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...

I. It's election time yet again at Western Washington University, and times are desperate. Last year, a scant seven percent of the student body voted in the election. Where did it go wrong? The last couple times I wrote about student electoral politics at WWU, things got a bit... lively. Hopefully this starts a discussion as well! The 2014 election marks the third straight year of precipitous decline , it should be noted. (The linked Western Front article implies that the decline started in 2012, but actually the turnout in 2011 was the peak.) Now we have this bizarre twist in the 2015 AS Presidential race : [AS Presidential Candidate Belina] Seare is now running unopposed after her one opponent, AS Communications Director Josie Ellison, announced the end of their campaign Tuesday, April 21. [...] Ellison attended the debate and voiced support for Seare. “The position was something that I was interested in doing, something I thought I could do well,” they said. “...

Source In the annals of philosophical thought experiments, it is written : There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks . Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice? And lo, there were many variations: Fat Man Trolley As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your onl...

Source: Travis Walton / WikiMedia I used to really like UFO stories, pretty much ever since I watched E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind , but then especially after picking up a book called Alien Encyclopedia in a third-grade book sale. It was great because the author presented both "real-life" stories and fictional characters with pretty much equal weight, so I learned about paranormal stuff and lots of science fiction at the same time. For a kids' book, it affords a surprising level of literacy in close-encounter stories (that is, stories from either abductees or contactees )—everything from Grays to Project Blue Book to Reptilians. At least, I thought it was surprising. Then I learned that pseudoscience is actually kinda boring . I'm still interested in those stories—for example, I listen to Coast to Coast AM —but more because I'm fascinated by the social phenomenon of telling close-encounter stories than the stories themselves. For exampl...

This post is a tangential follow-up to: Rhetorical imperialism I.   I will soon be working on a non-Marxist fix-up of an article from the Harvard Political Review called "On Privilege: A Leftist Critique of the Left":  Let me be clear that my criticism of discussions of privilege is not that they are too radical. My quarrel, to the contrary, is that they are not radical enough. The cultural Marxism of the mid-20 th century gifted the left with a powerful tool by which to understand how oppressive social structures are perpetuated through discourse—the critique of ideology. Ideology critique acknowledges that the status quo is enforced not only through a single, centralized node of authority, but through dispersed and diverse forms of discourse from all points of origin on the social spectrum. It is a peculiar feature of oppression that it is often enforced by those who are, in fact, oppressed. Ideology critique uses the term ideology to denote modes o...