a crash course in the power of nonviolence

UC Berkeley is following the example of Stanford and MIT and making almost all of their courses available online for free. I was just looking through their YouTube catalog and thought that, given the current situation in Burma, this lecture on nonviolence, might be of interest. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Or, if nonviolence isn’t your cup of tea, check out this wild Turkish version of Start Trek!

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6 Comments

  1. Steph
    Posted October 5, 2007 at 12:17 pm | Permalink

    Wait. Does this mean I don’t have to move to Berkeley to major in Tupac Studies?

    http://www.vh1.com/artists/news/1171/09101997/2pac.jhtml

  2. Valerie Bertinelli Van Halen
    Posted October 5, 2007 at 4:39 pm | Permalink

    Tupac was a gifted artist. It’s a shame that his work isn’t appreciated more broadly than it is. People laugh when I tell them that I listen to it, but it’s very well done. I wish people would just give it a chance.

  3. Eddie Van Halen
    Posted October 5, 2007 at 5:59 pm | Permalink

    ha ha ha ha ha ha

  4. mark
    Posted October 6, 2007 at 9:32 am | Permalink

    Bonnie Franklin just IM’d me. She thinks you’re about to start fight and she doesn’t want you do to it on a site that your son reads. So, she’s asking that you please, please take this conversation someplace else.

    If you’d like, I can direct you to some sites that no one ever visits. You can have domestic arguments there all day long without bothering another living soul.

  5. oliva
    Posted October 6, 2007 at 9:48 pm | Permalink

    I love UCTV, especially the weekend broadcasting–so many stellar lectures and presentations from the various UC schools.

    But the C-SPANs can also be so good on the weekends, including a special about JFK last evening in which they showed a clip from JFK’s June 1963 commencement address at American University. Here is a link to the transcript, plus a little morsel of the speech, to entice while lifting your hearts up:

    http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/JFK061063.html

    I have . . . chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

    What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by 11 of the Allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

    Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use the is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles — which can only destroy and never create — is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

    I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war — and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

  6. mark
    Posted October 7, 2007 at 7:56 pm | Permalink

    Thank you for bringing the conversation back around, Oliva. I was just thinking about the Kennedy brothers. A few nights ago, I was fortunate enough to have caught half of the American Experience on RFK. Those assassinations (of the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, and MLK) really put our country on the wrong track. Some of this stuff might have happened even if they’d been around, but I can’t imagine that we, as a nation, would be where we are today had some of them lived. RFK, at least for me, was the biggest loss.

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