A really great post that once again demonstrates that Facebook is filled with nastiness and stupidity.

Decided to give another chance to The Nation. Opened the fresh issue and discovered that Putin is great, reasonable, wonderful, and unfairly persecuted by evil Americans. Spit on the magazine but didn’t feel any better.

The Nation seems to be going in the same direction as the nation-state. I need to go stare on the chart of the rouble plummeting to make myself feel better.

With bated breath, I’m staring at the following graph:

I could just stare at it forever because of how beautiful it is.

Does anybody know what the blue line represents?

When everybody was going, “Bring the soldiers back home! Withdraw the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq,” I was saying, “No, don’t. Just don’t. If you don’t have the money to rehabilitate them, you can’t just bring them back and let them deal with the trauma on their own.”

I predicted this was going to happen back in 2008. People are not toys. You can’t move them around like pieces of a puzzle and not expect them to react in any way.

A propos the previous post:

May I also note that it irritates me slightly that the married faculty couples (both in the department) bring one dish, prepared by the female partner. The married men in my department seem largely incapable of turning on a stove or oven; the ones who are married to non-department members always seem to note that their wives made their dish, unless they’ve chosen to bring cheese on a platter, in which case they may have made the purchase.

Is anybody still surprised that students are noticing?

Reader Evelina Anville asks:

Why do you see the student evaluation bias towards males as trivial? It is quite clear to me the bias exists. It’s not impossible for women to get good evaluations of course (mine are quite strong) but in my experience, students are far more forgiving of male professors than they are of female professors. In fact, some people on my campus did some unofficial comparisons and the male professors have (on average) _significantly_ higher evals scores; simultaneously, it’s also quite clear to me that the men aren’t significantly better teachers than the women on my campus.

Since evals tend to be an important part of a candidates tenure dossier, gender (and racial) bias on student evals strike me as an important concern. It’s not the most pressing concern in global politics of course. But I would never call something that can affect someone’s livelihood “trivial.” So I would be interested to know why you are so dismissive of eval bias.

I believe that the period of listing grievances is over. It was a crucial period, it served an enormously important goal, but it’s time to let it go. We need to stop listing grievances and start doing something to change the situation.

Let’s say this bias exists. Repeating a bizillion times that it, indeed, exists doesn’t bring us closer to any important goal. 

I don’t want to offend anybody but female academics on this continent mumble. They mumble, they fidget, they smile apologetically and nervously, their hands shake, they bend their shoulders in a servile posture, and they end affirmative statements with a questioning intonation. When I see women on campus behave differently, I immediately know they are immigrants. Or they are from the generation that’s about to retire. There is a lot of research on this. Please consult it before you get angry with me.

American female academics are painfully apologetic for working. They are even more painfully apologetic for having opinions. Sometimes, I get bored during committee meetings and begin to time people who speak. The duration and frequency of female participation in actual discussions is rarely over 15%, even when women constitute the majority on the committee. More often than not, the only female voice we hear is mine. But then we hear a lot of it.

And when the university’s President came to campus, can you guess the gender of the people who got up to ask questions? Right you are, they were a man, a man, a man, a man, me, and a man. After that I left but experience tells me nothing much changed. And can you guess how many women there were in the room? At least half of all workers present, and probably more, were female. And this wasn’t exceptional. It’s always like this. Does anybody think that students are not aware of this?

It’s time to stop concluding that students have noticed this insecurity, mumbliness, self-effacement, and dithering – yes, they have noticed, how shocking – and start doing something about it.

Let’s walk into the classroom, exude authority, have a presence, present ourselves as intellectuals in our own right, and I promise, I absolutely promise that student evaluations are going to turn into a flood of exuberant and adoring praise.

I’m getting so frustrated with these constant discussions of how nobody is prepared to see women as figures of authority, intellectuals, and bosses. I look around and I see the reason why it happens. But it’s not an easy, pleasing answer that anybody wants to discuss. It’s so much easier to stop the conversation right after concluding that the phenomenon exists because the moment we start delving into the reasons for it, we face the need actually to do something about it.

The nation-state state rebelled against its creator, the Enlightenment,  and waged a massive war – in the most literal sense possible – against the Enlightened values of individualism, reason, women’s rights, rationality, etc. Hitler ‘ s hatred for the Jews is very emblematic of this antagonism. Hitler ‘s philosophy rests on the deification of the nation-state. The historically stateless Jews subvert the legitimacy of the order that rests on the belief that everybody should be packed neatly into the box of “their own country.”

The very existence of the Jews, let alone their tendency to prosper, the ease with which they move around,  their multilingualism, and their culturally conditioned love of reason and learning is a threat to the myth of the nation-state. Of course, the Jews’ rejection of the nation-state was only one among many reasons for the pathological anti-Semitism of Germans in the 1930s – 1940s. But it was an important one. Germans had come by their nation-state late and with great difficulty. It had been quite a struggle for them to force themselves to believe in their imagined community and then to keep dying by the million for this bizarre fiction. And that entire time, there were the pesky Jews hanging around,  reminding the Germans how ridiculously useless that sacrifice had been.

Ultimately, the Enlightened values won and humanity put reason,  individualism, and hedonism above sacrificing oneself for an imaginary construct.

Curiously, that was precisely when many Jews decided to put aside the Enlightenment and choose the nation-state instead.

The nation-state was doomed from the start. It was invented during the era of the Enlightenment but everything about it goes against the core Enlightened values.

The Enlightenment began the process of divorcing power from birth, inheritance, and blood. Gradually, everything became about individual achievement, and not even the most dense today believe in dragging the frumpy old aristocracy out of its dusty corner and investing it with power over our lives.

