With the Internet era and social media and politics being so out there with the lies, now you’ve got people denying things they’re on camera doing, and then you’ve got people not really caring about the truth. You’ve got people supporting people who’ve done horrific things, but just don’t want the other side to get any satisfaction.
As I started to pursue the subject more deeply I realized that walking was this wonderful meandering path through everything I was already interested in – gender politics, public space and urban life, demonstrations and parades and marches. The relationship between walking and thinking and between the mind and the body.
When you’re coaching at Kentucky, you’re held to a different standard, and like in politics, there is a core group that absolutely loves you, and everyone else is trying to unseat you in any way they can – anything to trip you up; that’s what it is. If you’re not up to that, then don’t coach at Kentucky.
What is more comforting to the terrorists around the world: the failure to pass the 9/11 legislation because we lacked a majority of the majority,’ or putting aside partisan politics to enact tough new legislation with America’s security foremost in mind?
When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.
Politics thrives on simple, clean messages, something that played to Obama’s advantage in 2008. Stagnant unemployment and the loss of America’s AAA rating are as simple and tough as they come. This is the economy on Obama’s watch, and there’s no one left to blame.
By dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going beyond ‘black’ and ‘white,’ we may construct new values, new institutions and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression.
One of biggest lies in politics is the lie that Republicans are the party of big business. Big business does great with big government. Big business is very happy to climb in bed with big government. Republicans are and should be the party of small business and of entrepreneurs.
When you go after someone who has a deep ideological belief set that is contradictory with your own, it’s conversion. Conversion is hard. Conversion is miraculous. We have entire religions built around the idea of conversion. Politics is not a religion. Politics is about persuasion.
If China’s expansion into Africa and Russia’s into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley’s ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.
Whether one believes or not, religion is as real a force in the life of the world as economics or politics, and it demands fair-minded attention. Even if you think the entire religious enterprise is at best misguided and at worst counterproductive, it remains vital, inspiring great good and, sometimes, great evil.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.
Where I grew up in Vermont, there is no municipal garbage removal. You have to bring your trash to the dump every weekend. Something like three hours on Saturday morning, the entire town goes in. It is actually a very efficient place to do politics. I would go to the garbage dump, get petitions signed, give out literature, talk to voters.
Ah, there’s a director. Astonishing, Spike Lee. A feisty guy, but a guy who’s, I think, incredibly misunderstood. I think people review his politics or his color as opposed to his filmmaking sometimes. Because he’s a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker and a lover of the art.
You don’t read many positive things about Iran in the press, which is depressing, but when I go back to my grandparents’ house in the hills, and I’m sitting by the pool, sipping a bootleg Turkish beer, watching a pirate DVD, eating my grandma’s cooking… you realise there is a real bridge between politics and country and people.
I was in the classroom four days after the inauguration, because I said to Joe when we got elected, ‘Joe, I really want to continue to teach.’ And he said, ‘Absolutely. You should be doing what you love.’ Politics – that’s Joe’s life, really, his love. But teaching is mine.
It’s not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It’s that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.
I am in the fighting game. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t watch the news, I don’t care about politics, I don’t care about other sports. I don’t care about anything I don’t need to care about. This is my sport: it is my life. I study it; I think about it all the time. Nothing else matters.
Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn’t leave the Republican Party; it left me.
My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one’s convictions can be subjected to empirical test.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more liberal, and my father is increasingly conservative. It’s so shocking to me because I always thought we had the same politics. The day I realized we voted for different presidents, I practically fell out of my chair.
Democracy is a revelation, but it’s complicated. There are elections to hold, politics to create, rights to assert, grievances to settle and institutions to build. To many, it’s exhilarating. For others, it can be disappointing when it turns out that democracy doesn’t immediately make life better.
Compared to developed countries, or even to some major emerging countries, burdened by aging populations, financial crises, widening budget deficits, faltering faith in politics and growing social demands, Africa has become the world’s last ‘New Frontier:’ a kind of ‘it-continent.’
Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man’s skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white – you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.
You know, the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that’s healthy and indeed even creative. But it’s where – it’s really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky.
