#the return of incorrect kp

[shawolsos]

Vegas: "We should breed and ask our offspring what they think." has quickly become one of my favourite ways to disagree with someone.

Pete: I disagree.

Vegas:

Pete: You know what has to happen now :)

[darkmaga-retard]

One of the great gifts of my life was wandering into a class on Contemporary Poland in college taught by a humane and deeply knowledgeable man named James T. Flynn. There, for the first time, I was forced to address something that many Americans, it seems, go to their grave never having thought seriously about: that nations (a cultural reality) and states (a juridical reality) are very different things and that the occasions when the two of them have been aligned in a relationship of congruence during modern history have been quite rare.

I did not know it then, but by forcing me to confront the reality of the almost always messy interplay between nations and states, he was gifting me with a topic of enduring interest, one around which I would eventually build much of my academic research agenda later in life. 

But that was only one of the many gifts he gave me. https://read.amazon.com/kp/card?asin=B0C4G4785Y&preview=inline&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_5XSJKQ95AWZV5P4JF795

Another was putting a small mimeographed sheet on his office door each Spring that said “Study this Summer in Poland at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow,” and in smaller letters, “Room, board and an intensive 8 week Polish Language course $350.” 

Broke and totally confused about what I wanted to do after finally graduating from college in 1982, I went home to my parents’ house and read for a few months, and tiring of that (or perhaps more accurately my parents tiring of me doing that), took a job as a house painter. 

Ten months later, having discovered the true, often depressing reality of hard and often boring work for the majority who had no return to school on the horizon (or any other reprieve for that matter), I was looking for a path of escape.