Manuscripts cannot be burnt (deleted, hid, made inaccesible etc.)

I've accross a saved version of that post I talked about earlier. Again, if you are lucky to be able to read in Russian, enjoy the rant of a woman who knows what she is worth ($3730 USD per month).

Russia's NY Rangers go down

Canada.com reports:

YAROSLAVL, Russia (CP) - The most expensive and star-studded hockey team in the world this season has been knocked out in the first round of the Russian league playoffs.

AK Bars Kazan, which acquired 15 NHLers since the lockout started in September, was eliminated in four games against Lokomotiv Yaroslavl in the best-of-five quarter-final series.

Lokomotiv, with eight NHLers of their own, defeated AK Bars 2-1 on Tuesday to end the season for a club which has spent unprecedented salaries in European club hockey and has been given the nickname New York Rangers East by European sports media.

Despite the likes of Dany Heatley, Vincent Lecavalier, Alexei Kovalev, Alexei Morozov, Ilya Kovalchuk, Slava Kozlov, Denis Arkhipov, Alexei Zhitnik and Darius Kasparaitius, AK Bars managed only five goals in the four games against Lokomotiv goaltender Marc Lamothe - a 31-year-old native of New Liskeard, Ont.

I watched the end of the second game yesterday when Heatley scored on the tenth (!) shootout attempt. But it turned out they were just lucky. The displined Lokomotiv, a slightly more offensive minded replica of NJ Devils, overplayed them and tied 'em down.
All those millions wasted...
In the ongoing lockout I tend to be sympathetic to the players side somewhat more. But honestly, this is just another evidence to the argument how grossly overpriced some NHLs are..

Political quiz results

You scored as Anarchism. <'Imunimaginative's Deviantart Page'> Anarchism 83% Republican 58% Fascism 42% Socialist 33% Democrat 33% Green 17% Communism 8% Nazi 0% What Political Party Do Your Beliefs Put You In? created with QuizFarm.com

Scholars for tyrants

A Scholar For Stalin
For twenty years, Grover Furr has been an English professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, where he educates students in his peculiar worldview, which is an updated Stalinism and in which America is the world’s biggest oppressor and greatest terrorist state. While his academic expertise is English literature, he presents himself as an expert on communism, and scours academic forums like the Historians of American Communism net, defending Joseph Stalin and calling America’s role in bringing down the Soviet Empire a moral outrage. “Was there something morally wrong in trying to bring down the Soviet Union? I think the only honest answer possible is: Yes, it was wrong,” says Furr.

The ugly extent to which American academic institutions are riddled with half, semi and downright unabashed apologists for the most murderous ideology in history of mankind is truly, truly frightening.
Can you find any Nazi prof who would be so boastful about his views.
I don't think so.
read it all

Hat tip: Daimnation

Russian feminism: what women want

Due to absolute impracticality of such posts, long time ago I set up a rule for myself - not to post anything that has no English translation available (at least my own). But this one is just... I don't know what to make of it:
she entitled it as follows:
"you ask, we answer. A response to the untactful question "if she is
so cool, why isn't she married yet."
Short summary:

Short summary:
- many successful women are not married due to the absense of the 'real man' in their lives.
- The real man is characterized by ... followed is a long list of things... most of which have do with material goods:
he should pay for -, included but not limited to,- shoes, apartment renovations, trips to Europe, lingerie, flowers, dinners at restaurants etc. etc. etc. etc.
- the meticulous calculations have yeldied the precise result:
the RM has to earn no less than 3 730 USD per month (to live with
his woman in Moscow).

The funniest thing of all is that she calls herself a feminist :-)

P.S. there has been about 1000 comments on the manifesto of that wholesale whore so far. Impressive, eh?

best article on PC I ever read

Political correctness. It's a dreadful word to me and I've touched upon this subject here and there. However, I couldn't find time nor inspiration to put summarize my thoughts about this phenomenon. The following article, written by a Polish intellectual, Agnieszka Kolakowska excited and disappointed me at the same time. Although I read a Russian translation of it (yes, I could only find it in Russian) and fired me up and was a great pleasure to read. Alas, having read it I don't think I could add anything more. So I decided
to translate some parts of it into English and here's what I've got
(my translation might as well be clumsy, I did it really fast but
I do hope I've been able to preserve the spirit of her work):

…political correctness originated from the same utopia and on the same ground: the American youth movement of protest in the 60s, the flower-children. It has a lot in common with other movements, trends, and ideologies that have the same roots, in particular feminism, antiglobalism, ecologism, and the so called “New Age” philosophy. It is equally abstract and mindless and grows out of the same pure, infantile idealism without a speck of irony. It doesn’t concern itself whether it is feasible to fulfill its ideals nor what they bring with them as well as practical consequences of its actions. All utterances, deeds, prohibitions, prescriptions, condemnations and intellectual trends, which we perceive as political correct ones, are inspired by this ideology.


Next, there is the illiterate. There are no stupid people only differently smart. Everybody has his own truth that is as important as anyone else’s (however, there are ones that are more important). What is called ‘objective truth’ doesn’t exist. It is an authoritarian notion, invented and imposed by the western civilization in order to oppress the ‘weak ones’….
Exams are an elitist way of oppression. Facts are irrelevant.

