Crowds of self-righteous white people are piling on the black reporter John Eligon for mentioning, in a beautiful and poignant article on Michael Brown, that Michael “was no angel.” They seem to think that being non-racist involves believing that black people are obligated to be angelic if they want to stay alive.

Jonathan Mayhew wrote a brilliant post on the Steven Salaita affair that everybody should read. Here is the most salient point:

People defending him because they agree with his perspective, or attacking him because they don’t, are putting forward irrelevant information. In other words, you should put it in the form of a hypothetical: a faculty member was hired, quit his previous job, and moved, and then had the appointment canceled because of tweets about X (where X is an unknown variable.) What do you think? Your opinion should not change after you discover the content of the tweets.

This is absolutely spot-on and it’s also how I approached the situation. I only now found out what the tweets in question actually said, and I believe their content is irrelevant to the issue. It is not a university’s place to police tweets, Facebook pages, Tumblrs, and blogs. Especially while there are shameless plagiarists who are in no way persecuted for plagiarizing among the faculty members at some institutions of higher learning. In short: universities, get your noses out of Twitter and start reading books already!

I also agree with Jonathan that “Salaita is a foolish anti-semitic blowhard who should sue the pants of UIUC.” His tweets are those of a raging anti-Semite. However, I don’t see why the entire academic community everywhere should be punished for Salaita’s personal bigotry, which is exactly what will happen if it becomes normal to castigate scholars academically for what they do outside of academia. While Salaita’s unhinged outpourings offend my sensibilities as a Jew and a normal person, the precedent set by UIUC can damage me and the entire academic community in a much more tangible way. 

There must be a reason why the books I need at the library are always located on the very bottom shelf, forcing a corpulent middle-aged lady in a summer dress to lie on the floor and make a total spectacle out of herself to reach them.

On the positive side, I just discovered that an article of mine was cited in a dissertation written in Catalonia. And if I make an effort, I can actually figure out what is being said.

I’m really shocked by the students this semester. Not only are they scarily good with a very high degree if linguistic sophistication (all if my courses are taught in Spanish this semester), but they are also extremely engaged and excited by the course material. I can literally feel them hanging on my every word. This gets to the point where I fear that what I have to impart will not rise to the level of their expectations.

And I just saw a group of my students get together after class to read medieval Spanish poetry collectively.

I made a joke about students throwing parties to go over conjugations of Spanish verbs and I get a feeling these students might just do that.

The reviewers of my sabbatical application are saying that I’m making a mistake in offering very ambitious promises of what I will achieve as a result of my sabbatical. They say that it’s better to promise less as a sort of an insurance policy in case I don’t manage to finish what I planned.

My plan is to finish the second book by the end of the sabbatical. Of course, I’m not planning to write the entire book during the sabbatical. That would be really insane, even for me. The truth is that I am already writing the book. I have a new Seinfeld chain and I get up at 7 am every day to write before work. I have done massive research and have an annotated bibliography with quotes I will use culled out. This bibliography / collection of quotes is 49 pages long and growing. 

The reason why I’m making my plan to finish the first draft of the book by the end of 2015 official is that I need to have an official deadline in place to keep myself accountable and not get distracted by the endless temptations to read just one more book or article before I continue writing. I don’t really care – and never did – about the formalities of sabbaticals, tenure, merit reviews, full professorships, etc. It’s nice to have them, but that’s not what I’m about. I’m writing this book because I need it. And I don’t want to fail because it will be my personal failure, not because the university administration will be on my case if I don’t do what I promised in the sabbatical application.

Am I crazy, though? Should I listen to the wise, older colleagues and tone down my wild promises?

There is all kinds of weirdo in the world: “On Sunday, rabbit-lovers organized a national day of action to draw attention to the production and sale of rabbit meat at the grocery chain, warning that dogs and cats could be slaughtered for meat next and accusing Whole Foods of being “bunny butchers.” Proving that virtually everything has an advocacy organization, the House Rabbit Society helped design leaflets adorned with adorable bunny pictures for protesters.” One has got to be a very strange person, indeed, not to eat rabbit meat because rabbits look cute or whatever.

“Puppy love allows you to develop romantic relationship skills. Those skills allow teenagers to learn how to balance another person’s needs with your own needs. It helps with your own verbal communication. It helps you practice social skills that are critical to getting into college and getting a job. They do have a cumulative effect.” I hope this person is being facetious because I’m not sure how to live on the planet where people say such idiotic things seriously.

And there is more from the same source: “It seems decidedly unromantic, but the tester relationships and love affairs of our teens and twenties are skill-building exercises that ready us for committed, long-term unions. There is utilitarian value in a broken heart.” Sad, stupid fuck.

Canadian immigration is very corrupt. See this story of a Ukrainian Jew who exploited the stupidity of the system until he finally got caught.

Just in case you needed more proof that radical feminists are, in reality, passionate woman-haters, check out this screed.

