SU Liberalism Report

I'm back at the computer once again, and I don't have a rant or anything, but I want to talk about a few things that happened in the 2 classes I had today (college+Friday=easy). They were both discussion sections, so a lot of the time was spent on discussion, obviously. The first one was for sociology, which I've mentioned a couple times before. We were talking about terrorism and the different solutions to it, and once again, I was amazed at how intelligently it was handled.

We discussed 3 solutions to terrorism: War, homeland security, and appeasement/peace talks. All of the groups basically came to the conclusion that war is necessary to deal with threats, and national security needs to improve to prevent another 9-11. Interestingly, most groups also realized that appeasement isn't a very effective strategy, which the TA didn't totally agree with. I said that "we're not dealing with rational people," referring to Hussein, Bin Laden, and others, and that seemed to make sense, so I guess I pointed out one of the flaws of that strategy.

One girl spent a lot of time just arguing with everything the TA said. At one point, she asked him if he was anti-Bush, and he hesitated for a second, then said yes. At least he's willing to admit it. He actually said he agrees with some of Bush's policies, but is against the war because he "doesn't like killing."

That doesn't make a lot of sense, but at least he seemed to have the minority opinion in the class. He also disagreed with increased security measures and said that war makes people so paranoid that we might eventually make laws against marrying foreigners and using certain words on the phone.

I argued that we have enough dissent to avoid things like that, and we're not going to be like Afghanistan was. His response: "We're not like that...yet." That bothered me. A student cited McCarthyism as an example of what could happen, but I really don't think it's going to reach that level. At the end of class, the TA did something really stupid, so I'm going to write about that. A few weeks ago, I wrote about a guy in my writing class that confused Palestine with Pakistan. I thought that was insane, but today THE TA DID IT!

We talked briefly about religious motivations for terrorism, and he said "Israel and Pakistan" about 6 times in the course of a minute...and nobody corrected him (including me, I guess). I think most of us actually knew what he did but wanted to see if he would figure it out. Overall, we managed to have a "fair and balanced" discussion, which once again tells me that crazy stuff such as those items from the Daily Orange has not taken over SU...yet.

By the way, I'm breaking my posts into separate chunks like this from now on so they seem less intimidating. I realize my writing style is extremely wordy and takes up too much space, so this is the least I could do. Anyway, the second discussion section was for philosophy, another class I've talked about on SIT several times.

We've now moved past abortion and are talking about Kant again (very confusing material; avoid it if at all possible), but we also have papers due in about a week, so the TA spent some time talking about those and went against another college stereotype. He said that many students will try and write a paper that the TA or professor will agree with in order to receive a higher grade.

From what I've seen, this is true, and many professors do grade based on whether the student argues for the "right" position. However, this guy said that he hates when students argue for something they don't agree with just because the person grading it has the same view, and he said that he would actually deduct more points if he saw that. According to him, he can't stand to see weak arguments for something he believes in, so he'd prefer to read the other side and consider all arguments. This guy described himself as a liberal Republican, so I don't know how much that factors into it, but it's good to know that some people grade on quality of argument and not the argument itself.

I apologize if I bored you with that post, but I needed to write about it. Other than that, not much is happening right now. It is Halloween, so some people are wearing costumes on campus, which seems really weird (one guy had a light bulb attached to his head), but there haven't been that many. I think the fact that it's 70 degrees outside on October 31 in Syracuse is stranger than the costume thing. It was snowing less than 2 weeks ago, and now it's warm. I don't know what to think.