The Chancellor called the police to remove the union members who came to protest at his budget talk with small, hand painted signs. The signs were not threatening or insulting but they did make a gentle pun on his last name. I’ll link but I don’t promise the article wouldn’t be censored again.

This shows that he’s a very inexperienced administrator who is not ready for this role. A person who is fit to lead would have addressed the content of the signs with good humor and sweetness. He’d say, “guys, great pun. My own favorite pun on my last name is this…” That would have been more productive for him than turning protesters into martyrs.

Today, we had another, much larger protest, and many more people came with this exact sign. Because they now know that it gets to him.

Forget about my university and this particular Chancellor. The point is that if you want to have an impact, you can’t leak. You can’t leak emotionally. Practice, meditate, imagine that you are surrounding yourselves with high walls that conceal you from view.

If you are a teacher, an administration, or a supervisor of any kind, you cannot respond to people under your command emotionally. You lose all authority by doing that. Even to direct insults you can only respond with motherly or fatherly kindness. And it has to be completely genuine. People experience high levels of anxiety around a teacher or boss who comes off as uncertain and emotionally incontinent. They act out more because of this anxiety.

Also, one more important trick. If somebody sends you long, ranting complaints, never respond to them with more than three sentences.

Sentence 1 should be: Dear ABC, thank you for communicating your concerns / wishes / ideas.

Sentence 2: Unfortunately, I will not be able to implement these suggestions. (Or whatever is appropriate to the situation).

Sentence 3: I propose that you…. And briefly outline what you propose. Briefly being the operative word.

The most loserish thing you can do is to start writing a point-by-point rebuttal of the complaint, bickering over details. Or give explanations of why you do things you consider necessary. Whoever explains, loses. Forget the word “because.” “Because” will be your downfall as a figure of authority. 

I have talked down such a number of problem students, colleagues, and administrators over the years that I am absolutely certain that this is the only way. And you know what? The administrator with whom I had the most ferocious public confrontations (during COVID it was) later told me privately that he really respected how I never gave any reasons and was always very secure in my conviction of what I was doing. Since then, we became great allies on a different cause while still despising each other’s position on COVID. And I now see him imitate my “no, I will not be doing this, thank you” in our current struggle which is kind of really cute.

On every channel where I appear, women show up in the comments to say that my hair is too crazy and this prevents them from understanding my argument. Every channel!

I am yet to meet a single man who’d have any problem with my hair. It’s always women. And OK, I do have wild hair. I cut it as short as it’s ever been. I try to keep it less wild. But why is it such an issue?

I have always struggled with understanding the language and the rites of female communities. I was brought up mostly by men, and this is the result. Can anybody help? I’m sincerely stumped as to why it’s the hair and not absolutely anything else they could pick on. It doesn’t hurt my feelings or anything. But I feel that something is being communicated to me that I’m not managing to understand correctly.

Whatever you dislike about Trump, at least he’s not doing this:

One of the UK’s biggest police forces has temporarily blocked applications from white British candidates in an attempt to boost diversity, The Telegraph can disclose.

West Yorkshire Police (WYP) is currently preventing white British candidates from applying for jobs as recruits to its police constable entry programmes. However, “under-represented” groups can lodge their applications early.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/09/west-yorkshire-police-blocks-white-applicants-diversity/

We would be in the same place or worse if Kamala won. And even now, there’s one election between us and this scenario. It’s a very sobering thought.

P.S. In the same vein, here are BBC journalists grilling Kemi Badenoch on why she hasn’t watched some dumb Netflix series. Badenoch tries to explain that she’s working, visiting constituencies, trying to make important things happen but the idiot journalists go on and on about a Netflix soap. It’s completely out there.

Kemi Badenoch torches BBC Breakfast: ‘I don’t need to watch Casualty to know what's going on in the NHS.’ 🔥

This is insane. The BBC are visibly offended that Kemi Badenoch *hasn't* watched the Netflix drama Adolescence.

I had to post the whole thing, it's utterly absurd. pic.twitter.com/sTr9ZJhCmQ

— Lee Harris (@addicted2newz) April 10, 2025

Shouldn’t the journalists be investigated for product placement practices? Is it now normal to do this kind of clearly corrupt stuff?

Badenoch is great, by the way. Hopefully, the next Prime Minister.

On a less entertaining note, three out of four student awardees sitting at my table had to take anti-anxiety meds to be able to go on stage to receive their awards. They weren’t expected to say anything, only walk across the stage and receive their certificates.

At the same time, my Ukrainian exchange students of the same age who spent the last three years hiding in bomb shelters don’t have anything remotely similar to these issues.

