Pseudo-Liberals' Hatred of Immigrants

Since this post disappeared, the discussion that initially inspired it has been continuing. As I said in the original post, in case you haven't been following, I wanted to share this debate because it demonstrates perfectly how terrified some people are that immigrants (with their linguistic, intellectual, feminist, philosophical, and cultural sophistication) will displace them with their imited, parochial values. Feel free to participate in the debate.

Here are some highlights of the discussion. (For the entire debate, see comments to the following post.)

This time, I will only give you the words of the hypocritical, immigrant-hating pseudo-liberal reader greenconsciousness. I believe they speak for themselves and demonstrate just how much such pseudo-liberals in reality mimic the hateful Conservative fundamentalists.

• Do you think it is in the interest of US citizens to have this immigrant flooding doubling and tripling our population every five years? Or is it in your interest as opposed to my interests? Citizens especially the working class have a right to defend ourself, our culture and our jobs. You can say we blame the immigrants but it is not blame; it is identification. Immigrants, especially illegals and those who come with work visas are a tool of the corporate interests that are destroying us. But this is my last word on the subject because I like you and do not want to hurt you. We have different economic interests which will never be reconciled. I do want you to know that the other half of my position is for the US to uphold its belief in freedom and human rights by working with people in their own countries using foreign aid programs to improve their life instead of bringing everyone here to degrade our own for the sake of profits.
• Immigrants are the tools the elites use to degrade us and immigrants are happy to be so used. They use guilt to silence us, call us racist for defending our rights. Tell us we are imagining and blaming. But we don't buy it anymore. We marched in Selma and suffered in the civil rights movement you were never a part of anywhere. We do not have to defend against charges of racism. We understand that we will fight or die. You should ask why you are so necessary to your bosses who are part of the US elites?
• Stick to your class and kind who have always oppressed mine. Try to turn this country into a densely packed, unsustainable, overpopulated, desert of cement populated by those who feel superior to the people they walk over - kill everything green and beautiful. I won't be back.
• Sorry for the drama. I really cannot keep up this conversation. Open your eyes. You never even saw the women in your own country who are not of your class; you don't know us here. But you do have an excellent mind and I believe if you start to try to understand you could.
• You know "dislike" is not the root of my opposition, nor do I think all other cultures are devoid of anything of value. But they are mostly too reverent of class and males who have the narcissism to believe that their work is universal when it is only male. In Russia it is practically an oligarchy.
• A wealthy family does not mean the majority of women are liberated. When Russian women were admitted to the professions they were called liberated but the wages in those professions plummeted. You know rape and DV are not addressed in any meaningful way for the women who are not wealthy enough to buy justice. When women try to organize they are told they are already liberated. Some day, gather all the stats which are lies but a start, and see if they match your experience.

Then this reader goes into a weird rant that I still have trouble understanding. For some reason, s/he chooses to believe that I am a Russian rape victim. I guess that makes it easier for him/her to dismiss my suggestion that only somebody who is 100% Native American can be justified in hating immigrants so much. So here is the rant, brace yourselves:

• I assume you will after your graduate work return to that pinacle of civilization and eqality, mother Russia. Maybe you will do a few studies yourself. How much domestic violence - did you report - what happened - why didn't you report -- raped? what age - what happened -- similarly as to women politicians -- what did you accomplish - or were you a helper to others -- to the female judges -- well there are many questions. How was it for you at work - From your studies you may find the courage to do a documentary on Russian women where they, rather than the state or the party, talk about the reality of their lives.
  If you ever need inspiration -- call on me and I will tell you the questions that expose the big lie of liberation achieved. I have done that and been there. I also wish you well on your journey. We do not have to agree - being honest is more important -- most important.

This is it for now but I have no doubt that more is to come. Since I wrote about this discussion yesterday, I realized that not only does this reader hate all immigrants, s/he is also tortured by the idea that other cultures might have some important achievements that the US culture does not have. What's at play here is obviously a huge inferiority complex that makes even the mere presence of anybody or anything different painful to greenconsciousness. The reason for this weird reaction is that even a slight glimpse of a different reality makes such people realize that - oh, horror - the silly swill about their superiority they have been fed on TV since early childhood is just stupid propaganda.

