Let's be completely honest, we're all somebody's rich friend on this site.
357 karma · joined December 19, 2010
The observation that terrorism is somewhat socially driven is interesting but should be backed by a deeper frame of reference, and one that the authors of those papers surely understood: the larger goals of an organization like Al Qaeda don’t align at all with traditional political demands. The long term strategy involves attacking the US to draw them into open war with a muslim country, spreading the conflict to neighboring regions, mobilizing local resistance to the invaders (as in Afghanistan) and drawing the west into a war of attrition. In this sense they’ve been startlingly successful, and a focus on social capital and “branding”, as opposed to concrete demands of existing governments, is actually quite strategic. Whatever commonality this has with the IRA, the FARC, or even Hezbollah and Hamas is superficial at best.
Procrastination, like other problems of self-improvement, is multilayered. Some of my friends who constantly agonize over their productivity levels confound me, because often from my vantage point they seem perfectly well adjusted, if not for the constant feeling like they should be doing more. Other times procrastination is a response to stress or trauma that needs to be addressed on its own. Some kinds of distraction are arguably more of a reflection of changes in our culture than individual pathologies. Sometimes you just need an egg timer. Sometimes human beings are just garden-variety imperfect.
At the risk of venturing in cheesy territory, I'd recommend checking out Brene Brown's TED talks on vulnerability and shame, if you're not already familiar with them.
http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame?lang...
What might look to you like "giving up" often more closely resembles "finding one's strengths". Not everyone is good at STEM, true, but then again that's not the problem with your attitude. It's the implication that having an aptitude outside of STEM entails some kind of intellectual deficit.
A somewhat related example is center embedding structures, which are grammatical but usually quite difficult to parse once you get a few levels deep:
http://harvardsciencereview.com/2014/01/23/the-science-of-sw... http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-swear/
Who decides what a word means and when? Has a dictionary ever defined the complex web of emotions tied to that or any other hateful slur? Can the OED tell you what it feels like for a person of color to hear it, even in supposedly clinical circumstances?
I've always resonated with the way Robert M. Pirsig describes it in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – good style is hard to nail down, but you know it when you see it. Better to show your students examples of (what you consider to be) good writing, hone their instincts as to what makes an enaging read, and get them to write as much as possible, in as many ways as possible.