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The complaints that it was difficult to read if not on a laptop/pc/etc were increasing in frequency and urgency.

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I'm reluctant to beat what is (on Twitter) already a very dead horse, but today's newest literary feces from Bari Weiss on the once-not-totally embarrassing New York Times opinion page is just astonishingly bad. If you ever wondered what it was like to grade a paper written by a really conceited (Everyone tells me I'm so smart!) 19 year old journalism major, here's your chance.

I decided it is too long, tedious, and stupid to give a full FJM treatment, since that actually requires effort on my part. And I realize (as they anticipate when publishing shit like this) the recourse to "Respect opinions you don't agree with" is strong. But this isn't about opinions and differences surrounding them. This is about the Newspaper of Record, in a misplaced stab at "intellectual diversity", giving regular column space to someone who literally sounds like a teenager. A not insightful, sickeningly proud of herself teenager.

Read as much of this as you can. This is simply awful. It is written at a college level, and not a high college level. "There be dragons" and "That which cannot be named" appear before the end of the fourth paragraph. The cliches and thesaurus-thumbing verbiage are so thick that you can see them coming two sentences in advance. If this were an article about luxury automated socialism for Arizona Cardinals fans, I would still loathe it because it is fucking unreadable.

Why does this person have this platform when equivalent writing can be found in the campus newspaper of any university in the country?
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Whose cousin is she? Who do mom and dad know? This is either a case of nepotism or Bari Weiss is the goddamn luckiest person on Earth, plucked out of the sea of millions of other people who can sort-of write in sentences but do it with the tone and cadence of a high school senior trying too hard.
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And on its merits, even if this weren't juvenile and hard to read, this argument is just fucking ludicrous. "Intellectual Dark Web" is a bunch of people with massive, highly visible platforms. Hack comedian and former gross-out TV host Joe Rogan has the second most listened to podcast. On Earth! Like, out of all podcasts! He was on a sitcom so even your mom and dad know who he is! Literally nobody is silencing Joe Rogan. Or Ben Shapiro. Or Jordan Peterson – you can't go five fucking minutes without seeing his cadaverous mug these days.

Here is a set of supposedly taboo ideas so subversive that one cannot avoid seeing them everywhere, every day. Major media outlets. The high-traffic internet. On university campuses. On talk shows. On podcasts. From the Republican majority in both chambers of Congress as well as the White House and 3/5 of state capitols. And the ideas are SO taboo that…you can name every single thing she is going to bring up by the time you've gotten six sentences into the piece.

Oh let me guess. Feminism is out of control. College kids are snowflakes. Identity politics something something. Immigration is bad. Muslims are terrorists. "Western culture" something something. There, did I get them all?

How does an editor let this happen? Do these people have no self-respect at all? Some overgrown sorority girl sends you a pitch like, "I'm gonna write about how all my friends and all the people who agree with me are REBELS!" and what do you say in response? Maybe the writing is on the wall for the Times to the extent that everyone just shrugs and says "OK, whatever" at this point. I can't tell if that is more or less sad than the idea of an editor reading this and thinking, "Great, this is exactly what I wanted.
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No Politics Friday is canceled.
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For obvious reasons.

I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I've read enough to know where this is going. To know how it ends. To see what happens when people become sufficiently fearful of The Other to weaken their attachment to civil liberties and embrace authoritarianism as it seduces them with promises of greater security. We've seen this before and I don't like where we're heading at all.

In Mexico, for example, the insane levels of violence that have resulted from the so-called Drug War have left better off Mexicans more than willing to give up rights, freedoms, and liberties (at least in theory) in exchange for greater security. In Europe, no matter how much they enjoy looking down their noses at the United States for our obvious problems with race and state-administered violence, their commitment to cultural liberalism crumbles fairly easily in the face of non-European immigration.

The ISIS plan all along – and without commenting on the morality of it, it's hard not to recognize its brilliance – has been to radicalize European Muslims by provoking extreme reactions from European non-Muslims. Despite the prejudices and social isolation they no doubt encounter, European Muslims have developed an appreciation for life in Europe over the last three decades. Yes, there is no doubt that they experience prejudice and racism and the sharp end of the stick of xenophobia, but if you asked the average Muslim immigrant to Europe how life there compares to life in Syria or Turkey or Iraq, they're going to look you in the eye and say "This is just fine.
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" So ISIS endeavors to create enough chaos to provoke a far-right reaction from European governments which will allow them to tell European Muslims, "See? We told you so! Look at how these white Europeans treat you!"

