SBS News turns a corner
Heretofore I preferred SBS news because it was crisp, moved fast to cover the ground in the time available so that there was no time for journalistic pontificating. I also thought there was a little more restraint in SBS News, and a little less advocacy than on the ABC.
Journalists have long since given up reporting facts and letting viewers and readers draw their own conclusions.
The Percles File
Warts and all.
Chapter Six: Thucydides and that war.
His debauchery was an open secret.
My essay “Cracking the Thucydides code” has appeared recently in the Antioch Review, a literary magazine of some note. It is the kind of publication many large libraries have.
Chapter Five: a little Aristotle, please.
Alexander the Great sent Aristotle an elephant. Imagine the Brown UPS agent who had to deliver that. Imaigne what Aristotle had to pay to house and feed the thing.
Aristotle was something of a character in his own time, an omnivore with an appetite for all knowledge, collecting mollusks, geodes, plants, animals, and books. He is credited with the first private library so large was his collection of books (scrolls). Any foreigner visiting Athens, whether theorist-tourist or not, might sell to Aristotle artifacts collected on the voyage.
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Chapter Four: Starting at endgame. Just like in chess.
Plato’s Step Children in Star Trek: the Original Series
What is the best life?
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Chapter Three: Going to class.
Image if Qantas Airlines had a 50% error margin in passenger reservations! That is the margin of error in our student record system class lists.
The adventure of going to class with little idea of how many students there will be.
The very word “theory”
A theorist is a tourist who travels both literally and figuratively to see other ways of living and is changed by the experience.
What does the very word “theory” mean?
Teaching political theory as political theory and nothing else
The needs of a student of political theory can not be met with mere fragments torn out of the great books of the past.
I will be blogging about my recent, treasured experience of teaching political theory for a bit. I have also taken the liberty of contacting a number of people at this time of year to alert them to the blog. Best to one and all.
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Holiday in paradise and conference in Ottawa
The Arizona Memorial. I have been on it before. While the memorial is moving, the crowd of cybermen I found on it put me off ever wanting to go on it again. Any sense of spirituality that the memorial imparts is blunted by the cybermen, tourists with video cameras stuck to their faces wandering to and fro. Rather than experience the memorial they want to capture it on film, and they do blunder about because they cannot see where they are going. So they do run into each other and me.
In October and November, when my duties as Acting Director for the Institute for Teaching and Learning at an end, I took two weeks of annual leave, and another week to conference leave. For the first two weeks it was family affair in Waikiki. Ahh…
Then I went on to – wait for it – Ottawa for a conference. Quite a change in climate. Along the way I stopped to visit still other family in Hastings.
I am still learning about picture sizes, links, and the like. So this entry is pretty uneven.
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