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.

After the Oregon shooting, the idiotic cliché of “toxic white masculinity” has been quietly substituted with the equally idiotic cliché of “toxic masculinity.”

What strikes me as especially significant is how outrageously, uncontrollably infantile are the people who are busily debating why the Pope met with Kim Davis and his gay friend from Argentina and what it all could mean.

These folks can’t bear the burden of taking responsibility for their own convictions and look to the figure of the Father (il Papa) to give them permission to have opinions. Saying “I support gay marriage because I believe that it’s right” is intolerable because they don’t know how to fill this “I” with meaning and authority.

The thought that their Papa has preferred another child (Kim Davis / gay friend) to them switches on the existential angst of a jealous toddler.

It is an absolute fucking disgrace that with everything going on in the world, the centerpiece of the first page of today’s NYTIMES is an article titled, “Before Clerk, Francis Met With a Gay Friend.” Even the piece on the mass murder in Oregon is pushed to the side for the sake of this deeply idiotic article.

As Zygmunt Bauman said, the public has been aggressively colonized by the private. As a result, we don’t have a public life or a public space.

Hey, people, check this out: another review of my book came out and in a very good journal, too. The reviewer – who is an important older scholar with a shitload of books to her name – says that my book is “magnificent.”

This is the third review of the book that I’m aware of. I wouldn’t have been happy with fewer than three reviews but now that I have them (and all in very respectable journals), I can rest easy.

Seriously, this Grandin fellow is just the limit. The number of utterly idiotic statements he can produce in a fairly short space is impressive.

When Castro sent troops to Angola, that was a wonderful thing to do because those miserable Cubans (dragged all the way to Africa against their will and spat at by the dictatorship afterwards, by the way) were fighting for “freedom.” When Kissinger gets the CIA involved in Angola in some unspecified way, that’s horrible because that’s not about fighting for “freedom.”

The USSR never engaged in the arms race, not even in the 1950s.

The US could have and should have just stopped participating in the Cold War.

The US should have demilitarized in the 1970s and used that money to prevent the global economic crisis of the second half of the decade.

I’m having to force myself through his rambling mess of a book whose only organizing principle is the author’s extreme incapacity to notice that people who don’t happen to be American are fully human.

This Grandin fellow is dumb with the stupidity of 20 total dumbos. He goes on and on and endlessly on, trying to prove his shocking discovery that. . . Nixon and Kissinger tailored foreign policy to suit domestic needs.

Of course, every elected politician does that. Even Putin, who’s not an elected politician, tries, first and foremost, to impress his citizenship and serve domestic needs with whatever he does internationally. And he doesn’t have to worry about getting reelected.

The rest of the book is toilet jokes, anti-Semitic barbs, and dumb, trivial statements by a very superficial fellow.

Hey, are you, folks, watching Obama’s press conference? It’s really good. I don’t even mind my Dr. Phil being displaced by it because he’s saying valuable stuff on both domestic and foreign affairs.

From Greg Grandin’s book on Kissinger:

Kissinger dwelled awhile on the danger statesmen face when they point out to their nation’s people that they are not, in fact, the world, that their aspirations are not boundless, that other peoples, with different interests and experiences, exist. Unwilling to accept these limits, citizens often stage “an almost hysterical, if subconscious, rebellion against foreign policy.

This is absolutely spot on. Here’s the reason why the US foreign policy is so impotent. Voters flip out whenever foreign affairs are mentioned because they are traumatized by the realization that other human beings, with the will and interests of their own, exist.