Thalia's LAST adventure

The whole revolution talk in this chapter really took me back to the days that every musical theatre kid goes through: the Les Miserables phase, specifically the reference to the revolution eating its young and young men most often being the victims of revolution. I really liked the point made in the video that these men are heroes because they did not live long enough to disappoint. Eventually, these young men with nothing, fighting for something, would become old men with money and power and all the disgusting traits that come with it. But how can we be sure they would have disappointed? They were part of the revolution, after all, so it's possible that the values necessary for someone to take up arms in a revolution would have stuck around into adulthood. I really enjoyed the part about a revolution on the internet, where it can't be silenced, and it made me think of the current political upheaval one might see on the internet these days in regards to Donald Trump or Harve...

I don't know if it's my education up until now, my upbringing, or Mexican representation in the media, but I somehow always thought of Mexico as a big old desert with lots of cacti and sand and ponchos. I believe this is in part due to the media's representation of foreign countries, especially those in crises, as backwards and needing our help so donate now! It's probably also in part due to cartoons always depicting Mexico and other Latin American countries in this way, as deserts without any buildings, just vast expanses of desert, while New York is a bustling metropolis. It goes without saying that cartoons are built off of stereotypes, but to what extent are these stereotypes damaging, or even racist? I found all the hard, concrete information a little difficult to digest. I guess that's why I'm not an economics major. I also found all the novelties of the products discussed a little difficult to understand, probably because I have electricity and have had...

I love the question about race being a social construct. It always makes me think of Rachel Dolezal, who claimed to be black (but was really a white woman doing some form of complicated blackface) and then the hordes of (mostly) white people rushing in to ask "well, if race is a social construct, and gender is a social construct, then why is trans-racial not a real identity in the same way transgender is?" And the answer lies in the stain of racial violence, especially the one that carried on today. It is in the fact that NFL players who kneel during the anthem are "sons of bitches" and white supremacists are "some very fine people". I think the history of slavery in the Americas shapes it in a negative light. People of colour are routinely oppressed in the Americas, especially the United States, but there are also disturbing and saddening examples of colourism in Latin America. It's always hard for me to compare slavery in the Americas with other cou...

If liberalism involves commitment to abstract principles, then what does conservatism involve? I like that the description of the colonies at this time does not sugarcoat anything, it tells it like it is. there was war, and it was violent, but it was pretty much the same everywhere else. It's shocking to think that that was the norm back then, constant wars in your country. It obviously would not have been war to the scale we would see (and might if trump doesn't get impeached soon) these days with nuclear weapons and large-scale weaponry, but it's still terrifying to think of your world as filled with nothing but war and destruction. At first I was worried that there would be accounts of how backwards Latin America was at this time for having so many wars, but I was glad (in a relieved way) that it was mostly just a sign of the times rather than a sign of those poor backwards countries. In another class, a student made a minimizing point about people from the 15th centu...