I normally don’t like this fellow, but in this post he’s absolutely right: Liberals confirmed every nasty stereotype of themselves in the Kim Davis debacle. And this was written before the disgraceful “Has the Pope met her?” hullabaloo.

This author is not my cup of tea either but this article of his is surprisingly insightful: “In the febrile environment of social media, this cult of sentimental humanitarianism frequently manifests in virtue-signalling and policing and in immense waves of collective emotion. Declaring definitively, yet thoughtlessly, upon issues of labyrinthine complexity, it regularly appears to involve a narcissistic preoccupation with our own caring, not least relative to the supposedly inadequate caring of others. The simplistic vision that would cast fiendishly knotty social and political problems as if they were parable scenes for us to re-enact for our moral self-validation is bankrupt.

What a happy, sheltered reality is that where people can fight over how to name their baby.

“One of my colleagues told me the other day that s/he has switched to multiple choice exams in most of his/her lit courses and has students do only minimal writing, most of which s/he doesn’t respond to or grade.” I will do the same thing. It isn’t teaching, it’s bullshit. But if my health insurance is taken away  (which represents an enormous and entirely undeserved pay cut), I will be cutting down the services that I provide.

A refugee riot in Germany. Once again, I have to repeat: refugees are human beings. Not puppies, not dolls. They are people.

My anxiety is way better than your anxiety! Do people even notice how insane an anxiety contest sounds?

“I can even understand some of Carson’s unease about electing Muslims to the Presidency. But then, I’m uneasy whenever a man (or maybe someday a woman) of God is elected to the Presidency, regardless of their faith.” Hear, hear! I prefer politicians to keep their religious beliefs as far out of my life as possible. I don’t get why job interviews for some state jobs prevent the prospective employers from asking about the candidate’s religion why other state jobs allow a candidate to persecute the employers with his or her boring religious convictions.

A young woman is being prosecuted for manslaughter just because.  .  . she sent some text messages.

Poly, schmoly. In my country, we call it “Wake up, honey, your husband found himself a mistress and doesn’t know how better to kick you to the curb.”

“Americans are Powerful & Safe; So why do they feel Like Victims?” Answer: precisely because they are so safe. It titillates the jaded palates.

And hey, doomsterism and despair are wildly profitable.

A novelist quits a teaching job over a loyalty oath.

“So ironically the Russian Federation and its ex-Communist president is taking a conservative position here, of trying to prop up the status quo, which the US views itself as a radical democratizer a ala Thomas Paine.” I hate it when people use words without ascertaining their meaning. What can possibly be “ironic” about this state of affairs? Is anyone still unaware of the deeply conservative nature of Soviet Communism since the early times of Stalin?

Of all the weird things to do, pumping a 14-year-old full of hormones is one of the more extreme. With a mommy like that, who needs enemies?

I had no idea people still needed persuading that the Rosenbergs were guilty.

Jewish Studies are dying.

Just like I went back to buying paper books and using a wristwatch, I’m back to writing paper letters.

I used to be a great letter writer. People loved my letters. And then that all died in favor of stupid emailing.

There are several reasons for the dramatic increase in obesity rates in the US in the past 3 decades. One reason that never gets discussed is the anti-smoking campaign that has intensified alongside this increase.

Smoking addiction develops as a result of oral trauma. Once smoking as a way of managing oral trauma becomes more inconvenient, socially less acceptable, more expensive and more onerous, people will move to the next available substitute. Overeating is that substitute.

You know what other manifestation of oral trauma has exploded alongside the smoking bans? Virulent, angry speech of the kind we see on the Internet. These enraged Internet users who erupt in uncontrollable and outlandish insults to everybody they meet online are the orally traumatized. (Yes, me too, obviously.)

None of this means that the connection is as direct as all former smokers overeating and being angry online. It means that as a traumatized person looks around for the most convenient and socially acceptable way to self-soothe, s/he will gravitate towards overeating when 20 years ago s/he might have moved towards smoking.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the anti-smoking campaign shouldn’t have taken place. It simply means that you can ban the practice but there is no ban one can place on trauma. The trauma remains and will find a way to manifest itself.

“Ultimately, if you accept the evolutionary theory, you dismiss ethics, you don’t have to abide by a set of moral codes, you determine your own conscience based on your own desires,” Carson told Adventist Review. “You have no reason for things such as selfless love, when a father dives in to save his son from drowning,” Carson continued.

I had no idea he was quite this dumb. This is even scary in its aggressive idiocy.

One of the biggest battles during the negotiations between Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, and Putin yesterday was whether the 1,000,000 refugees from the occupied territories of Ukraine’s Donbass region will have the right to vote in the upcoming Ukrainian elections.

Ukraine’s president Poroshenko refused to consider the proposal by Putin, Merkel and Hollande that these 1,000,000 refugees be denied the right to vote in their own country (where they do and always did reside) to please Putin. Obviously, Putin is aware that the refugees who were displaced by his invasion are not too likely to vote for his puppet representatives. Just as obviously, Merkel is deeply indifferent to refugees if she can’t use them for a photo op.

