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6 (50%)

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4 (33.3%)

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0 (0%)

Not really

1 (8.3%)

Not in the slightest

1 (8.3%)

Total Members Voted: 11

Voting closed: February 15, 2022, 10:51:36 AM

[Hairy Lime]

The latest from the  Build Back America lunacy:
Paid Family Leave - Gone
Free Community College -Gone
Billionaires Tax- All but Gone
Green Energy Shit -Gone

The destruction of Socialism is always a beautiful thing to behold!

Whatever happens they will call it a victory.

It will be. A massive program that will improve the lives of millions of regular Americans will be passed. It is not perfect and it is not as big as it should be, but the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good.

6% Inflation but only 2% growth while Biden  and the democrats debate raising taxes, even unconstitutional ones.
Thankfully 52 per cent of the US Senate can see what a lie Build Back Better really is.

Nice fiction.

HairLine, RedStain only deals in facts....please, sir, try to remember that when you address
our Stock market and Constitution resident expert!!!
ROFLOLOAO

I take offense to that. I haven't had one of those since the early 90s.

[facilitatorn]

http://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/28/2060746/-New-SEC-filing-uncovers-call-made-from-Sen-Burr-to-brother-in-law-minutes-before-stocks-dumped

Bill Burr for prison!

[kidcarter8]

The latest from the  Build Back America lunacy:
Paid Family Leave - Gone
Free Community College -Gone
Billionaires Tax- All but Gone
Green Energy Shit -Gone

The destruction of Socialism is always a beautiful thing to behold!

Whatever happens they will call it a victory.

It will be. A massive program that will improve the lives of millions of regular Americans will be passed. It is not perfect and it is not as big as it should be, but the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good.

Fuck Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.

Fuck all 50 Republicans

Without them you have nothing

[kidcarter8]

The Stock markets are hitting new highs.....can't wait to hear the credit lavished on Biden
the way it was on Trump!! IIRC it was treated as vindication that businessman Trump alone
knew how to finetuned an Economy! ROFLOLOAO....it was depicted by some here as a clear
Happiness Index that the US was the happiest place on earth or any other planet!
How long before the praise floods in?

Does Joe know there is a new housing bubble?

[facilitatorn]

http://www.vox.com/22745597/big-oil-congress-hearing-exxonmobil-bp-chevron-shell

[josh]

I am not the biggest Cornel West fan, but I think he hits the nail on the head in this WaPo piece:

From Cornel West, who defends Western classics as he condemns Howard University's decision to abolish teaching the Western Canon. 

s decision to abolish teaching the Western Canon. 

Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.

Long after Douglass's encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian -- he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963  "Letter From Birmingham Jail."

Yet today, one of America's greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational "prioritization," Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.

Academia's continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture's conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it's hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion.

The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the creme de la creme  of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking "What kind of creatures are we?" no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.

Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in "schooling," which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.

The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education. To end this spiritual catastrophe, we must restore true education, mobilizing all of the intellectual and moral resources we can to create human beings of courage, vision and civic virtue.

Students must be challenged: Can they face texts from the greatest thinkers that force them to radically call into question their presuppositions? Can they come to terms with the antecedent conditions and circumstances they live in but didn't create? Can they confront the fact that human existence is not easily divided into good and evil, but filled with complexity, nuance and ambiguity?

This classical approach is united to the Black experience. It recognizes that the end and aim of education is really the anthem of Black people, which is to lift every voice. That means to find your voice, not an echo or an imitation of others. But you can't find your voice without being grounded in tradition, grounded in legacies, grounded in heritages.

As German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasized in the past century, traditions are inescapable and unavoidable. It is a question not of whether you are going to work in a tradition, but which one. Even the choice of no tradition leaves people ignorantly beholden within a language they didn't create and frameworks they don't understand.

Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great." -Cornel West

[LarryBnDC]

The latest from the  Build Back America lunacy:
Paid Family Leave - Gone
Free Community College -Gone
Billionaires Tax- All but Gone
Green Energy Shit -Gone

The destruction of Socialism is always a beautiful thing to behold!

Whatever happens they will call it a victory.

It will be. A massive program that will improve the lives of millions of regular Americans will be passed. It is not perfect and it is not as big as it should be, but the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good.

Fuck Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.

Fuck all 50 Republicans

Without them you have nothing

I would rather have noting than have to experience the Republicans attack democracy because they have nothing to offer the electorate.

Oh yeah...

Caravans are back, huh?

[Oilcanary]

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050175142/naacp-pro-athletes-not-sign-texas-teams-voting-abortion-laws

Keep marching.   

[facilitatorn]

http://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgzpa/patrik-mathews-canadian-soldier-sentenced-nine-years

9 years has to be the minimum for anyone who helped steer the trump train into the Capital on Jan 6 or who is running a big lie campaign this cycle. The standard has been set of 9 years at least.

[REDSTATEWARD]

There is much to be thankful for though Joe Biden and the democrats have no player in this game.
Skittles has atoned for an 8 year old fuckup of eliminating the lime flavor skittle in favor of green apple.
I Mean has a green apple slice ever adorned  Margarita, a Vodka gimlet or a Gin and Tonic?
Of course not.
But the lime is back in the Skittles bag and the green apple is gone.
We are after a free society that votes with our choices.
Joe Biden beware!

[facilitatorn]

If you keep your advocacy to the candy isle you will be far less of a danger to your countrymen.

[josh]

[josh]

I am not the biggest Cornel West fan, but I think he hits the nail on the head in this WaPo piece:

Josh,  The article says that these courses will still be offered, not abolished. As for the removal
of a classics department, I would guess it has more to do with finance and class enrollment, than it
does an abandonment of the western cannon.  Good read by Prof. West.

Deej, after 30+ years of watching colleges, ditching the department leaves the individual courses to the vagaries of those separate departments and as the step-children they are, they drop rapidly by the wayside.

This is just the latest step.

[facilitatorn]

Therein lies just one problem with allowing the profit motive to infect the delivery of education.

[facilitatorn]

http://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/28/2060867/-Boise-mall-shooter-was-a-far-right-gun-rights-extremist-who-stalked-local-antifascists-at-rally