“The rest is silence.”

This will be my last post on the Word Warrior for the foreseeable future. Probably, hopefully longer. I retire of blogging.
This has been a long time coming, but I can only finish it impulsively. I’m fine; I’ll be better for this. A part of me regrets doing this. Some part of me will regret it tomorrow. But [...]

Guys, guys, CRAZY healthcare demonstration happening in front of AMU right now!

Okay, so there are like 25-40 people on Wisconsin as I type this chanting
Healthcare for all!
and waving posters at drivers-by that read
BIG INSURANCE SICK OF IT (sic)
, even though the current proposals (the House’s and Baucus’) would leave the industry intact, but regulated. A public option is looking less and less likely, so the industry [...]

The subtle feminism at the heart of America’s fairy tale

Slate’s Meghan O’Rourke has a fascinating review of two  recent biographies of Frank Baum, creator of Oz:
If Oz and its sequels are shaped by Baum’s sharp eye for the theater of commerce, they are also shaped by his wishful revisions of social conflict. Notably, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz offered a paean to strong women [...]

Monday Evening Surrealism

Gave a presentation on Tom Stoppard and the Theater of the Absurd today. We volunteered to do brief talks on various topics we’d be encountering. Even though I listed Absurdism as my third preference, after Flaubert’s realism and the symbolic use of Rembrahnt in Zadie Smith. I was the only one to sign up for [...]

TONIGHT: “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo”

For the first event of Sexual Violence Awareness Week, the award-winning documentary will be shown tonight in Cudahay 001 @ 7p.m.
Please do try to make it! I won’t be able to, being swamped as I am; but many hoops were jumped through to bring this to campus, and it really will be worth the [...]

Monday Morning Surrealism

Stanley Fish does not believe in the university

There is, I believe, in most advocates of campus speech codes an unconscious or unrecognized inconsistency in the valuing of free expression. If speaking in purely theoretical terms, they will strongly come out “for” unfettered expression, but when faced with practical policy proposals, they will claim free expression must sometimes be subjegated to the interest of traditionally [...]

Sad Stats for Saturday

A phone poll asked Oklahoma public high-school students some basic questions from the US citizenship exam. They got this result:

We might have the makings of a Saturday tradition here.

Taking conservative protesters seriously

From Reason’s Jesse Walker, via Sullivan:
When pundits weave a small number of unrelated incidents into a “pattern” of crime, then link it to the rhetoric of Obama’s opponents, it becomes easier to marginalize nonviolent, noncriminal critics on the right, just as a red scare makes it easier to marginalize nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the [...]

Hume was wrong

From the Treatise, I.VI :
[W]e may observe, that the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other. Our impressions give rise to their correspondent [...]