I feel this homogeneity obsession today has turned into a caricature lately of one of civilizations not-at-all-good-but-always-and-forever qualities. It has been usurped by modern politicos from the good ol’ fashioned haters, that we know are just gonna keep on hatin’.

It’s now just smoke and mirrors, a classic magician’s trick. While we’re expressing outrage at the idiot atrocities they shake in their left hand as public policy, they are actually already fingering us with their right.

Social norms are indeed becoming oppressive, even the good guys gotta watch out. I blame the 24hour News Cycle/Internet Age Apathy and computer mediated human interaction class chasm. I’ll wrap as I join this into another subject to contend that anonymity is not the problem on the internet, it is the solution. I cannot be myself if I am tethered to my identity.

Wow… that’s profound.. that just kind of popped out, now I gotta go ponder that some more… when my angry ranting becomes poetic I get excited that I may NOT have to “write the manifesto” after all…

I do believe we (pop-society) have gone so far that we’ve circled back and not acknowledging that everything is upside down. As proof, this lefty finds today’s wisdom from the Godfather of The Right, no less. Sage man, dude is sage…

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

hayley, 17 from north wales

With Sirc’s glowing approval of Shipka and Hawk, only to be matched by his excoriation of Miller, what strikes me as noteworthy is the emphasis (in the form of an incantatory, guttural plea, or is it a syncopated moan?) on shifting our focus toward the material register of writing. I found this quite eloquently present in Jody Shipka’s recent talk at Rowan (and like many others, I’m excited about reading her book). And so I have to ask about the inevitable disruption such a pedagogical directive evokes–whether as paralogy, vitalism, happening, or rearticulating process–in writers who cannot but show up to the scene of writing enframed within a technological relationship to writing–the drive to employ writing as a means to get it right. While this emphasis on the material register of writing does not invoke a critical pedagogy (as Sirc inveighs against), such an emphasis, in its shocking difference from the customary familiar approach to writing, inevitably courts a spectrum of response from resistance to willing participation. It just so happens that the latter cases are the rule, and the former the rare exception.

http://vitia.org/wordpress/2012/03/03/literary-texts-and-solipsistic-pedagogies/

http://joetorok.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/sirc-resisting-entropy/