This is a day late again so if the POV changes that’s because I wrote the last half today.

So day 4 has arrived (past?) and this time I wont be skipping my History class as some interesting things were said. Most of this class discussed chapter 3 of Lynn Hunt’s History Why It Matters which focused on History being a discipline that was the domain of privileged men (wealthy white men), social and cultural History, and History and Citizenship.

History used to be about politics and statesmanship but more “recently” has shifted to being about citizenship since people of multiple backgrounds have access to academia that was previously barred from them. Is it perfect, no of course not. Let’s be honest, we all know there are still barriers to higher education that nobody seems to acknowledge. But thats just my own thoughts on the matter, none o that was said in class. Moving on, apparently women in Europe didn’t start making it into universities until the1920s vs women in North America were going to university and college as early as the 1880s (or around that time, at least) which I had no idea about, the fact that North America was slightly better than Europe when it came to educating women. Lynn Hunt does comment that ethnic minorities and even lower class white men struggled even more so when it came to breaking into university. Now when discussing minorities trying to destroy barriers in society my professor brought up systemic racism and how frustrating the conversations surrounding it are. As a liberal he believes in personal individual rights and freedoms but also understands that barriers, such as systemic racism, are incredibly difficult to break through. For example the well-known liberal Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Liberal? I that doesn’t sound right.

Moving on, when lecturing about cultural history my professor asked the class what culture is. The consensus was along the lines of food and general tradition. My professor was, I guess, pleasantly surprised as according to him back in the day he and his classmates would describe culture as being paintings, music, ballet (as it was a “cultured” activity), the opera (same deal as ballet), and things like that. He then went on a weird tangent about the opera and when he was younger Bugs Bunny was used to teach about the opera, something about Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit” but nowadays Bugs Bunny isn’t on TV anymore because it too politically incorrect because the coyote always dies and I think something about characters getting shot/blown up. This kind of confused me because I grew up with Bugs Bunny but also other violent cartoons that still air today. Also cartoons still depict violence quite frequently. You could also argue that a lot of cartoons deal with more mature themes such as mental health problems and politics in general. Whether they handle those subjects well is up for debate and really dependent on the specific show.

After that this class was coming to an end in which we went over Canadians not getting citizenship until, like, the 1940s which is much later than the US and France. We then talked about sovereignty, what it means in certain contexts, and pluralism. Regarding pluralism my professor talked about his father, who left when he was nine, hating the fact that cereal boxes had French translations on it and would deliberately turn the boxes to hide the French part. This was not because the man hated French people or the language, he encouraged my professor to learn it in school, he just hated the government mandating it on products and “basically” making people buy French stuff. Does this sound like it came out of nowhere? Because it kind of did! My professor seems to have a weird habit of dropping tidbits about his personal life, some of it being quite traumatic. His mother was a super alcoholic and he had too help raise his siblings.

Class ended but I want to talk about a segment from Lynn Hunt’s book as it feel necessary:

“In 2012, fifteen years after the Chinese took over Hong Kong from the British, they introduced a new curriculum that vaunted the communist party as “progressive, selfless, and united,” while downplaying the violence of the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the bloody crackdown on dissidents at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Despite protest demonstrations against this brainwashing by tens of thousands of parents, the government enforced the new standards.”

I’m so glad I didn’t spent a cent on this book, because what the hell is this? Clearly Lynn Hunt is a French Revolution historian because she fumbled this so badly. Absolutely embarrassing. Anyway, moving on.

During my two hour break I ate my grilled cheese and mushroom sandwich, biscoitos, and wrote the first half of this post. Nothing really happened except its hard to find good places to sit and write as majority of the tables near my Political Science class are very short so typing hurts the back big time. Maybe Friday will be better on my back.

