Category Archives: politics

Trendsetting Garbage

internet, politics, sports Leave a comment

Not loving the new Twitter? Here’s how to revert back to the old desktop version (Manchester Evening News) Now that my AFL club is doing well again (albeit with a propensity for needing last-second heroics week after week to get wins, even against bottom-of-the-ladder clubs), I’ve been looking at more Australian Rules Football videos online lately. As I’ve been doing so, I’ve noticed that there is one user on YouTube — I won’t mention their name, but I will say that they’ve uploaded zero videos,…

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Remaining Silent

politics, rhetoric, teaching Leave a comment

‘Know Your Rights’: Immigration advocates, attorneys ramp up efforts ahead of planned mass ICE raids (NBC News) One of the English classes I taught back in Toledo started out on the first day with a student threatening violence against me because he couldn’t use the textbook from his previous English class in mine. (I didn’t have any control over what textbooks I could use in that class, but he was giving every sign that he didn’t want to listen to anyone, as evidenced by his…

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Passionless

politics, rhetoric Leave a comment

Shouting match erupts as Pennsylvania lawmakers debate welfare bill (abc13.com)Nancy Pelosi Is Listening to the Wrong People (Esquire via Yahoo! News)Hey, Democrats: Stop Being Polite (Huffington Post via Yahoo! News) After the Republican wave election in 2010, new Republican majorities in a lot of state houses were quick to use their power to push through extremely right-wing legislation, covering everything from budgets to social policy, for a lot of new Republican governors to sign. Trying to determine which state got hit the hardest by these…

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O’er the Land of the Screwed, and the Home of the Screwers

politics, teaching Leave a comment

DeVos Repeals Obama-Era Rule Cracking Down on For-Profit Colleges (The New York Times) This presidential campaign season, as execrable as it already is (and I’m under no delusions of it somehow getting better in the next sixteen months), has at least generated some discourse about American colleges and universities, especially about their cost. While the possibility of forgiving student debt has grabbed the most headlines, how future students will pay for their higher education, or even if they’ll have to pay at all (outside of…

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Trimmed

books, politics, writing Leave a comment

The first video-intensive website I remember visiting is a special site that Norelco built to sell a new razor that was designed to capitalize on a new trend, one that’s called “manscaping” these days. Not only was the instantly-loading video kind of a shock to me at first (as was automatically-playing audio, which had become a no-no back when so many of us were loading our websites up with crappy MIDI sound files), but the website, shaveeverywhere.com (which is now owned by a domain hoarder,…

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