Thalia's LAST adventure

I always love a week that talks about the role media plays. I know how important media is, but I don't think about it so consciously until I get to these readings. I interact with media so frequently that it's just a part of my daily life to check the news for the recent happenings. Whenever the war on drugs is brought up, I always like to refer to a study done in Vancouver by Bruce Alexander called Rat Park. Here's the wikipedia article on it , but he basically took rats out of isolation and built a utopia for them where they got to run and play and they had the choice of drinking opiate-laced water or just regular water and none of the rats developed a dependency on the opiate water because they had a solid social structure. I think my favourite part of this article is that it helped to sway Portugal into legalizing all forms of drugs. You can buy marijuana and heroin at the grocery store. I believe that this is one of the solutions to ending the war on drugs, by legali

man, I was so pumped from last week and how there were so few problems, and now we get the bloodiest time since independence. Yet another problem for Latin America. People tend to become angels or demons when looked upon with a modern eye gazing into the past. Their actions are boiled down to what they did once, how they acted in political power and the role they played, rather than becoming the sum of all of their parts. I don't think it's entirely possible to take a historical figure and not try to categorize them as good or evil, because that's how we deal with the past. the past is evil, the past is not who we are today because we have learned from the past and we will (try to) not be those people again. We are inclined to sort people into good or evil boxes in our minds and I think that's okay. Binaries are how we are generally taught to see the world and this is something that we can unlearn as we grow away from these ideals, but they stick with us. Good and evi

            In Matthijs Rooduijn's 2013 article called "The Nucleus of Populism: In Search of the Lowest Common Denominator", he identifies a criticism of the elite by the leader. This is a hallmark of populism, often colloquially called an "us versus them" mentality. Rooduijn argues that this is one of the most common techniques that populist leaders use, what he calls "the lowest common denominator". For the purpose of relevancy, I am only looking at Rooduijn's analysis of Perón.              Of course, another staple in being a populist leader is charisma, and Perón had plenty of charisma, but Rooduijn mentions that his language was very important. Rather than using flowery language that would alienate his working-class followers, he used language that they would understand with metaphors that made it interesting for the well-educated. Rooduijn argues that Perón most emphasized the gap between the "good" (the people) and the "

I feel like this week could be summed up with "ahhh, for once, not  another problem for Latin America!" This week's reading was very refreshing: there was no political turmoil or big wars to talk about, but an attempt to establish trust between the government and its people. I don't often think about how lucky I am to have a government that I trust, even if I'm not one hundred percent satisfied. I can trust that my government, on all three levels, will never put me through the same things as Latin American leaders have done in previous weeks. I really appreciate this week's material for not being so violent. I loved the part about the radios! Radios were a big thing in my house growing up (though not as big as here) and they were always tuned to cfox. I still have a clock radio as well, rather than using my phone as my alarm, just because I like waking up to music or talk-shows or what have you. My grandma always talks about radios when she was young, too, a