Friends, I’ve made changes to commenting to see if we can solve the glitch that appeared recently. Please leave a comment and let me see if anything improved.

My daughter is so American it’s funny. For her birthday, she doesn’t want a party. Instead, she wants me to take her and her best friend to the mall, and then zip lining, and then laser tag, bowling and the arcade. And the menu will consist of pizza, Mac and cheese, and dot ice cream.

This is dot ice cream, in case you aren’t local:

NYC Democrats are trying to pass a measure to allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections. They propose that anybody who has resided in the city for over a month should be able to vote.

“In five City Council districts, non-U.S. citizens make up about a third of the adult population,” attorneys for the city’s lawmaking body wrote in a legal filing. . . Most estimates suggest the new law would make an additional 800,000 people eligible to vote. Not all of them would register, but even if a fraction do, that’s still a major expansion of the electorate.

This is a nifty trick. Flood the city (county, state, etc) with foreigners and then argue that the sheer number of them means citizenship should be abandoned as a functioning concept.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1888860932492624014?t=r4ikYksq6qkJ2D3mG23pJA&s=19

This is exactly what I was told by the administrators at my school: there’s no federal funding for anything that’s not BLM. It wasn’t even DEI. It was specifically BLM.

Well, I mean, of course you can’t change physiology. I’m never going to be calm like a Swede or excitable like a Brazilian. After everything we’ve witnessed, I break out in hives when people suggest changing physiological attributes. Earlier today a UK doctor testified it’s not true that you need a man and a woman to make a baby.

Moving on from my trauma over this insanity, an enormous lot in life depends on the functioning of our nervous system. We think it’s our personality and see its workings as either virtue or moral flaw but it’s often simply physical stuff that exists outside of our volitional purposes.

Just one more quote, and I’ll lay off Han for the time being:

Porn kills off sexuality and eroticism more effectively than moral repression ever could have hoped to.

The Disappearance of Rituals

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as that, my friend. Professional associations in the Humanities aren’t funded federally. Our funding comes 100% from annual memberships. This means, we are private individuals who associate in a freely chosen way and can issue any statements we want. There is such a thing as institutional memberships but, in the age of budget cuts, they are extremely rare and financially trivial.

As for the university, again, we aren’t federally funded. We are funded by the state of Illinois. If the Governor of Illinois opposed DEI statements, we’d take them down ASAP and pretend they never existed. Unfortunately, the Illinois GOP is for some reason incapable of running anybody not completely demented, so we are stuck.

At my university, there is a couple of people who get federal funding but that’s as close as we get to federal money. Our mission is to provide free (or extremely cheap) higher education to the residents of Illinois. This is a good, noble mission but we exist outside of any federal interests. The only way that we could be impacted on the federal level is through the accreditation commissions. If the existing ACs were dismantled and new ones were created with a completely different set of accreditation criteria, that would help. These commissions come by once every 7 years, and we won’t have another until 2032 (there’s one currently accrediting us). So even if accreditation commissions change, for it to impact us, it would take the better part of a decade.

I’m sorry this is not the fun response everybody wanted. It’s not one I want myself. But DEI will exist for as long as people want it to exist. You can’t flip a switch and make it go away. The steps where we got to make an appearance in the marketplace of ideas, argue our case, and win can’t be skipped.

Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves. Very often, they do not communicate a message. Poems are magical ceremonies of language.

Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals

We have abandoned the playfulness of language because overheated neoliberal egos accept no other object of worship than the perennially wounded, aggrieved, underfed self. If a toddler’s mother gets distracted, the child perceives this as a threat to her very survival. Only the mother’s constant, kind, loving attention makes the world less cruel and terrifying. Gradually, the child learns to do for herself, and eventually displaces her mother’s attention with her own as the main guarantee of well-being.

A neoliberal self never grows up. If it did, how could it adopt constant changeability and malleability that are the only marker of neoliberal morality? The clamoring infantile self perceives as a mortal wound any distraction of the attention of others. Such an individual has no inner core to which he could retract. He doesn’t exist if he can’t see himself, or rather, the wounds that constitute his self, in others. We’ve all seen this phenomenon in free Palestiners who appear under every social media post to berate posters for discussing something other than the Palestinian issue. [Cue Free Palestiners who will respond to this post with rants about their favorite psychic wound, remaining utterly unconscious of how they embody the exact issue I am discussing.] Or in activists who make everybody recite land acknowledgments at all sorts of unrelated events.

Playful language is as bound to wound somebody’s sensibilities in the world of overinflated egos as an umbrella is to poke a passenger in an overstuffed subway car. Speech codes that have proliferated today to the extent that would have shocked the strictest medieval Torquemada are the result of this bellowing, suppurating narcissism.

I think best in dialogic form. When people ask questions, offer their perspective, and suggest venues of analysis, that really helps me figure out my own ideas. Unfortunately, the kind of teaching that I do precludes any dialogue about the ideas that interest me. So I created this blog, and it’s literally the most useful tool I have found to advance my intellectual development. I’m grateful to everybody who is participating because I’m a slow, plodding thinker, and I need a lot of repetition and looking at things from different perspectives to arrive at complete ideas.

When I’m stuck in my writing, which is at least every other day, I write something on here, and it always pushes me along to where I need to be.

The whole point of the blog for me is to share what I read and think about and receive feedback. I read voraciously in many different directions. I need complete freedom to look at all sorts of ideas, try them on, discard, adopt, modify, and so on. I don’t have another place to do it other than this blog. Life isn’t worth much to me if I can’t read, think and discuss. This sounds like a big statement but I’m completely sincere. I need this like I need to breathe air.

Many people over the years have found value in hearing what I have to say on here. Some found books to read, discovered favorite authors, sharpened their rhetorical skills, consolidated their system of arguments, or simply found a way to have fun, enjoy, relax, and have a chuckle. I think it can be very useful to witness a person’s intellectual journey as it happens and see what goes into making ideas. If Zygmunt Bauman, for example, had a blog where I could see how he arrived at his ideas, that would be fascinating to me. Obviously, I lay no claim to being at the level of Bauman but I believe there’s value in observing a regular person, a mom, who packs lunch boxes, makes PB&J sandwiches, and decorates the dining room table with fluffy bunnies, read and then create philosophy.

I’m very attached to long-time readers who, to me, are more close and real than most people I know in my daily life. But this is a relationship that has to be honest and free if it is to have any meaning. I’m not going to censor myself because then what’s the point? We have to accept collectively and individually that pursuing the life of the mind isn’t always all flowers and butterflies. It’s akin to crashing through the thick forest undergrowth, leaving flaps of skin and drops of blood on thorny branches.

Trump approval numbers:

Young people seem to have been more fed up than anybody expected by the pious officiants of the self-righteous cult vanquished by Trump.