Dr Clam said:
Please don't call me objective! The sense-impressions I chose to notice, and the intepretations I put on them, are obviously conditioned by my status as an employee of a publicly-funded institution, as a married parent, as an Australian (specifically as a rural and regional Australian), as an American(specifically as a blue county in red state American), as a more-or-less collapsed Catholic, and as a fanatical raving looney! You should always bear this in mind... :)
The main reason that I didn't go around reading both sides (to the extreme?) views on both Israel/Palestine and higher education say, is partly because there are "agents" like you that have done it for me already! (For Israel etc.) I basically adjusted for your conditioning as an American ex-catholic which in my mind would make you take at face value more what the democratically elected leaders (of Israel) are saying, than other figures in the region. When I read an "Economist" analysis on Israel/Palestine, I am confident that there is very little "country bias" and almost no "government bias", basically, there is no country or person which they are afraid to offend - However, like all private media, it will tend to "sensationalise" situations in their articles (to make a mark, increasing sales) which I do usually adjust for as well.
I don't think reading a whole heap of articles on higher education funding issues from various (likely biased) sources will get me closer to a model of the reality of the situation which I crave. Both the Economist article on Higher education and your reply to it are "objective" in my mind as being objective doesn't make you provably right, but much more useful than articles from sources which I don't know their connections or can't adjust for them. I do however think that the article in question was spotted by someone else at UNE who brought it to your attention? It is quite easy to see that if everybody in your work peer disagrees with a concept, it will be seen as not objective by all of you. I fight very hard with myself when management start complaining about cheap imported clothing, because I want our tariffs reduced even more, against the feeling of my peers.
2 comments:
Just a minor quibble- you haven given me a dreadful shock by referring to me as an 'ex-catholic'. I do not think of myself thus. I am only collapsed, disarticulated, and flat-packed for storage. I shall address this further in my own blog in a little while.
Parenthetically, I lament with no little sadness that my meditations on the nature of the creative act have elicited no further response from Androoo. I would love to talk about art as well as politics and religion, although I concede it is a dangerous topic for discussion...
The documents of Vatican II that have to deal with non-Christian religions carefully skirt around the only question of any importance, which is whether their adherents go to Hell or not. All I want is an encyclical answering this issue with a ‘no.’ That is the only real unresolved issue I have, but it has kept me paralysed and on the fence for a long time now.
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