Reader NG asks a crucial question:

How is a consensual bias arrived at? I don’t have the answer but what are your thoughts? Did a whole lot of folks wake up one morning and decide that the Ukraine would now be referred to as a “former soviet vassal state”?

This is a great question. A great, great, REALLY GREAT question. What many people don’t realize is that the Kremlin employs an army of propaganda workers who – for years and years – go from one website to another and so on and so forth, repeating these same ideas, many many times, and then repeating them again. There are specific set phrases that they repeat, copy-paste, repeat some more. Gradually, after you encounter these set phrases several times in different contexts, you just automatically adopt them.

This all works on the level of basic language acquisition: first, the passive knowledge is created; then, it becomes active through repeated use.

One example is the expression “sphere of influence.” Putin is a great admirer of Stalin, and he came up with this philosophy that the two global superpowers (Russia and the US) should have their spheres of influence, just like Stalin agreed with Churchill and Roosevelt during WWII. Ten, fifteen years ago the whole thing sounded completely bizarre. Russia was needing American handouts to survive, it was barely managing to handle day-to-day operations, what sphere of influence could it hope to have?

But the Kremlinbots kept working, copy-pasting their “sphere of influence” argument time and again, and what do you think? Russia is doing worse than ever by every measure, yet the belief that “Russia deserves to have its own sphere of influence” has colonized the minds of an enormous number of American reporters and even professors of Slavic Studies. And then you see these fools passionately defend the idea of “the spheres” because they heard it several times and, for them, this is a prompt to accept it as their own.

Never underestimate people’s willingness to be manipulated. There is so much that new technologies are permitting us to do in terms of propaganda, and so very few folks are actually making use of these opportunities.

It’s gotten to the point where the President of Ukraine is personally asking stupid Zuckerberg to open a Facebook office in Ukraine because Kremlinbots rule Facebook like it’s their loyal vassal. For instance, they’ve managed to ban as pornographic this photo of a little girl wearing her dead father’s medal:

Of course, what upset the Kremlinbots were the colors of the Ukrainian flag in the photo. There are so many trolls who do this sort of thing professionally that it’s next to impossible to keep any pro-Ukrainian Facebook page alive. And Zuckerberg, while opening completely useless offices in places like Montréal, still can’t open one in Ukraine.

The hidden curriculum is created by the environment in which you are located and instills you with the norms and values of your academic culture. Think about it: admitting incompetence is a loss of face and undermines your academic authority with your peers. Hence the fear of admitting you might not really know how to search the literature thoroughly or efficiently [emphasis is not mine].

People who think this way will never amount to anything because their field of vision will forever be limited by the psychological problems they keep mistaking for objective reality. I’m telling everybody in sight how I made an ass of myself recently because I had no idea how to write abstracts. And it doesn’t occur to me to fret about loss of face and undermining of authority.

And then these loss-of-face people come into the classroom and start projecting their battle for respect with the inner censor onto the students. 

OK, folks, are there any French-speakers around? How do I say “This is really great news! Thank you for letting me now. Here is my address”?

I’m getting published in French but – and I’m very very ashamed to say this – I just can’t find any remnants of French in me right now to respond to the editors.

No matter how much money Yale gets in donations, it will renovate everything but the horrible little building where the Department of Spanish and Portuguese is located.

The building is dank, gloomy, and stinky. The reason for the stench is the fast food joint on the first floor. Orders yelled out in the kitchen are so loud that some offices are nearly impossible to work in.

This is a little hint to those who are wondering why no graduate students decided to join this marginalized and disrespected department.

An IKEA is opening in St Louis.

This must mean we actually exist.

Swedes are using Russians’ homophobia to repel them:

 Swedish peace society has come up with a new way of fighting off Russian submarines in the Stockholm archipelago: a subsurface sonar system called ‘The Singing Sailor’, which sends out Morse code and features the message “Welcome to Sweden. Gay since 1944”

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The current wisdom in Russia  (accepted on the level of state law) is that just seeing a gay person might convince one to become gay. So Swedes decided to make good use of this irrational fear.

And here is a question to the brain-dead losers who keep saying that college professors shouldn’t do research.

Please look at this list of books on the Spanish Civil War.

Concentrate. Concentrate some more. Now really concentrate.

And now answer this: is it or is it not beneficial to my students that I’m reading these books?

An additional question for those who are not entirely stupid: what would I be teaching about if I weren’t reading these books? The last time I took a course in graduate school was 10 years ago. Should I just repeat the same outdated material like a stupid drone for the next 40 years? Is that effective teaching, in your opinion?

My plan for the 8-month-long sabbatical is simple:

1. Write 350 words a day (this sounds like very little but I don’t do drafts. These 350 words have to be really good and almost ready to submit). [3 hours writing + 2 hours research]

2. Read 100 pages a day (obviously, this is work-related reading. Everything else I read falls outside these 100 pages.) [3 hours]

In terms of time, this rises to a full work day. The 350 words require research. I can’t just pull them out of thin air. And that research takes time, too. So in case there are still people who think that sabbaticals are like holidays and that professors “do nothing” while on sabbatical, it’s time for them to let go of this insane belief. I will maintain this schedule even on weekends, mind you. 

For those who believe this is too ambitious, I’ve got to say that I have been working this way for a while, and it’s eminently doable. By the end of the sabbatical I will have:

1. Finished the book;

2. Submitted 3 articles for publication (two of them are almost ready, I’m just waiting for a couple more secondary sources to arrive through interlibrary loan);

3. Given a talk at Oxford.

So it seems that American Idol will be cancelled after next season, and I say, good riddance! The only good part about this show were the first two episodes of each season that featured horrible singers convinced they had talent. Their self-delusion was entertaining but got repetitive after a while.

Other than that, I never saw any value to the show.