Friday, April 23, 2004

Music: John Mayer - Love Song For No One
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I know there was no Message From Jersey Monday, but this week has been a bit busy.

I still have 4 books on Oswald Mosley, to read before I can write my paper due the 4th. I've also got two more papers, one due a week from today, but they get shoved on the backburner.

Right now I would like to talk about my hatered for my school's two special intrests publications.

I say that there are only two, but there are more. Hell I'd even consider the school newspaper a special interest paper if you call "Total Fucksticks Who Don't Check Their Sources and Make Up Quotes For Their Articles" a special interest group. But no. I am talking about the campus right and left. I'm a little under the weather, so I slept through my first class. This gave me a huge chunk in my day where I was still too groggy to get any good work done on my books, so I decided to finally compare the two pubilcations, The Counterweight (published by the Bucknell Conservatives Club [BUCC]) and the Catalyst (Published, ostensibly, by the College Democrats).

I fear for the future.

I've read the Counterweight before. They put it in most of the Academic buildings and sometimes the satire on the back page is pretty funny ("Bucknell Wins National Beer-Pong Championship"). But some of the stuff inside is stomach turning. There was once an article in a different issue discussing how gay and lesbian couples should not be allowed to adopt children on moral grounds. Okay. You think that. Whatever. But if your paper is going to protray itself as the champion of Free Speech at school, the one paper with the guts to cut to the facts without entangling itself in Political Correctness, leave that kind of article out. Its a discussion of morals. You can't qualify them since everyone's moral code is different. Adding stuff like that only cheapens the publication. In this last issue, like most of their issues, the attacked the Speech Code we have here, which point and fact is unconstitutional if well meaning. The real offense in *this* issue is the "Four Points Of View On Abortion." It's not four different points of view. It's basically a list of four different reasons why the writers feel abortion is immoral, unjust, etc. Not exactly "fair and balanced" as the cover proclaims.

I was especially dissappointed with this Catalyst. Granted, they do normally hold the torch of the rabble rousing shock paper. Typically, there are images of the horror of Third World countries and the horrors of life there while American economic imperialism continues to worsen things. I'm going to sound really cynical when I say this, but they almost don't affect me anymore. I've seen them so many times that it's just not registering like it should. I would suggest a different, perhaps more text-based way of getting across the ideas of these pictures. No one should become desensitized like this. They actually had a really interesting article on Nicaragua in this last issue, but it got drowned out. They took a different road with this issue. Instead of pleading for the case of the disenfranchised, I got page after page of ranting about why everyone else in a terrible human being and an enslaver of his fellow man. God damnit....You guys can make such good points...And yet you chose to waste time and paper on saying why everyone else is wrong instead of taking on the not entirely difficult task of explaining why you guys make sense? Motherfucker...

"Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" the Conservative cries when he sees a political cartoon on a professor's door that he finds demeaning to his political sensibilities.
"Bullshit!" the Liberal fires back. This than leads to a three and a half hour long speech about how his political leanings are under attack from all sides, and that it is the very nature of his ideology that he is under attack.
What ensues eventually ends in name calling and nothing gets accomplished.

For my time, I think I'll stick with the BBC to get my news.

::transmission ended::
This transmission logged byErisSaid on 1:39 PM

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