I’ve been thinking about “community” a lot lately, mostly due to the dissertation chapter I’ve been working on. And this story reminded me that you don’t always get to choose your community…or your mood:

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal.

Am I responsible for those that are “three degrees removed”? Am I responsible for their actions? Clearly, according to this study, I am (in DDD’s words) response-able to them. I am exposed to them. This can mean terror and (according to the above study) happiness. You don’t get one without the other.

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I’m sure many Blogora readers are following the Mumbai situation closely and wondering how one might have hope for discussion, discourse, rhetoric…

I am distrubed by Marty Peretz’s rant about “the reasonable Islam”:

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President-elect Obama will hire the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States, and ObamaCTO.org asks people to suggest what the priorities of that CTO should be. Clearly, these are just suggestions, and the CTO will not be checking with “the crowd” before making decisions. But it’s nice to see the incoming administration asking for input.

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I continue to wonder what a continuation of the Obama “movement” will look like. This Slate story asks whether Obama can continue the participatory ethic of his campaign when he moves into the White House:

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Not surprisingly, Judth Butler’s warnings against uncritical exuberance about Obama are dead on:

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Check out this sleight of hand:

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A break from the election, perhaps?

I was originally drawn to listen to/read this poem by John Hodgen because of it’s title: “Upon Hearing a 2-Year-Old’s First Attempts at an Elvis Impression, I Recall the Difficulties of Her Birth.”

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This is the oldest Blogora entry I can find (link via the Wayback Machine. So, I guess yesterday was The Blogora’s fourth birthday. Jim Aune said this on the eve of the 2004 election:

“What interests me, as a rhetorician, about this election is the level of hatred on both sides.”

How much has really changed?

I’m reading a lot about Geoffrey Canada these days. I’ve heard stories about him on This American Life and Terry Gross, and I’m now hearing about a book that features him called Whatever It Takes. Canada completely transformed a section of Harlem with afterschool programs, parent training, and a slew of other programs.

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I just got home from the Alamo Drafthouse where I saw the movie, Crawford. Filmmakers David Modigliani and Matt Naylor ask the question: What happened when W came to town? This is not a Michael Moore hack job. In fact, the film premiered in Crawford (on the football field!), and just about everyone who’s in the movie agreed that it’s a fair depiction of Crawford. You can watch the whole thing, for free, on Hulu.

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Any Mad Men fans out there? Last night’s season finale was strong. Of course, as I was watching the characters deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was reading Jim’s post about Syria…life imitating art? Given all the discussion of whether or not Sarah Palin blinks, it was interesting to watch the Mad Men characters dealing with JFK’s staring contest.

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Hat tip to Nate Krueter.

Recently, the McCain campaign asked YouTube to stop taking down content due to copyright concerns:

The letter opens by talking about how important YouTube has been for the campaign’s efforts to get out copies of commercials, speeches, etc., but notes that the site’s usefulness is being curtailed by “overreaching copyright claims.”

YouTube’s response? Due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube has to take down such content to avoid lawsuits. Want to know who voted for the DMCA? That one.

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We read Milan Kundera’s The Joke in DDD’s Rhetorical Agency class a few years ago. It’s a story that shows how easily it is for a text to take on a life of its own. Kundera was an outspoken opponent of totalitarianism. That’s why it’s surprising to read this:

“A document written by the Czech Communist police claims that author Milan Kundera informed on a purported Western spy in the 1950s, a state-sponsored institute said Monday.

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A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to Mark Pesce’s talk on “Hyperpolitics”. I had never heard of Pesce, but this piece intrigued me. Pesce is a “digital ethnologist,” and his discussion of “hyperpolitics” draws on a discussion of Wikipedia, Flickr, and the Obama campaign. At times, it’s difficult to tell whether Pesce is championing digital technologies that empower users or decrying these technologies for their reliance on mob rule.

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The latest issue of Computers and Composition Online is out, and it includes a piece about the CWRL Video Game Project: Rhetorical Peaks

Dylan…marked up:

Link via Language Log.

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A Republican friend sent me this piece from Time magazine that argues for letting “the poorly managed, overly risk-taking financial institutions fail!”

This friend forwarded this along and compared the current discussion about the bailout to discussions about The Patriot Act. That is, if you are against the bailout, you hate America and you want the economy to collapse. I think this is exactly what is happening, and as much as I don’t like the reasons for dissent (”you’re being partisan”…”no, YOU’RE being partisan”) I’m happy to see dissent. I don’t know what the answer is, and I’m uncomfortable with the “let them fail” rhetoric because it seems to oversimplify things. What about the collateral damage? What about the people that will suffer because of the failure of such banks…people who didn’t necessarily take any risks or make any bad decisions?

