An academic who uses the words “whiteness” and “structural oppression” unironically could just as well place a neon sign on his forehead flashing the words “can’t get published or noticed to save my life.” This terminology is a sign of being defeated in one’s profession.
Book Notes: Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment
I enjoy Liane Moriarty’s chatty, gossipy novels and always pre-order the new one. But Here One Moment disappointed me. Instead of a story, Moriarty decided to go with a premise, and it’s a trite one. The message that the novel delivers will the regularity of a metronome hitting a reader’s skull is this:
You can die at any moment, so live your life to the fullest! Have EXPERIENCES! Don’t let boring things such as duty and caution prevent you from having FUN. It’s all about FUN. Also, you need to TRAVEL. And MOVE. That’s what happiness is, incessant moving. And traveling, don’t forget traveling. Because you can just DIE. Everybody will DIE.
Original this idea is not, that’s a given.
Five hundred pages of chewing over the gnarled bone of our imminent mortality are loosely bound by the story told by Cherry, a deeply boring, smug and self-involved guru of the “travel and move” philosophy. Moriarty usually is at her best when she writes about families but Cherry’s bizarre obsession with travel makes a family an impossibility. Her life is vapid and her attempts at humor embarrassing.
This was supposed to be a light, cheery read but it turned out to be morbid and pointless. I’m being let down by favorite authors this year. First, Claudia Piñeiro decided to go all social-justicey, and now Moriarty is trying to be philosophical. Why it’s not OK to tell a great story without trying to teach readers an important lesson about life I have no idea. I want to be entertained, not improved.
Disparate Impact
DOJ lawsuit points to higher pass rates for males and white candidates as evidence of discrimination.
It is not surprising because the tests were extremely hard and deeply racist-sexist. No wonder black and female candidates did so poorly.
Here is one question:
Right? How can anybody be expected to answer this complicated quagmire of a question?
Here’s another, and brace yourselves because it’s horrific:
The absolute bloody horror.
I’m sorry to keep traumatizing you but it gets more and more horrific with every question. Like this one:
If this question isn’t discrimination, I don’t know what bloody is.
Now prepare yourselves for the real racism-sexism to rear its ugly head:
I warned you, it’s grim.
This is where state money is going, my friends. To compensate adults for not being able to add 3 and 12.
Don’t Be Duped
And both groups are idjits.
Walz is channeling one of very popular leadership models in the corporate world. If nature endowed you with a soft physique, a higher-pitched voice and a kindly Santa visage, you play it up, and nobody notices how vicious you are.
We have an administrator who puts on exactly this kind of persona but to an even greater degree than Walz. I made the mistake of writing him off immediately as a frumpy lightweight. Until he quietly and with a “sweet grampy” voice narrated to me how he destroyed a certain unfriendly power. This is an unfriendly power that had wrestled 4 Deans and 2 Provosts to the ground. And this fluffy pot-bellied dude in a crumpled shirt that perennially hangs out of his trousers defenestrated it in one conversation. I can’t go into details but this was a “Master and Commander” sort of feat. I very uncharacteristically felt like a little, very sheltered girl protected by a raging demon.
Walz has been mega successful in bending Minnesota in the direction he wanted. You write him off at your own peril. Gender roles, schmender roles. Forget about Walz, it’s not even about him. It’s about what I said earlier. It’s so easy to play people because they try to understand reality based on half a dozen silly clichés they memorized.
After making a few mistakes of this kind, I took a 3-month class in profiling, and now I know immediately where the power center lies in any group I enter and how to work it to my advantage.
The Old Man’s Revenge
The old man is standing up for himself:
Good for him.
Fake Images and Social Trust
The spread of these fake images will sound the death knell to the remnants of social trust and cohesion that we enjoy. We are only at the beginning of this journey but soon enough we’ll be in a place where the first immediate and visceral reaction to anything unpleasant will be a refusal to believe it’s real.
The absolute bastards who spread this fake photo are complaining that the government is not taking the catastrophe of Helene seriously. In the process of complaining they are making sure that the government will simply deny the reality of the next Helene and that denial will sound believable and realistic to everybody affected.