Lacking any actual achievements of their own, people like greenconsciousness, Real American Woman (that some of my long-term readers surely remember) and the troll that has been bugging this blog for a while keep harping on about their American passports. For them, these silly pieces of paper signify their superiority over absolutely everybody else. They can't understand why some people have no interest whatsoever in acquiring it for themselves. When they realize that they are losing in a discussion (which their huge intellectual limitations make unavoidable), they bring out what they see as their strongest argument: "You are not even an American!" Like this statement is supposed to have some intellectual value.

I feel sorry for people who are so terrified of having to be an indvidual that they hide from this "terrible burden" in a set of nasty, angry, mean and venomous collective identifications.

Hatred of Sex as the Guiding Principle of Russian Literature

God, I'm happy I recovered this post. (The post on Norway will have to wait for now, since I need to go look for the pictures I used in it once again.)

I almost never read anything by the Russian authors any more. Russian literature has not been able to recover from the political, ideological, and artistic constraints imposed on it in 1934. When literature is not allowed to develop naturally, it withers away and dies. And this is exactly what happened to literature written in Russian. I have tried for years to find good Russian writers but they don't seemk to exist any more.


This is why I was happy when my favorite Times Literary Supplement published a long review of Kamennyi most by a writer named Terekhov. I immediately bought this huge 800+ volume and started reading it. Of course, as was to be expected, I discovereed some really bad writing, a complete incapacity of the author to use his own language correctly, and a boring attempt to imitate Western authors in a very clumsy manner.

However, buying and reading this book was not a total waste. It helped me realize that the guiding principle of the Russian prose writing by men is hatred of and disgust with sex. (Until well into the XXth century there were no well-known female prose writers in Russia, which has always been a profoundly patriarchal society. So there is no literary tradition to speak of in the case of Russian female novelists, and I don't know if my argument would apply).

The main character of Kamennyi most (in Russian) has a lot of sex with a lot of women. His descriptions of these sex acts are filled with so much hatred and disgust that they are impossible to translate. I tried to think of translations for them but in vain. I simply don't know any words in English that would transmit the same emotional charge.

For anybody who read the XIX century Russian novelists, however, this is not surprising. The same hatred of human sexuality informs Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, Chekhov's The Duel, pretty much all works by Dostoyevsky. The list can go on ad infinitum. There is no way anybody can understand why the protagonist of Terekhov's latest novel hates sex so much, unless one has read his literary precursors.

So if anybody is looking for a doctoral dissertation topic in Slavic Studies, feel free to use this one.

Back from Miami

Courtesy of reader J., the first recovered post:

So I'm back from my trip to Miami, Florida. This was my first visit ever to this city, and here is the list of things I did and didn't like.


What I liked:

Civilization: restaurants, stores, bars, and coffee-shops are open until forever. I have sorely missed this kind of civilization here in Southern Illinois. People are outside all night long, walking, shopping, having fun. The city doesn't go dead after dark, unlike so many US cities.

Spanish: I love hearing Spanish being used on a massive scale. For one, it tells me that my profession will always be relevant and needed. Also, I really enjoy hearing it.

Ocean: I love the ocean. I can spend hours just looking at it. People who live in Miami are very lucky because they can enjoy it any time.

Students: there were tons of students in Miami this week who came there for the spring break. They would spend the whole night partying, dancing, screaming, and drinking themselves into oblivion. And then they would read books on the beach the next day. I even saw several students reading books on gender studies. I simply love seeing students enjoy themselves, it makes me very happy to observe them.

What I didn't like:

Airport: Our entire flight to Miami was shorter than the insane amount of time it took us to get to the place you collect your luggage, obtain the luggage, find the shuttle to take us to the hotel, and have the shuttle come out of the endlss and depressing maze of the airport. I have been to way too many airports in my life and I can say that the one in Miami is the most depressing of them all.

I've been sitting here for a while trying to think of something else I didn't like about Miami but there is nothing else. A great place, people, I totally recommend visiting it.

News on the Lost Posts

Today is a very happening day for this blog. :-) I have this wonderful reader who signs her comments as 'J', and who saved my posts in her RSS feed. And now she sent them back to me!!!! I am soooo happy. Now I will be reposting them again.

Thank you, J., for doing this! I hated the idea of losing these particular posts.

Thank you everybody who expressed support on this issue. It's great to see that while I have only one troll, I have so many wonderful readers.

