Wednesday, February 28, 2018
“If you can’t get elected without taking money from child murderers, why are you running?”
Brian Higgins, my congressman, was pretty bad on gun control, and then he got okay, and now he's good. As I am writing this I have just received notification on my phone that there were shots fired in a Georgia high school, with no injuries reported. Kids, if you are going to take this past where we are today-- which is already further than we've gotten since, probably, the Brady Bill-- you are going to have to get a lot of your peers registered, and they are going to have to hit the streets. Can it be done? I think it can, but it is going to be a big lift. There are a lot of people for whom guns are a single issue. They need to know that gun violence is unacceptable, and you are going to have to be the ones that explain it to them.
Brian Higgins, my congressman, was pretty bad on gun control, and then he got okay, and now he's good. As I am writing this I have just received notification on my phone that there were shots fired in a Georgia high school, with no injuries reported. Kids, if you are going to take this past where we are today-- which is already further than we've gotten since, probably, the Brady Bill-- you are going to have to get a lot of your peers registered, and they are going to have to hit the streets. Can it be done? I think it can, but it is going to be a big lift. There are a lot of people for whom guns are a single issue. They need to know that gun violence is unacceptable, and you are going to have to be the ones that explain it to them.
Monday, February 26, 2018
Judged undergrad Mock Trial yesterday. Mad props to Jon Lines and Peter Yacobucci -- the Buffalo State students that I teach along with them can stand in the room with any of the students I saw yesterday.
It's a funny thing about teaching: I've been doing it for a long time now, and one of the big things I've learned is that it really doesn't matter where your students start-- as long as you gear your starting place to their abilities you can move them to the place where they can excel. I judged two rounds, so I saw 24 students in all. I find that I don't really care about where the students are from, for the most part, but two of the teams I saw were from medium-fancy colleges, and they comported themselves very well. (Overheard at lunch: "How come these kids are so much better than the guys I see in court every day? Most of those guys don't seem like they should be able to find their way into their own socks.")
It's a funny thing about teaching: I've been doing it for a long time now, and one of the big things I've learned is that it really doesn't matter where your students start-- as long as you gear your starting place to their abilities you can move them to the place where they can excel. I judged two rounds, so I saw 24 students in all. I find that I don't really care about where the students are from, for the most part, but two of the teams I saw were from medium-fancy colleges, and they comported themselves very well. (Overheard at lunch: "How come these kids are so much better than the guys I see in court every day? Most of those guys don't seem like they should be able to find their way into their own socks.")
Friday, February 23, 2018
By the way, Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an enviromental activist who wrote The Everglades: River of Grass. The high school named for her opened in 1990. It seems to me to have produced some outstanding students.
Thursday, February 22, 2018
I knew less about Paul Manafort than I should have. What a creep.
Monday, February 19, 2018
Interesting comparison:
[T]he Hill-Thomas conflagration was the first moment in American history when we collectively, truly grappled with sexual harassment. For my generation, it was the equivalent of the Hiss-Chambers case, a divisive national argument about whom to believe in a pitched political and ideological battle, this one with an overlay of sex and race.It's a funny thing about social change- sometimes it seems as though it happens pretty quickly, but I suspect that is an illusion, and things really just gradually build up until the change is upon us. Sexual harassment is, an outcome which exists because of a failure to recognize the common humanity of us all (just like racism). I'm certainly not immune, or above criticism, but my daughters are clearly more evolved, and I think this is probably the case with many- if not most- people who are their age. And when I listen to the speech made by Emma Gonzalez the other day I have some hope that we are actually moving in the right direction.
Monday, February 12, 2018
The Reagan Administration was populated with every sort of grifter, goniff and poltroon anyone could have imagined at the time, and the Republican Party managed to persuade itself that it was a brilliant success, and that Ronnie himself was a bizarre sort of secular saint. That's the problem with lying to yourself- at some point you start believing it, and we end up with the sort of cargo-cult politics we are living with today. Do you think Paul Ryan believes in this shit? Of course he does- he really is that stupid. As for the 40% that mostly supports Trump, my guess is that roughly 10% should know better, but are so pissed off that they have persuaded themselves that trolling the rest of us is a productive and worthwhile thing to do. It is possible that Mitch McConnell falls into this group, a septuagenarian middle finger to the world of the sane
Wednesday, February 07, 2018
We were watching "The Good Place" and I opined that there is a difference between morals and ethics. EGC, who has taught Ethics and certainly given the issue more thought than I have, contends that the terms are interchangeable.
