The Mother of All Headdesks

So. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion asked me to give an hour-long talk titled “Hispanic History, Culture, Art, and Values.”

One. Hour. Long.

There’s truly nobody who despises other cultures more than lovers of diversity. Honestly, folks. How’d you feel about an hour-long talk titled “History, Culture, Art, and Values of the English-speaking World”?

This hurts my feelings. I’ve spent the last 20 years studying “Hispanic History, Culture, Art, and Values,” I’ve lived and breathed this stuff for two decades and my knowledge is still minuscule, microbic, speck-like compared to what there is. This is a beautiful, enormous, majestic culture. It spans continents and centuries. Just the variety of language alone is a subject one could discuss for hours, days, months. These are many countries, many different time periods, artists, events, are you fucking kidding me?

Hey, have you read the Bible? Can you retell it in a couple of sentences?

I just can’t even. These people.



Found this over at Mike’s blog:

Watching the returns come in from that Floridian hotel room, alone, with no bars open that I could get to, is one of the gloomiest memories I have.

And what I wouldn’t give now to have a hapless rascal like W back.

— Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) August 16, 2019

I’m as frustrated with these idiot dumbasses as Mike. Iraq war vs nasty tweets? You gotta be kidding me.

Why is it so hard for so many people to dislike Trump in a way that doesn’t turn them into babbling fools? I recently saw somebody go on and on about how Trump is into violence while Obama was kind, gentle, and a saint. If the poster had stopped before making the ridiculous comparison and wording it this way, that would be one thing. But these people can never stop.

Why Do You Put up with It?

From the NYTimes:

Discuss a recent instance of police brutality in your community. Read op-eds arguing for and against legal status for unauthorized immigrants. Compare and contrast border conditions in the Palestinian territories and Mexico. Those are some of the lesson plans suggested in a draft of California’s newly proposed ethnic studies curriculum for K-12 public schools. The documents have led to bitter debate in recent weeks over whether they veer into left-wing propaganda.

Yes, what a mystery. Is “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression” left-wing propaganda? Hmmm, how can I possibly answer this. Let’s debate some more.

We all know how I feel about homeschooling, but seeing this, I can’t condemn anybody who’d choose that option. It’s easy not to care when you can pay for private but what if you can’t and still want to preserve some dignity?

Because let me tell you as somebody who was educated this way in the USSR. This kind of contemptuous brainwashing doesn’t make you stupid or convince you of anything. But it destroys your dignity. You just don’t feel about yourself the same way as you would without it.

This is even more humiliating and offensive in the US than it was in the USSR because you, folks, work like dogs compared to how we lived. You work and work and pay taxes, so for you to get shat on in this way is more painful.

Why you put up with this is a mystery.

One Latin Americanist

Our university is killing one of the two Spanish-speaking Latin Americanist tenure lines in order to hire a Latin Americanist who will teach in English at the English department.

We will now have a single person teaching about Latin America in Spanish for a university of 14,000 and growing.

This was the personal decision of our Dean. Everybody (except the history department) at the college chairs meeting voted not to kill the existing tenure line.