My mother turned on the news and suddenly saw the village of Svetlichne where she grew up. Svetlichne is a tiny Ukrainian-speaking hamlet in the Lugansk area that is located right in the middle of the war zone. The village has been changing hands as the Russian troops advance and then are beaten back by the Ukrainian army.

The images from Svetlichne were devastating. The cemetery where my grandparents are buried has been leveled with the ground. My mother saw the faces of her classmates, her neighbors, people she grew up with. An 87-year-old woman was crying and telling Ukrainian soldiers, “Please don’t leave us. These people [the invaders] don’t understand us, they don’t even speak our language. I survived the war [she means WWII], and this is worse. These guys are worse than the Nazis.”

The Ukrainian army manages to hold on to these areas because of the heroic efforts of the volunteers who are arming, feeding, and clothing the soldiers. The people fighting on Putin’s side are the lowest of the low: neo-Nazis, drug addicts, criminals, freaks. They loot, murder, rape, rob, torture, and destroy. They have no goal other than destroying as much as they can. 

In the winter of 2013, after 22 years of post-Soviet corruption and stagnation, Ukrainians finally decided to get rid of the oligarchy, defeat corruption, and start constructing a fairer, more hopeful society. But the moment they started doing that, Russians – who have not made such a decision for themselves – invaded and started destroying Ukraine. The Russians did not invade because of anything the US did or anything the NATO did. They are not reacting to any actions of the West. They are reacting to what is happening inside of Russia. Their lives are hopeless and purposeless, and they have found a purpose to their existence in war.

Putin’s regime was losing legitimacy in the eyes of a growing number of Russians all throughout 2011 and 2012. The egregiously falsified elections of those years had finally made the people of Russia protest against the oligarchy that has been ruling and robbing them since 1991 (actually, from much earlier than that because their rulers are the same people that were in power before the collapse of the USSR). Dictators often use war to ratchet up patriotism and create the impression that their rule is legitimate. This is, for instance, what the Argentinean junta was trying to achieve with the Falklands War.

Putin’s strategy worked. His approval ratings within Russia have soared. The war in Ukraine is extremely useful to him politically. He will drag out the hostilities, attacking more and more peaceful cities in Ukraine for as long as he can. The only hope right now is to shorten this “as long as he can.” The better Ukraine manages to resist the invasion, the greater is the probability that the people of Russia will wake up from their stupor and start asking why they need to keep dying in Ukraine to keep Putin and his fellow oligarchs in caviar, yachts, and palaces. 

Many people in the US fear that sending weapons to Ukraine will anger Putin and make things even worse. This belief is based on a profound ignorance of the very nature of Putin’s regime. Nothing that Putin does is a reaction to anything done or said in the West. He is trying to achieve his own internal goals. He will or will not invade a NATO country, he will or will not use weapons of mass destruction, he will or will not send troops to take Kiev or invade Estonia based on the internal needs of his regime. The fear of causing an intensification of the conflict with Russia is misplaced since it’s not in the West’s power to control what Putin does. All that can be done is to make the war so costly to the people of Russia that they will start questioning their blind adoration of their leader. 

If no weapons come to Ukrainians, the war will drag out, probably for years and years. The fairly low-intensity (from the Russians’ point of view) war in Ukraine allows Putin to get rid of the most lumpenized parts of the population. He is happy to have a place where he can send all of the junkies, neo-Nazis, “angry young men,” and criminals to die while advancing his interests. 

The people of Russia already are convinced (because Putin has been telling them so) that there are Americans soldiers fighting against Russians in Ukraine. For Russians, the NATO troops are already actively involved in the war. Not sending weapons to Ukraine will not convince Russians that there are no Americans fighting in Debaltsevo today. That boat has sailed a long, long time ago. The argument of, “So what, we should now go to war with Russia?” is impotent because, from the Russians’ point of view, that war has been going on since last spring.

And it’s a war that we – the people who detest oligarchy, dictatorship, corruption, jingoism, and stupid anti-Western rantings – can win. Or rather, Ukrainians can win it for us, for themselves, for the whole world, if only we give them a tiny bit of help and the smallest sign that they have not been abandoned by the entire world. Even a tiniest gesture of good will from the civilized world will help Ukrainians feel that they are not alone in the fight against barbarity.

