" I find comments such as the 'poor baby!' in this link trivialising to the point where I feel embarrased and offended for the victim."
Oh please! What's embarrassing and offensive is the idea that being given a blowjob while asleep is in any equivalent to being forcibly penetrated - it's pure PC nonsense to suggest that it is.
"Let the poor sould die with some dignity."
And how exactly does an allegedly brain-dead person lose out from an "undignified" life? If she's brain-dead, she can't be in any position to know or care about her circumstances, can she?
"Her husband says that she wouldn't have wanted to live like this, and, barring new evidence, there's no real reason why her wishes shouldn't be honored."
Are we to assume that he's incapable of lying?
"That guy should take his $1 million and cure Africa of TB.."
It'll take a lot more than $1 million to cure Africa of TB (besides, TB's a problem everywhere around the world, not just in Africa).
In any case, there's a much more important issue at stake here, potentially affecting the lives of very many people. I don't have a problem with indisputably voluntary euthanasia, but the cavalier manner in which a lot of people are approaching the Schiavo issue sends my alarm bells ringing; some people on here really need to look up "Ich Klage An" and "Tiergarten 4" before making flippant remarks about offering money to have Terri Schiavo's feeding tube pulled.
"Theoretically they should be most into "god's will" i.e. what happens without human intervention."
By your reasoning, the Vatican also ought to be in favor of allowing gangrene patients to die of their wounds, or malaria and AIDS patients to pass away untreated.
"I think it's a dangerous precident for them to set and it seems vaguely hypocritical. Birth control is human intervention after all."
You do realize that the Vatican's never been in favor of any artificial means of birth control, right? To be "hypocritical" one actually has to be in favor of something first.
Just because the Vatican happens to speak out in favor of something doesn't make it bad. The Catholic Church has been wrong on very many issues, but this is one occasion on which I think they have it right: life, once taken away, cannot be restored, and what's the big deal about keeping Terri Schiavo alive if it's neither an imposition on the state or her husband? One has to be crazy to think her parents would love and care for her less than a former partner who's already started a new family.
"Any experiences, references, or links would be greatly appreciated."
My first suggestion for you would be that you learn how to slipstream Service Pack 4 into your Windows 2000 install disk, or at least look around for a Win2K disk which already has the SP slipstreamed; the reason why this matters is that SP4 has more up-to-date drivers in general, as well as better support for PnP, USB, etc.
As for resolving specific driver issues, I suggest you look at the Win2K Resource Kit or the Microsoft Press books on administering the OS to learn how to create a custom install with any desired drivers in the appropriate locations; you'll find that MS makes plenty of provision for administrators looking to provide install-time support for new hardware.
WTF? Anybody know what this might be referring to?
The Hyksos, or Sea Peoples.
To take one obvious point, the Philistines spoke a Semitic language unrelated to Greek.
And the Northmen spoke Old Norse, but became French-speaking Normans. Migrants do sometimes assimilate to the host culture, even violent migrants ...
"The important thing is that we immediately doubt and brand as a liar any woman who claims to have suffered from the production of material than so many men worship so uncritically."
Yeah, sure, whatever. I'm supposed to buy into someone's claim simply because she falls into an Oppressed Class™, despite the fact that the person in question offers no corroborating evidence, despite the fact that she's been caught out lying on other matters, despite the fact that no one who worked with her seems to have been willing to confirm her story, and despite the fact that said story changes significantly between the first and fourth editions of her memoirs. Nope, no reason for doubt there whatsoever.
I call this guilt-tripping-of-sceptics maneuvre you're trying to pull the "Rigoberta Menchu" trick, and I for one refuse to fall for it. Anyone can claim anything whatsoever years after the event, and from what I know of human suggestibility - e.g. the "recovered memory" movement, or the extent to which witnesses can be goaded into "remembering" things that never were - there is absolutely ZERO reason for me to suspend all scepticism, NONE whatsoever.
The onus is on those with extraordinary claims to substantiate their assertions, and Boreman's claims were indeed extraordinary, with not an iota of third-party evidence to back them up. Your "vulnerable woman" claptrap is just that, a load of rubbish, and YOU are the woman who is guilty of worshipping uncritically a false notion that porn is "exploitative" and therefore EEEVIIILL!!
