[Xmca-l] Re: My Hometown Minneapolis

[Anthony Barra]

I, too, like avoiding politics here, but this will be a social
analysis/dialectics question, piggybacking on a fair amount of the rest of
this "Minneapolis" thread.  So don't ban me! : )


Rhetorical hyperbole aside, is this the biggest Straw Man of all time, or
are a percentage of the following sentences true? My guess is: both. (At
first I thought that everyone here would reflexively reject and dismiss
this Social Analysis out of hand - and understandably too, but now I'm
wondering if some parts of it might be acknowledged, unapologetically, as
in fact correct.)

"This is about Donald Trump. Of course it is. We just couldn't see it. For
normal people, Donald Trump is a president: you may like him, you may not
like him, but either way there will be another president at some point, and
we will move on as we always have.  But for Donald Trump's enemies: there
is nothing else. Everything is about Trump; everything. Donald Trump
defines their friendships, their careers, their marriages. Donald Trump
affects how they raise their children. Trump occupies the very center of
their lives. As long as Donald Trump remains in the White House, they feel
powerless and diminished and panicked, and they cannot be happy.

In everything they do, their overriding goal is to remove Donald Trump from
office. And that's exactly what they're trying to do now. That's what these
riots are about.

The most privileged in our society are using the most desperate in our
society to seize power from everyone else. Got that? That's the nub of it:
the most privileged are using the most desperate to seize power from the
rest of us. They are not seeking racial justice. If they were seeking
racial justice, they wouldn't be denouncing their fellow Americans for
their race - which they are. It has nothing to do with it. What they are
seeking is total control of the country. And it goes without saying that
none of this has anything to do with George Floyd. Shame on those who
pretended that it did. Those who fell for the lie, and those who knew
better but played along because they are cowards."

Souce: Tucker Carlson, "Liberal activists now want to 'defund the police'"

(P.S. My own personal utopia would be to synthesize the very best ideas of
the left with the very best of the right, but alas, that is by definition a
dream, by definition "no place.")

Thanks in advance for any thoughts (and yes, this thread is
America-centric, starting from post #1 about the great city of Minneapolis
-- sorry to those understandably not interested).

Anthony



On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 5:27 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thank you, I'll take a look. Sounds similar to dialectics, little I know
> of both.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thursday, June 4, 2020, Richard Beach <rbeach@umn.edu> wrote:
>
>> Anthony, the concept of “expansive learning” posits that objects/motive
>> in activity are ideally always open to change/transformation—that they are
>> never fixed given that as participants encounter new
>> contradictions/challenges, they “learn to”/formulate new objects/motives.
>> This requires learners to be open to exploring optional actions/tools/norms
>> as they redefine/revise their ever expanding objects/motives.
>>
>> Coping with decades-long racist practices in Minneapolis, requires
>> “expansive learning” to continually experiment with new objects/motives
>> given that some of the tools/practices attempted in the past haven’t
>> necessarily worked, although attempts were made to do so, only to be
>> blocked by a timid political leadership
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.startribune.com/in-2008-we-had-a-reform-plan-for-the-mpd-it-got-derailed-by-politics/570998162/__;!!Mih3wA!SLGpQj8PmApHqKlEeH3z-ohB8R76qeqnpglVMrj9N2HOiJRn_QxL9FXpHMmS9eXEdK2Cgg$>
>> .
>>
>> For more on expansive learning theory, see attached reports:
>> Engeström,Y., & Sannino, A. (2010). Studies of expansive learning:
>> Foundations, findings and future challenges. *Educational Research
>> Review, 5*, 1–24.
>> Sannino, A., Engeström, Y., & Lemos, M. (2016). Formative interventions
>> for expansivelearning and transformative agency. *Journal of the
>> Learning Sciences, 25*(4), 599-633.
>>
>>
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