A Podcast About Rhetoric and Current Events
This week we address the dissent in the Dobbs case.
We explained last week why dissents can be so important. Eventually the reasoning of a dissent can become the common understanding. More on that in a minute.
Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan list MANY reasons for their dissent, a number of which have been circulated among popular discourse. [Read More]
Where to even begin?
In a normal world (or whatever that means) the big news of the week would have been the January 6th committee. It continues to lay out a devastating case against the former president and has even called a special session that wasn’t originally scheduled because of new evidence it has received while the proceedings have been going on. So it’s a pretty juicy story. And the bombshells that it dropped this week were pretty big, no doubt. But it has to share the headlines. I mean, we’re basically having public hearings on whether a sitting president fomented insurrection, and it’s not the major news of the day. That cannot be a good sign for us, as a nation. [Read More]
It’s Pride Month and there are a million reminders all over the place. In fact, there are rainbows and equality signs on logos and commercials everywhere.
But in some ways, this is a tension. There’s a concept called rainbow capitalism that is the focus of a lot of critique from the LGBTQ+ community. [Read More]
In 2010 I got really sick. I started getting headaches. At first I thought I was dehydrated because for a while it felt like a really bad hangover. But the headaches kept getting more and more frequent and worse and worse. I went to the doctor and he gave me a shot for pain reduction but it didn’t help. [Read More]
The field of rhetoric wouldn’t exist without teachers. We have survived because of a tradition of strong teachers for thousands of years, now. And our foundations are teachers, too. The people who first developed what would become rhetoric, who shaped and molded the very basics of the discipline, were teachers who wanted to pass on their ideas to students in order to do something good for their community. Rhetoric depends on teachers. So it makes sense that rhetoricians have a vested interest in the way teachers at large are treated. [Read More]