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Lawrence Lessig provides evidence (and evidence, and evidence) that Palin would be the least experienced (at best, the third least experienced) VP ever.

Join the RSA Facebook group.

Link via Blogos

Colin and some others are raising the question of 4C’s panel selection criteria. One point Colin makes is that 4C’s has become more inclusive, and that this lends itself to a certain kind of proposal:

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A great example of China’s “filtering” (or “copy editing”) of information.

Link via Spinuzzi.

If you never had Huevos Rancheros or Migas at Las Manitas, you probably don’t understand how sad I am to report that Las Manitas has closed down.

Over the years, BYU’s Sliva Rhetoricae has shown up in a number of my Google searches. The site has evolved a bit over time, and it seems to be much better organized these days. It also boils things down a bit (sometimes too much), but this is (I think) because it’s meant to be a general introduction to rhetorical terms.

I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts on this site. Do you use it? Why or why not?

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What do the rhetoricians think of Obama’s speech? The MSM seems to be GUSHING. Check out some of New Republic’s blogger responses for some evidence of this. CNN and MSNBC couldn’t seem to find anything to critique.

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When I logged into Google Reader today, I got a message that I could read what journalists and what people from the Obama and McCain campaigns are reading. So, I subscribed and started reading “what they read”:

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The most recent issue of the CWRL’s e-journal Currents in Electronic Literacy is now live. The issue’s theme is “The Commons” and it features some heavyweights: Lawrence Lessig, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Stuart A. Selber, Alan Liu, Cedrick May, and Robert Scholes.

It also includes the musings of a lightweight.

Congratulations to the editorial board - Mark Longaker, Justin Tremel,
Noël Radley, Lydia Wilmeth, and Kevin Psonak - on a fantastic issue.

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According to Austin Sound, Jake Mitchell of the Austin Band Boxing Lesson was sentenced to 5 years in prison for growing Marijuana. But Mitchell was sentenced under the Patriot Act as a “narco-terrorist” which changes EVERYTHING. Here is part of a statement from Boxing Lesson’s publicist, Ryan Cano:

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In this month’s Atlantic, James Fallows performs an interesting rhetorical analysis of primary debates in order to predict what kind of president Obama or McCain might be. He focuses much more on Obama, arguing that the Republican debates played a smaller role in McCain’s nomination. In many ways this seems to be a cop out, and it could be argued that this turns into an Obama puff piece, but the mere fact that it’s entitled “Rhetorical Questions” means that Fallows’ discussion deserves The Blogora’s attention.

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RSA has announced it’s Third Biennial Summer Institute. It will be held at Penn State, June 22-28. Once again, RSA has put together an impressive collection of rhetoricians to run their 5-day seminars and 2-day workshops.

If you’re not yet reading Language Log, I’d highly recommend that you start. The authors are linguists, and some of the posts are clearly geared toward linguists (just as some of the Blogora content excludes the non-rhetorician). But on the whole, they have some interesting stuff.

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Ronald D. Asmus and Richard Holbrooke at WaPo offer a “told you so” on Georgia and also a plan of action (apparently for the next administration):

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What does the Blogora make of (failed?) attempts to frame the Russia/Georgia conflict with Cold War rhetoric?

Alexander Lomaya, secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, said conflict arose because Russia sought to “thwart its neighbors’ movement toward Western society and Western values” and framed the stakes in expansive terms that were reminiscent of the cold war.

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From Lawrence Lessig’s Change Congres project comes the Declaration for Independence:

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Any Blogora readers get word yet about whether their 4C’s panel was accepted? I think its possible that only graduate students have received notice since the email I received was mainly about applying the 4C’s Chars’ Memorial Scholarship. But maybe the acceptance emails when out as well?

Slate’s Jack Shafer discusses the fact that nothing sticks to Obama. He rejects the thesis that the press is soft on Obama by pointing to stories about Reverend Wright, Obama’s compromise on an energy bill that reportedly benefitted a donor, his relationship with Tony Rezko, and many more. Shafer then asks:

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Opposing Views is a new website that seems like it would a great tool for teachers of rhetoric, speech, and composition. From the FAQ:

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Right wing blogger, Dr. Melissa Clouthier (form chiropractor turned blogger) saw this poster for Obama’s speech in Berlin:

and it reminded her of this image:

So she put the two images next to each other on her blog. She added what I’ll call a “just sayin” claimer:

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For those of you who aren’t Pittsburgh Pirates fans (er, I’m assuming this is the majority of you), check out this story for an explanation of my title.

