I’m not overly fond of Blackboard, but every LMS has its pluses and minuses, and I have figure out how to make it work reasonably well for my classes. Also, some combination of my university and Bb are responsible for providing support, and doing backups, and all that, and if the whole site falls apart in, say, December (as it did one year on my campus), the problem has to be dealt with on an institutional basis. If I choose to use some start-up LMS, and it folds in the middle of the semester, that’s my problem.

Mind you, I’d be happy to have an open-source LMS customized and maintained by university employees (which I think might describe Moodle, with which I have no direct experience). I’m no fan of the edu-behemoths. But mostly I hope that the “entrepreneurs” don’t persuade the powers that be to switch systems too often, since there’s always a learning curve.

Thus we have tyranno-political parties and democrato-political parties. We have democrato-banks and tyranno-banks, democrato-religions and tyranno-religions, and democrato-HMOs and tyranno-HMOs. The list is long.

Some things, however, have only one side: chattel slavery, for example.

These democrato and tyranno entities depend on the nature of the human beings who control them. Because of this dichotomy many elements of our lives occur in opposing pairs: good and evil, fairness and unfairness, love and hate, inclusion and exclusion, nonviolence and violence, peace and war, liberty and tyranny.