And please don’t tell me this is inevitable. People who are caught plagiarizing are eviscerated and destroyed even though they aren’t meddling in a humanitarian catastrophe where lives are at stake. And good, they should be held accountable for this egregious violation of academic rules. Why, however, are we accepting Thai bastardization of our newsfeed?
That whoever created and spread this fake image (or the fake quotes from Vance’s autobiography or the fake images of mass graves in NYC during COVID, etc, etc) is not eviscerated like the plagiarizing Columbia profs is a terrible mistake on all our parts.
Q&A about Israel
Good question, thank you.
I was wondering why Israel, which is the strongest nation-state in the West currently, wasn’t interested in supporting the fight for the preservation of the nation-state model. Since then, Israel started fighting for the nation-state on its own behalf. That’s good. The US has largely abdicated both the nation-state model and its erstwhile world leadership. Somebody else has to do it instead, or we are all screwed.
Smaller, less powerful nations are stepping into the void while the US is still trying to figure out whether to become Rhodesia and how fast.
This is the number one question facing every nation in the world right now. Do we embrace the fully neoliberal model like the one described in the article on South Africa posted in one of the comment threads? Or do we look at it and say, “God, this stinks. Let’s dial it down because this sounds atrocious”?
Instead of palpating the elephant of neoliberalism blindly, we need to step back and look at the big picture.
A Pronoun Question
Pronouns are stupid because nobody addresses people in the third person. So it makes no practical difference whether you announce “pronouns” or not. People who are at least marginally polite and integrated into society refer to others in their presence by their name. I’d be taken aback if an administrator referred to me in my presence as “she” not because I want to be called “he” but because it’s rude.
With students, I speak in Spanish, and it’s a language that drops personal pronouns almost always anyway.
If, on the other hand, you are asking about transgender students, I use the name they provide. In language courses, half of the people present use assumed names because they want to sound Spanish.
New Mexican President
The new Mexican president is just as bad as the previous one. This is not surprising because she’s his puppet. Two days into her presidency, she restarted the previous president’s demands that the King of Spain apologize for Hernán Cortés.
The King of Spain belongs to the dynasty that came after the dynasty that sent Cortés yo Cuba and prohibited him from conquering Mexico. The Mexican Creole* elites that rob Mexicans blind and that produce these presidents, however, definitely are Cortés’s fault.
At least, AMLO was his own man. This Sheinbaum person, on the other hand, is a subservient, useless, Putin-worshipping, race-mongering lefty.
*Creole means white in Latin America.
Why Was DEI Dialed Down?
It was definitely dialed down a lot but I don’t see the connection with 10/7. Much of the change where I am was provoked by the patient and painstaking work of the conservative organizations that sued for discrimination again and again. The other crucial factor is the money shortage. Even at our obligatory anti-racist bookclub we weren’t assigned a racial book this Fall. Instead, we are reading a pro-neoliberal book about the high moral value of austerity.
So in both cases it’s about money.
Also, you can motivate people with negative emotions – guilt, pity, etc – for a short period of time. But you can’t evoke them for long. Neoliberalism – unlike DEI – is successful because it appeals to the best, strongest, most motivated part of us. We like it because it feels good, even if it’s killing us in the process. It’s a feel-good drug.
I spent the morning at a budget meeting where I successfully defended my department against every attempt to cut us down. I won because I was really prepared. Other people will lose but I won. And it feels good.
After the meeting, I worked on my research to enhance my personal brand, and again, it feels good. I have a whole system in place to ensure my high productivity, including 5 apps and professional psychological support. Success, accolades, awards – that’s all motivating. Listening to how I’m irreparably racist and perennially guilty does not. Neoliberalism wins, DEI loses.
This, by the way, is why pro-Palestinians keep losing. They appeal to compassion but that wears off fast. They don’t even try to position their cause as that of strong, resilient people, winners, whose incredible powers will rub off on you if you hang around and ally yourself with their cause. You can’t whine “but don’t have the right” and attract people. It’s off-putting, weak. I come out of all my Ukrainian meetings excited, energized, feeling powerful. That’s what works.
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