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On the eve of the State of the Union, thought I’d take the time to display some recent exposition I participated in about the nature of our country and where it is relative to our founding ideals. Featuring three Brandeis debaters!
Mini Cup Round 3 (Brandeis A vs Brandeis/BU) from Will Crocker on Vimeo.
Our teetering economy is completely based on an ongoing imperial campaign to dominate resources around the globe. Our country’s primary contribution to the rest of the world is death. We export death, that we may import gadgets and trinkets and nonsense. So says Joe Rogan.
I’ve always felt the turning point in the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign was the moment when the sight of then-candidate Barack Obama after wrapping up the Democratic nomination was almost immediately contrasted with now-failed-candidate and angry man John McCain, in front of a sickening green background and performing to an audience which sounded more like a canned laugh track, giving a nasty, pitiful screed about the man who would trounce him in the election only a few months later. One man represented the best of what America would like to imagine itself as–intelligent, broad-minded, appealing to the better angels of our nature–and the other represented the impossibly tired bitterness of a rapidly disappearing part of our society. The choice, and thus result, was never more stark.
Beyond expressing my sorrow for the lost and injured and all those affected by this tragedy, I have little to say about the horrific events in Arizona yesterday except one thing. Regular Mep readers / listeners will know all of us here put a high value on communication and the power of rhetoric; the two greatest speakers of the twentieth century (arguably) were Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler, and I don’t think anyone needs a cheat sheet to determine which person pursued the good and which the evil. What yesterday conclusively, definitively proves is that rhetoric is not an unalloyed good. It is a neutral tool, and it has consequences.
Hell yeah, I want my pony!
This article at The People’s View should be required reading for all those interested in discovering what some parts of both the right and left of the blogosphere have to gain in trying to destroy (fortunately unsuccessfully, I think) President Obama–or, more accurately, what they have to gain in upping the ante on false outrage in a public forum. (Here’s a hint: it’s the same thing anti-corporatists are always claiming (often rightly) is the end goal of every politician.) One wonders how much time MLK or Gandhi would have had for this kind of kabuki.
Presuming that you’re an American reading this, the odds are fairly strong that you heard this juicy tidbit in the internet/sports rumor mill today. The story is about a woman who is adored for her ability to play pretend, who filed for divorce from her husband, who is adored for his ability to throw a sphere into a standardized hoop.
Unless you are a facebook friend of mine, or happen to follow CERN’s twitter stream, you almost certainly weren’t appraised of this story today. That one told of the most complicated device ever constructed by your species, spawned something that, until fairly recently, was thought to be a purely theoretical type of stuff and sustained it for longer than it had ever been sustained.
I would love to say it was a good day for the human race. I’m not so sure.
Teachers are used to working with less. Primary school teachers are used to buying basic classroom supplies out of their own salaries; secondary school teachers are used to teaching with classrooms at double or more capacity; post secondary teachers at all levels are used to ever increasing demands from multiple masters (publish now, do committee work now, teach now, advise now…everything now, or preferably yesterday). I’ve taught at all these levels, and most of the teachers I know accept their respective situations with a shrug and a sense of humor (there’s a reason the teachers’ lounge is the most important room in any school building for the people to whom it caters).
This is mindblowingly brilliant…and perhaps the best use of a Congressional hearing in decades. Proof that this hits home: the face of bigoted jackass Rep. Steve King, who understands the target of the joke. I’d ask the Republicans who don’t understand to read up on Voltaire, but I doubt they’d get the reference.
I anticipate a lack of consensus on this point amongst the Meppers, but I think Richard Dawkins gives us a worthy starting point here in responding to a hackneyed argument against Atheism, that it cannot truly uphold morality.
Here is the esteemed Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, repeatedly failing to use the English language in her Gubernatorial Debate opening statement. Arizona seems to be well on its way to surpassing California in the stupefyingly incompetent elected official category.
On the other hand, I am somewhat mollified by her assurance that she has done the best possible job of any conceivable theoretical candidate.