I read a lot of blogs, but I don’t read a lot of comments. In fact, The Blogora and my own blog are the only places where I really pay attention to comments. This disregard for comments is probably the reason I don’t understand this post by The Valve’s Bill Benzon about shutting down comment threads that had gone off topic:

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Since I’m in the midst of moving, I’m a little late on this. But Derek Mueller is hosting a “CCCarnival” for Karen Kopelson’s article in the latest issue of CCC: “Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.”

I’m going to jump in to the discussion either today or tomorrow, but head over to earth wide moth for more details.

Andrea Foster at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog notes that YouTube is making cheating easier. The video she points to shares how to cheat using a Coke bottle, and Foster notes that this particular strategy “works only if students can have beverages with them when they’re sitting for exams.”

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I have written about the micro-blogging tool Twitter before. John Culberson is a Texas Congressman who uses both Twitter (see his Twitter page here) and Qik (a video streaming tool) to communicate with constituents.

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The Valve has linked to a list of the top 100 liberal arts professor blogs. The Blogora did not crack this list, but a couple members of our blogroll did: CultureCat and earth wide moth. If you don’t already read these two blogs (or anyone else on our blogroll, for that matter), snap to it.

Language Log points us to a story about a school board member in Louisiana who wants to institute a rule that graduation speeches be entirely in English:

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Mark Liberman of Language Log bids (an early?) farewell to the Bushism:

“Count me among those who will not be at all sad to see the last of the Bushisms industry. In the end, it’s a bit like making wheelchair jokes about FDR, except that all of us commit infelicities of verbal expression from time to time. I guess that W gets tangled up a bit more often than most politicians do, although I think that even this much is not entirely certain.”

This button is on sale at the Republican State Convention courtesy of a group called Republican Market. The Austinist’s Patrick Dentler points to this and asks whether mudslinging by political candidates is the least of our problems in the coming months:

“With this being the first presidential election since the ascension of YouTube and blog culture, many see the mudslinging and dirty work being done not by the candidates, but by surrogates [and] independent interest groups.”

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For a couple of weeks, I’ve been reading about how David Sedaris’ new book may contain some “exaggerations.” It seems to me that this became a hot-button issue (or at least more of of a hot-button issue) when Oprah berated James Frey about his “lies” in A Million Little Pieces. Sedaris admits that he exaggerated some details…he is a storyteller after all.

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This is why I’m not an early adopter:

Jason Zengerle at TNR calls this woman a “female Archie Bunker.” I don’t think I understand this vitriol. I get that people are frustrated that their candidate didn’t win, but I don’t understand hatred for Obama (”an inadequate black male”). And I don’t understand declarations of support for a man who gets a 0% rating from NARAL.

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I was finally able to step away from panel life and get internet access in the hotel lobby. Seattle is beautiful, and the conference promises to be a good one.

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Chris Matthews gives a lesson in history and grammar:

Link via TNR.

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Reading this story about the recovery of a melted hard drive from the space shuttle Columbia made me think of the current state of the rhetorical canon of memory.

Specifially, it reminded me of Greg Ulmer’s discussion of memory in Internet Invention. The current version of the Simonides story is the Internet - a redundant system meant to recover things after the disaster. Ulmer reminds us that the Web was designed by the U.S. Department of Defense so that communication channels could survive a nuclear attack.

Do we still teach memory? What happens to this canon “after” the Internet?

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All three potential presidential candidates have backed a shield law to protect the confidentiality of journalists’ sources. As the New York Times points out, conservatives are now showing support for this bill:

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The Alt Text video below guides you through the fallacies used in flame wars. I’m not sure about his example for “straw man,” but it’s still work a look (and maybe even worth showing in class.) Then again, I was just talking to someone the other day about teaching fallacies, and I argued that we too often only teach fallacies as “wrong” ways to argue (rather than as a way to parse arguments). Was it Perelman that said every fallacy (or every argument?) was some version of “begging the question”?

Anyway, this dude’s take on ad hominem is entertaining:

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Sometimes I worry that this is how I sound to my students:

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This image comes via Bitch Ph.D.:

Byron Hawk’s book A Counter-History of Composition (published in November 2007) is required reading for anyone interested in composition theory, complexity theory, Deleuze, and/or the history of the discipline (among other things.) Byron was interviewed by Victor Vitanza at 4C’s an interview that will be made available via podcast.

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