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Pat’s Polemics
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False equivalencies: Cow One is not Cow Two
01/18/2020 Pat Barrett Add Comment“Jonathan Rausch wrote the following at https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/rethinking-polarization Here is my response: “It is too bad I missed Rausch’s talk at ASU. I go to those (Continue Reading)
I’m reading about why my wife sees family the way she does
01/16/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn Generations of Captivity, Berlin has a passage characterizing the Black family toward the end of the period of slavery when many free Blacks and (Continue Reading)
A page from one day, Jan. 4, 2020
01/13/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentJust a note that I’ve added Rachel Maddow’s Blowout to my list to replace Aspect, which I finished. Another note: my blog guru, Wes, has (Continue Reading)
A Danger To Their Way of Life
01/11/2020 Pat Barrett 3 CommentsSteve Scalise, House Minority Whip, said of Nancy Pelosi’s rush to get the impeachment that “they” seem to think there is a danger to “their (Continue Reading)
The Root of All Our Evil?
01/11/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe New York Review of Books is a treasure trove. In it you find reviews of books on many liberal arts and humanities topics as (Continue Reading)
The transmogrification of a word
01/11/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI started to title this bugaloo but thought better of it. I even deliberately misspelled it here. The Bugaloo was a dance originating in the (Continue Reading)
We All Used To Get Along
01/09/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThat refrain is heard from the old guys, especially the Seniors like myself, older than the Baby Boomers. They were invoking a time when there (Continue Reading)
Black Hats and White Hats
01/07/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI’m restarting my Running Commentary category to cover what may prove to be Bush’s Iraq and Johnson’s Viet Nam. Most Americans, I am willing to (Continue Reading)
John Bolton – real American
01/02/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentGood old Bolton may have to testify, but he’ll hold off as long as it takes to get his book published. Anything for the good (Continue Reading)
Total misunderstanding of language
01/02/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentA member of a listserv for fl teachers told on her colleague who was a big-time grammar person. She went to Mexico City on vacation (Continue Reading)
Preliminary write-up on What I’m Reading Now
01/01/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe books I’m reading fall into four main categories: the African Diaspora, Language, Economics, and History. Eight books make up the reading on the African (Continue Reading)
What Outrages Conservatives?
12/30/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentLet me count the ways conservatives get outraged and compare them to what outrages liberals. Take language. Conservatives rail about the degeneration of language at (Continue Reading)
The deafness of Whiteness
12/29/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhen I was a child, my mother would sing the songs she had sung as a torch singer in the thirties. Songs like September Song, (Continue Reading)
List of reading books
12/27/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentBecause I’ve started blogging routinely on what I’m reading now, it will be easier to use abbreviations for the books, so I will list them (Continue Reading)
It is not as simple as it once was
12/26/2019 Pat Barrett 1 CommentIn my blog entry All Liberals Are Communists and All Conservatives Are Fascists, I wrote about giving up on reading the local newspaper back in (Continue Reading)
Dec. 26, 2019
12/26/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentReading an article in the New York Review of Books, I discovered that the colonists before the revolution in this country had a take on (Continue Reading)
The Darwin Awards – may Wendy receive one
12/23/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentI am so sick of people’s cruelty I cannot imagine that I have not blogged on The Darwin Awards, the award that celebrates the death (Continue Reading)
Starting blogging on daily reading Dec. 23, 2019
12/23/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentAs I follow my reading program, I find myself going to this blog to write another entry. So rather than do that, I will react (Continue Reading)
A response to Russel Kirk’s Ten Principles
12/22/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn 1986, Russel Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and long considered the initiator of intellectual conservatism in the U.S., offered ten principles of conservatism (Continue Reading)
he up and left or he up and left?
12/22/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe other day, Clapper, the former CIA chief, said, “He upped and did something.” In my speech it would be, “He up and did …..” (Continue Reading)
Music to my Yiddishe ears
12/15/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentMy sister-in-law has a granddaughter about 4 who told her that her friends Caleb and Sarah do not celebrate Christmas, they celebrate Harmonica.
They build a world and then go live in it
12/13/2019 Pat Barrett Add CommentNow that world will come to them, at least in Britain. With a huge majority, the pro-Brexit people won, just about guaranteeing Britain’s exit of (Continue Reading)