Public Comment

What do you want to be when you grow up?This question, and my variety of answers through the years (I’m 33 years old now…does that count as “grown up?” Sometimes I think not working one’s “dream job,” or not earning a desirable wage are things that can make one feel less “grown up,” “adult,” “empowered to practice responsible adulthood,” et cetera, as the “grown ups” talk about property taxes they pay on the homes they own, the expenses related to bringing up their children, et cetera. This is all worked in to my confused notion of equating landing your dream job with growing up).One of the privileges that I believe Americans and other Western countries, along with the wealthier factions of other nations, get to enjoy is aiming for that  “dream job”— conceptualizing such a thing—what is my dream job?As the strangeness of our still relatively new internet economy continues to shake up the old order of things, that seemed to endure… approximately from after  World War 2, and into the early part of the first decade of the 2000’s, and as a millennial in this changing marketplace, the notion of a job worth putting all of my effort towards capturing has boggled my mind a bit...(from the May 21, 2019 Public Comment Vlog)FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT VISIT https://publiccomment.blog/Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

So, yesterday the New York Times reported that the Trump administration announced they’re going to hold an “economic workshop” in Bahrain hoping that their contribution to an improved Palestinian economy will lead to a friendlier approach to Israel. Meanwhile, the Trump administration appears to lean towards a pro-Israel one-state solution, as President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is on record saying “let’s just not say” ‘two states’ (God forbid– and no pun intended)This unreasonableness here, and the bias is blatant.  Not that I’m in love with a so called “two state solution.” I have many reservations about this. But my opposition to a “two state solution” is of the unconventional sort.I do understand a case for cynicism that Israel and the Palestinians could ever live in a secular and cosmopolitan democracy. The recent violence in Gaza– the worst breakout of violence in 5 years, as has been widely reported– is ample proof that both sides of this conflict are deep in the thickness of zealous, indignant nationalism. But that is the root of the problem– nationalism!...(from the May 20, 2019 Public Comment vlog)*FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT VISIT https://publiccomment.blog/Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

Republican Congressman Justin Amash, and Fox New’s Chris Wallace criticize Trump . My Theory on free will.[(From the May 19, 2019 Public Comment Vlog]  FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT VISIT https://publiccomment.blog/ Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

This vlogging/podcasting endeavor is the most interesting and exciting endeavor I ever undertook even despite the intimidating complexities of social and digital media. I don’t know what the most suitable and efficient multimedia integration consists of just yet. Today I switched from Facebook live streaming to YouTube live streaming because YouTube has much better video quality.What Facebook lacks in video quality it gains in the likelihood that I might reach a wider audience in the short term, but as I am in this for the long term, I’m willing to produce videos of sharper quality than immediately reach more people. But what about Vimeo? And do I really need to record my videos live?[from the May 17, 2019 Public Comment Vlog]FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT VISIT https://publiccomment.blog/Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

Misspeaking: I do it too much.A few days ago I claimed to disapprove of how philosophy tends to be taught in the universities. I regret making this comment. I lack sufficient research to make this claim. Why did I say it?Sometimes we just gaffe.Sometimes, for whatever reason (laziness? depression?) we just don’t care. It’s not always a “big deal” (I mean, not the “end of the world,” however, when people claim to provide us with definitions to words without dictionary sources this can be a pet peeve of mine as I take definitions quite seriously.I spent years attempting to find a definition of “poetry” I deemed clear and concise, growing frustrated with how so many poets impose ambiguous definitions of “poetry.” For example...[(from the May 16, 2019 Public Comment Vlog] FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT VISIT https://publiccomment.blog/Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

When it comes to self marketing (as opposed to political marketing, or marketing for an employer), anxiety and a complicated array of thoughts, at times, stifle me.I have a fear of annoying people with my requests for their time, feedback, money and/or endorsement, most of all because I understand many of us are quite busy and bombarded with other people asking for our time, feedback, money and endorsements.Also, I often think of how money can corrupt...[(from the May 14, 2019 Public Comment Vlog ] *** FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT VISIT https://publiccomment.blog/Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