Belonging to a nation-state, however, is based on nothing but the accident of one’s birth. That something so major should be decided based on blood, creating yet again an aristocracy of birth, is enough to make the hair of any Enlightened thinker stand on end.

The nation-state can only exist if people reject reason in favor of a completely irrational form of emotional attachment. And reason is the driving force of Enlightenment.

In the nation-state state, the individual is sacrificed for the sake of the collective and self-interest is thrown out of the window. “Ask not what your country” is as anti-Enlightenment as it gets.

The imaginary borders that are so crucial for the nation-state go against the Enlightened belief in the unstoppable nature of science and technology.

From the very moment it was invented,  the nation-state was in mortal battle with the philosophy that created it. Ultimately, science, technology, individualism, self-interest, and cynicism won. And the nation-state can no longer be sustained.

(In Ukrainian). Even students (who in Ukraine are traditionally even more apathetic than in North America) are being inspired by what is happening in the country to bring democracy to their school.

Rape in the CIA torture report.

The “feminist” research center that exploits people’s labor is defending itself by saying that it’s perfectly OK not to pay feminist scholars for their work as long as said scholars are immigrants. Are they trying to make themselves as offensive as possible to everybody in sight?

The blogosphere is exploding with rage over this post on charter schools. I have no idea what is so significant about the post – I find it boring and poorly written. But if people find it relevant, here it is.

(In Swedish). Russians keep provoking the silly impotent Europeans.

(In Spanish). And only the brave Poles are trying to stand up to the Russians’ egregious violations of the flight space of neighboring countries.

Do you have a vulva puppet? If not, go here to discover why you urgently need one.

(In Russian). Russian propaganda at its most hilarious.

Greece: a place where Japanese go to be weird.

There are brain-dead losers who are defending online medicine and online education as something positive.

Women of the world are fighting bravely for their rights.

In the meanwhile, American pseudo-feminists keep listing their trivial little grievances. And here is another example. The first link is from somebody who has been writing weepy garbage for years but the second one is from somebody who used to have some promise. This is just sad.

And here is an excessively verbose old-school feminist feeling a vague discomfort with something vaguely named and going on at length trying to express her vague feelings.

Higher Ed is as stupid as ever. Now it has published an article whose only point is for a highly imarticulate, painfully stupid person to make fun of autistics. Why can’t these stupid bureaucrats just be bumped off campuses already?

“The report examined data from the bureau’s National Crime Victimization Survey collected between 1995 to 2013 about women aged 18 to 24 — the demographic that is most at risk for sexual assault. The researchers found that the rate of rape and sexual assault among nonstudents in that age group was 1.2 times higher than that of students.” OK then. Can we stop presenting college campuses as horribly dangerous places where people are more likely to get raped than outside of them?

Horrifying corruption at Cornell: “Leadership of the board that oversees Cornell University’s medical college is passing from father to daughter, an unusual transition of power for a higher education board.” Shame on you, Cornell!

Highly ridiculous: “U.S. health regulators estimate that consumers will suffer up to $5.27 billion in “lost pleasure” over 20 years when calorie counts on restaurant menus discourage people from ordering french fries, brownies and other high-calorie favorites.”

“As many humanities programs struggle to avoid cuts or face tough questions about job prospects for graduates, Washington University in St. Louis will launch a doctoral degree program this fall to cater to aspiring academics with interests in specific components of classical studies.” Good job, Wash U!

(In Russian). Estonians have the most gangsta Lenin ever. There’s just a photo, though, so the language doesn’t really matter.

The argumentative Jew.

(In Russian). An interview with a blogger from the Donetsk Region. She has a much kinder view of the region but don’t listen to me, listen to her. She’s been there, she knows.

The best placemats in the universe.

“In her speech to the dinner guests in Washington, Hirsi Ali recalled meeting Vice President Joe Biden. He informed her that “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam.” When she disagreed with him, Biden actually responded: “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam.” “I politely left the conversation at that,” Hirsi Ali said, to laughter.”

(In Spanish). Spain’s Mariano Rajoy declared this week that Spain’s crisis is over. I guess, my book has become irrelevant now. (Hint: Rajoy is being serious and I’m not.)

Even more of the funny developments at Harvard. Let’s debate this. Who supports the prof? Who doesn’t? Can you guess whether I do?

Both Houses of Congress have adopted the bill that will make it possible to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine. There is a lot more said in the bill, but the only part that really matters is lethal weaponry. Everything else is just empty verbiage aimed at concealing this crucial nugget: this is a bill to provide weapons to Ukraine. At this point, Ukrainians have nothing to protect them from the massive tanks and armored vehicles of the invaders. They have been begging for the US to give them weapons but, until now, nothing was happening in that direction. 

In case anybody has forgotten, the reason why Ukraine’s weaponry is no match for Russia’s and why Ukraine is directing these pleas to the US and not to anybody else is that exactly 20 years ago, Ukraine, Russia and the US signed an agreement, according to which Ukraine disarmed in pursuit of world peace. In exchange, Russia and the US promised to defend Ukraine’s borders form invaders. We have all been observing how well that promise was carried out.

Now, the US Congress has finally developed a conscience and adopted a helpful bill.

News sources inform us that (emphasis is mine):

Obama Undecided Over Signing of Bill to Ramp Up Sanctions: White House.US President Barack Obama has not yet made a decision to sign legislation, passed yesterday by the US Senate, that would impose harsher sanctions on Russia and provide lethal assistance to Ukraine, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday.

“We are looking at it right now. We still need to take a look at this piece of legislation before we are going to articulate a specific position on it,” Earnest said.

It’s no shock he’s “undecided” but I really hope that the President doesn’t choose to go against the Congress on this issue. For the next 2 years, he will be working with two antagonistic houses of congress. What sense does it make for him to seek confrontation over an issue he neither understands nor cares about?