Really amazing mathematical sculptures.

An important point that often gets lost: “Of course Russian serfdom/slavery and U.S. slavery weren’t exactly alike, but I think using two words (“serfdom” and “slavery”) and treating them as unrelated phenomena is more misleading than using the word slavery for both. After all, being a slave in Virginia in 1750 was different than being one in Connecticut in 1840 or Mississippi in 1860, but we have no trouble using the same word to describe these varying conditions of bondage.”

Dictionary site trolls homeschoolers. Hilarious!

“I had always thought that it was a sacred canon of our profession that the classroom requires certain and very specific rules of engagement from us as teachers. I would never, for example, respond to libertarians in my classroom the way I respond to some libertarians on Twitter.” What is upsetting is that this very obvious thing has to be explained over and over again.

“My leftist Ukrainian friends reacted badly to the slogan “Glory to Ukraine!” This is a nationalist slogan, they say.” I can’t even begin to imagine what “leftist Ukrainians” might look like. One can hardly be Ukrainian and feel nostalgic for the USSR.

“We want to live in a safe world, says Ruskin in this interview, “But we don’t.”  Kids 7,8,9 and 10 should not walk to school or even venture outside without you, she says. Perhaps by age 11 you can let your child out in “short spurts,” but really, folks, “It is your job to be the parent,” and if you trust your kids to walk the dog or bike to a friend’s, you are guilty of “parentifying” your child — turning the child into an adult.” People pile on this Ruskin creature and fail to recognize that she only tells the viewers what they desperately want to hear.

I’m all for Salaita’s reinstatement in his job but I hate these touch-feely, “oh have pity on him because he has tender feelings” letters that purport to support Salaita but, instead, make him look like an unhinged hysteric. Salaita should be defended not because of his hurt feelings but because a university administration should not be in the business of policing people’s Twitter accounts, that’s all. What Salaita did or didn’t feel at any point of his life is completely beyond the question.

More and more often, when I read articles published in the EU, I have to restrain my desire to exclaim, imitating Zizek, “Degenerates! Degenerates!” See the linked article on how we should all feel massively sorry for pedophiles and give them money.

This post is in Russian but it has really really great photos of the wettest place on Earth. Which sounds very, very attractive.

I hope that after this nobody will annoy me by claiming that Western Europe is not totally and utterly on Russia’s side and dedicated to helping Putin win global dominance:

 

After months of ratcheting up pressure on Vladimir Putin, concern is mounting in Berlin and other European capitals that an emboldened Ukraine’s military successes in the east are reducing the chances of a face-saving way out of the crisis for the Russian leader.

 

As a result, the focus of German-led diplomatic efforts has shifted, according to senior officials, towards urging restraint from Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and averting a humiliating defeat for pro-Russian rebels, a development that Berlin fears could elicit a strong response from Putin.

My explanation is the same as why North American Liberals are so besotted with Putin. Europeans are tired of the tutelage of the US. The forgot that they owe everything they have to the US aid of the post-war years and want to stick it to the Americans at any cost. And the fantasy of sticking it to the Americans is something they can only enact through Putin whose rhetoric is concentrated 100% on the hatred of the US.

Today Ukraine celebrates its independence but whether it will continue to exist as an independent country is very much in question. Now that Merkel and her band of Eurotrash have openly allied themselves with Putin, the world has gotten itself a new global leader. And it is a leader of such a kind that soon those very Europeans will sigh nostalgically for the good old times when all they had to do was defer to Americans.

You will never believe it but sometimes – very, very rarely – I jump to judgment too fast. For instance, I sent in a proposal to a conference on testimonial literature. Every email I get from the organizers mentions that “we check our messages twice per day at 10.00 am and 5 pm UK time.”

“Gosh, what a bunch of pretentious snobs,” I thought. “Do I even want to speak at a conference where people are so stuck-up that they need to pretend they are British? Jerks.”

Of course, if I’d paid attention to who was organizing the conference, I’d have known that the organizers checked their messages according to UK time for the simple reason that they belonged to a British organization located in the UK.

In my justification, I can say that I have a very special logic of selecting conferences to go to and that logic usually is, “Will going to the conference allow me to visit Montreal?” If the answer is “yes,” I don’t care what the conference is about and barely even read the conference flyers. What am I supposed to go to conferences for instead? To network and meet useful people? Can you imagine me in this uncomfortable pose?

The good news is that the conference’s steering committee is less judgmental than I am and it accepted my proposal. So I’m going to Montreal. Yay!

I’m really happy about the boycott by academics of the University of Illinois over the Stephen Salaita business. I have no idea what it was that he tweeted and I’m supremely uninterested in finding out. But it is nothing short of shameful that a university should be in the business of tweet-policing.

One great thing about television is that no matter when you turn it on, there is a Law & Order marathon playing on one of the channels.