Hey Everyone!
I am a new contributor to this blog....I'm horrible with computers and have never blogged before, so bear with me. Anyways, I'm seventeen and in my last semester of High School. I absolutely love history and politics and my dream is to be a high school social studies teacher.
"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Popular Misunderstandings
I have always been fascinated by how phrases enter colloquial usage stripped of their original intent. NPR covered one this morning that caught my eye. "Sold Down the River." Today it means to be betrayed, but the original meaning was literally a slave being sold to a plantation owner in the cotton kingdom and transported down the Mississippi. A short, brutal life of hard labor picking for the insatiable appetite of the textile mills lay at the end of that journey.
So when Glenn Grothman touts a 7 day workweek and some other conservative somewhere chirps longingly about ridding workers of the burden of overtime, it is not a slippery slope fallacy to note where they desire to take us. Any step commodifying labor or dehumanizing workers is a step back toward the re-enshrinement of slavery. Pitting one group of workers against another to bring both down, as governor Scott Walker regularly does in WI, is merely the age-old exercise of serving power. The fact that it not only happens in a democracy, but that these slave-power antics are popular among certain segments of the electorate who stand to gain nothing and lose much is a statement of how powerful propaganda can be.
Do we have to wait until everyone is sold down the river before figuring this out?
So when Glenn Grothman touts a 7 day workweek and some other conservative somewhere chirps longingly about ridding workers of the burden of overtime, it is not a slippery slope fallacy to note where they desire to take us. Any step commodifying labor or dehumanizing workers is a step back toward the re-enshrinement of slavery. Pitting one group of workers against another to bring both down, as governor Scott Walker regularly does in WI, is merely the age-old exercise of serving power. The fact that it not only happens in a democracy, but that these slave-power antics are popular among certain segments of the electorate who stand to gain nothing and lose much is a statement of how powerful propaganda can be.
Do we have to wait until everyone is sold down the river before figuring this out?
Saturday, January 11, 2014
Bitter retired tanker spews hate for the President, is surprised by reaction.
I've got one MOTHER OF ALL QUESTIONS. Who and which Federal Agency conducted and cleared Barak Hussein Obama for a SECURITY CLEARANCE? As President of the United States, shouldn't he at least pass a TOP SECRET SECURITY CLEARANCE with BACKGROUND INVESTIGATION????? When was it conducted and who authorized the clearance? Please pass this on to everyone that cares about the future of our country.
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