Yeah, especially when the star of that movie says she was forced to make it at gunpoint, locked in a basement, and wears bruises from beatings in the film itself (thus the sunglasses). Funny stuff!
And how exactly do we know that what she said was true? Is it really out of the bounds of possibility that she later became ashamed of what she had willingly done at the time, and sought to absolve herself by claiming to have been "forced" into it? Perhaps she was just fishing for sympathy? Why does this remind me of "To Read a Mockingbird?"
Fo all I know, Linda Boreman might indeed have been coerced into making deepthroat, but I refuse to take it for granted that her claims should be accepted without doubt, and nothing sends my bullshit-o-meter over the scale like sentences about "standard stereotype-reinforcing material", which sounds to me very much like ye olde "Women are naturally virtuous and asexual" trope.
Without corroborating third-party evidence, Boreman's claims amount to nothing more than a "he said, she said" type of accusation, and her own deceitfulness about her past exploits in zoophilia (referenced in the very Wikipedia page you link to) gives me no reason to believe that she was an individual of impeccable honesty.
"And you still have not answered why school vouchers are not payback to the religious electorate."
Isn't that for you to demonstrate? Aren't you familiar with the notion that the onus is on the one who makes an assertion to demonstrate it? What next, are you going to ask me to prove that pink unicorns don't exist on Pluto?
Besides, even if it were true that school vouchers were "payback" for some party or another, how does that show that they're a bad idea? When you buy a hotdog and fork over your money to the vendor, he gets something out of it - is buying hotdogs therefore a bad idea?
Finally, have you even bothered to take a look at the empirical evidence? I'm sure you still haven't looked at the World Bank paper even as I'm writing this. Why don't you give us your critique of its contents if you have, and actually understood what you read?
"Privatisation means that Hospital A has a service level of 0"
Demonstrate it. Go on, show me under what theoretical framework the entrance of competition would act to reduce a provider's incentive to provide a high quality of service; show me the empirical evidence to support it. You just flat out say it must be so, and proceed on the basis that your word will be taken as law.
I'm clearly wasting my time here, as neither jp nor Alex Reynolds seem to be familiar with even the rudiments of economics, and I can't teach them the subject from first principles from within the confines of this comment box. Hopefully others will at least get something of substance from these exchanges.
Flashboy,
Finally, let me address one grave logical flaw in your argument that is easily glossed over - it simply doesn't occur to you that the amount of variation in service quality can increase even as quality rises across the board. To see what I'm getting at, consider the case of 5 hospitals, A through E, each with a quality rating of 2/10, where 1 is the lowest possible score. Suppose they're privatized and now service quality is A=4, B=5, C=6, D=8, E=9; by your reasoning, those who frequent hospital A have been made "losers", even though in absolute terms they and everyone else are much better off than they used to be. That's a pretty strange definition of "losing", isn't it?
Competition in schools will do nothing to solve the base causes.
JB,
If competition means children get to go to schools where more of the budget is used to provide meals that ensure they can actually pay attention in class, then yes, competition will help to solve the base causes, and as an empirical matter, we already know for a fact that it does so - just follow the link I provided. Eppur si muove!
But sadly not what real-life experience demonstrates; as, for just one example, Britain's Thatcher and Major-era privatisation experiments (and many of the Blair/Brown Public Private Partnership schemes) demonstrate.
Oh really, like what exactly? You don't mean British Telecom, do you? Telecoms services have never been cheaper or better? Do you mean airlines? British Airways makes money, unlike most European airlines, and it provides great service doing so. How about British Gas? Gas prices have been falling in real terms - at least until the Iraq War drove them back up. Where exactly are these cases we should "sadly" look upon?
In some areas, undeniably there has been an improvement in efficiency (although often at the expense of jobs and communities, sometimes disastrously so).
That bit about "at the expense of jobs and communities" refuses to acknowledge that change must often come at some cost. If there were no jobs being destroyed, who would fill the ones being created? Do you really believe that working oneself into an early grave in a coal-mine is better than working at a call-center? British unemployment levels are the envy of continental Europe, and thanks to Thatcher's reforms, British economic performance has outshone that of France, Italy and Germany for the last decade and a half. There is no law of the universe that commands us to throw money down the whole to preserve "communities" that have ceased to be economically viable, and it's a dead certainty that the individuals who constitute the communities you mention are much better off in the aggregate today than they were before Thatcher came into office.