And I know exactly why. The Ukrainian students were never told that the option to freak out over little daily things to the point of needing to be medicated exists. The American students, though, were given this as the primary behavior model. These are all young women. It’s a highly impressionable cohort. If they grow up surrounded by endless manifestations of performative frailty, they accept it as a norm. These are patterns of behavior they perceive as normal.

What’s worse, young men are becoming increasingly coopted into this model of behavior as well. It starts as performative but after a while it becomes real. That’s how we end up with people who grew up in complete safety and comfort yet exhibit the symptoms of a very battered psyche.

This is the opposite of the “talking cure.” People talk themselves into having psychological dysfunction. The anxiety and the other symptoms they exhibit are completely real and very painful. But they are all caused by how we all collectively narrate to ourselves our encounters will small issues of daily life. We value emotional dysregulation so it proliferates. We don’t value resilience, so it fades.

The award ceremony yesterday had 160+ people in attendance. The show was stolen by a department head who climbed onstage to announce his awards and started with, “And the recipient of the Professor Peter Pratchett Memorial Award is…”

Half of the people in the audience gasped. We had all seen Peter on Monday when he bravely stood up to the Chancellor during the yearly budget meeting. Was Peter dead? Had the Chancellor done something to him?

“We established the Peter Pratchett Memorial Award because his great achievements…” droned on the department head.

“My boyfriend is supposed to be writing a test in Pratchett’s course on Friday,” a student sitting next to me chirped. “Is he really… I mean…”

Finally, the department head noticed people waving at him from the back of the room.

“Oh!” he said. “God. What did I say? I didn’t mean Peter Pratchett Memorial Award. I don’t know why I said that. Please don’t tell Peter or it will be my memorial. He’s fine! It’s Peter Pratchett Award, not memorial!”

“Please continue with your department’s awards,” said the Dean dripping with venom. A beautiful fantasy of great savings occasioned by a professor’s passing was being rudely snatched away.

“Yes, so. We are also happy to announce the Jim Lacey Memorial Award,” went on the flustered department head. “Wait, is he dead? Just a second, I want to make completely sure.”

He peered nearsightedlly at his brochure.

“Yes, this one is actually dead!” he announced triumphantly.

I’m in the final stretches of writing Neoliberal Love. I can imagine the time when I’ll be done. I will finally lay neoliberalism to rest. What will my next obsession be? It’s a whole world out there, and I’ll be able to start torturing everybody with some completely new topic.

I have no idea how you can be a Professor of English and start your talk with the words “in today’s challenging times”. Or be a Professor of Journalism and start yours with “our job is to amplify voices.”

It’s 7:40 pm, I’ve been at work for exactly 12 hours straight, and these are the indignities to which I am subjected.

The union leadership revealed that the administration’s goal for my faculty isn’t to get rid of us but to make us teach in English. They do want to get rid of the physics profs but us they are desperate to keep. Because we can teach in English outside of the discipline. Specifically, they need crowds of people to teach about globalization. Physicists are not as useful for that purpose as, for example, I am.

Now I understand why the Dean keeps giving this weird speech about how tying your identity to teaching within your discipline is a psychological hangup.

If these absolute losers had said what they really wanted from the start, I would have participated happily. I’m really into teaching outside of the discipline and in English. But they started doing underhanded shenanigans to get us into a place where I, for one, actually wanted to be. This is deeply stupid behavior. They are stupid people.

Also, the problem here is this industrial-level management. If the Dean managed to talk to me like a human being in all the years we’ve worked closely together, he’d know that he doesn’t have to extort me into teaching about globalization. I’d be his greatest fan if he heard me all the times I tried to talk to him about research and made me a normal, honest offer. I’m pretty certain I’ve actually mentioned to him how much I love teaching my only course in English.

It’s totally like a dude you like grabbing you and throwing you on the ground when you would have agreed willingly.

Does not all the world know that when in autumn the Bismarcks of the world, or they who are bigger than Bismarcks, meet at this or that delicious haunt of salubrity, the affairs of the world are then settled in little conclaves, with greater ease, rapidity, and certainty than in large parliaments or the dull chambers of public offices?

Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister

Delicious haunt of salubrity! Isn’t the English language absolutely amazing? The depths of sarcasm in that one tiny turn of phrase are exotically pleasing.

What a joy to be reading such stellar prose.

The taping went very well. I mentioned neoliberalism at least 63 times which means great success to me. Somebody smart in the comments said that what the US is experiencing has a very perestroika-era vibe. And yes, that’s true. I remember back in Kharkiv in an open-air market I once bought a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita, a beautiful new edition. I walked down the street, pressing it to my chest, incredulous that you could actually buy a book like that. It’s the same feeling as walking today with my new copy of Curtis Yarvin’s Unqualified Reservations that came out as a book this year.

The feeling of freedom, new possibilities is very similar.