“No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors”
“This concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”
“Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to turn them into objects”
“When a word is deprived of its dimension of action: reflection automatically suffers as well and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah”. “
“There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world”
All taken from “The pedagogy of the oppressed”. All inspiring. All distracting me from writing my learning theories essay.
I found this and thought it summed up the Western world’s response to terrorism as best as I can understand it. For the uninitiated LeBron James is probably the best basketball player in the world at the moment (other’s might tell you it’s Kobe Bryant, but they’re wrong).
“I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.
Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:
(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.”
Mulled Wine. Note the mangled lemon and orange pieces
This is normally more of a Bec thing to do – but it’s Christmas so why not have a go. With this year’s Christmas being a relatively chilly one, I decided that our Christmas Eve celebrations should involve my favourite German Christmassy tradition: Glühwein (mulled wine).
Geoff’s Glühwein recipe
2 bottles of whatever Red Wine you have lying around
1/3 of a bottle of leftover port (also lying around)
A packet of cinammon quills
Some brown sugar
Grated whole nutmeg (much nicer if you can get the whole ones – plus the insides of whole nutmeg looks a lot like brains!)
Cloves (we didn’t have any whole ones around so it was pre-grated for us)
Chinese Five Spice (Smells about right)
A Dash of Orange Juice
Two Whole Oranges (from our new backyard, Wooo!) – one sliced, the other squeezed for all its juice and mangled
One Whole Lemon – likewise juiced and mangled
A (really decent) dash of Cointreau
Directions:
Put everything except the Cointreau together in the saucepan, over a very low heat. Stir until spices and sugar have dissolved. Taste. Add some more of whatever you think is needed, until the harsh edge has been taken off the Red wine. In theory this should take about 5 minutes, but if you’re doing it right it should take about an hour and a half. Enjoy the delicious aroma permeating through the house. Add the Cointreau close to serving time or once you have taken off the heat (don’t want to lose the alcoholability of the liqueur).
Serves best if left for a number of hours to stew in the rind of the citrus and the cinammon sticks, but if not you can probably just serve straight away – nice and hot.
Rich white straight-acting blokes who believe in God, or pretend to, hold a disproportionate amount of the world’s power and have for centuries. It’s not because, as many would like you to believe, it’s a case of ‘we are the best, chuck out the rest’. It’s simply due to circumstance. Class, freedom, money and education are the basis of power. And access to these is almost entirely due to where you were born and to whom. Sexually transmitted hereditary privilege and genitally determined advantage.
This quote has been waiting in my draft posts for over a month now, waiting for me to have something valuable to add to it. And like her or hate her (and there are plenty on both sides of that divide), I don’t think that you can really argue that Catherine Deveny is actually wrong here.
