All Thoughts Being Equal

I.   My friend Jon Bash is a very talented musician/composer , so it's safe to assume that he thinks very seriously about music in general. Recently he posted this article ( "How Popular Music's Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy" ) from a site called The Anti-Media, about a study examining the "reading level" of Billboard Top 40 songs. Stories about the study were passed around other places too, including The Guardian ( "Hip hop ain't top: new study reveals reading levels behind music lyrics" ) and The Onion 's A.V. Club ( "Popular songs are dumb and only getting dumber, says dumb study" ), with varying levels of skepticism and/or snark. Before getting in to any substantive discussion, however, I will first make fun of The Anti-Media for writing a really dumb article. Claire Bernish (Twitter handle: @ subversive_pen — Twitter bio: a Julian Assange quote) opens her turd-de-force with the following incredible paragraph-and...

This post is a follow-up to the AS Elections series: Part 1 and Part 2 I have one more p ost left in this series, about the aftermath of the 2015 AS General Elections and what could be done in the future. Then, as befitting my position as someone who's not even enrolled at WWU any more, I'll let the matter rest. This post, though, is not the last. I reached out to people I knew, who had run for office in the AS or worked in the AS but are no longer a part of it. Katrina Haffner (of La Commedia Politica) and Dan Hagen stepped up. Here are their responses, lightly edited for readability and length. Any highlights are mine. 1. You said you ran for election twice and lost. What do you think contributed to that? The other candidates' messaging? Your own knowledge of the election process? Katrina: First and foremost, elections are popularity contests. When it’s mainly people from the AS and friends of candidates voting, it becomes quite apparent. When writing my cand...

This post is a follow-up to AS Elections 2015: Why Do We Even Bother , and a partial follow-up to Western Washington University: "diversity" = "anti-white"? , AS Presidential Debates: Shit Gets Real , and Inappropriate I. When 6 out of 7 positions on the WWU Associated Students board are uncontested in the 2015 elections , and only 7% of students voted in the 2014 elections , that's an embarrassment and the AS should feel bad. If only this hasn't been a recurring theme, with the same problems and platitudes traded back and forth, for—at the very least— fifteen years ... But that was the last post. Now we're in case-study mode. This past academic year, what did the AS Board, they of the 7% voter turnout, actually do with their newfound powers? Let's start with what they wanted to do, as documented by this strangely titled AS Pravda Review (yes I will make that joke again) article, "What Have the AS Board Been Up To?" Given th...