So what happened in Political Science; oh boy this class was a doozy! So right off the bat we had a pop quiz, and I got all but one question right so that’s cool. I forgot the word “Postmaterialism” by Ronald Inglehart. So this class we went over the characteristics of the modern state: territory, sovereignty, legitimacy, and bureaucracy. Fun fact, I have such a hard time spelling the word bureaucracy. First we began with the historical origins of the modern state and apparently it was conceptualizer in Europe and then exported to the rest of the world. It emerged at the end of the Middle Ages. Then we went over the terms state, country, nation, regime, and government and how they don’t actually mean the same thing contrary to vernacular usage interchanging them constantly. That is not allowed in Political Science and I made sure to make note of it because I am very forgetful. Max Weber was mentioned due to his definition of what a state is; my professor says he wont really be testing us on the names of most political figures but we should probably remember Weber and Marx.

When discussing the 4 characteristics of the state this is where the most interesting part of the school day happened and I would encourage everyone to at the very least read this part of the post! First was territory, an area with boundaries where a state lays claim. With this in mind my professor brought up that after the collapse of the Jewish Kingdom and WWII there are nations but they have no state. Second was sovereignty defined as absolute power, ultimate authority within borders with external and internal validity, as there needs to be recognition by outside states. My professor used the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic as an example of recognition, they internally recognize themselves as states but have yet to gain external recognition, therefore they are not states. I swear to God, when I heard my professor say “Donbas” my head whipped up so fast I should also mention that when my professor was explaining why the DPR and LPR aren’t states he used a neutral matter-of-fact tone rather than mocking.

Continuing with this sovereignty conversation, while it seemed my professor was ready to move on a few students had questions and they were quite interesting. one student asked about the China and Taiwan dispute, how Taiwan wants to be a sovereign nation but China refutes this vehemently, or. In other aspects Taiwan sees itself as the legitimate China and wants to govern over the entire country instead. My professor acknowledged this as a difficult question to answer as this conflict is less an issue of Political Science and more of a game of power relations. He also made sure to add the context that the government of Taiwan was expelled from mainland China due to their loss but also growing tensions, he also made sure to add in a comment about nationalism. He explained that sovereignty is not to be defined by Political Scientists but by governments.

Sovereignty is not unchallengeable. But then another student piped up with a laugh to her question that by that definition North Korea is not sovereign because its government in unchallenged. My professor explained that there are conflict between the North and South Korean governments but both are well defined separate states since the Korean War (did the Korean War ever really end?). “But what about Russia?” she asks, and with the aid of another student he continues her question “Russia is a democracy but their higher powers cannot be challenged.” What does he mean by this? I have no fucking clue. The student continued before my professor could answer, “Russia has veto powers too, so maybe they’re just corrupt.” Finally my professor was able to speak, while yes it is hard to condemn a permanent member of he security council due to their veto ability, but its also difficult to condemn Russia as illegitimate since there isn’t really much substance to that claim. He seemed to be connecting the dots that this question was being brought up because of the current war in Ukraine so he emphasized that such a conflict must be resolved diplomatically.

When the students tried to push on Russia not having internal sovereignty as the government goes unchallenged my professor shut it down as he clearly wanted to move on to the next section of the material before we ran out of time. That next section was about the 3 kinds of legitimate authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal. He mentioned Mao Zedong as a charismatic leader, and just revolutionary leaders in general fitting that form of authority. he emphasized that all leadership makes use of all three (most of thee time). Students asked about Hitler but that discussion wasn’t interesting and unfortunately it took up the rest o our class time that we couldn’t finish the content.

Then I went home and finished writing this post the day after. So what did you think? For me I’m a tiny bit optimistic when it comes to my Political Science professor. Is he a Marxist? I have no clue and maybe I’ll never know but he seems incredibly respectful so far. Let’s hope things get better and better and the days go by and maybe I’ll feel comfortable enough to participate in class. I do need to take advantage of office hours so if anyone has questions I could ask during those I’d be more then happy to bring them up.

Thank you all for reading and I look forward to my next classes.

One last thing, I’m going to be making a separate community for these posts as it’ll help keep things more organized. I will still cross post to here but make my main posts (journals?) in their own space. I hope I am allowed to do that.