I confess to being troubled rather than elated by the daily rumble of idols falling to accusations of “sexual misconduct,” the morbid masscult fixation that conceals private titillation, knowing smirks, and sadistic lip-smacking behind a public mask of solemn reproof.
While accusations of student anti-Semitism at McGill draw international headlines, the university administration’s open association with a Jewish supremacist organization has been ignored.
A civilization where women and children are sexually commoditized is one in terminal decline. The next enduring superpower will be one that had successfully shielded its women and children from the ongoing epidemic of mass-mediated sexualisation. Any futurist worth his salt will vouch for this axiom, as well as note the inverse correlation between the enfeeblement of the current superpower and the procession of phallic chevrons that accompany its military compulsions abroad.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles.
— Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013, “The Cure at Troy.”)
The vast majority of human beings are pretty intelligent. A tiny percentage are noticeably slower than others, and an even tinier percentage are considerably brighter than others, but the vast majority of us are about the same, intelligence-wise. So the reason that most people don’t understand how the world really works has very little to do with intelligence; it has everything to do with two well-established and powerful institutions: education, and the mainstream media.
As a researcher and writer largely focused on Canadian foreign policy I was surprised to be profiled by a right wing US magazine and downright amazed when the story was tweeted out by renowned French imperialism apologist Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)
Economic violence against adjuncts
Just recently I went through a destabilizing, confusing, painful, shocking and infuriating experience of being stripped of my rehire rights as an adjunct college instructor. For those who do not know the term “road scholar” or “freeway flyer” is another way of saying that I cobble together a livelihood traveling from college to college. Adjuncts are like intellectual day laborers: the last hired and the first fired, with few, if any, protections or recognition.
If cutting-edge educational technologies can scientifically maximize student learning, then why do so many Silicon Valley bigwigs at Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Yahoo!
I’m beginning to suspect that the self-proclaimed liberals who protest scheduled talks on college campuses across the US are. in fact, conservative students working undercover to foster public disgust with the left. Some of these fiascos have to be staged. After all, it’s difficult to imagine a better way of shoring up conservative politics than by depicting liberals as a lot of hypersensitive scoundrels playing fast and loose with the First Amendment.
