Thursday, August 6, 2009

Discover Janesville at Codos Coffee - David McKay, PhD

The episode filmed at Codos Coffee shop will be broadcast on JATV next weekend. It will feature interviews with Teri Huber, Terry Thomas, Jose Carrillo and David McKay. In the meantime, I will begin to post the clips of the interview here and on YouTube.

First is the interview with David McKay, PhD. David is a professional historian, who lectures on history and also works as the Fine Arts Coordinator at the UW Rock. We sat down and had a great discussion talking about several areas of David's expertise. These include the Electoral College and its value to our democracy. David made a very interesting statement when he said that so far the Electoral College has not disgraced itself sufficiently to warrant its removal.

We also talked about the Jeffersonian Dilemma, which had to do with the fact that Thomas Jefferson knew that slavery was deeply wrong. Yet Jefferson felt that correcting the evil of slavery was going to be difficult and thus he chose to not address the subject. A very interesting discussion that has to do with the philosophical implications of this simple dilemma: if we are aware of evil but feel that ending it will be too complicated, is that a sufficient justification to ignore the evil?

Finally we discussed a class that David teaches together a physicist and a philosopher at UW Rock that deals with the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Japan by the United States, at the end of the WWII. David covers the historical significance of this powerful event, while the philosopher and the physicist look at this historic event from their respective perspectives. This has to be a very interesting class and I highly recommend anyone who has an opportunity to take it, to do so.

Here is the interview:

part 1

part 2

part 3

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