s next emerging superpower in 1898, this was the result of the country doing phenomenally well at home and overtaking everybody else on the planet in most categories. In terms of the economy, women’s rights, military prowess, industrialization, education, political process, cultural vibrancy, nobody was managing to catch up.

It will take Russia 200 years of hard work  (which nobody there seems interested in investing) to catch up with the US of 1898, let alone the US of today. It’s much more likely that I will make it to the Bolshoi than that Russia will finally catch up.

To resume, a superpower is a country that creates ideas, technology and lifestyle that everybody else wants. Piss poor malcontent losers, however, do not a superpower make.