•For a mere seven
bucks, even aloof Manhattanites could
easily take the NJ Transit Train from Penn Station to the Montclair State U.
stop on Thursday (Oct. 25). Why do
that?
Because at 7pm in
University Hall Room 1070, I’ll moderate a debate between a conservative, a
leftist, and a libertarian professor under the auspices of the Young
Americans for Liberty: Dr. David Tubbs, Dr. Grover Furr, and Dr. Yuri Maltsev,
respectively. It will address issues far
more philosophical than what you’ll hear from, say, Donald Trump.
•After several years
of debate-moderating, I will of course be neutral and fair – though in the
interests of full disclosure I should note that Dr. Furr has denounced one
acquaintance of mine from my college days, Tim Snyder, since Dr. Furr argues
that massacres under Stalin, about
which Snyder has written to great acclaim, were greatly exaggerated (a
recent piece on the popular leftist site Counterpunch made a similar argument).
On the bright side,
as I’m sure many have noted, Grover Furr – in addition to being a medievalist
and a McGill alum – sounds kind of like a Muppet, which may itself be a more
timely issue.
•On a more serious
note, my own pick for biggest issue that somehow slipped under the radar for
the past few months is the January 2013
budget-cutting deal, now commonly referred to as the Sequester and just
beginning to become a source of rhetorical contention, since politicians
would no doubt like to take credit for the good parts and deny responsibility
for the bad parts of this almost-unplanned but potentially very helpful
development.
I have quietly long
been in favor of the Sequester slipping under the radar, by the way. Let whoever’s
president in a few months spin budget-cutting as a good thing that’s all
part of his master plan, I say.
•By the way, the two
photos nearby show how difficult it can be for your humble moderator to avoid
the issue of regulation even when he wants to: Muchmore’s (where last night’s
Dionysium was, as usual, held) must now post a sign warning patrons it is
illegal to dance there – hardly a very Dionysian development – and the
Starbucks closest to your humble moderator’s home had to remove its popular and
unobtrusive outdoor seating pending regulatory review.
Someday, in a
Nietzschean fashion that renders all the old right and left labels irrelevant,
humanity may just shrug off all the controls.
Until then: see you in New Jersey.
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