Dude, just wait till you find out what feminism’s promise to women has been the whole time.

Why shouldn’t men finally want the same?

Being unemployed was a crime punished by jail in the USSR. If you were, for example, a mother who wanted to stay home with your kids, that was not legal.

This was a crime easy to avoid because unless people did something extremely dissident (for example, applied to emigrate to Israel), nobody got fired.

People with higher education had to “pay” for their diplomas by way of accepting jobs they didn’t choose somewhere far away geographically. That’s how my parents met, by the way. They were both working in these assigned jobs away from their native towns. That’s how N’s parents met, too.

The Soviet system provided jobs for everybody and paid the same pittance for them. My father was a scientist with a PhD, my mother a school teacher, my grandma a lawyer, and my grandpa a pediatrician. And we never had enough to eat. The first time in my life I had my own clothes (not hand-me-downs) was in 1990. My cousin, whose mother was a math teacher and father a dentist, had to wear not only used clothes but used underwear, which caused him great shame since his hand-me-downs were from girls.

People in white-collar jobs were legendary for doing absolutely nothing whatsoever at work all day. I remember my parents’ acquaintance laughing that she was ready to retire from the place where she’d worked all her life and had no idea what its actual name was or what it was supposed to be doing. I’m sure she was exaggerating but not by much. People would come to these jobs, make tea, swap recipes, tell jokes, lounge around, read forbidden literature, knit, exercise, give each other makeovers. I’d love it when my father would take me to his job because it was like one large daycare for adults.

Obviously, people did other things, too, but I was too little to understand that. When people have no life purpose beyond buying things, nothing to occupy them, and no religion to constrain them, they tend to go really wild. My mother who had been brought up in a strict environment of a little village was perennially scandalized by the things her fellow teachers did behind the training equipment in the gym once school was out.

The idea of strict monogamy in marriage was not something I heard about until much later. My mother’s female friends ran absolutely wild, and it was all work-related because there was nowhere else to be. The stories I heard as they gossipped were very educational.

I never heard of anybody getting fired because, as I said, that was the purview of Jews trying to emigrate and we didn’t know any.

Because Israel knows how to do diplomacy and manages not to take sides in US internal conflicts.

I say this with the greatest sadness and the most fervent wish that things were different but I believe in agency and accountability. Ukraine fucked up massively where Israel didn’t. This doesn’t cancel the fact that Trump is shaming the US by being weaselly and subservient to the Russians who laugh at him. I hope we are evolved enough around here to be able to hold both thoughts in our minds at the same time.

Great news, people! Alex Berenson’s wonderful book

Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

is available on Kindle Unlimited. This is a must-read, especially for parents.

Alex Berenson is a national treasure, especially since most of journalism has devolved to pure partisan hackery.

There are layoffs at my husband’s job. It’s a very large company, and consequently there are large layoffs. Several universities in Illinois, including mine, are laying off people. We all know that “being fired” is baked into the concept of “having a job.” Who hasn’t been fired at least once? I have, including for being “too pretty” but that’s a story for another time.

During COVID, many people lost their jobs, businesses and livelihoods. My sister lost her business a week after her husband lost his job. They have two small children, and this simultaneous job loss was not enjoyable for them.

Just yesterday people at N’s job gathered to say goodbye to an engineer who’s been with the company for 18 years and got fired this week. It’s very sad, I’m very sad but there’s no drama on social media over that firing or any other firing that isn’t of these government workers.

The reason I’m saying all this is that this incessant drama over some firings but not others unnecessarily hurts people’s feelings. It’s like we have two castes, those who should be exposed to the vagaries of fate and those who should be immune.

I’m just not sure what it is we should be collectively opposing here. The idea of losing one’s job? The reality in which all jobs aren’t for life? We don’t want to live in that reality, that’s for sure. Is it that good bosses left, bad bosses came and started firing? But again, this happens constantly. The layoffs at N’s job are because the company was recently acquired and new bosses do things differently. The firings at my job gave the same genealogy. Both N and I, at the very least, provide not less value than a regular government worker. N works in cancer research, in case people don’t know. I teach kids from East St Louis and Chicago Southside. And I don’t propose that there should be national outrage over our jobs. What’s happening is unpleasant but in a mundane, not “stop the presses” kind of way.

The reason why I’m going on about this isn’t so much the tweet at the top but that I found the same approach in people I know in real life. “Yeah, it sucks that you are getting fired but wait till you hear what’s happening to Jessica. She’s actually afraid for her job! Can you imagine? Isn’t that wrong?” Jessica is 28 and childless, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why her plight is so much worse than mine. I’m not minimizing Jessica’s discomfort. This sucks for both of us. But it doesn’t suck more for her than for me.

I hope nobody says that it sucks more for Jessica than for me because her firing is politically motivated. I explained at length yesterday that mine is, as well. Every side engages in politically motivated firings. Unpleasant, but as I said, not in “the sky is falling manner”.

If the boss at your job sent an email on Friday directing people to respond by Monday, how many would manage to complete the task?

And how many wouldn’t check their emails until next Thursday because they believe they should be entitled to check their emails once a week? The reason I ask is that I wonder if it’s only in public sector jobs that it’s ok to do this kind of thing. Or decide not to show up when there’s 1,5 inch of snow on the ground. Or because—and this is a sentimental favorite—because it’s trash day. 

“I decided to teach remotely today because it’s trash day and this is just easier” is a real thing that transpired a few weeks ago.

There are tsunamis of outrage over this everywhere on social media. I must be very different from other people because I would have loved to get this email. I’d love to have this kind of accountability at my workplace. Right now I do this for myself but how wonderful would it be to work somewhere where it’s about achievement, excitement, accomplishment.

In my ideal scenario, we’d all list the books we read and the number of words we wrote each week and it would all be shared among the group. And then we’d talk about it, and what joy would that be.

Everything I read, write, publish, give talks about, etc is tolerated as a sort of an annoying hobby at my work. It’s all “well, if you absolutely have to do it, okay but how exasperating.” I’ve accepted that but still I sometimes think that other people like me must exist even if I’m far away from them. Not academics necessarily but simply people who love to work.

500,000 followers and she publishes a completely fake article that thousands of eager zombies gladly repost:

The official in question served not under Zelensky but under Yanukovich, a Putin puppet, removed from office in 2013. None of this has anything remotely to do with Zelensky as it happened 2 presidencies before him. But the post got 17 million views from low-IQ chimpanzees who now believe they received crucial information.

Just in case we have our own chimpanzees lurking around the blog, this isn’t about Zelensky. Anybody can spread absolutely any lie about anything happening domestically and millions will believe it because they are utterly ignorant of just how stupid they are.

Say what you wish about Curtis Yarvin, but one can’t avoid reaching the conclusion that putting the entire functioning of society in the hands of the chimpanzees might be a suboptimal approach.

Personality cults are cringe irrespective of the personality in question. Humans are fallible and shouldn’t be worshipped. The need to have an all-star, infallible idol is a sign of immaturity.

This is a general reminder that everybody should heed. Life becomes better when you accept everybody’s fallibility, including your own.

By the way, new video! Funny stories about my European travels. Nothing heavy at all.