Normalcy as a Disorder

Thanks to Izgad, I discovered this funny satirical piece on neurotypicality as a disorder. (Neurotypical means non-autistic, or what many people see as "normal"):

Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity. Neurotypical individuals often assume that their experience of the world is either the only one, or the only correct one. NTs find it difficult to be alone. NTs are often intolerant of seemingly minor differences in others. When in groups NTs are socially and behaviorally rigid, and frequently insist upon the performance of dysfunctional, destructive, and even impossible rituals as a way of maintaining group identity. NTs find it difficult to communicate directly, and have a much higher incidence of lying as compared to persons on the autistic spectrum. NT is believed to be genetic in origin. Autopsies have shown the brain of the neurotypical is typically smaller than that of an autistic individual and may have overdeveloped areas related to social behavior.
Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical.

An Autistic Hedge Fund Manager

Here is an interesting article on an autistic hedge fund manager:

In early 2004 a 32-year-old stock-market investor and hedge-fund manager, Michael Burry, immersed himself for the first time in the bond market. He learned all he could about how money got borrowed and lent in America. He didn’t talk to anyone about what became his new obsession; he just sat alone in his office, in San Jose, California, and read books and articles and financial filings. He wanted to know, especially, how subprime-mortgage bonds worked. A giant number of individual loans got piled up into a tower. The top floors got their money back first and so got the highest ratings from Moody’s and S&P, and the lowest interest rate. The low floors got their money back last, suffered the first losses, and got the lowest ratings from Moody’s and S&P. Because they were taking on more risk, the investors in the bottom floors received a higher rate of interest than investors in the top floors. Investors who bought mortgage bonds had to decide in which floor of the tower they wanted to invest, but Michael Burry wasn’t thinking about buying mortgage bonds. He was wondering how he might short, or bet against, subprime-mortgage bonds. Every mortgage bond came with its own mind-numbingly tedious 130-page prospectus. If you read the fine print, you saw that each bond was its own little corporation. Burry spent the end of 2004 and early 2005 scanning hundreds and actually reading dozens of the prospectuses, certain he was the only one apart from the lawyers who drafted them to do so—even though you could get them all for $100 a year from 10kWizard.com.

The subprime-mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified. A bond backed entirely by subprime mortgages, for example, wasn’t called a subprime-mortgage bond. It was called an “A.B.S.,” or “asset-backed security.” If you asked Deutsche Bank exactly what assets secured an asset-backed security, you’d be handed lists of more acronyms—R.M.B.S., hels, helocs, Alt-A—along with categories of credit you did not know existed (“midprime”). R.M.B.S. stood for “residential-mortgage-backed security.” hel stood for “home-equity loan.” heloc stood for “home-equity line of credit.” Alt-A was just what they called crappy subprime-mortgage loans for which they hadn’t even bothered to acquire the proper documents—to, say, verify the borrower’s income. All of this could more clearly be called “subprime loans,” but the bond market wasn’t clear. “Midprime” was a kind of triumph of language over truth. Some crafty bond-market person had gazed upon the subprime-mortgage sprawl, as an ambitious real-estate developer might gaze upon Oakland, and found an opportunity to rebrand some of the turf. Inside Oakland there was a neighborhood, masquerading as an entirely separate town, called “Rockridge.” Simply by refusing to be called “Oakland,” “Rockridge” enjoyed higher property values. Inside the subprime-mortgage market there was now a similar neighborhood known as “midprime.”

But as early as 2004, if you looked at the numbers, you could clearly see the decline in lending standards. In Burry’s view, standards had not just fallen but hit bottom. The bottom even had a name: the interest-only negative-amortizing adjustable-rate subprime mortgage. You, the homebuyer, actually were given the option of paying nothing at all, and rolling whatever interest you owed the bank into a higher principal balance. It wasn’t hard to see what sort of person might like to have such a loan: one with no income. What Burry couldn’t understand was why a person who lent money would want to extend such a loan. “What you want to watch are the lenders, not the borrowers,” he said. “The borrowers will always be willing to take a great deal for themselves. It’s up to the lenders to show restraint, and when they lose it, watch out.” By 2003 he knew that the borrowers had already lost it. By early 2005 he saw that lenders had, too.

The rest of the article is here.

