Ok, did everybody do the dress test that was all the rage yesterday? Can someone tell me what it’s all about? Is it a ploy to get links? Because the dress is obviously white and gold.

Scott Walker is trying to remove the investigation and adjudication of rape cases from the hands of deanlings, deanlets and deanoids of all stripes. He is also suggesting measures that will weaken the association of college and rape.

We all know how much I detest Walker but, people, this is long overdue. Every year, I have to sign long and humiliating statements swearing to heaven and earth that I will report any instances of pedophilia that I might observe (in a university where half of the students are older than me and nobody underage is even allowed to appear on campus). Nobody ever asked me to sign similar letters about witnessing murder, battery, robbery, theft, mugging, etc. In my opinion, this really trivializes sexual assault because it is being singled out as something that a highly educated and alert person like myself would not even identify as a crime without mile-long documents to the effect.

And the whole “colleges are rape nests” propaganda is also really stupid. It has nothing to do with reality. Rape exists everywhere and singling out colleges is ridiculous. As if the young people who are denied education for whatever reason experienced less sexual assault than the people who do get educated. 

I believe it will be great if we all just stopped fear-mongering about the horrible danger that awaits women if they try to get an education. There is crime on campus. There is crime outside of campus. Let’s battle crime instead of reinforcing a worldview where women who venture into the spaces of knowledge put themselves at an enormous risk of rape that they would avoid if they chose to lock themselves at home and never peek outside.

I also believe that Walker’s plan to overturn

the requirement that the Board direct each institution and college campus to incorporate oral and written or electronic information on sexual assault in its orientation program for newly entering students and to supply all students enrolled in the institution or college campus with the same information in either printed or electronic form

is a great idea. (And believe me, I feel extraordinarily weird mentioning the words “Scott Walker” and “great idea” in the same sentence.) I do not think that any useful purpose is served by mentioning sexual assault as part of the activities for incoming students. To the contrary, this creates an intolerable environment for the students who will, from the start, begin to associate the acquisition of knowledge specifically with sexual violation. Conduct a little experiment to see if I’m right. Ask an older colleague who holds a superior position to yours to come by your office or cubicle several times a day and say “There is danger of rape. Rape. Rape statistics. There is rape in this space.” And compare your productivity before and after that. 

I will never understand why we can’t all just accept the idea that rape is a crime just like any other crime and that it has to be investigated by police and prosecuted in the court of law irrespective of where it happens and to whom. OK, I’m being coy, I do understand. Rape is too convenient a tool to terrorize young women into compliance and justify helicoptering around college-age people to protect them from growing up.

This is a marriage certificate from Kiev dated 1930:

This was right before Stalin started to Russianize aggressively. Which is funny given that Stalin himself spoke Russian with a heavy accent and used to be a Georgian nationalist in his youth.

The departmental secretary is placing signs saying “Garbage” in different languages next to the trash cans and asked me to provide the Russian translation for the word “garbage.” I am sorely tempted to write “Putin” because the words are synonymous anyway.

N is watching his favorite show American Greed. I glance at the screen and see enormous mansions.

“Ah, that’s where the bandits live!” I say.

“No, the owners are hedge fund managers,” N explains.

“That’s what I said, the bandits,” I respond.

You know what really bothers me? Crowds of smug, self-congratulating Westerners who fill the social networks with endless criticisms of Ukrainians, the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian military. Their help to Ukraine has been nil. Their understanding of what is going on is limited by distance and ignorance of the country’s reality. Yet they consider themselves qualified and entitled to offer advice and lecture Ukrainians who are fighting a war and trying to survive in desperate circumstances. And they don’t seem to notice how amazingly offensive and condescending it is to barrage Ukrainians with a stream of endless “you shoulds.”

I left Ukraine in 1998. I’m now an outsider to Ukraine and all I can do is send money to help the POWs, spread the information, tell people here in the US and on my blog about what is happening, and ask what I can do to help. If Ukrainians (the ones who are in Ukraine, I mean) decide that their current government is not doing its job, that will be their decision. But it would be incredibly bizarre if I – as an outsider – started rubbishing the Ukrainian leadership. And it is even more bizarre when people who don’t speak a word of Ukrainian do it. I’m getting really tired of the endless “Ukrainians are idiots” articles and tweets that come from people who claim to support Ukraine.

This post is written in answer to a question two readers asked me as to why I “defend” Ukraine’s President Poroshenko. It is not my place to defend or not to defend him. Poroshenko’s job is not to please me. It is to work for the people who elected him. But when I see these constant attempts to scrutinize and criticize every single thing that Ukrainians do, I get angry. If you are so sure that you’d do a better job if you had to battle a foreign invasion, let’s wait until you get an opportunity to do that and then we will all joyfully follow your shining example. Until then, though, it would be great if people could just keep their useless advice on military and political strategy to themselves.

I just received an email from a reader whose comments were not appearing on the blog. I searched in the Spam Box and found them there. It is an absolute mystery why WordPress decided to censor this long-term reader and his valuable comments all of a sudden. I have restored the comments and apologize for the inconvenience.

Please know that I haven’t banned anybody from the blog since the unfortunate and offensive comment by reader Kyle who said that Michael Brown deserved to be killed. Since then, not a single commenter has been banned or censored in any way. So if your comments are not posting, tell me and I will try to restore them.

I will be talking about the murdered nuns in El Salvador during my “Latin-American Conflicts” lecture today, just when the poor nuns are back in the news again for the first time in decades. Weird. I hope nobody asks me about Bill O’Reilly in class because I’m consciously as politically bland in the classroom as it is humanly possible*.

Where I’m not going to be bland is the talk about Ukraine that I will be giving to the university next Wednesday. People stop me on campus all the time to ask me about Ukraine (my very bright scarf in the colors of the Ukrainian flag might have something to do with it) but it’s hard to provide a short but meaningful response on the go. I have pretty much turned into the “Russia invaded Ukraine, pass the news along” person, and that’s getting old. At least, talking about Ukraine in public will make me feel better.

My colleague from Ukraine spoke about the war to the area’s retirees, and she says it was the best experience. The retirees remember the Cold War vividly and understand exactly what is going on. I will have a younger audience, and that is tougher.

Going back to El Salvador, in every class on Latin-American conflicts students ask, with a look of complete shock, “But why did the US support and finance this horrible regime?” And when I mention the Cold War in response, it doesn’t register a whole lot. I, on the other hand, am doing some real rethinking of history because of current events. The Cold War looked like a big joke from my side of the Iron Curtain because it was obvious that, after Stalin’s death, nobody was going to use nuclear weapons. But now I am understanding the terror of the crazy Russians that fed the Cold War from the West’s side and led to seemingly crazy things like financing nun-murdering regimes. 

* Not worth the aggravation is why.

“I go for a run every morning,” I tell my colleague.

“Seriously?” she says, eyeing my not-so-slender body.

“Oh yes,” I respond. “Every morning I run around the house, yelling, “Fuck, I overslept again!”

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to run.