It seems like, after all, the refugees will not be stripped of their basic civil right and will get a chance to vote.

Lacey told her father that at one point she could hear a woman tell the gunman, “I’m sorry that you are going through this — I’m sorry that somebody has hurt you.”

“I bet you are, but it’s not good enough,” Lacey remembered the gunman replying, and then, she said, he shot the woman.

The killer has a gun pointed at her, yet she still can’t quit trying to service a man emotionally. As long as there is a pair of pants in sight, she will try to be useful and accommodating.

I thought nothing could make me any sadder about the tragedy of the Oregon shooting but then I read this story.

Today, there is finally a possibility that the Russian invasion of the Donbass region will be over by the end of the year, everybody will go home, and the war will end.

On the one hand, it is sad, horrible, immoral and wrong that the West chickened out, abandoned Ukraine to its fate, betrayed the Budapest agreements, and allowed Putin to humiliate the so-called Western leaders in any way he chose.

At the same time, though, there is an enormous positive potential in the fact that Ukraine won its hopeless war against the enormously much more potent enemy on its own. While the West was too terrified of Putin to say as much as “boo” to him, Ukraine, a country without an army and with a pitifully bad economy, got over itself, created an army, stabilized the economy, and won the war.

A victory won on one’s own merits is always superior to the one achieved while others are propping one up. As the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset said, a nation only exists while its members are conscious of working on a shared project of building a common future. In the age of a tottering nation-state, Ukrainians have demonstrated that a nation can not only continue to exist but even be strengthened. All that is needed to achieve this is a shared belief in the value and importance of the national project.

In terms of who actually deserves the Nobel Peace Prize 2015, I’m convinced it’s the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko.

For all his multiple flaws, one thing is undeniable: Poroshenko is a fanatic of peace, peace at all costs. This fellow pretty much buried his future in his own country as a result of his obsessive, single-minded dedication to peace.

Poroshenko is not loved in Ukraine precisely because of his obsession with peace. For many people, peace is not worth the sacrifices made to achieve it.

Yet, Poroshenko perseveres. He shakes Putin’s hand (which visibly brings him to the point of a cerebral hemorrhage every time), listens patiently to Merkel’s prevarication, puts up with Hollande’s posturing, stoically accepts Obama’s snubs, stretches himself paper-thin to please the IMF, and pushes the immensely unpopular legislation that can offer a glimmer of a hope for peace through the Parliament.

The result of all these efforts – which most Ukrainians see as betrayal and pro-Putin waffling – is that the casualties are lower than we would have seen with a more aggressive stance and there is now even reason for a timid hope that the war might be drawing to an end.

With all due respect to Merkel, what war did she stop in 2015? Poroshenko, in the meanwhile, has actually managed to engineer a situation where an actual war transformed into a tense, annoying, insufficient but still peace. And he did that in spite of Merkel creating one obstacle after another to the cause of peace, by the way.

The Nobel Peace Prize is used these days not to reward actions but to prevent actions. Obama was given the Prize before he had the time to do anything at all. We all laughed but what we didn’t get was that the whole point was to make sure that Obama continued not doing anything much on the international arena.

Putin wasn’t given such a preventative Nobel Peace Prize, and now nobody can stop him being maniacally active.

Today it seems that Angela Merkel will be given the next preventative Nobel because the world wants to take a rest from her endless efforts to be liked, to lecture, to control, to set an example, to hector, and to tutor.

I’m a white guy teaching Kindergarten in a school that is 100% Black and 100% free-meals. I am one of three white persons on a staff of roughly 30 that, other than the three, is all Black and majority women. A colleague, who is a person of color, has recently shown such incredible disdain for their students that I was speechless, and that says a lot. This disdain and frustration has been revealed in person to students.

I have been told in recent years that, as a white male with privilege, I have very little say or place in the conversations about teachers or youth of color. I need to sit down, shut up, and listen. I ask my activist colleagues out there in the ether: what are the protocols in this instance? As a white male, can I challenge and reply with equal disdain with my perspective on this colleague’s treatment of their students? Do I sit down, shut up, and listen to this person call their students “bank robbers” or “murderers,” call them “evil” to their faces?

As an activist colleague, I have some advice. First of all, stop being such a victim because it’s obnoxious. If somebody really told you to “sit down, shut up, and listen,” start working on your presence because I have no idea how you can teach anybody if you can’t even get your friends to respect you and not take this tone with you. I cannot begin to imagine anybody taking this tone with me in any situation or even trying to refer to me as “white female with privilege.”

Aside from that, the aggrieved and victimized position of a “white male” who is terrorized into silence by evil black colleagues makes you sound like an asshole of enormous proportions. Quit feeling so massively sorry for yourself, stop policing what your colleagues do, and concentrate on maturing both professionally and personally because you can use a lot of work in that area.