P.S. I’ve never asked for re-posts but now I am. Please re-post and get people to read this. Even if you disagree (on the basis of your profound knowledge of Ukraine and Russia, I am sure), you must still consider it important for competing viewpoints to circulate, right?

Gregory Lafarge, a French law professor, saw a veiled student in the classroom. Lafarge is one of the few remaining Frenchmen who don’t enjoy spectacles of female debasement, so he asked the student to remove the veil. The student refused because marking herself off as an inanimate object is of a greater value to her than acquiring education.

So the professor left the classroom and returned naked. I mean, if everybody should be allowed to wear whatever they want, so should the professor, right? We all totally run around wearing whatsoever all day long, irrespective of how offensive others might find it. 

Well, the management of the school where Lafarge works chose not to support him and supported the woman-hater instead. Lafarge has been fired. Because the right to treat women as cattle is absolutely sacrosanct.

Vive la République!

Congenital idiocy runs in this family of clowns:

Jeb Bush has mistakenly published the full names, addresses, and social security numbers of the people with whom he communicated as Florida’s governor between 1999 and 2007. The information was published along with an e-book containing all the correspondence the former governor (and current presidential hopeful) sent or received during his terms.

Some of the emails contained within the archive contain information about state business, a child’s medical struggle, and other personal issues, according to a report from the Verge. Many were probably sent without the assumption they would eventually be made public.

Haven’t we had enough with two brain-dead creatures from this family of fools? Gosh, this article made me feel like I was back in 2003, and every day there was news of some new fuck-up from the epically inept George W. We’ve just barely started crawling out of the hole the previous Bush dug for our economy. Do we need yet another bumbling, brainless Bush to – mistakenly, of course – put us into another recession?

A new trend in hiring is to offer jobs to people with degrees in the Humanities and not with Business degrees. As opposed to a BComm, a BA offers actual skills that will be extremely useful in the workplace. Bachelor degrees in business, even from very prestigious schools, are quite useless. These degrees were invented to meet the demand, but since the demand was created by people who had no understanding of the workings of higher education, these undergraduate business programs ended up being completely meaningless. Students who graduate from undergraduate programs in Business, Finance, Marketing, etc. can offer nothing but their enormously overblown expectations as to the salaries they believe they deserve.

People with BAs, on the other hand, are articulate, have great writing, speaking and interpersonal skills. More often than not, they speak more than one language. They are well-rounded and are good conversationalists. They have an openness to the world and its wonders while people who come out of undergraduate business programs often exhibit an attitude of gloomy resentment against the world that didn’t hurry to offer them a huge salary straight out of college.

Of course, the old-school frumpy business owners still haven’t caught up to this new trend in hiring and continue offering positions to the graduates of these hopelessly outdated business programs. But who wants to work for them anyway? They lack vision and can’t create the kind of a workplace where promising, enthusiastic workers will want to stay. New, exciting startups are the places that are spearheading this transformation in hiring practices. As an academic who is now making a killing in the business world said:

Newsflash, grads: if that HR person thinks Humanities degrees have nothing to offer, and that HR department has no way of comprehending why your incredible sense of discipline, focus, and strong communication skills are relevant, then you shouldn’t want to work for that company. Any progressive, modern institution or company nowadays should know that, ironically, those qualities that you possess are easily the hardest to find in the concrete modern business world and, I’d argue, the most important as vehicles of progress and innovation.

The future in business belongs to those who can find and attract the best talent available. And that talent can be found in the Humanities programs of North American colleges.

Every semester, I say good-bye to a Grad School committee that I’ve been on. The director of the Graduate School thanks me for my service, I hug the secretarial stuff that helps the committee, and leave. My husband and I celebrate the end of my glorious run on the committee (my husband and I celebrate something at least 3 times a week, so don’t be too surprised). 

And then next semester I receive an email telling me that I’m still on the committee. This is an elected position and, as far as I know, my term ran out years ago. But I’m being told I’ve got to be at the committee’s meeting tomorrow, and it feels bizarre to ask (yet again) whether the Grad School people are sure I’m still on the committee.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore this committee and would happily serve on it in perpetuity. But I like to know what to expect, and the workings of this committee have been very mystifying.

