Thursday, March 23, 2006

It's been a while since I posted, and I am not sure why I am posting now. I have a paper due in about an hour, and I think it is still missing one or two key elements. The class frustrates me, so maybe I am posting out of a desire to protest. Down With Dumb Classes! I don't mean 'dumb' as in 'unintelligent'. More like kind of pointless and convoluted. I feel like the whole relativism thing has the potential to turn most conversations in the social sciences into wildly spinning loops. Like yesterday. We were talking about news coverage of the Romanian revolution in 89/90. People kept making references to "what really happened". So this one kid pipes up and says "I feel that the discussion of truth in this situation is irrelevant. We can never know what really happened in the Romanian revolution, because we are all stuck inside our perspectives." I thought it was a cop out. As social scientists, our job should be to get around the lenses. We should be trained to work as hard as we possibly can to understand the way that our perspective is coloring our assessment of a situation, and then do our best to over come it. I was hoping that others would agree with me, but I was sorely disappointed.

So much for social science.