Monday, September 1, 2008

Forget about your brotherly and otherly blogs...

Motherly love
Motherly love
Forget about
The brotherly and other-ly love
Motherly love
Is just the thing for you
You know your Mother’s gonna love ya
Till ya don't know what to do....


.....—From the Mothers of Invention's "Motherly Love" (1966)

Check out Suzanne Crawford’s post on today’s “College Life” blog: Time to Smell the Dirty Laundry. (CL is affiliated with the OC Register.)

Today’s post focuses on Orange Coast College and its accreditation situation (it's part 3 in a series). Part 2 (8/18) and especially Part 1 (8/11) touch on Saddleback College and Irvine Valley College’s accreditation issues.

While you’re at it, check out Andrew Tonkovich’s recent posts on "College Life":

Don’t Be Stupid...About Democracy (8/28)
A Magpie’s History of the US (8/23)
Just How Stupid? Challenging the (Purpose-Driven) Premise (8/17)

I really like Andrew's posts because they always fail to be "flammatory." That is, they never fail to be inflammatory.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

As of right now, the latter two links are both to the "Magpie" article. I wanted to read the "Stupid" article to see how, once again, one of the DtB crew expresses himself by calling his opponents "stupid." (Isn't that just too easy? Doesn't it ever get old for you?) (Don't you realize that all anyone has to do is call you "stupid" right back to reach a low-level rhetorical impasse?)

Andrew doesn't so much argue as he invites the reader into his point of view, which he takes for granted. He articulates angry leftism well enough, and, of course, there is much to it. (I live in an area Steinbeck describes, and we still have trouble with the land owners mistreating the workers. Workers still die here sometimes from heat stroke, when companies don't follow guidelines to protect them, the fieldworkers.)

So one can learn much from AT, but it might be nice to see more justification and less "inflammatory" assumption. I certainly don't get the sense that AT can learn from anyone with whom he disagrees, and I know that he is in no sense whatsoever "tolerant" of anyone who doesn't share his point of view. He seems to glory in being inflammatory, as if that had any evidential value.

More seriously: one thing to remember about the original "Red Emma," AT's "patron saint" on DtB, is that she was a conspirator and collaborator in violence and assassination. That stuff isn't to cool for democracy either, Andrew. (I am responding to your critique of your neighbor's apparent rejection of participatory democracy: doesn't anarchism look at liberalism as "bankrupt?" Don't anarchists--like you--want to blow it all up?)



That makes you worse than merely unfriendly and intolerant: you seem to be outright dangerous.

Roy Bauer said...

10:14, the third piece concerns a recent book entitled, Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter--to which we have already referred here in DtB.

For those who read such books (or who simply pay attention), the thesis that American voters are "stupid" (a colorful word for "ridiculously ignorant") is about as controversial as saying that George W. Bush is inarticulate.

I know Andrew well and I do not find him to be intolerant or unwilling to listen to and learn from others.

Some of us embrace rhetorical styles that seem to work for us (among many readers) but that definitely don't work for some others. Andrew has an angry but not intolerant style. His use of language is ultimately pretty gentle, it seems to me.

Dude, you're tone deaf.

Anonymous said...

Well, just minutes ago you called his writing "inflammatory" rather than "gentle."

Here is an ugly truth: there are leftists who pose as peace loving hippies, but who will kill your ass if you disagree with them and they get a chance. Like you, I remember the 1960s, and such people manifested quite regularly back then. They blew people up, as you know. Not to mention what anarchists have done so many times in other countries, in Europe.

But if I am tone deaf, and Andrew is not really the assassin type, if he doesn't sympathize with (or justify or engage in!) murder as "propoganda of the act" (the famous anarchist phrase) like the original Red Emma, whom he openly identifies with, then good. It's not something I wanted to be right about.

You get the last word, if you want it. I understand my obligation to "give it a rest" on your blog, with respect.

Anonymous said...

Roy - you're expecting 10:14 to actually READ instead of REACT.

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...