Cornel West, Leftist


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Vershire School

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http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/05/us/education-vermont-seeks-tighter-rules-for-prviate-schools.html We made the New York Times http://marthamoxley.com/news/042802gt.htm And our OTHER claim to infamy : Micheal Skakel and the Moxley murder This was one of the places I went to school. A very unique place in a very unique time. Pictured, the dining hall in the main building, "The Lodge", and a few years after the place closed down. For Vershireites with foggy memories (for whatever reasons), or nostalgia: http://web.archive.org/web/20080624190520/http://www.vershireschool.org/ I think Chip Allee put this together, but it's no longer maintained.
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Bad Guys, Good Guys, and Critical Thinking

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  Bad guys can convince most of a nation that they're the good guys. Happens all the time. It's why we have advertizing, and why TV ads are so powerful. They can lie straight to you and make you believe they're the most honest people on the planet.   The only bulwark against that is critical thinking. Experiment, observation, reason. Not a preacher's authority, not what "feels right".  And, most definitely NOT authority.   We can get the Bush White House telling us Hussein was part of Al Quaida, and that cutting taxes on "job creators" is the route to a strong economy.   BP can run all the ads they want about how they're helping the Gulf come back, but they're doing everything they can to not spend a penny more than they're legally obligated to unless it's in PR dollars. When they do their job right, you almost forget that the damage was due to their criminal negligence.    The Koch brothers can hide all their ads and pr...
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Free Will and Choices: Spoiler Alert. We Don't Have Them

I don't believe in free will. From the big-bang through our evolution, to all the experiences we have throughout our lives, to the billions of things that affect us each and every second, we can only react to the serendipity around us. Why we do what we do has far less to do with the choices we make than the choices thrust upon us. We are here, at a specific point of history, with a specific set of genes, and a specific background all by random chance. Where, and who, and when we are, programs us with limited (if any) choice about how we're going to react. We're only able to do, in any situation, what we're able to do at the time. We're not possibly going to be able to do anything we're not able to do.    Keep an eye on this post. It's one of those I will probably expand upon several times. It's one of those recurring issues that always come up.
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