The Language of Politics

I'm not familiar with the politics of blogging, but apparently there is a big debate going on about whether editing threatening language and vulgarity out of the visitor's comments section of your blog is censorship or responsible management. Here is a link to an article in today's New York Times where you can read all about it.

Click here for NYT Article.

 

Watch this clip from Meet the Press and make a guess at why this is even being discussed. What's going on here?

Occasionally my conservative aunt sends out politically charged email-in-a-can to everyone on her address list which includes me. The emails range from rich text encouraging the "silent majority" (i.e. obnoxious right-wingers) to "stand up and tell those whiny minorities to shut up" about the ten commandments in public places, to slideshows of American landscapes and monuments and soaring eagles set to a country music song that implicitly ridicules other country musicians who have "unpatriotic" opinions. I thought I'd break the blogging ice by sharing my aunt's most recent pleasant prepackaged sentiment followed by my immediate reply. In my reply I tried to limit myself to one specific argument rather than launching into everything from the demeaning aspect of the idea of "common sense" to the fallacy that every bird without a worm must be lazy. I must say my reply is a bit caustic, and I would write it a tad differently today. I geuss I was too busy being reactionary in my criticism of reactionarianism. Here is her message:

One of the texts that we'll be reading is called, "On Bullshit." Here are some video files of the author, Harry Frankfurt, responding to some questions about bullshit. You can watch the whole interview in Quicktime format here. For other formats, go here.

This looks like a cool website that will be very useful for our work:

Discourse DB is a new kind of site: a database that uses the power and ease-of-use of wiki technology to collect the opinions of the world's journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues.

Check it out here.

From Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

Vancouver Olympics will own words like "winter," "2010" and "Vancouver"

Canadian Industry Minister Maxime Bernier recently introduced Bill C-47, the Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act, through which the Vancouver Olympics are guaranteed exclusive public use of the following words: winter, gold, silver, bronze, sponsor, Vancouver, Whistler, 2010, tenth, medals, and games.

It's amazing how the Olympics have come to symbolize bullying corporate greed; overreaching, violent "security measures;" drug abuse and destruction of public facilities and low-income housing.