Everybody has the right to realize his dreams or more correctly, the right to demand from the state to fulfill them. Everybody has the right for self-expression (but for the freedom of speech). Every person is determined by his/her belonging to this or that group – sexual, social, religious, ethnic. Each such group, if it is a minority, has the right to demand special treatment from the state. The only solution of all problems – of schools, universities, poverty, hospitals, hunger in the Third World – is to relentlessly invest money, however only taxpayer money, and there is no need to investigate how it is being spent, especially in the Third World, and especially when it ends up in the hands of dictators who care so much for their people, of course never ever possessed any nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Some of the thoughts and opinions I have cited are extreme and supported only by the fanatical adherents of political correctness. However, even they wouldn’t exist in isolation from everything else. Other are more common and even mandatory among leftist elites and can exist separately.

Here's another article by her worth reading:
Political Correctness and the Totalitarian Mentality. Note her poignantly bitter treatment of the European constitution at the end of it.

Discussing feminism: Russian style

yesterday I watched one of the few slightly intelligent Russian talk shows the Duel. It’s basically a dispute over a hot topic between two opponents who don’t like each other, to put it mildly. This time the subject was feminism.

In one corner it was a flamboyant journalist, in the other – a well-known Russian feminist Maria Arbatova. So what do I have to say?

First of all, it was funny to hear that Arbatova assured the audience that she’s no radical feminist. If in the West such an admission would be a sign of the post-radical feminist wave, in Russia it’s the only way to legitimize the discourse. Feminism in Russia is associated with ‘those crazy American things’ though I doubt many Russians heard of Andrea Dworkin and her ‘intercourse as rape theory’. Russian men and women would be put aback by much milder things.

The discussion wasn’t particularly interesting, it was quite superficial, but the jokes were. I thought for myself that if many jest that were said by Arbatova’s opponent and the anchorman would have never been allowed on any North American show. As George Carlin once put it: “you can talk about rape but you can’t joke about rape.” There has been a different approach to humor in Russia. Russians hold humor in much higher regard than in America. ‘For a good laugh I won’t spare even my own father’ says a Russian proverb. That’s why political correctness would never take roots in Russia, at least to the same extent as in North America. The reason for it is historical and can be found in the experience of totalitarianism and communism when joking was the only form of political dissent even if, as it was the case during Stalin’s time, the jollier could be sent to GULAG.

Another funny thing that happened was a clash between Arbatova and a woman in the audience, a professional gynecologist MD etc. She said that she feels no discrimination and is satisfied with her personal and professional life (she said she would get her Ph.D. in medicine in eight months). I was a bit disgusted with the way Arbatova totally dismissed her. She kept saying that you’re on a low level yet and when you reach your ‘glass ceiling’ then we can talk… I thought it was quite arrogant of her.

Unorthodox guide to media studies

It is not an easy task to go through the great amount literature written in the area of media studies. Even if you’re well versed in reading academic literature, say in history, it’s still hard to make sense of it. In the realm of media studies things are unfolded so that they can be juxtaposed and then explicated. I guess now I know the difference between explaining and explicating. While the former means clearing something up to make it more understandable the latter is all about obscuring and confusing them even more. Ok, but back to media studies. But once you get past the incomprehensible part, it’s quite revealing.
As 90% of media research deals with the U.S. media (or Western media in general) it rests on few core premises. The researchers use many words to describe them but to put it succinctly it looks like this: the U.S. media is skewing things up because it’s part of the ruling elite. The most famous expression of it is Chomsky’s notion of ‘manifacturing consent’. Being unable to prove with concrete evidence that the U.S. media is taking directions from the White House it purports to demonstrate that the media presents issues in such a way that serves interests of the elites, deliberately obscuring possible alternative angles.
One of the favorite subjects of the research done in the 90s was the first Gulf War. How did the media skew the debate at the time? I’ve come across two explanations. The debate was presented as having only two alternatives: either attack Iraq now, or later. But

a) nobody bothered to consider whether Iraq had legitimate claims to Kuwait.
b) nobody wanted to discuss the possibility of negotiations, as oppose to the armed stand off.

And this is presented as some sort of hidden truth that the brave scholar has evinced to the gullible public. The problem with these ‘alternative frameworks for discussion’ is that they’re entirely illusory. It is implied that those options were indeed somehow feasible and the media just didn’t want to explore them. However, their feasibility must be proven first for otherwise it opens up the Pandora box of countless alternative scenarios.
Let me give you an example. Take the last presidential elections: the media was relentlessly discussing what would happen if either candidate wins but nobody bothered to discuss what would happen if monarchy is introduced in the U.S. And guess what – coz it ain’t gonna ever happen.
Like many other disciplines in social sciences, media studies have been hijacked by the Left. Hence those absurd claims about bias where there is none (and conversely don’t expect to find any study that examines the left-wing bias). In order to succeed in this field one has to posses two skills: to be well versed in the leftist dogma and to be able to express his thoughts in a complicated, perplexing manner that passes for ‘academic lingo’. “To live with the wolves one must know to cry like a wolf’ says a Russian saying – I’m slowly learning.