Every day, I encounter an article which suggests that it is perfectly normal to have “moods.” Remember our discussion of product placement? The idea of “moods” serves is part of this strategy. Today’s bit of pop culture wisdom on moods is the following:

You already know moods shape your experience.

No, I don’t know anything of the kind. I haven’t had “a mood” in my life. But I know what it’s like to have my “experience” shaped by people who think it’s OK to allow themselves “moods.” And that’s a knowledge I’d rather have done without.

The article proceeds to tell people how to use their “bad moods” to become more productive at work. The possibility of finding the cause of the problem and getting better is not even mentioned.

After a long break, I’m now back to watching Dr Phil (whose show is a hugely important social phenomenon, which needs to be said in case anybody feels an attack of snobbishness approaching). And what really strikes me is how dramatically the show has changed.

Dr Phil is now always completely and adamantly on the side of abused children of all ages. Even just five years ago the opposite was the case. He was all “some kids are just born bad” and “your parents are abusing you for your own good.” Today, that’s all gone and he doesn’t mince words when telling abusive parents how much damage they cause.

This is huge, people, just huge.

By the way, do you know which is the highest-paying Liberal Arts Major? 

Mine:

So says the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which reports that the top-paying liberal arts majors for 2014 graduates are foreign languages and literature (average starting salary $46,900) and English ($42,200).

These are really great salaries. The problem is that students are not aware of this and still believe that the best way to untold riches is Law School (which is actually a way into extreme penury these days because there is such an overproduction of lawyers.)

The Great Depression was followed by a great consolidation of centralized authority. The Great Recession of 2008-9 has led to the exact opposite: the EU is cracking, Spain is on the brink of dissolution, Scottish independence suddenly became an issue out of completely nowhere, and a disturbing percentage of Americans supports the secession of their state.

For people who are saying they are “tired” of hearing about ISIS and Ebola: the way in which a market-state legitimates itself is by proving that it is capable of protecting citizens from 3 things:

1. International terrorism in its most liquid form;

2. Global epidemics in their devastating fluidity;

3. Consequences of natural disasters that, more often than not, will have to do with water, as well. 

There will be two major ways of addressing these threats. One will be an outdated nation-state “let’s close the borders” approach. I just heard this sentiment expressed on Fox News Radio’s discussion of Ebola by people who are not catching on to how obsolete and useless borders have become. An alternative (and much more productive way) will consist of battling the fluidity of these threats by becoming even more fluid than they are. 

So you know how this was supposed to be the best semester of my career? I handed in my tenure dossier, there is zero research pressure since my book came out this year, and the worse my student evaluations are at the end of the semester, the better for me.

But it turned out to be a really crappy semester, and the worst part is that I’m not sure why. The courses I teach are all higher-level, and I love them. The students are the best ever, active, engaged. There is almost no service. Well, that’s always the case but still. I don’t have to wait for the bus and can get everywhere easily.

For some reason, I constantly feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and drowning in work. And I’m not like that as a person. I don’t like such people, so how come I’m one of them, and for no discernible reason, too?

It’s gotten to the point where I’m greeting my husband’s arrival home from work with, “I’m afraid the house is about to explode, quick, do something!” And all that because I’ve been haunted by images of gas leaks and explosions.

My only guess as to the reasons for this bizarre state of affairs is that I have accumulated exhaustion. And there is no immediate remedy for that.

To counteract all this whining, I want to share that I just discovered that somebody has already written the exact article I was planning to write, and this makes me very happy. Since the argument already exists out there, I can build upon it and take much further.

Yesterday I read a post that quoted a very famous book on narcissism. The success of the book demonstrates that many people are trying to survive the trauma inflicted on them on the narcissists in their lives. However, the following quote demonstrates that the book in question is a load of stupid and vicious garbage:

Successful narcissists have a whole lot of sex, which means they’re statistically likelier to have a whole lot of babies—at least compared to everyone else. This highly adaptive component of narcissism gives it a big edge over other disorders in getting passed down to the next generation.

First of all, there is no connection whatsoever between narcissism and sex. The only connection exists in the Puritanical brain of the sexually unhealthy author of this book. Second, the number of sex acts correlates with the number of babies only among the most Orthodox religious fundamentalists. Everywhere else, there are crowds of people who’ve had and are having tons of sex yet who have one, two or no babies. Narcissism is not a genetic disorder. It is a personality disorder that is a result of early childhood traumas. Children of narcissists can also develop narcissism. However, they are just as likely (or more likely) to develop a different series of disorders: addiction, low self-esteem, broken mechanism of motivation, depression, anxiety, etc.

There is an interesting discussion taking place at Jonathan’s blog:

Most child abuse is not by the hand of priests. Yet we are more outraged by their abuse than by almost any other set of child abusers. Why is that? The church is supposed to be better than that. So outrage at those scandals is actually a back-handed form of respect: we respect those institutions implicitly, police or church, and hold them to a much higher standard.

I was really surprised by this statement because I never felt this way and assumed nobody else did either. Here was my response:

This really depends on who the “we” are. I’m definitely not one of the “we” because I don’t come from a strong religious tradition. Since I don’t come from the school of thought that expects anything better or anything just even remotely positive from priests, I’m not more outraged by child abuse by priests. I’m a lot more outraged by parental child abuse.

I just read a very funny article by one Sergey Kuznetsov titled “When Russians thought the Internet would make them free.” Of course, it’s cute to see how Russians still can’t get over the idea that somebody or something other than themselves holds the keys to their jail cell. Centuries pass, and they still sit there, waiting for their good tsar. Mr. Kuznetsov probably sees a difference between waiting to be delivered from one’s misery by Putin and waiting to be delivered from said misery by the Internet but, in reality, the difference is slim.

Kuznetsov’s article starts in a cryptic way:

For the majority of young men, imagining a Soviet closed society is as hard as it is to imagine the world without miniskirts, contraception, and X-rated video.

The only thing this can mean is that, for some mysterious reason, it must be much easier for young women to imagine life without miniskirts and contraception. There is no explanation for this startling conclusion. The author just rambles off towards a different topic and begins describing the sad horrors of Soviet reality:

We had Samizdat – the underground circulation of typewritten books – but mostly it was anti-Soviet prose and poetry or – rarely – poorly-translated pornography. We had no fanzine system or means for sharing independent information about movies, books, music etc.

Yes, this was definitely the worst thing about the Soviet system: porn was not written in a beautiful language and there were no fanzines. Poor Soviets, just imagine them, sighing over aesthetically displeasing porn with not a fanzine in sight! In the meanwhile, their lucky Western peers were busily consulting fanzines to swap the reviews of their favorite works of pornography all day long!

What follows is a long lament about the unfairness of the world that hasn’t given Russians a free Internet. This is the main complaint of the Russian people throughout the ages: they haven’t been given enough by mysterious unnamed forces.