Weird Things on This Blog

The recent crash of the blog is not the first weird thing that happened to it. Right after I published angry posts about Blankfein (here and here), I received am e-mail from Google (which provides the platform for the blog) saying that they got complaints from their advertisers that some content on my blog was "detrimental to their business practices." As a result, they pulled Google Ads from the blog for good. I don't care about it in the least because I prefer having my Amazon ads that I control rather than Google Ads that kept advertising Russian brides on the blog anyways. I have no idea whether this had anything to do with posts on Blankfein and I don't want to be paranoid. Maybe it's just a coincidence.

Another weird moment was when my blog was tagged as pornographic and removed from several directories because of the post on Mochica art.

So as you can see, blogging brings many surprises, and not all of them are good.

Slavoj Žižek on Vegetarians

I'm feeling so upset about the posts that disappeared that I'm going to post this very short video of Slavoj Žižek expressing his (strong) feelings about vegetarians. It shows how eccentric the great philosopher is and always makes me laugh.

Enjoy! However, if you are touchy on the subject of vegetarianism, then maybe you don't need to watch it. I don't need even more angry people descending onto my blog for the moment.

Crash

Ok, so I just woke up and realized that 6 or 7 of my most recent posts disappeared from the blog. And these were really good, long posts. There was a fun discussion of immigrant-hating pseudo-liberals. And a lovely (in my opinion) post on Russian literature. A beautiful post on Norway. The most recent post on trolling, with a fun picture and interesing quotes.

This is so annoying! I have no idea why the blog crashed, people. One possibility is that in a fit of technological stupidity I did something to it, but for the life of me I can't say what it could have been. I don't recall doing anything unusual with it in any way.

Another possibility is that the troll who has been bugging us for a while is to blame. S/he has been away for a while but last night the vile creature resurfaced and tried posting nasty comments on the most recent post. I prevented the comments from being published through moderation. Could this be the troll's doing?

This is very upsetting to me. A lot of effort went into those posts. The hatred towards immigrants discussion is at least preserved in the comments section of the post where it initially started. But Russian literature and Norway are gone for good. And the silliest thing is that I've been forgetting to back up the posts (which I normally do) for a few weeks now.

Michael Moore Makes Fun of Democrats

Michael Moore on 'The Rachel Maddow Show' making fun of the whiny, perennially scared Democrats.

Alligators and Indians

In Miami, we were given this advertisement for a tour to the Everglades. In case the photo comes out blurry, here is what it says:

Take an Airboat Ride across the River of Grass and see all the Nature, Wildlife, Animals, Alligators, Exotic Birds and The Native Indians.

Besides the annoying capitalizations, the list of things to see is very shocking. Animals, alligators, birds, and Indians? Are the people who worte this for real? If this is supposed to be some kind of a joke, it definitely isn't funny.

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Flowers for me

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Our Hotel and My Thoughts on Entitlement

This is our room at the Shelbourne Resort Hotel. We chose it because it was inexpensive and was located right on the beach. After we reserved the room, I read reviews of the hotels by recent guests and they were mostly negative. So much so that we fully expected to encounter some scary ruins upon our arrival. When we checked in, however, we discovered that the hotel was really great. Our room turned out to be not even a room but a suite, with a kitchenette, a living room, and a huge bedroom. It is shocking to me that so many people found something to complain about in this wonderful hotel.

Things like these make me very happy that I was born and spent the first 22 years of my life in a Third World country. I enjoy things a lot more than many people who were born to the First World affluence. Their gaze is first and foremost attracted to little imperfections and keeps dwelling on tiny details that are not absolutely perfect. It's sad to think how many people's vacations were spoiled because they don't know how to enjoy things.

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Ten Things to Say to a Naked Guy

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Cool Soaps

And they smell incredibly too.

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Jewelry Shopper's Paradise

'

Miami is a paradise for those who love flashy costume jewelry. And this particular store has fantastic and original headbands that I will use to shock my students. :-)

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More Beach

See how empty the beach is on this very sunny day? And it's already 10 am. The city is filled to the brim with tourists but they must be getting over their spring break hangovers, hence the deserted beaches. :-)

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The Waves

There is nothing more beautiful than the ocean. . .

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Hat

This is me on the beach in my huge pink hat.

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Lincoln Road, Miami

This fun store is decorated by dozens of ancient sewing machines. This is so cool.

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