Somehow I stepped into having the flash pop-ups from two of the most popular of the propaganda channels of Russian news on my computer. And I’m too lazy to try to disconnect them. So while I work on my desktop, I constantly see these pop-ups in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen yell breaking Russian “news” at me. I’ve been working on the desktop for the past 3 hours, and in that time I got over a dozen pop-ups in the vein of “Trump said in a tweet he’s going to attack our troops in Syria! American missiles are on their way! American bombing is imminent!”

It’s not really hard to guess who it is that is desperate to prevent US troops from withdrawing from Syria. Distracting people from a failing economy, corruption and a crumbling infrastructure with saber-rattling is the oldest trick in the book. The idea that the US would withdraw from Syria was so threatening that Russians had to organize a chemical attack to stop it.

The “Basque turn” of my scholarship is, to put it very mildly, not the smartest idea I could have had. I’m narrowing an already narrow field, which my colleagues from other departments consider to be irrelevant and arcane as it is. They consider research into Spain to be useless and boring, so what will they think if I ask for a grant to study the culture of a tiny part of this already ‘insignificant’ country? (I’m obviously not going to apply for such a grant because it’s a total waste of time). The Spanish language, at least, is interesting thanks to the enormous Latin American population of the world. But Euskera? If we were in Nevada, then OK, but not around here.

I feel like a married woman who has fallen violently in love and starts an affair even though she understands it’s destructive. I’m trying very hard to get interested in something else but it’s not working. I’m hopelessly obsessed.

A smart person in my place would branch out into Latin America, which I’m very well-equipped to do. But love can’t be reasoned away.

 

At least, the Facebook debacle brought one good thing. Zuckerberg put on a nice suit for the Congress hearings. His “little boy in white T-shirts” image has gotten too old.

This, I believe, is the best thing Barbara Ehrenreich has ever written. Of course, being who she is, she is incapable of engaging even with such a concept as death outside of the same ideologically barren framework of primitive Marxism.

Primitive Marxism is similar to primitive feminism. It consists of a constant pointing out that capital is evil (or men historically oppressed women.) There’s no intellectual engagement with the issue. Just repeated incantations that go in a loop.

This impoverished ideological approach has always characterized Ehrenreich’s writing, so this is nothing new. Within the limits of what she’s capable of, this is the strongest piece by her that I have read. Which obviously doesn’t mean I endorse or share her ideas.

This article about the closure of Backpage is pure comedy. I’m sure it’s not supposed to be funny but it is.

Prostitution is perfectly fine but we are only going to write about a prostitute who did “nothing but” handjobs. Nothing too distasteful for our classy readers, please.

The prostitute has no contact information for her clients because “she cares about their privacy.” And they are not managing to find her in her “office in a nice building with a receptionist” because they are apparently brain-damaged and need to be given directions afresh every time. Through the website. Because a website is a lot more private than one-on-one contact.

And she lost all her clients not because she’s nearing retirement age but because a webpage closed. Of course. Clients are desperate to use a prostitute on a Zimmer frame. If only they could remember the address where they always see her. Drat. Old age is a bitch.

And of course it wouldn’t be a good sob story without cancer. So cancer was somehow massaged – sorry for the pun – into the narrative.

And Craigslist reduced the number of homicides by 17%. I wonder why not by 117%. It’s not like anybody is a fanatic of accuracy here.

We were talking about reporters who take bribes for stories yesterday. This has got to have been paid for by some coalition of not very bright pimps.

Very true. I was confused when I was first asked over for coffee in North America and was served a cup of coffee, wartime style. And that was all. I kept waiting but nothing else materialized.

“I threw up tonight and papa cleaned up my mess,” Klara says.

“Oh, poor papa,” I say.

“No, poor me,” she retorts calmly.

For those who don’t know, she’s two.

This snack quiz told me I grew up in the south. Of course, it’s the south in relation to the North Pole. Or Finland. But not much else beyond that.

I said I like poutine. How southern can that be? I mean, for the Inuit, I’m sure poutine is what the Southerners eat but that’s about it.

I don’t know anything about Jordan Peterson except that he was in the midst of one of those bizarre pronoun scandals and that he was in a very weird interview. But there is a stack of copies of his book at the local bookstore, and every time I’m there (which is every other day because it’s Klara’s favorite place), I see men between the ages of 20 and 50 reading his book, buying his book or avidly leafing through his book. The men look very working class, with the kind of hands that you don’t often see holding books by college professors. I wish I had time to read the book because now I’m very interested in what he could have written to attract this particular audience. But it’s beyond heart-warming to see it.

Of course, the most reasonable thing to do is to delete anybody who uses the word resistance (or even worse, Resistance) from my newsfeed. But save for Inc.com and the Lovers of Australian Literature blog, that’s the entirety of my enormous newsfeed. It took me years to compose it. And I used to enjoy scrolling through it while having my morning coffee. The newsfeed had geeky people, funny people, brilliant people, policy-wonk people, activist people, ultra-smart couch potato people, academics, gamers, journalists, bloggers, feminists, anarchists, libertarians, reformist Muslims, etc. It was a multitude of fascinating voices that told beautifully different stories about the world.

And now all that is gone. The newsfeed has become downright robotic. Everybody is saying exactly the same thing in exactly the same voice. And the thing they are saying is very dumb.