So since I can’t afford the best equipment just yet, and since I lack any kind of support staff some of the technological aspects of my presentation, alas, suffers. At some point in life one must, if one suffers from degrees of perfectionism, come to terms with the fact that one simply cannot do it all. I read about this earlier today on a website that is new to me: fastcompany.com– a technology news site of sorts, it seems. “Make peace with incomplete knowledge” is what the article suggested.I’m working on it!One of my struggles, which you may have heard me mention earlier, is that I get so flustered trying to research everything I want to learn, trying to pay attention to as many aspects of the world around us as I can, trying to be what some may refer to as a “well-rounded person.” (Political news, entertainment news, podcasts, radio, art work, history books, social media, business news, technology news, blogs and vlogs, et cetera….) I accept and I am in the process of making peace with the fact that nobody can be perfectly well-rounded. (I mean, I get it…nobody can be perfect at anything. But still, one wants aims, standards, et cetera, right?)...[from the May 13, 2019 Public Comment Vlog]***FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT VISIT https://publiccomment.blog/ Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

Between my failed attempt turn my self-published book, my three failed runs for political office, and my failed pursuit of a teaching assistantship position as a graduate school student I’ve had enough failure to feel like I’m an expert on the topic. But, like Elon Musk, I refuse to be defined by my failures, so today I imagined myself as the Montaigne of the personal vlog, digressing from topic to topic as I pleased, from failure to time, thinking of Hootie and the Blowfish, when they sing: “Time, why you punish me?”[[[from the May 12, 2019 Public Comment Vlog]]]Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

The philosopher and writer Michel de Montaigne– whose work I had the opportunity to study in college– continues to influence and inspire me. I revere his contribution to the development of the “personal essay” and the written treatment of individual subjects from the perspective of reflection on experience with/connection to such subjects. In this context one can learn about the person in particular, the human soul in general, the topic, in a conversation as opposed to a lecture or pure argument. And in the case of essays such as the sort Montaigne wrote, there’s the freedom to digress, in his case, in and out of history, philosophy, politics, et cetera.I think of Montaigne now, as I contemplate my extemporaneous, thinking-out- loud- as- I- go approach to vlogging and podcasting, and as I touch on the subject of graduating college, from the perspective of someone who once received an F in fifth grade and dropped out of college multiple times to someone who fell in love with academia, graduated with a  3.98 GPA and was granted the privilege to speak at his college graduation. That is to say, there is, among the ironies, the irony that while I possess some “academically” derived thoughts on my academic experiences—I mean, based on scholarly articles, and university research from which I could merely synthesize that sea of research—I could not speak with accuracy if I detached from my personal connection to this subject.To graduate at 33 as opposed to 22 years old, at points in my reflection, brings sadness and regrets because sometimes it can seem like all this does is confirm some notion of myself as slow compared to my smarter peers. Yet I don’t think that way about those who are my age or my elders who earn their college degrees later than is “conventional.” That would be to do what Ayn Rand referred to as “context dropping...” [from the May 10, 2019 Public Comment Vlog]FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT VISIT https://publiccomment.blog/

How can we gain a sense of the world, of life, living it to the fullest, appreciating all that’s “out there” with such a bombardment and deluge of information…an overwhelming plethora of options to contemplate everywhere? How does this impact the way we process, say, the news, for example, when historical, monumental, complex events transpire: I’m thinking of President Trump’s Attorney General William Barr who faces Contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with the House Judiciary Committee’s subpoena for the unredacted Mueller report, and how this thrusts us, (say Judiciary Committee Nadler and Speaker Pelosi) into a “constitutional crisis.” What does that mean? What does it mean for the future of our country, our democracy, and the rule of law as the president persists in obstruction of justice and his executive branch plays along?This conflict of prioritization has bothered me for a long time...[from the May 9, 2019 Public Comment Vlog] For more from PUBLIC COMMENT view publiccomment.blog Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

