People have interesting friends:

Recently, I politely declined to debate with one such baffled male friend, who followed up by sending me some well-intentioned advice on how I could be a more effective feminist. Having never thought much about feminism before, he said, he just didn’t find my social media posts appealing. Too shouty and academic. What I needed was to explain things in a way that appealed to men.

Considering himself as the sort of bloke who “could be part of the solution”, he helpfully sent me a link to a twelve-minute TED talk which contained, in his words, “a basic yes/no test” for misogyny together with proposed steps to solve the problem. In an impressive gesture of hubris, he suggested the next time I was asked to educate a man who was genuinely trying to learn about feminism, I forward this snappy sound-byte resource he had just found for me.

The long post misses the most interesting part: how the author trashed the “friend” for being a condescending, self-congratulating freakazoid and made him curse the horrible day on which he was born, exposing himself to the dark future of crossing paths with her.

In the meanwhile, one is sitting here, itching to brutalize somebody for using the word “shouty”, yet never getting a chance. Life is unfair. Some people

basically already won the life lottery just by showing up

while others never get any luck.

Happy International Women’s Day, everybody, and remember that trashing freakazoids is a great way to celebrate.

Several Chechens have been arrested for the murder of the dissident Boris Nemtsov in Russia.

N said this was going to happen the second after I told him of Nemtsov’s assassination. This has been a regular pattern in Russia: do something horrible, then blame the Chechens.

Putin has lost some of his recent gains among the Russian neo-Nazis with his slow and bumbling progress in the invasion of Ukraine. Chechen-bashing is a great way to get the neo-Nazis back into the fold while distracting everybody from the murder of the dissident.

For everybody who’s been following the events in Russia for the past 20 years, the triumphant “the Chechens did it!” is nothing but obnoxious. This card has been played so often and so shamelessly that it just got boring.

P. S. One of the Chechens accused of killing Nemtsov blew himself up with a grenade.

For many people, religion is nothing but a way to project their unhappy parent-child model on something outside themselves to make it less painful.

In this model, God is a strict parent whose love is conditional and has to be deserved. Former unloved children invent the original sin, the profound sinfulness of humanity, the need for a savior, etc to explain why they were never loved unconditionally as children.
Of course, there is a lot of rage attached to the knowledge that, for your parent, you were always damaged goods, always not good enough. This rage is displaced in this kind of religious people onto the sinners, the unfaithful, the atheists, etc. We all know that few things can equal in their destructive power the rage of the religious hordes that are destroying everything in view because the pain of being unloved, unwanted children burns them up.

For this sort of religious people, religion is all about fulfilling series of mechanical and meaningless obligations  (fasting, praying in a certain way and during certain time of the day in a specific position, controlling one’s diet, not having sex on certain days, etc). These rituals allow them to feel like good, obedient children who are trying to deserve the strict parent ‘ s approval. “God” controls their lives in the same areas – food, sex, clothing – that their unloving parents did.

1. No, Putin is not tall, charming, handsome, and linguistically gifted. He is 5’5, ugly, socially awkward, speaks very little English, and his Russian vocabulary is that of a lower-level small-time gang member.

2. No, there is no evidence that Putin killed a mujahid in Afghanistan with his bare hands. He wasn’t even in Afghanistan.

3. Yes, Putin is divorced and it is also rumored that he secretly married his long-time mistress and the mother of his two children Alina Kabaeva. 

4. Yes, there is heavy persecution of gay people in Russia but they are fighting for their rights on their own, without any noticeable help from American activists.

5. Yes, Putin has been accused (by some quite reliable people) of blowing up apartment buildings in Russia as a pretext to starting the second war against Chechnya.

6. Yes, it is true that an opera house in Moscow was taken over by Chechen terrorists and Putin gave orders to gas everybody in the building, including hundreds of civilian hostages.

Author: José C. Vales

Title: El pensionado de Neuwelke

Year of publication: 2013

My rating: 2 out of 10

This is the book I thought was fantasy but it turned out not to be. This didn’t make the book a whole lot better, though. In this novel, a governess in a boarding school in Livonia (this is an area in the Baltic states) during the 1840s suffers from an affliction that makes some sort of a ghost-like substance come out of her every once in a while, freaking everybody out. So for 460 pages, the ghost-like substance comes out of the governess and everybody freaks. Then it comes out some more, and everybody freaks. And then the book mercifully ends. And that’s it. There is no explanation of the ghost-like substance and no real resolution to anything. The novel is some sort of a weird pseudo-Gothic thing that just goes on and on and on pointlessly.

After finishing this painfully long and wordy novel, I did some research to find out what the hell it was all supposed to mean and discovered that people who believe in all kind of paranormal crap do think there was a real governess in Livonia in 1840s who had this ghost-like substance come out of her. So El pensionado de Neuwelke was directed towards this weird audience. 

I knew things were bad in Spain but I had no idea they were so bad that 460-page novels on ghost-like substances were sorely needed. I have no idea if the book will be translated into English and I don’t care to find out because I didn’t like it. The book gets 2 stars instead of zero because there was an endearing character called Augusta Dehmel who suffered from insane jealousy and that character was finely done. Spanish authors have not lost their skill of writing about jealousy in a convincing way. Other than that, the novel was a major disappointment.

A very interesting article on “superfluous people” and why no social unrest is possible:

My best guess at present is a combination

of drugs and computer games as a solution for most … it’s already happening. Under different titles, different headings, you see more and more people spending more and more time, or solving their inner problems with drugs and computer games

And that’s precisely why mass unemployment will not lead even to a shadow of a protest in post-industrial societies.

Of course, there’s still time to wake up and turn in a different direction. There’s still time.

A myth of exceptionalism lies at the basis of every nation-building process. As we know, a nation is an invented community, and everybody prefers to imagine their community as the best at something or maybe even at everything. If the purpose of nation-building is to create an emotional attachment strong enough to convince people to lay down their lives for the imagined community, then nothing is more reasonable than to imagine the nation as exceptional.

Everybody’s exceptionalism is different, however. The American version is what I call “a triumphant exceptionalism.” Its narrative is celebratory and goes as follows: 

We have the greatest freedoms, we are proud of our constitution, we are a land of opportunity, anybody who comes here can advance on his or her own merits, American Dream, Civil Rights movement, life, liberty and happiness for all, only here you can achieve everything you want if only you try.

It is completely beyond the point to which extent the myths of nation-building are grounded in reality. They don’t have to come from reality but they do end up shaping it.

Now, the Russian version of exceptionalism is what I call “aggrieved exceptionalism.” Its narrative is sulky and self-pitying:

We have the most spiritual of all cultures, the most beautiful of all languages, the richest of all literatures, the most glorious of all histories but nobody recognizes our achievements, everybody steals our inventions and appropriates our victories, we are surrounded by enemies, we keep saving the world but the world is ungrateful and persecutes us.

Imagine repeating “there are enemies everywhere and everybody hates me” to yourself for ten days in a row. How will that make you feel? Will that have an impact on your life? And what if you were to repeat it for 100 years? All day, every day, nothing but this. 

Yes, these narrative are manufactured, constructed but they, in turn, manufacture reality.

Because living in a state of bitter anger is an enormously heavy burden to bear, you insensitive dimwit. These are people, not props for you to exercise your idiotic wit on Twitter.

Montréal ‘ s Concordia University is often a weird place. And not in a good, heart-warming way.