By Richard John Stapleton
It’s a case of lying, lying, and more lying, and 91 criminal charges, with no convictions.
i watched them on live TV watching the insurrection unfold on TV ensconced in a tent on a cold day.
Damnedest thing I ever saw.
Some of them looked like they were high on something. Trump junior in the foreground got interviewed along with a female supporter who was gleefully doing the twist in a heavy coat and heels.
Eyes bulging Trump junior looking into the camera shouted Fight! Fight! Fight!.
Trump senior standing in the background never took his eyes off the TV screen, pointing out happenings on the screen while making muted comments now and then to people standing around him, including his daughter.
Napoleon Bonaparte never had it so good drinking brandy in his tent watching his troops fighting for him in one of his battles.
Come to think of it, if only the USian deep state could “find a way” to exile Trump on an island like Elba somewhere ASAP, and bring this frustrating, picayune, pusillanimous, maddening USian Trump insurrection investigation-indictment-trial-by-jury-media-circus process to a screeching halt, to solve the problem before all hell breaks loose, while preserving the functioning of the USian justice process, that generally functions well enough to enable the US to muddle through, however flawed the USian justice process might be, we would all be a lot better off.
If probably not, there is no telling what kinds of absurdities and abominations USians, and all Earthian humans, for that matter, will be seeing and hearing on TV for a long time, caused by the happening of Trumpism.
There have been innumerable cases throughout Earthian human history in which aspiring or successful fascist dictators have been caused to exist in large organizations such as countries by rare concatenations of infinitely-progressing cause-effect chains; but most likely never in Earthian human history has such a concatenation caused the existence of an aspiring fascist dictator who is an emotionally and intellectually deranged crime boss circus clown, devoid of empathy and intellectual honesty and integrity, in an organization such as the United States of America.
To see what the tent, the TV screen, Trump, and his entourage looked like on January 6, 2021 as they watched his insurrection live on TV click here:
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=317419247453758&set=a.112791747916510.
We no longer have political debates in the USA. What we have now are political lying contests, disconnected from reality, telling us what we saw and heard January 6, 2021 on live TV with our own eyes and ears as Trump’s insurrection happened did not happen. According to lyin’ Repug politicians and paid essayists, Trump committed a heroic patriotic act with his insurrection January 6, 2021 no matter what US law says or what millions of TV viewers saw and heard live with their own eyes and ears as the insurrection happened.
It’s easy for intelligent Earthian humans to be overtaken by feelings of sadness, madness, and scaredness in today’s psychological and social worlds.
It’s unlikely that intelligent Earthian humans will be overtaken with feelings of gladness when considering Earthian states of affairs.
It’s easy to learn how to put Earthian humans to work increasing human OKness for everyone by reading AS THE ROOSTER CROWS EARTHIAN OKNESS INCREASES.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMERâ„¢ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMERâ„¢. The psychological GAME roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
Be it noted that Stapleton sat in the same circle in the same kind of chair as students, and the De-GAMING rules also applied to him. If the Classroom De-GAMERâ„¢ landed on him he had to lay out the case just like any other student and discuss what was the problem, what were the alternatives, and what he recommended.
Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was about what the student observed, researched, analyzed, and wrote about an existing business in the local environment or a business plan the student created. The other write-up was an analysis of a case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.
Stapleton has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER†he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning, management systems, and business policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana– Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMERâ„¢ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers†for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works†in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,†in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation system he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.â€
To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations†has by now (July 10, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including eleven new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.â€
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
Stapleton’s latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
For more on Stapleton’s cultural, educational, and professional experiences see “RJS Academic Vita,†at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-academic-vita/.
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