Charles M. Blow this morning explores the media double standard

in reporting on crime committed by whites and blacks. Last Sunday’s gunfight in Waco, TX was between “bikers” or “outlaw motorcycle gangs.” Those terms, Blow writes, evoke the American romance of the Old West and the open road

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I think everything is simpler. Nobody cares if these biker gangs slaughter each other in huge numbers.

Let’s be honest, is there anybody here who felt emotionally involved with the biker massacre story? Do you know anybody who did? I can’t imagine anybody not belonging to these gangs caring.

What does bother me is that the very crucial discussion of horrible living conditions in West Baltimore is being drowned in a sea of triviality. These facile and empty comparisons with their triumphalist tone serve no purpose. Everybody hates these bikers and wishes they just disappeared. End of story.

In the meanwhile, the problems of East St Louis and West Baltimore remain unchanged.

The owner of the most popular social network in Russia had his business taken away from him and was forced to flee the country in fear for his life.

This happened because he tried to deny the government the right to control the users’ pages on his social network.

But Snowden is still a heeeeeero because only the rights of Americans matter. Everybody else is subhuman.

From Alain Touraine’s After the Crisis:

The thirst for consumption has driven the poor to consign the very poor to a position of abject inferiority in order to draw a distinction between them.

I’m not crazy about the book overall, but there are some valuable insights.

A question for people who have experience with Masters programs in languages and literature. How long does your program require the MA dissertation to be?

I’m asking because back at McGill we were expected to produce between 80 and 90 pages. But I’ve just heard of a place that only asks for 10,000 words. To me, 10,000 words make a regular final essay, not a dissertation.

What’s your experience?

Have you gotten tested to find out how dirty your mind is?

I have, and the result is predictable:

You have a very mature, sophisticated and smart mind that sees things as they are.
You have a very practical way of thinking that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. You are always reliable, you have the best pieces of advice on every situation, and the people in your life can always count on you for emotional support.

Or, as I put it in the preceding post, “you are an ancient old fart.”

The famous “Mattress Girl” (this is not a nickname I invented) is managing to create weirdness and attract attention even during graduation.

Millennials truly are different. And I mean it in a good way. Of course to us, ancient old farts, this exuberant self-branding does look strange. But it’s our problem, not the youngsters’.

 

OMG, I had no idea people still did that:

On Sunday, after church, Julie and I had a Full And Frank Discussion with our boys over inattention at the liturgy. We tried to impress on them that there are places in this world where Christians are risking their lives simply to do what we can easily do on Sunday morning. I told them about Father George Calciu, and what he and the other Romanian Christians endured in Ceaucescu’s prisons — and how they celebrated that same liturgy inside prison walls.

In my childhood, the starving children of Africa were the preferred trick to try to make me eat. The result was, of course, a life-long eating disorder. 

Do people still think that this heavy-handed and dumb manipulation provokes anything but eventual contempt for them?

Author: Ulrich Beck

Title: German Europe

Country: Germany

My rating: 5 out of 10

In Europe, “sociologist” is not a swear word like it is in North America. Some of the most important thinkers of today are European sociologists, and Ulrich Beck is one of them.

Ulrich Beck’s German Europe (2012) is a slim volume that discusses the current crisis that the European Union still can’t overcome. The main problem of the EU, according to Ulrich, is that it can’t let go of the outdated attachment to the nation-state model. As a result, for instance, Angela Merkel makes decisions that affect the entire union on the basis of nothing but her concern with winning votes at home. 

After two costly efforts to achieve hegemony within Europe that cost the world two devastating wars in the XXth century, Germany is finally seeing its dream come true:

The fact is that Europe has become German. Nobody intended this to happen, but, in the light of the possible collapse of the euro, Germany has slipped into the role of the decisive political power in Europe.

I’d disagree with the “nobody intended” part, yet the rest is unassailable. Beck believes that this state of affairs is deeply problematic because the very existence of democracy in several other countries of the union now hinges on the domestic political strategies of German politicians. 

I wasn’t that interested in the part of Beck’s argument dedicated to Merkel whom the sociologist calls “Merkiavelli.” It bores me to see politics reduced to personalities because I don’t see anything useful coming out of this sort of analysis. What I did find interesting is the suggestion that the root of Germany’s power today does not lie in anything that Germany does. Rather, it resides in its dithering, its constant vacillation that keeps other players on the European arena constantly on edge.

The book was written back in 2012, so there is obviously nothing in it about Russia. We can see, however, that the strategy of “yes, but no, but maybe yes” is precisely the one Merkel has been using with Putin. Feel free to judge the results for yourself.

Germans are tired, Beck says, of doing endless penance for the Holocaust and the two world wars so they are welcoming a chance to adopt a posture of being pedagogues to Europe who are teaching wayward Europeans how to do things right. Still, even the boring didacticism of the Germans is not too huge a price to pay for the ultimately very positive and successful project of the EU.

I’m watching an interview with a real-life pedophile teacher whose story imitates,  in great detail, the plot of Alissa Nutting ‘ s novel Tampa.

The pedophile would come to the kid’s house and flirt with him in the presence of his idiot father. Later, she’d have sex with the kid in the father’s house. She followed the boy when he went on vacation. They had sex in a parking lot. The first time she raped him was in the classroom, in the very first year she worked as a teacher. The pedophile is the same age as the one in the novel. The victim is the same age.

Plus, the real-life pedophile is speaking in the same dispassionate, monotonous, cold  voice as the novel’s narrator.

I’ve got to take back everything I said about the novel in my review. It’s scarily true to life, as it turns out.

A colleague asked us to a party in honor of her daughter’s college graduation. I was at this young woman’s high school graduation, and still remember her as a gawky teenager who had no idea what to do with her life. And now she’s a very cool, sophisticated adult who will be leaving for her prestigious job in Austria after the party.

It’s really funny how I only came here for a year and stayed for many more. I’m very glad I’m not into the “write your way out” mentality. So many people don’t even notice their lives passing them by while they fantasize about a magical future that never really comes. It makes much more sense to love the present instead.