[Xmca-l] Re: My Hometown Minneapolis

[Martin Packer]

Help me understand, Anthony, why someone would *not* want to remove Trump?

Martin




> On Jun 5, 2020, at 8:40 AM, Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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