20110126

letnotutbeaz

Daily Herald story
Deseret News story
Couldn't find anything on ksl or sltrib.

I was glad to be one of the I'd say 150+ people who braved the descending cold to be on the steps of the Utah State Capitol building. Though I can't help seeing chants from a meta perspective, sometimes shouting along, but often just amused by them.

Good speakers, though not always the best speeches. Each speech cycled to hit the same key phrases, which works as a kind of poetic rhetorical mnemonic, but i'ts a bit on the blunt side.

I signed up for United for Social Justice's mailing list, though for the time being I work during their meeting times. I'm leery of the other group there, the UVU Revolutionary Student Union. Their main organizer is clearly bright, passionate, and dedicated, but they go out of their way to specifically say they're not closed to those who believe in violence.

Ideally, I like the idea of open borders. In a free world, anyone should be able to live where they like. Practicality should consist not in lamenting the impossibility of the ideal while reinforcing its opposite, but in working incrementally to make the reality more like the ideal.

Nations are an occasionally useful fiction. Fixed borders are a more recent and philosophically suspect notion. The borders of a place were the vague area where a power couldn't reliably project its control.

It's ironic and hypocritical to blast the people coming to our shores and borders when what drives them here is economic situations often imposed on their home countries by our corporations, our strategic doctrines, and our Department of State.

Our laws need to be reformed to make legal immigration easier, and yes, amnesty will need to figure into that. Stricter enforcement of bad laws won't fix a broken system. Strict enforcement of disrespected law undermines respect for the rule of law.

20110125

newcentrismanditsdiscontents

I read this and thought it needed some spreading around. Of course, I've already demonstrated my tendency to align with Lakoff, he says what needs to be said about the language and philosophy behind political positions, and the political positioning behind political language.

The "New Centrism" and Its Discontents, by George Lakoff

On another note, I'm going to try to adjust my web2.0 usage. Since this blog feeds my facebook anyway, I'll try to put any non-slice-of-life thoughts here first, not reassembled here later.
HTML is more flexible, anyway.
 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Additionally, for clarification I grant that "unauthorized commercial use" generally only applies if the work itself is the object of exchange, and specifically that a site with click-through or advertising income is welcome to share it (attrib, no-deriv, otherwise non-com), so long as the work shared is openly available to all and not subject to sale or paid access. Any elements of my works that might be original to others are Fair Use, and you are left to your own to make sure your own use of them is likewise.