Programming Presentations – D29

For programming class with Kyle, we first talked about the course of the class and decided to work on a mini project for this semester and a bigger project for next semester, I am thinking of a phone app. After this, Pablito and Carmen presented their Project Euler problem (20) and because they didn’t had it finished, we all finished it together during the rest of the class. Although it was a little slow, it was a good approach of solving this problem and I did learned a lot.

Project Euler's 20

Presenting the Liberty Project and some more of Emerson – D29

After lunch, Isa, Alejo, Pablito, Marce, and I presented our idea on forming a liberty club, and I must say that it didn’t went as we expected. Many of our classmates misinterpreted us in many things of our project and reacted in a negative way towards it. After some intense dialogue, I found it helpful to see other perspectives and actually decided as a group that it would be better to implement some suggestions they gave us and substitute them for what we had before. After the discussion, we were able to improve our project in order to do a better work.

Later, we read some more of Emerson’s essay, which we are finding the true meaning of what Emerson is trying to tell us. I found this essay very interesting and accurate in his ideas. I’m also starting to think that Emerson is quite a libertarian for the way he writes and what he claims on individualism.

Carmen's look during the dialogue

Just dialoguing

Some more Greek – D29

Some Greek reading exercise

Today we did had Greek class. As it appeared to be, nothing very important happened, although I do have to admit I felt a little bad, because I’m still late on the lessons and I’m not doing my best to master this class. In fact, this is the class I haven’t paid attention to so it was important for me to realize that my performance on mastering this class has been very poor. I made a commitment in getting up to date this week and I’m going to accomplish it, even if I don’t sleep. Yes, that’s how badass I’ll be.

Our Greek professor, Moris

Carmen’s qualities morning meeting – D29

After the usual announcements, Carmen made an activity for the morning meeting. It consisted of writing in a piece of paper our name and then pass it to the right, in order for that person to write something positive about that person. At the end of the round, we ended with more than 20 positive things, since Carla and Bert joined us for the activity. I really enjoyed it and think it was a great activity to reinforce our perspective on the positive things each of the MPC’ers has.

This is what everyone wrote about me,

How to advance liberty workshop with Alexander McCobin – Saturday 20

SFL Workshop @ Acton MBA

 Just for you to know how much we like liberty, seven of the MPC’ers (Isa, Marce, Mabe, Alejo, Franz, Pablito, and I) went to a workshop this Saturday (Revolution holiday) to a workshop about student group organizing with Alexander McCobin. He told us many useful tips about organizing and spreading the libertarian ideas. Also, we made a brief workshop in which the MPC’ers decided to work as a team to create a club or organization to reach this goal in Guatemala. We concluded we would start a kind-of-club (We don’t know the name yet) and make the Liberty Café. Our goal is to, “Engage others to achieve their own understanding of liberty.” This we would achieve by three major means, Le Sticky Method, a webpage and a fan page, and the Liberty Café. Le Sticky Method consists of creating stickers, buttons, and pins with questions about relevant daily topics such like, The Social Healthcare would fail, want to know how and why? The objective of this is to encourage people to ask you this question and start an important conversation anywhere you are, whether a cafeteria or the street. After this conversation, you can invite them to the Liberty Café and offer them to visit our webpage, in which they may find all resources needed to be prepared for the dialogue tables. These resources would include videos, essays, books, and other important ones. Finally, the Liberty Café consists of round table dialogues about important topics. We found this project very interesting and easy to replicate in other places starting in universities, and we even got contacts from Alexander for funding this project!

Excuses are like elbows...

MPC'ers working as a group

How to advance liberty – Dialogue with Alexander McCobin – D28

This afternoon, we had AlexanderMcCobin as a guest at the MPC. Alexander is the president of the huge, pro-liberty, student movement, Students for Liberty. He studied a major in the University of Pennsylvania and now is getting a Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown. Our dialogue was about the best ways to advance liberty, and for that we read Leonard Read’s article, How to Advance Liberty, a Learning, not a Selling Problem. By the way, it’s a great article, which I highly recommend. Our dialogue was very interesting, dynamic, and thoughtful. As Bert told us later, “I was very proud to hear so many strong voices in the dialogue yesterday. Very thoughtful and courageous. We have come a long way from our first dialogue.” I have to agree with Bert, we have improved dramatically since our first dialogues and I hope we keep improving.

The argument, which Leonard Read proposes, is that in order to advance liberty, we must use the power of attraction and it consists of attracting people to the libertarian ideas through our passion and expertise towards these ideas. He opposes to mass media communication because he believes it’s not a selling problem but a learning problem, which we must engage personally. Although many of the MPC’ers thought like this, Alexander didn’t. He thinks marketing is very useful to accomplish the expansion of libertarian ideas. I agree with both perspectives in the sense that marketing is a useful tool to engage people to learn the libertarian ideas, and we must also encourage them through our experience and expertise for them to understand these ideas by themselves. What we all agreed on, was that there is a long road in the success of advancing liberty, nevertheless we must start now and do our best to expand them.

*Download How to Advance Liberty!

Documentation Presentation – D28

This morning we presented our best features of our documentation. Each of us presented their webpage or blog and talked for 5 minutes of their main features. To be honest, I’m not so proud of mine, mainly because I’m having trouble catching up with it so I’m a little behind.