Two interesting new items today.
The first is that Vice President Dick Cheney wants to change Senator McCain's Defense appropriations amendment so that only the military is barred from torturing people, not the rest of the Federal government. He also wants to allow torture as long as it doen't occur in the United States. Combined with the Bush Administration's repeated violation of our laws on extraordinary rendition, this makes the GOP the pro-torture party. This is just another little bit of hypocrisy for them - first they try to appear pro-life, and push their "culture of life" agenda while executing people left and right, and fighting an unnecessary, illogical, war of agression. Now they want to pretend to be against torture while setting up loopholes that allow it.
The second bit of news is this petition to "draft" Al Gore for the 2008 election, as General Wesley Clark was drafted for 2004. Sign it here.
From Chris Bray at Histori-blogography comes some tidbits on the new Iraqi Constitution. These items make me wonder what conservatives, either old-style or neocons, think of this thing. It's much closer to the Social Democratic model found in Europe than American-style democracy.
I wonder whether this will provide an interesting lesson in nation-building for the poli sci crowd in fifty years. I also wonder whether it will work.
Remember Cambodia and Laos? Remember Mr. Nixon's secret war?
From the NY Times, a report that U.S. and Syrian troops are skirmishing on the western boarder of Iraq, as U.S. troops look for insurgent bases. You can't just violate the territorial integrity of sovereign nations, no matter what your mission is. That's a good way to start another war.
While some video games are a bit over the top, I don't think they cause any additional violence. They may provide some additional inspiration for the already unbalanced, but so do movies, television, books, and music. Needless to say, I'm with Buckley...
One of the really negative consequences of not checking the site in awhile (3 months) is that it let the Blog Spam pile up. I seriously hate dealing with this stuff, but it has to be done. Why do I hate it?
First, it's basically theft. Blog Spammers are stealing bandwidth and disk space from every site they send their crap to. If they want to advertise, they should pay for it.
Second, they really disrupt any attempted conversations. That isn't a big deal here, as I get very few comments, but on other sites, it's a serious inconvenience. how are you supposed to carry on a conversation with al of those ads interposing themselves into the stream?
Third, most Blog Spam is seriously offensive. If it isn't gambling or porn, it's drug ads. It's hard to take people serious with that type of stuff on their site.
Fourth, it's a pain to clean, even with Blacklist. I know there are better options, but that would require changing away from Movable Type or adding more plugins.
So, I'll be cleaning the site a bit over the next few days.
Maybe it's just because I'm new at the whole teaching thing, but I find that each class not only has a different personality, but each semester does. That sounds like common sense, but I honestly hadn't thought about it too much before now.
Like last Spring, I'm teaching two online sections of Western Civilization 1, which ranges from the stone age (neolithic) to approximately 1715. I'm still not thrilled with our textbook, but I'm familiar enough with it (and its problems) and how the course is structured now to sort of work around the problems in Spielvogel. We're supposed to be moving to a new textbook in the Spring, but that was the plan for Fall 2005, as well.
One of my classes has a fair share of whiners this term. They complain that the work load is too much (four discussion posts per week, a quiz every couple of weeks, one chapter per week). They complain that they shouldn't have to post during the week. They complain that they shouldn't have to post on the weekend. They complain that they have to stick to a schedule. They complain that the quizzes are scheduled from noon on Friday to 5pm on Sunday. They complain that other students answer questions "too well".
The other class is just sort of there. They don't complain, they (mostly) do the work. But they also don't seem to be really engaging in the course, despite my efforts to draw them in. I think I may have to try some alternate Discussion questions , or add some additional outside sources for this group. I can't tell if they're distracted, lazy, or bored...
I'm back, I've just horrendously busy. I'm also having a hard time being motivated to post here, as talking about politics just doesn't seem to change anything...