If you walk long enough to the left, you will find yourself on the right:

The news organization LifeSiteNews*, joined by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation**, the Family Research Council***, and the website Counter Cultured****, released the following statement on Monday about the controversial movie.

“Feminists and social conservatives agree: “Fifty Shades of Grey” promotes misogyny, abuse, and manipulation, not relationships based upon mutual love and respect,” said the coalition. “This film normalizes and glamorizes behaviors such as stalking, threats and physical violence. Its portrayal of relationships and sex is offensive to real life victims of domestic abuse. The film sets a particularly dangerous example for younger viewers, who may not understand that attractive, charismatic young billionaire Christian Grey is also an abusive sociopath, especially since victim/narrator Anastasia Steele continually describes and portrays him as a god.”

“Valentine’s Day is supposed to be a celebration of love; however, the relationship between the two main characters in “Fifty Shades of Grey” is anything but caring or loving.

As we can see, sexual dysfunction doesn’t care about political allegiances. It is completely bipartisan.

* Founded in 1997, LifeSiteNews is the world’s largest pro-life, pro-family news organizations. With reporters and contributors in10 countries on six continents, it is a vital resource for the promotion of traditional values around the globe.

** Founded in 1962, National Center on Sexual Exploitation is the leading national organization dedicated to opposing pornography by highlighting the links to sex trafficking, violence against women, child abuse, and addiction.

*** The Family Research Council is a D.C.-based policy organization that stresses the importance of traditional values related to abortion, marriage, religious liberty, and other pressing public policy issues.

**** Counter Cultured was founded in September 2012 by conservative sisters Anna Maria Hoffman and Gabriella Hoffman.  It advocates for culturally conservative issues, using small government, non-theological arguments

We’ve been fans of Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s public art project, “Stop Telling Women to Smile,” protesting street harassment for awhile. Now Fazlalizadeh has taken her project to Mexico City — and teamed up with Anna Holmes to document the trip in a cool multi-media feature for Fusion.

Few things disgust me more than when spoiled,  fussy Western do-gooders export their trivial concerns to other countries. Women in Mexico live in an environment of such vicious sexism that the melodramatic obsession of rich American tourists with being told to smile is the last thing they need to address.

But the tourist feminists don’t care. They believe that if they throw a couple of bucks to the locals, these locals are obligated to parrot their fussy preoccupation with banality. The locals always oblige because they need the money but the abyss between them and the overfed foreigners widens.

Finally, a great article on Ukraine from somebody with a functioning brain:

Ukraine gave up more than 1,800 nuclear warheads in exchange for that bogus commitment from Russia back in 1994 to respect its sovereignty and borders. Surely it has thereby earned the right to something more than night-vision goggles.

It’s strange to find such a lucid article, and in the New York Times, of all places.

I’m still trying to figure out why so many good, kind, intelligent, well-meaning people in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, etc. keep supporting Russia in its cannibalistic war against Ukraine. It is so obvious to me that nothing whatsoever can be found about Putin’s regime that would be even remotely redeeming. Yet people keep making googly eyes in Russia’s direction.

Is it as simple as: everybody has gotten used to seeing Russia as a source of alternative ways of being, and even though Russia’s alternative has been discredited very clearly and extremely recently, people still can’t snap out of that mentality? Is that’s what going on?

From a great post by Jonathan Mayhew:

On a face-book page for the Chronicle there were people ranting about an article that suggested that every college professor should be a researcher, that the teaching-only jobs were few and far between. The community college community exploded with accusations of elitism. Well, if you think elitism is bad, then you probably shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near higher education.  .  .
Everyone admires elite athletes and musicians, elite surgeons. In every area of life, being better is better than being worse. The race is in fact to the swift, and admiration does flow to the pinnacles of human achievement. Education is the major pathway to this excellence. We lie when we decry elitism, because we want it for our children.

I’ve always found very annoying the tendency of many to go “But it’s elitist!” and make scary eyes as a way to silence opponents. I happen to be extremely elitist and very proud of being that way. If I weren’t elitist, I would be posting images of kittens on Facebook instead of discussing the nation-state, politics and foreign affairs with a small elite of very exceptional readers.