But in others - most notably in our rail system, and PPP hospitals - history gives the lie to such casual blanket statements.
I hope you know what "natural monopolies" are, and why railway lines fall into that category while schools do not. I also hope you appreciate that Blair's PPP hospital scheme was watered down to meaninglessness thanks to Labour party opposition; the German medical system shows that privately run hospitals with the freedom to raise and dispense with funds as they please are perfectly compatible with top-notch healthcare.
"The inefficiency argument against monopolistic state control is undeniable, if often wildly overstated."
Do you have any numbers to support the charge that it is "often wildly overstated"? I don't put much faith in mere assertions, if you've noticed, especially not when they go against the substantial amounts of data I've seen that contradict them.
If competition is introduced, then that inherently implies 'winners' and 'losers' - more precisely, a spectrum of quality. Now either one makes the case that it is acceptable for some citizens to have poor quality services - in which case, what decides who these citizens will be? And why were we having the argument in the first place? - or, in order to provide an acceptable quality of service, you will need significant over-capacity in the system, to allow the substandard service providers to be eliminated. And, ba-boom! Inefficiency.
One could use this self same argument to argue for the abolition of all markets whatsoever. The notion that markets are about maximizing static "efficiency" is utterly wrong-headed, and to see why this is so, I recommend you pick up a copy of Joseph Stiglitz' "Wither Socialism?" Markets are good because they recognize incentives, and facilitate innovation to address people's desires in ways no one might have anticipated, not because they make for the highest capacity utilization at any given point in time.
Vouchers are pork barrel kickbacks to religious organizations.
If you think non-denominational private schools are going to take in poor "voucher kids" from off the street, you are kidding yourself.
Argument by assertion has never been very convincing, and it's obvious you haven't even bothered to so much as glance at the research I provided a link to. As for your "private schools won't take in poor voucher kids" argument, tell that to my (poor, black) friends from college who went to just such schools on the "A Better Chance" voucher program.
Here's this for a novel idea: fix the mechanism by which taxes fund schools. When schools are funded equally, when public schools aren't falling apart and have computers and modern textbooks, when neighborhoods don't look like Iraqi war zones and kids have the mental space to study, and when kids aren't becoming parents at 15 or 16 because we can't teach them sex education, then you can blame the unions.
Plenty of emotive rhetoric, but absolutely nothing by way of counter-evidence or substantive reasoning to explain the lack of a discernable relationship between school funding and test results. I see I'm wasting my time; you already "know" what must be true, and you won't let a few facts get in your way. What's saddening is that so many children are having their futures sacrificed on the alter of other people's irrational attachment to failed dogmas - which makes it not so different from communism in the end.
Urban and rural areas do not receive nearly the same per-pupil funding.
Washington D.C. is the second best funded school district in the country, with per capita expenditure of ~ $15,000 per student, and yet it has second most atrocious results in America. How does funding explain that? Why do Minnesota and Iowa manage to do so much better with two-thirds of the expenditure made on D.C. students? Why do American students perform so poorly on international comparisons of literacy, scientific knowledge and mathematical skill, if funding is at issue? Do you realize that even the worst funded school districts in America are better funded than typical schools in most of the developed world?
Vouchers do nothing to address this, other than being a kickback to religious organizations as an exchange for votes. There are reasons for separation of church and state.
Your church and state argument is groundless. Not only has the Supreme Court found such arguments spurious, but if taken seriously it would mean that federal money ought to be withheld from schools like Yeshiva University or Georgetown. The constitution clearly says that no religion shall be treated as established - i.e, favored over any other - not that federal largesse may not be utilized in religious schools.
The fact is that there is plenty of research out there on vouchers (here's some for starters), and it supports what elementary economic reasoning would tell one: that people and organizations perform better when they have competition.
All the talk of "kickbacks to religious organizations" only serves to obscure the reality that teachers' unions are currently the Democratic Party's biggest backer, and the one thing they detest more than anything else is meaningful competition that threatens the careers of deadweights. The "kickback" argument is nothing more than a projection of what liberal anti-voucher advocates are doing unto their opposition.
As languagehat and others have noted, the very idea of a "practical communism" is an oxymoron, as it ignores human nature.