I'm afraid, given the number of major terrorist attacks in Europe over the past year, that the strategy is on the verge of working. Far-right nationalist parties have been doing better than usual in European elections for the past few years, and xenophobia is on the rise everywhere.
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A nation partial to cultural hegemony like France is not far away from getting a decent amount of public support behind an idea like "Let's round up all the Muslims and put them in camps." It's plausible because there really is no means for a modern nation-state to stop attacks as low tech as what we've seen lately. The attack in Nice required nothing more than access to a truck. The pool of people in Europe who meet that stringent criteria number in the tens of millions.

What has been seen recently in Europe is not 9/11, not the London 7/7 bombings, not the Madrid train attacks. We have seen attacks lately that literally cannot be stopped because they are so low tech. It takes no sophistication, no ISIS coordination, no detailed planning to mount an attack along the lines of, "Let's go somewhere with lots of people and shoot a bunch of them" or "Let's find a big crowd and drive a truck into it.
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" As people across Europe try to come to grips with the inability of states to grapple with these one- or two-man terrorist attacks, far right wing authoritarianism is going to appeal to more and more of the population. There is no way to stop one man acting alone driving a truck into a crowd of people; so, anyone pushing the message, "Let's get rid of all of Those People" will have the upper hand.

I do not like where this is headed. I do not like it one bit.

One of the hazards of following Gin and Tacos during the Stanley Cup Playoffs is the potential for a five hour, six period game with 115 shots on goal to come between me and the schedule of posts for the week. I had the best intentions. Thank you for your patience. This has been your annual Overtime Hockey Service Interruption (OHSI). Part II of yesterday's post will be here as soon as possible.

Bonus fun fact: Headers are illegal in hockey, so I guess it's not correct to call it Ice Soccer anymore.

What we have thought for years has become painfully obvious – John "Orange Julius" Boehner has no real power and no control of his own caucus. Anecdotal evidence has suggested this in the past and now the hard numbers back it up.

According to VoteView, there is a clear divide within the House GOP on the Homeland Security supplemental.

When the Speaker of the House gets elected by the smallest margin ever and then cannot deliver a three week budget extension through the House with a massive majority, it's safe to say that the spirit of Joe Cannon has not returned to Congress in a new host. That vote also demonstrates the increasingly frequent consequences of the Republican Party's incredible lurch to the right over the last two decades (also from VoteView).

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It's worth noting, for the conspiratorial or anti-intellectual factions, that VoteView is the product of two of the most conservative people I've ever met in academia.
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Guys who make Glenn Beck look like Jane Fonda (who they both hate, because of course they do). The thing is, they also have a great deal of integrity and they're more interested in the accuracy of their analysis than making ideological points. Having been a colleague of one of them for a few years and being subject to every manner of Thanks Obama rant, I have to laugh every time his findings end up being used in stories on major news sites and someone in the comment section comes forth to remind us that Ivory Tower Librul Professors are not to be trusted.

In any case, we are rapidly approaching a reality in which House Republicans are too conservative even for…the House Republicans. They provide a nice counterweight to those communist Democrats who have barely moved ideologically in a century-plus.

The best part of teaching, hands down, is reading internet comments in which every jackass on the planet tells you the correct way to do your job. Monday's post provides some really choice examples.

See, the problem is always the teacher to some people; there is no chance it could be – maybe, possibly, in any reality – that an actual problem exists with the modal student. Nope. Teacher's fault. Every time! Isn't that amazing? You'd think that by chance the student population (or their parents, or whatever is under discussion) would be responsible for their own shortcomings once or twice. You'd be wrong.

Everyone thinks they know something about teaching because everyone has been in school. Makes sense. Also, I eat in a lot of restaurants so I am a fucking chef.

Did it ever occur to any of these morons that maybe – maybe – I dump all my frustrations here so that I don't let them show while I'm at work? That I actually do everything but cartwheels in the classroom to try to get them to show any enthusiasm at all for the subject matter? That I leave all of my energy and enthusiasm on the field and when I get home and post here at midnight I'm fucking tired and getting ready to get up and do it all over again?

Did any of these pedantic dipshits consider that if I decided to yield to their expertise and let them do my job that they'd be lucky to get through one day? No, of course not, because the students basically do the job for you as long as you know how to teach. This skill, oddly enough, belongs only to non-teachers.

