Word: machiavellis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that homosexual behavior was "shameful." The aggressive: he said this while testifying in favor of a Colorado constitutional amendment which would have banned laws that specified homosexuality as a distinct category for legal protection. The passive: he said that laws protecting specifically gays would patronize them (an argument Machiavelli sort of makes in his Discourses on Livy). And though the BGLSA (it didn't have a "T" that year) might have hated him, several of its members liked and respected Mansfield personally...
HYPOTHETICAL SITUATION: A student is assigned a paper on Machiavelli's indirect government. The student turns in a paper with the following thesis: "Machiavelli's indirect government laid the groundwork for a current system of patronizing rule." However, as the professor reads past the thesis, he discovers that this student provides no evidence to support his claim. Instead he says: "Machiavelli's indirect government laid the groundwork for a current system of patronizing rule because I believe that is the truth...
...have anything to say or protest, say it now because the lecture is on the topic of Machiavelli, not on anything [else] I've said," he said...
Mansfield seems to have adopted this system under the misguided notion that a two-tiered system will put him in line with the times. Arrogance and a deprecating demeanor may have been requirements of teaching positions in Machiavelli's Europe, but sometime in the last several centuries pedagogy accepted the principle that it isn't the job of a professor merely to point out how little a student knows. Indeed, if Mansfield weren't so preoccupied with standing up against the liberal gods of grade inflation--who have so erroneously fooled the world into thinking that ignorant Harvard students...
...tried, and he's always selected good ones. In Texas he chose (or was chosen by; let's keep that open) lieutenant governor Bob Bullock, one of the shrewdest s.o.b.s who ever walked. Let's just say that if Bush had studied politics under Lyndon Johnson or Machiavelli, he couldn't have done better. Dick Cheney is apparently the new mentor, and I'm favorably impressed, certainly by Cheney's demeanor; one worries because his voting record is so nutsoid...