In particular, it makes no allowance for the role of incentives - in all but the smallest communities in which everyone knows anyone else, what incentive other than fear of punishment can anyone possibly have to do any more work than the absolute minimum, when "to each according to his needs" guarantees that one will be rewarded no more and no less regardless of the effort one puts in? And how does one pick out the shirkers in a state of millions without an all-pervasive network of spies looking over everyone's shoulder? Totalitarianism is in the very nature of communism, not just some accidental feature that happens to be historically associated with it.
"in the USA, better than appallingly funded public school and health systems"
The funny thing is, the USA spends more per student on high school education than all but 4 other countries in the world, and is no. 1 in terms of both percentage of GDP and absolute amount spent on healthcare. The shortcomings of American secondary education and healthcare have nothing to do with "funding", and everything to do with - you guessed it - messed-up incentive systems. Anyone serious about improving America's public education system will have to take a serious look at injecting some competition into it, and that means (shudder) vouchers.
"This actually ties in neatly with the theory that our ability to have sex at will (rather rare in animals) may be due in large part to walking upright."
But how does this explain bonobos? They're even more into the free-love thing than we are, and they aren't bipedal.
I think the stigma attached to the term "loner" arises in part from a big misunderstanding; an ability to enjoy one's own company is hardly the same thing as timidity or an absence of social graces, but introversion and social phobia are routinely conflated in the public mind.
But since the Indians are getting a small fraction of the pay Americans recieve, it's the corporations who are racist.
How so? Isn't paying Americans more to do a job Indians are willing to do for less actually the mark of self-sabotaging prejudice? Besides, trade doesn't really work that way - businesses aren't charities, and the low wages of Indian workers reflects their relatively low productivity by comparison with American workers.
Oh please! What's embarrassing and offensive is the idea that being given a blowjob while asleep is in any equivalent to being forcibly penetrated - it's pure PC nonsense to suggest that it is.posted by Goedel 19 years ago
In "Tycoon offers $1 million"
"Let the poor sould die with some dignity." And how exactly does an allegedly brain-dead person lose out from an "undignified" life? If she's brain-dead, she can't be in any position to know or care about her circumstances, can she? "Her husband says that she wouldn't have wanted to live like this, and, barring new evidence, there's no real reason why her wishes shouldn't be honored." Are we to assume that he's incapable of lying? "That guy should take his $1 million and cure Africa of TB.." It'll take a lot more than $1 million to cure Africa of TB (besides, TB's a problem everywhere around the world, not just in Africa). In any case, there's a much more important issue at stake here, potentially affecting the lives of very many people. I don't have a problem with indisputably voluntary euthanasia, but the cavalier manner in which a lot of people are approaching the Schiavo issue sends my alarm bells ringing; some people on here really need to look up "Ich Klage An" and "Tiergarten 4" before making flippant remarks about offering money to have Terri Schiavo's feeding tube pulled. "Theoretically they should be most into "god's will" i.e. what happens without human intervention." By your reasoning, the Vatican also ought to be in favor of allowing gangrene patients to die of their wounds, or malaria and AIDS patients to pass away untreated. "I think it's a dangerous precident for them to set and it seems vaguely hypocritical. Birth control is human intervention after all." You do realize that the Vatican's never been in favor of any artificial means of birth control, right? To be "hypocritical" one actually has to be in favor of something first. Just because the Vatican happens to speak out in favor of something doesn't make it bad. The Catholic Church has been wrong on very many issues, but this is one occasion on which I think they have it right: life, once taken away, cannot be restored, and what's the big deal about keeping Terri Schiavo alive if it's neither an imposition on the state or her husband? One has to be crazy to think her parents would love and care for her less than a former partner who's already started a new family.
posted by Goedel 19 years ago
In "Curious George: You can't install that OS!"
