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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Neat journal. I haven’t read your other posts, but if this one is anything to go by then I’m sure the rest will jettison me right back to my college days. Especially the bit about no one in your history class wanting to participate. I’m sure you’ve started to notice this is par for the course in most lecture classes. Welcome to higher ed.

    I think what strikes me most about your post is the sense of newness these classes and interactions have on you. I’m not saying you’re naive or anything. No, I appreciate how earnest you are about your feelings. Even though you’re posting to internet strangers, it shows more bravery than I had first year of undergrad. And talking about nervousness, apprehension, but also excitement and anticipation so readily, like it’s all very new to you—that’s something I miss. As you age you realize more and more that there’s very little that’s truly unique about your experiences. Everyone has done everything, and there’s always someone you can relate to. It’s a notion that can fill your with a sense of community. Sometimes it make you feel like one little droplet in the ocean.

    I have two masters degrees. I’m a teacher. Each year I see the same expressions. The bemused to the ecstatic on that first day of school. You get a sense, over time, of who’s who from these little insights. I have to fight that urge to put my students in little boxes, predefined roles that they must adhere to based on years of watching the same, unique children wander into my classroom.

    And here I am digesting your work, your honesty and courage—and trying to put you in a little box too. I read your words and feel so many of the same emotions echoing in my head from years ago. I think of my far off memories of college as banality. Like time somehow flattened my unique experience. Crushed and press-molded it into a carbon copy of my colleagues’. And that it’ll happen to yours. But those thoughts, intrusive as they are, don’t actually reflect reality. They’re just the unconscious bitterness that remain as youth ripens into middle age, I guess. Hopefully your professor with the hot garbage Dilbert take isn’t going to be my future.

    Anyway, thanks for putting me back there. It’s good to remember. These are good times to be who you are and to live as you are. Be well.







  • I work in education. I need something for my young learners. You wouldn’t think so, but little kids can sense the anxiety of us adults. I try my best to incorporate community resilience into my lessons, and I’d love something that will help further deprogram the individualism they get from all other areas of their American lives.

    Edit: Also parents and admins here are pretty politically and historically illiterate, but they’re foxbrained enough to recognize Marx or Lenin. But probably not someone like Eugene V. Debs.







  • Imagine a pretend political ideology called cleavism. Given its name you say it’s all about cleaving the good in society from the bad, whatever the hell that means. But there are so-called “cleavists” out there who insist cleavism is about joining the bad and the good together. What gives? Well, in practice cleavism has little to do with the two opposing definitions of “to cleave” (“to split” and “to join”). It’s really just named after some guy with the surname Cleaver or something.

    Political ideologies aren’t medical diagnoses. You can’t derive their meaning like you can with atrial arrhythmic induced tachycardia cardiomyopathy. If you try this naive etymology out on anarchism then you’ll reduce that ideology to nothing more than a non-substantive, meaningless, circular definition. Conservatives conserve. Liberals liberate. Socialists socialize. See? Meaningless.

    Unfortunately for the entire world, conservatism has never been about “protecting the good in society.” That’s just a vapid and empty wish for what you want conservatism to mean. You’d be hard pressed to find any reputable political science text that would trivialize one of the most dominate ideologies of the past two centuries like this. Let alone claim there is some inherent goodwill baked into the ideology.