It’s weird to call him a prophet, what with all the F-Bombs and other NSFW obscenities he drops, but consider that this dead jester said the below in 2005. Prophetic indeed. . (h/t to Hullabaloo)
Archives for posts tagged ‘critical thinking’
“The New York Times is Always Right”: A Media Literacy Lesson
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm should remember Squealer, the pig whose “journalism” manipulated the entire animal society into unquestioningly supporting the dictatorial pig Napoleon. If they studied Animal Farm in the classroom, the depressing odds are they learned it as a good, all-American attack on socialism. The most simple-minded of our teachers make a [...]
Fugue: Jesus, Plato, Confucius, Goldman Sachs
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
Democracy – the rule of the people at the heart of the American political ideal — and plutocracy, the rule of the wealthy and the tumor at the heart of America’s political reality: both are looked on as very problematic thingsĀ in wisdom traditions both Eastern and Western. A few snapshots will serve: Jesus’ Needle: [...]
Cassandra, Mammon, and the Death of Critical Thinking
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Hear, hear: University students worried about getting a job see the study of the humanities as a waste of precious time. . . . Times are hard for humanists. But when economic growth becomes the focus of education, both democracy and human decency are in jeopardy. In her new book, Not For Profit: Why Democracy [...]
A Real-World Mini-Lesson in Critical Reading and Writing
Saturday, 12 June 2010
I’m always looking for models of real readings to share with students. The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein gives us a good one with his reading of a recent opinion piece by conservative NYTimes columnist David Brooks. At issue is Brooks’ argument that deficit spending during periods of debt crisis makes consumers insecure, and thus deficit [...]
Beach-Side Thoughts on History, to My Students
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
So I’m somewhere in Thailand called Pattaya that I wouldn’t choose to come to except that John, my best friend from my “professional college student/Bohemian vagabond years” from age 20 to 34, is here — I wrote about him and those years of our knuckleheaded intellectual awakening in the In the Crumbling Temple of the [...]
(How) Would You Use This Critical Thinking Video?
Sunday, 27 December 2009
“The Rumors of My Death…”
Friday, 27 November 2009
wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.” True here as well, but only slightly. Autopsy The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up: My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb And my piano crouched in the corner of my room With all its teeth bared Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not [...]
When Corrupting the Youth is Good
Friday, 29 August 2008
Truly Critical: Thinking about Science, Religion, and Goodness
Tuesday, 25 December 2007
Did you ever notice that we have no holidays in which we revere history’s true – in the sense of “backed up with evidence” – miracle-workers, those hard-working saviors we call “scientists”? Think about it: scientists, through the “miracle” of human reason, have eradicated diseases for literally billions of people through medicine, created light and [...]






