A Place for Learning

Taylor’s “Race for Profit” is necessary if you want to understand the Black economic plight and the persistence of racial housing segregation in the United States.  She documents in great detail the many failures of HUD public-private housing programs of the 60s and 70s.  Taylor argues programs such as the low-income homeownership program were doomed from the start with the inclusion of the real estate industry, which steered the objectives from increased housing stability and homeownership among low-income Blacks towards providing a steady cash flow for real estate industry hustlers and corrupt bureaucrats. It was no surprise then programs failed as the schemes allowed widespread exploitation, bringing down those they were supposed to help. Instead of addressing the clear fraud, mismanagement, and neglect of HUD and its private partners, they found an easy scapegoat: Placing blame on the victim's character, the culture of poverty, and the insufficiency of government. Mea...

       My Interest In Nietzsche The psychology professor whose lectures on psychology and human behavior I enjoy listening to--,  Jordan Peterson describes the writer as a genius in describing the societal shifts of the late 18th century. He is also said to have- in ways- predicted the Holocaust, theorizing there would be a violent side-effect from the decline in religious ritual and practice, referred to as "the death of god."  I first became aware of Nietzsche when reading a biography on the late Jim Morrison, the volatile, rebellious rock legend who voraciously read the philosopher at a young age, which greatly influenced his poetry and later song lyrics for the Doors.  I also thought of Neitzche this past summer when hiking on the Neitzche trail to the little French town of Eze, where Neitzche spent time thinking and developing his theories that later turned into the infamous book  Thus Spake Zarathustra. A Birth of a Tragedy     So ...

  Drift and Mastery by Walter Lippman I picked up this book off my partner's shelf of old philosophy books on a night I couldn't sleep. I became entranced with the book and couldn't put it down for the next day.  The ideas and observations are timeless; even though this book was written in 1912( the year the Titanic sank), its wisdom rings true to this day, especially as we are going through a time where radical ideologies, corrupt institutions(specifically government and media), and people struggle with all that comes with the ever-expanding changes associated with "modernity."  At his time, this may have been the Model T, the radio, and women's rights. We still find a surprising number of similarities in the struggle to incorporate everyday innovations into our interaction with the world and how we imagine our future.  What should we hold on to from the past? How do we imagine a new and better future? How do we update our ways of thinking? Our institutions? ...