Debating Myself

Just an update, the Economist ran an article on rural schools and their decay this week–the silent problem that my senior thesis attempts to partially explain.

I hope sometime soon to put up a longer post discussing both of my theses and giving some better analysis of the issues they contain.

Also, I will be putting the PowerPoint slides of my senior project presentations up sometime this summer, right now I am just trying to find the best way to convert them to Flash videos (probably using Camtasia Studio to take a screencast).

I will also be posting PDF files of my two senior theses–so be looking for that soon.

Technorati Tags: rural schools, PowerPoint

Don’t worry, I won’t be gone for long, but I will be unable to post until at least Tuesday next week due to graduate school visits. I’m actually on the road now visiting a program and then Tuesday I will be deciding which school I will be attending for the next several years.

That leaves me with too many life-altering decisions to make and not enough time to blog. I’ll post a full report when I get back, plus we have upcoming posts about free trade (continuing the promised series), education policy, and Olympic xenophobia (which I may actually post before Tuesday, since I am newly motivated).

How’s that for a teaser?

Paul Silver, over at The Moderate Voice, points out that moderate voices are not more prevalent, and what the term ‘moderate’ really means:

Few of the central controversies in our society can be resolved by simple extreme answers: they do not reduce to: power versus finesse, carrot versus stick, civil liberties versus security, and it certainly isn’t liberal versus conservative. It is almost always a balance and blend.

Moderate voices aren’t present enough. People search for easy answers in extremism, ideologies, or one-sided discourse that only reaffirms poorly formed policies. The left and the right are both susceptible to offering what seem like easy answers, but they are not. The only way toward truly successful solutions is through a moderate dialog between ideas coming from both the left and the right.

As a moderate myself, I often find myself torn between left and right wing ideologies that rarely address the issues in a convincing and meaningful way. In the flash and buzz of cable TV news spin machines, sound bytes on talk radio, and left and right wing shock columns in national newspapers across the country America is losing its ability to generate meaningful and well-reasoned political discourse. Moderate voices don’t get TV ratings and don’t raise the passions of Americans in the way that more ideologically biased voices tend to do. Fortunately, for those looking for a more balanced discourse the Moderate Voice is a great starting point for getting in touch with blogs across the entire political spectrum—left, right and the middle.

Over the next few weeks I will be selecting several blogs across the political spectrum to feature in the link section of this page. The links will be divided accordingly so their ideological bias is known upfront and readers can decide for themselves what ideology to look at and find a diverse array of political opinions to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.

The idea for this blog has been around for a long time. From time to time I have kept various blogs, though only one is worth noting–my travel blog from my year of studying in Germany. The other blogs I have kept were all personal diaries for the most part, tracking my feelings and reactions to the world around me, and just basically conveying my feelings into the vastness of cyberspace–and playing with blogging software.

Since my last blog ended (sometime in 2003) I decided that I would not start blogging until I had something interesting–and hopefully important–to say. As a student of political science and a junkie of international news I have a lot of opinions–still very malleable for the most part–and I wanted to put them out there and open up discussion. The middle of the election season for 2008 is a golden opportunity to begin this process.

I am also a software geek–though merely an amateur–and enjoy tweaking with software like WordPress. So this is also a forum for my online experimentation.

Finally, the primary reason I have started this project now is in response to an article I recently read that really inspired me to further develop my online presence. I am finishing up my undergraduate education this May and will be moving on to a PhD program in Political Science, and I believe a strong and well developed online presence will be a great asset to me as I advance in my education and career. This blog is the beginning of that development.