In my youth, my dad often gave me the following advice. Respect your elders, but don’t take any shit. I took Dad to mean that there is a mutual component to respect, that my respecting my elders didn’t give them… Read More ›
politics
Thoughtlets. xxviii.
It’s no small annoyance whenever an interlocutor stops to evaluate whether what I have just said falls on the political left or the right. In so doing she’s pegging me to a side. And once pegged, in her mind, whether… Read More ›
Thoughtlets .xxv.
If you like something a political speaker has said or the way she’s said it, ask yourself who her target audience is and whether you are a member. If so, remember the politician is soliciting your vote. It would not… Read More ›
Thoughtlets .xviii.
Words such as ‘matters’, ‘dangerous’, and even ‘good’, require an indexical, by which is meant these words require a to or a for. Once you flesh in the indexical you open questions such as why, how, and so what? Some… Read More ›
Thoughtlets .viii.
Stand in one room while the television is on in the other. Now see if you can distinguish the voices of Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) and Tucker Carlson (Fox News). I can’t. Notice that it’s not just their voices that are… Read More ›
6.2.c.i. The Political Rhetor and The Future. Future Generations: The end of ‘my’ world versus the end of ‘the’ world.
In this entry, I examine a broad swath of the conceptual territory underpinning future generations. Since this topic is particularly content-dense, I’ve decided to break this blog entry into several posts under a few different subheadings. Before reading on, I… Read More ›
Aristotle and Pam on The Political Rhetor. Series. 6.1. Intro.
“The political orator* aims at establishing the expediency** or the harmfulness of a proposed course of action; if he urges its acceptance, he does so on the grounds it will do good; if he urges its rejection, he does so… Read More ›
Fist Pumping.
I’ve here in mind the fist-pumping variety of politically vocal people, those certain that one side is leading us to another dark ages and the other to a totalitarian state. It appears that for some “left and right” thinking is… Read More ›
The Political Rhetor and the Future. 6.2.b. Children.
Preparing for the future must begin, as always, with our children. Ronald Wilson Regan, State of the Union [USA] 1987, 27 January 1987. Children have little to no political voice. They can neither vote nor hold public office. But think… Read More ›