"Any experiences, references, or links would be greatly appreciated." My first suggestion for you would be that you learn how to slipstream Service Pack 4 into your Windows 2000 install disk, or at least look around for a Win2K disk which already has the SP slipstreamed; the reason why this matters is that SP4 has more up-to-date drivers in general, as well as better support for PnP, USB, etc. As for resolving specific driver issues, I suggest you look at the Win2K Resource Kit or the Microsoft Press books on administering the OS to learn how to create a custom install with any desired drivers in the appropriate locations; you'll find that MS makes plenty of provision for administrators looking to provide install-time support for new hardware.
posted by Goedel 19 years ago
In "The Greek Dark Age"
Actually, the Hyksos can definitively be ruled out, as they too were Semites. The Sea Peoples, on the other hand, fit the bill quite well.
posted by Goedel 19 years ago
WTF? Anybody know what this might be referring to? The Hyksos, or Sea Peoples. To take one obvious point, the Philistines spoke a Semitic language unrelated to Greek. And the Northmen spoke Old Norse, but became French-speaking Normans. Migrants do sometimes assimilate to the host culture, even violent migrants ...
posted by Goedel 19 years ago
In "Inquisitive Imp: Pornography Club."
"The important thing is that we immediately doubt and brand as a liar any woman who claims to have suffered from the production of material than so many men worship so uncritically." Yeah, sure, whatever. I'm supposed to buy into someone's claim simply because she falls into an Oppressed Class™, despite the fact that the person in question offers no corroborating evidence, despite the fact that she's been caught out lying on other matters, despite the fact that no one who worked with her seems to have been willing to confirm her story, and despite the fact that said story changes significantly between the first and fourth editions of her memoirs. Nope, no reason for doubt there whatsoever. I call this guilt-tripping-of-sceptics maneuvre you're trying to pull the "Rigoberta Menchu" trick, and I for one refuse to fall for it. Anyone can claim anything whatsoever years after the event, and from what I know of human suggestibility - e.g. the "recovered memory" movement, or the extent to which witnesses can be goaded into "remembering" things that never were - there is absolutely ZERO reason for me to suspend all scepticism, NONE whatsoever. The onus is on those with extraordinary claims to substantiate their assertions, and Boreman's claims were indeed extraordinary, with not an iota of third-party evidence to back them up. Your "vulnerable woman" claptrap is just that, a load of rubbish, and YOU are the woman who is guilty of worshipping uncritically a false notion that porn is "exploitative" and therefore EEEVIIILL!!
posted by Goedel 19 years ago
Yeah, especially when the star of that movie says she was forced to make it at gunpoint, locked in a basement, and wears bruises from beatings in the film itself (thus the sunglasses). Funny stuff! And how exactly do we know that what she said was true? Is it really out of the bounds of possibility that she later became ashamed of what she had willingly done at the time, and sought to absolve herself by claiming to have been "forced" into it? Perhaps she was just fishing for sympathy? Why does this remind me of "To Read a Mockingbird?" Fo all I know, Linda Boreman might indeed have been coerced into making deepthroat, but I refuse to take it for granted that her claims should be accepted without doubt, and nothing sends my bullshit-o-meter over the scale like sentences about "standard stereotype-reinforcing material", which sounds to me very much like ye olde "Women are naturally virtuous and asexual" trope. Without corroborating third-party evidence, Boreman's claims amount to nothing more than a "he said, she said" type of accusation, and her own deceitfulness about her past exploits in zoophilia (referenced in the very Wikipedia page you link to) gives me no reason to believe that she was an individual of impeccable honesty.
posted by Goedel 19 years ago
In "Curious George - Commie Pinko Bastards"
"And you still have not answered why school vouchers are not payback to the religious electorate." Isn't that for you to demonstrate? Aren't you familiar with the notion that the onus is on the one who makes an assertion to demonstrate it? What next, are you going to ask me to prove that pink unicorns don't exist on Pluto? Besides, even if it were true that school vouchers were "payback" for some party or another, how does that show that they're a bad idea? When you buy a hotdog and fork over your money to the vendor, he gets something out of it - is buying hotdogs therefore a bad idea? Finally, have you even bothered to take a look at the empirical evidence? I'm sure you still haven't looked at the World Bank paper even as I'm writing this. Why don't you give us your critique of its contents if you have, and actually understood what you read? "Privatisation means that Hospital A has a service level of 0" Demonstrate it. Go on, show me under what theoretical framework the entrance of competition would act to reduce a provider's incentive to provide a high quality of service; show me the empirical evidence to support it. You just flat out say it must be so, and proceed on the basis that your word will be taken as law. I'm clearly wasting my time here, as neither jp nor Alex Reynolds seem to be familiar with even the rudiments of economics, and I can't teach them the subject from first principles from within the confines of this comment box. Hopefully others will at least get something of substance from these exchanges.