***There are significantly more homicides per 100,000 people in the U.S. than in the U.K. Moreover, you are more likely to get stabbed to death in California or in Texas than you are in the U.K. In the UK there were 285 knife/stabbing related homicides between March of 2017 and 2018 in a population of roughly 66 million people. In contrast, there were 280 knife/stabbing related murders in 2015 in California in a population of merely a rough 39 million…or Texas where there were 175 knife/stabbing related deaths out of a population of roughly 29 million.I bring these points up because I hear from conservatives and libertarians this idea that in the UK even if they don’t have a gun problem, they have a stabbing problem, so the real problem is world wide homicide, not homicide by guns in the U.S. They are wrong. Homicide is a bigger problem in the U.S. than it is in much of the world. It’s not about guns versus knives. It’s about homicide, guns and knives and we must take measures to address all of these issues.[(From May 8, 2019 Public Comment vlog)] FOR MORE FROM PUBLIC COMMENT VISIT https://publiccomment.blog/ Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

If you’ve heard Bob Dylan’s song “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” then perhaps you will understand? Here’s the sense of conflict: this deep rooted desire for all-encompassing independence– economic, ideological, political, intellectual– thinking something like: “To Hell with academia!” To Hell with the corporations and ‘big business!’ To Hell with everyone who stands to gain a profit of the information they sell us! To Hell with the ‘Main Stream Media!’ To Hell with Religion!” To Hell with so called ‘art!’! et cetera…and you think it because you have a vision that just doesn’t seem to fit with all the many standards out there (ironically enough!)– too blunt to be a poet, too academic to be a journalist, too populist to be an academic, too conceptual to establish a conventional ‘narrative,’ too self preserving to be “corporate,” too “independent” to belong to a political party…Yet, I’m not the anti-social type...[Originally published May 7, 2019]For more from Public Comment, visit https://publiccomment.blog/Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

Greetings! In today’s video blog I look beyond politics (though not quite away from it… [can I ever, really?])… to speak with you as honestly and intimately as I can about what it means to me to find a balance between practicality/responsibility and also seeking self-fulfillment/self actualization. In other words, I am thinking a lot about what my “sense of purpose” is…how to be the “change [I ]want to see in the world.My mother has liked to say in the past that she believes I have the “gift of gab.” I like to talk. That is the whole reason behind why I write in fact. Though one frustration I find with my writing is, as a result severe perfectionism, it takes me a long time to finish writing projects, so extemporaneous speaking enables me to try and balance a sense of trying to speak constructively without spending many, many months just to say one thing.Also in this episode, I talk about immigration, the violence between Hamas and Israel, globalism versus nationalism, and I reflect on our changing economy.[[[(from the May 6, 2019 Public Comment Vlog]]]Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com 

*Did Attorney General William Barr break the law? If so, what do we do about it?          *The Mueller Report & the infamous Trump Tower meeting & Trump et. al. just can’t seem to remember          *The problem with Biden[This podcast was originally created on May 2, 2019,  during an experimental period when Public Comment was only a YouTube vlog.] Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com  

Politics is on my mind at an ever more intense level these last few days but so are the ethical reasonings behind my desire to be constructive in my efforts as a political activist. For example: how can we expect our society to be rich in its ethical thinking (and thus in its political thinking) when we don't even require basic philosophy and ethics to be taught in our high schools?  For more from Public Comment, check out: https://publiccomment.blog/Listen to the Public Comment Podcast on Radio Public Subscribe  to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/seanoconnoressays/featured Visit me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/publiccommentblogFollow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/publiccomment.blog/Tweet me at https://twitter.com/sopubliccommentConnect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soconnorwritingtutor/ Email me at sean.publiccomment@gmail.com