Romania is having a normal one:

Yes, you ready showed everybody, Romania. Nobody can outdo you in “wait, what?” news.

The reason why the university wants to get rid of full professors isn’t that they cost too much. It’s never really about money. People who have been with the university for many years are the keepers of institutional memory. Their knowledge stands in the way of change for the sake of change.

When the new Chancellor came in, he started saying, “Let’s introduce this new policy. It’s so obvious this is going to be a great change. I have no idea why this hasn’t been done yet.”

Older professors said, “It was done. These changes were introduced in 2010. They were catastrophic, and the current system was created to mend the damage.”

There were several things of this kind. Every time, older professors would say, “this was tried, it failed. If you start taking things apart, these will be the consequences, just like the last time this was tried.”

Get rid of the people with memory, and you can wreak any havoc you want, put it on your CV and move on, which is the whole play for this new Chancellor. He started interviewing for a new job a year after we hired him. Nobody else is stupid enough to take him but what his plan is has been clear from the start.

I lost an opportunity to appear on Ukrainian TV because people in Ukraine love communicating through FB Messenger which I never open. In the US, people always connect for comment or appearance through X but in Europe there’s a Facebook obsession, and I keep seeing messages long after they become relevant. I’ve lost publication opportunities (non-academic), appearances, and all because of this. Both from Ukraine and Spain.

Curtis Yarvin says that the Trump administration is fuffing up its historic chance by firing bureaucrats in cruel ways and shutting down scientific grants that mention things like “diverse cell cultures.”

A country needs both bureaucrats and scientists. There’s nowhere to find new ones if the existing ones are thrown out. Instead of antagonizing them, says Yarvin, the power that is here to stay instead of rage for a short spell and be swept away would make them loyal and loving. Things are bad on the job market for scholars, and gaining their loyalty by making things easier for them wouldn’t be hard. This opportunity is being pissed away because the inane goal of “saving money” is being pursued.

Yarvin wants a country, a nation-state. Trump kind of wants it but doesn’t really know how to get there. Musk doesn’t begin to understand the concept and most definitely doesn’t want it.

My own take is that country is not recoverable anyway because the way people feel in the world changed and doesn’t contain that concept anymore. Musk wins because his position is the most popular.

Yes, Pam Bondi did it on her own initiative. All on her very lonesome.

Dumb groupies waiting for the good tsar.

Let’s have fun with this, people.

Who can guess which was the first department at my university to get slated for elimination as unnecessary?

Let’s see how well you understand neoliberal bureaucrats.

Just to make it easier, it’s not mine.

I expressed myself regarding TPS visas many times. I very strongly believe that the TPS visa should not exist. I won’t repeat the whole story again but TPS is the absolute worst thing that happened to Central America in the past 30 years. Use the search function on this blog to find my posts about Salvadoran gangs and how they came into existence.

Regarding specifically Ukrainian refugees, I assume people are unaware that one of the most controversial policies of the Zelensky government is that it wants the countries who took in Ukrainian refugees to return them. Last year, a new ministry was created in Ukraine to look into ways of bringing back these refugees. Two days ago, a large sum was appropriated in the Ukrainian budget to support these policies. One of the main complaints about the Zelensky government in Ukraine is precisely that it’s too aggressive in trying to bring back the refugees. There’s endless talk that the government is exercising pressure on European allies to start revoking the refugee status. This is controversial in Ukraine but it’s a big subject of discussion.

There are two, I’d say, schools of thought in Ukraine regarding what to do about the population collapse that happened because of the war. One school of thought advocates bringing in millions of migrants from Asia. The competing school of thought wants to bring back the existing Ukrainians. This is debated hotly, and I’ve participated in many a discussion regarding whether to embrace the neoliberal theory of people as interchangeable widgets or not. Its the perennial neoliberals versus nationalists debate. Zelensky was originally elected because people thought he’d be more globalist and less nationalistic. And he disappointed many (and charmed many others) by moving rapidly and dramatically towards nationalism.

I hope this context helps people figure out the situation.

I’m now a managing editor of a scholarly journal. I send submitted articles to reviewers and make the recommendation to publish or not based on their feedback. It’s a modern languages journal, so almost no articles are in my own field.

We received an article recently that was written by a young, inexperienced scholar with very conservative beliefs. I didn’t need to Google him to know that he’s young and inexperienced because it was clear from the writing. But it’s somebody with an original, unusual point of view. Somebody who is trying to engage with theory and big ideas instead of applying somebody else’s ideas to yet another “diverse” author. If I were the reviewer, I’d guide him to rewrite for clarity and coherence and I’d definitely publish the piece.

The first blind peer reviewer recommended exactly what I would have. He didn’t engage with how “correct” the author’s thoughts are but whether they are clearly expressed and coherently argued. The second reviewer, however, went into a full-on ideological mode. Her main argument was that these questions have all been settled, structural racism is indisputable, fluid identities are great, saying that identity labels can be used to seek victim status in a competitive economy is insulting to a long list of identity holders, and so on.

Of course, I recommended that we go with the first reviewer’s approach. It is not our business to judge which ideas are correct but to facilitate a free exchange of thought. We cannot take an ideological role of promoting “correct” ideas, I said. We’ll see how the two editors-in-chief respond but this is a heartening development. It’s time to see theory that is free from the shackles of the politically correct and the ideologically permissible.

It looks like Democrats are making an effort to dial down the far-left fervor that engulfed them in recent years:

The problem is, simply not mentioning ‘women’ with penises and George Floyd is not enough. There needs to be an open, clear and collective disavowal of these superstitions. “We were wrong. We made a mistake. We did a lot of harm.” Once this is said, Democrats can have a real comeback.

I’m not saying they can come back with me. I’m so done with them. But they should come back in general and start doing useful stuff. There should be a new generation of Democrats who are tired of all the identity-nitpicking, paroxysms of outrage, censorship and illogic. It’s time for them to start showing up.

I saw a video of a guy taking down a large portrait of a Ukrainian war hero:

I got really mad until I realized that he was removing a picture of himself from the alley of soldiers missing in action. Because he came back.

It’s not always what it looks like. Anybody can be duped or confused.