posted by Goedel 20 years ago
Flashboy, Finally, let me address one grave logical flaw in your argument that is easily glossed over - it simply doesn't occur to you that the amount of variation in service quality can increase even as quality rises across the board. To see what I'm getting at, consider the case of 5 hospitals, A through E, each with a quality rating of 2/10, where 1 is the lowest possible score. Suppose they're privatized and now service quality is A=4, B=5, C=6, D=8, E=9; by your reasoning, those who frequent hospital A have been made "losers", even though in absolute terms they and everyone else are much better off than they used to be. That's a pretty strange definition of "losing", isn't it? Competition in schools will do nothing to solve the base causes. JB, If competition means children get to go to schools where more of the budget is used to provide meals that ensure they can actually pay attention in class, then yes, competition will help to solve the base causes, and as an empirical matter, we already know for a fact that it does so - just follow the link I provided. Eppur si muove!
posted by Goedel 20 years ago
But sadly not what real-life experience demonstrates; as, for just one example, Britain's Thatcher and Major-era privatisation experiments (and many of the Blair/Brown Public Private Partnership schemes) demonstrate. Oh really, like what exactly? You don't mean British Telecom, do you? Telecoms services have never been cheaper or better? Do you mean airlines? British Airways makes money, unlike most European airlines, and it provides great service doing so. How about British Gas? Gas prices have been falling in real terms - at least until the Iraq War drove them back up. Where exactly are these cases we should "sadly" look upon? In some areas, undeniably there has been an improvement in efficiency (although often at the expense of jobs and communities, sometimes disastrously so). That bit about "at the expense of jobs and communities" refuses to acknowledge that change must often come at some cost. If there were no jobs being destroyed, who would fill the ones being created? Do you really believe that working oneself into an early grave in a coal-mine is better than working at a call-center? British unemployment levels are the envy of continental Europe, and thanks to Thatcher's reforms, British economic performance has outshone that of France, Italy and Germany for the last decade and a half. There is no law of the universe that commands us to throw money down the whole to preserve "communities" that have ceased to be economically viable, and it's a dead certainty that the individuals who constitute the communities you mention are much better off in the aggregate today than they were before Thatcher came into office. But in others - most notably in our rail system, and PPP hospitals - history gives the lie to such casual blanket statements. I hope you know what "natural monopolies" are, and why railway lines fall into that category while schools do not. I also hope you appreciate that Blair's PPP hospital scheme was watered down to meaninglessness thanks to Labour party opposition; the German medical system shows that privately run hospitals with the freedom to raise and dispense with funds as they please are perfectly compatible with top-notch healthcare. "The inefficiency argument against monopolistic state control is undeniable, if often wildly overstated." Do you have any numbers to support the charge that it is "often wildly overstated"? I don't put much faith in mere assertions, if you've noticed, especially not when they go against the substantial amounts of data I've seen that contradict them. If competition is introduced, then that inherently implies 'winners' and 'losers' - more precisely, a spectrum of quality. Now either one makes the case that it is acceptable for some citizens to have poor quality services - in which case, what decides who these citizens will be? And why were we having the argument in the first place? - or, in order to provide an acceptable quality of service, you will need significant over-capacity in the system, to allow the substandard service providers to be eliminated. And, ba-boom! Inefficiency. One could use this self same argument to argue for the abolition of all markets whatsoever. The notion that markets are about maximizing static "efficiency" is utterly wrong-headed, and to see why this is so, I recommend you pick up a copy of Joseph Stiglitz' "Wither Socialism?" Markets are good because they recognize incentives, and facilitate innovation to address people's desires in ways no one might have anticipated, not because they make for the highest capacity utilization at any given point in time.
posted by Goedel 20 years ago
Vouchers are pork barrel kickbacks to religious organizations. If you think non-denominational private schools are going to take in poor "voucher kids" from off the street, you are kidding yourself. Argument by assertion has never been very convincing, and it's obvious you haven't even bothered to so much as glance at the research I provided a link to. As for your "private schools won't take in poor voucher kids" argument, tell that to my (poor, black) friends from college who went to just such schools on the "A Better Chance" voucher program. Here's this for a novel idea: fix the mechanism by which taxes fund schools. When schools are funded equally, when public schools aren't falling apart and have computers and modern textbooks, when neighborhoods don't look like Iraqi war zones and kids have the mental space to study, and when kids aren't becoming parents at 15 or 16 because we can't teach them sex education, then you can blame the unions. Plenty of emotive rhetoric, but absolutely nothing by way of counter-evidence or substantive reasoning to explain the lack of a discernable relationship between school funding and test results. I see I'm wasting my time; you already "know" what must be true, and you won't let a few facts get in your way. What's saddening is that so many children are having their futures sacrificed on the alter of other people's irrational attachment to failed dogmas - which makes it not so different from communism in the end.
