Category Archives: rhetoric

America’s Summer of Discontent

To twist an old joke, what’s worse than a year with a US presidential election? A year with two US presidential elections. On the one hand, thinking about going through two national-level election days in a single calendar year is somewhat mitigated by the fact that our political and infotainment spheres have wrenched us to a point where we’re perpetually in a national election cycle all the time now, as can be easily seen by the cornucopia of news stories about who might run for…

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Loss Upon Loss

Is Learning “Lost” When Kids Are Out of School? (alfiekohn.org) One of the most infuriating aspects of American big business is its seemingly deliberate ignorance of how much better well-rested employees work. Case study after case study in Europe shows how employees who aren’t forced to work as long as Americans in a given week, and who get much more vacation time than what is typical here, not only get a lot more done per hour on the job, but even a lot more done…

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The Devil: Himself

I was part of that generation of young people who arguably got to experience Bill Cosby at the best possible time; Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids was still in reruns when I was in my earliest years, and the first years of The Cosby Show started right when I got to watch prime time television on a regular basis. My parents already owned a couple of Cosby’s comedy albums on vinyl, and I kept picking up more of them on cassette tape when I…

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No More Balls to the Face

[The following blog contains mentions of bullying and suicide.] Free college is a ‘socialist takeover of higher education’ and student debt cancellation is ‘wrong,’ Betsy DeVos says (MarketWatch via MSN) I’ve never been inside of a ball pit. By the time I first heard of ball pits, I was already outside of what most people would consider their target age group, and I don’t think I even knew the location of any ball pits in Toledo until after I turned eighteen. This used to make…

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Worn Out

Racial Battle Fatigue: What is it and What are the Symptoms? (medium.com) The infamous George Carlin routine about “soft language,” particularly his explanation of how the condition first called shell shock has come to be known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, has more than its fair share of merits. Its strongest point is that medical language, like other specialized language used in small circles of the broader public, tends to obfuscate and depersonalize the serious problems that the words represent. Shell shock may have an additional…

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