Did it escape the notice of this brigade of pedagogical superstars that they picked up a habit of blaming teachers from their own academic failures and the need to make every C+ someone else's fault? The system ultimately failed to recognize their brilliance and they're back to set it straight.

In conclusion to the angriest post I've ever written, thanks for your concern but I know how to do my fucking job. I'm actually pretty good at it. The fact that your thought process is so linear and your imaginations and intellects so dull that you conclude that the way someone anonymously blogs about something has given you insight into their personality and habits in the real world would make me even more irritated if I wasn't busy pitying you.

Please describe your profession in the comments and I will get back to you individually telling you how you are doing it wrong.

Eagerly Waiting,
Ed

Having written for the past six or seven hours without interruption, I have neither the piss nor the vinegar right now.
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Will try Wednesday morning instead. Bear with me this week and the content will be back on schedule before you know it.
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Literally. Since you won't know it until you check back and realize that it's here.
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OK, so this isn't entirely devoid of politics. It's just a little, though, in keeping with the spirit of NPF.

You know that I have a strong interest in maps and geography, and a lot of what I actually get paid to do involves GIS. So it was with great pleasure that I read this interview on Wired's MapLab with the head of the US Geographic Information Unit. It sounds boring, right? And then you see the guy and you think, my god, this is going to be the most boring thing ever.

Power through your skepticism and read it. He has some rather neat stories to tell about the role of mapping in U.S. foreign policy. When nations disagree about a border or the name of a geographic feature, how does the State Department avoid hurting anyone's feelings?

One case I worked on that was kind of fun involves a tiny island off the coast of Morocco. It’s very close to shore and very, very small. But about 11 years ago Morocco sent a few troops there and Spain swooped in with helicopters and expelled them and it became a big deal.

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[Then-Secretary of State] Colin Powell was asked to mediate the conflict. [In Powell's plan] everyone was going to leave the island, with no prejudice as to who it belonged to. They drew up an agreement but the problem was the name. The Spanish wouldn’t use the Moroccan name and the Moroccans wouldn’t use the Spanish name.

I was at a dinner party that Saturday night and I got a call from the Secretary’s staff saying that instead of a name they wanted to use the coordinates for that island.

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So I showed them how to get on a database and do that. I could hear the Secretary in the background saying, “Ask him how accurate those coordinates are.” They’re not totally accurate, but there’s no island nearby with which it could possibly be confused. So the documents he drew up for the mediations referred to “the island and such and such coordinates” and those documents had to be signed by the prime minister of Spain and the king of Morocco by midnight that same day.

The prime minister of Spain signed, no problem. But they had to send a high speed car looking for the king of Morocco. This was in the days before cellphones were prevalent. So they caught up to him and he basically had to pull over at some house and say, “Excuse me, I’m your king, could I use your phone?
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” He called up Powell and asked him to read the document, which he immediately agreed to. So that was a big deal, and my small part in it was to provide those coordinates. It’s a great example of how geographic names matter.

Clever. So the old saying is true and it's impossible to offend either a Spaniard or a Moroccan with coordinates.

Tuesday night I began writing the all-planned-out piece from yesterday and one of my academic pals started chatting at me on Facebook about the direction of our respective careers. He is quite successful and works at a large research university in a wonderful location.

I am a complete failure at this and I do not.

If you want to have the feeling of being a cork in the ocean or the ball in a pinball machine, become an academic. Because whenever people give me this talk, the only thing that becomes apparent is that I have no control whatsoever over my career. It all hinges on totally subjective decisions made by strangers.

Sure, I can send out lots of papers, apply for a lot of jobs, and so on, but then it's up to others to make the decision, often in startlingly random ways. So instead of thinking, "I need to publish X papers" we end up having to think, "If I can somehow get X papers accepted" or "I hope there are some job openings this year.
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The action verb is always referring to someone else in this field. Nothing to do but try and hope for the best, knowing full well that the odds against The Best happening are 99% and growing. If having no control over where you live or the conditions of your employment sounds appealing, contact me to learn more about how to get started in the exciting world of higher education.
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I laid down four hours ago to write this post and I ended up writing nothing.
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This is happening a lot lately.
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I know what to write about and I know, in some cases, exactly what I'm going to say but I end up doing nothing. Is there a word for losing the ability to do anything except stare aimlessly at the internet or TV?

Sorry to disappoint the, like, fifty readers I have after doing this daily for a decade.