posted by Goedel 20 years ago
Urban and rural areas do not receive nearly the same per-pupil funding. Washington D.C. is the second best funded school district in the country, with per capita expenditure of ~ $15,000 per student, and yet it has second most atrocious results in America. How does funding explain that? Why do Minnesota and Iowa manage to do so much better with two-thirds of the expenditure made on D.C. students? Why do American students perform so poorly on international comparisons of literacy, scientific knowledge and mathematical skill, if funding is at issue? Do you realize that even the worst funded school districts in America are better funded than typical schools in most of the developed world? Vouchers do nothing to address this, other than being a kickback to religious organizations as an exchange for votes. There are reasons for separation of church and state. Your church and state argument is groundless. Not only has the Supreme Court found such arguments spurious, but if taken seriously it would mean that federal money ought to be withheld from schools like Yeshiva University or Georgetown. The constitution clearly says that no religion shall be treated as established - i.e, favored over any other - not that federal largesse may not be utilized in religious schools. The fact is that there is plenty of research out there on vouchers (here's some for starters), and it supports what elementary economic reasoning would tell one: that people and organizations perform better when they have competition. All the talk of "kickbacks to religious organizations" only serves to obscure the reality that teachers' unions are currently the Democratic Party's biggest backer, and the one thing they detest more than anything else is meaningful competition that threatens the careers of deadweights. The "kickback" argument is nothing more than a projection of what liberal anti-voucher advocates are doing unto their opposition.
posted by Goedel 20 years ago
As languagehat and others have noted, the very idea of a "practical communism" is an oxymoron, as it ignores human nature. In particular, it makes no allowance for the role of incentives - in all but the smallest communities in which everyone knows anyone else, what incentive other than fear of punishment can anyone possibly have to do any more work than the absolute minimum, when "to each according to his needs" guarantees that one will be rewarded no more and no less regardless of the effort one puts in? And how does one pick out the shirkers in a state of millions without an all-pervasive network of spies looking over everyone's shoulder? Totalitarianism is in the very nature of communism, not just some accidental feature that happens to be historically associated with it. "in the USA, better than appallingly funded public school and health systems" The funny thing is, the USA spends more per student on high school education than all but 4 other countries in the world, and is no. 1 in terms of both percentage of GDP and absolute amount spent on healthcare. The shortcomings of American secondary education and healthcare have nothing to do with "funding", and everything to do with - you guessed it - messed-up incentive systems. Anyone serious about improving America's public education system will have to take a serious look at injecting some competition into it, and that means (shudder) vouchers.
posted by Goedel 20 years ago
In "Distance running shaped human evolution."
"This actually ties in neatly with the theory that our ability to have sex at will (rather rare in animals) may be due in large part to walking upright." But how does this explain bonobos? They're even more into the free-love thing than we are, and they aren't bipedal.
posted by Goedel 20 years ago
In "Nongregarious George"
I think the stigma attached to the term "loner" arises in part from a big misunderstanding; an ability to enjoy one's own company is hardly the same thing as timidity or an absence of social graces, but introversion and social phobia are routinely conflated in the public mind.
posted by Goedel 20 years ago
In "Preventing Outsourcing = RACISM!!!"
How so? Isn't paying Americans more to do a job Indians are willing to do for less actually the mark of self-sabotaging prejudice? Besides, trade doesn't really work that way - businesses aren't charities, and the low wages of Indian workers reflects their relatively low productivity by comparison with American workers.posted by Goedel 20 years ago
In "Dwarf hominid lived in Indonesia just 18,000 years ago."
Oops! I see I've been beaten to the punch. Please ignore this thread! [Hangs head in shame.]
posted by Goedel 20 years ago
(limited to the most recent 20 comments)