Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Future Secretary of Agriculture



This brilliant young mind is an involved citizen testifying before the City Council in Santa Cruz, California but, as Mark Churchill notes, "she's destined to one day become Secretary of Agriculture."

And where do great minds like this come from?

Good news: They are locally grown, right here in the U.S.A.!

Just consider this course title and description from Occidental College just a few hours up the road from Santa Cruz. Now here's good fertilizer for young minds!

180. STUPIDITY. Stupidity is neither ignorance nor organicity, but rather, a corollary of knowing and an element of normalcy, the double of intelligence rather than its opposite. It is an artifact of our nature as finite beings and one of the most powerful determinants of human destiny. Stupidity is always the name of the Other, and it is the sign of the feminine. This course in Critical Psychology follows the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and most recently, Avital Ronell, in a philosophical examination of those operations and technologies that we conduct in order to render ourselves uncomprehending. Stupidity, which has been evicted from the philosophical premises and dumbed down by psychometric psychology, has returned in the postmodern discourse against Nation, Self, and Truth and makes itself felt in political life ranging from the presidency to Beevis and Butthead. This course examines stupidity.

You would think this has to be a parody. But no, it's in the online course catalogue.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that Miss Teen South Carolina?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww

HTTrainer said...

Now, I am even more convinced that we were entering the 2nd Dark Ages.

Living the life in The Little City said...

Yikes. That's just tragic.

Water Over The Dam said...

An interesting class - I had no idea that colleges were already studying the Bush administration at the undergraduate level.