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Post by Moses on Feb 1, 2005 11:29:18 GMT -5
It's the parents' fault that the US high school students believe that the media should toe the line of the authorities?
I think this calls for a new flame thread!
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Post by camaxtle on Feb 2, 2005 22:45:30 GMT -5
Hey Moses, I got to thinking about what some of these people at the sc were saying, in their lambasting of public education. Well today I told my class of 4th graders, that if they did not feel like reciting the pledge of allegiance, that was their right and did not need to do so, just as long as they were not disrespectful towards others.
But on another topic, I just want you to understand that I think a lof of the people who are anti public education are people who had a bad time in school, who were not successful, who got into trouble with authority. I say this because some of the people who were anti public schools talked about the authority figures.
I never had that problem. Anyway. I will admit there are problems with public education, but there is also a problem at home. I see it all the time.
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Post by Moses on Feb 3, 2005 0:42:45 GMT -5
Of course there are problems at home! That's a given. But the problems in public education cannot be blamed on parents, who are, after all, the citizens/taxpayers who support public education. Instead, however, public education is imposed on us, in a form we have no input whatsoever in creating.
I'm surprised that anyone at SC defended parents, because it seemed like alot of the operatives there blamed students or parents for the problems w/ public education.
Studies have shown that only about 60% of all students can muddle through public education w/o being harmed by it. And the economic factor in this is only 15% variable.
There are three main problems, according to studies:
1) The infrastructure, including facilities, books, etc. -- school size, e.g. 2) The instructional methodologies, concocted out of nothing in the ed departments, by people who know nothing about nothing, and don't even understand a) the brain is the instrument of learning b) the brain develops so that little children learn differently from high school students, e.g. 3) the transactional aspect of public schools -- meaning the culture of the public schools and the emotional component -- which is hostile to students and families, primarilly (blaming parents an indicator of this).
These are just the main three. Bottom line, public school is DETRIMENTAL to 40% of students. They would be better off staying home and watching videos.
4th grade: a watershed year, right? And the last good year before they inappropriately prepare kids for middle school in 5th grade-- see the excellent Rand analysis of middle school -- it is a disaster, cannot be fixed, and should be abandoned. But instead, "testing" and "standards" is added to this already destructive set-up.
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Post by Moses on Feb 3, 2005 0:43:45 GMT -5
P.S. What you did telling the kids they don't have to say the pledge is excellent! But won't you get in trouble?
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Post by Moses on Feb 3, 2005 9:35:09 GMT -5
P.P.S: While parents (citizens) are the scapegoats of the governing class, studies have shown that less than 10% of parents are dysfunctional, (in other words dysfunctional parents are very much the exception to the rule) and most parents make healthy adaptations to the problems they have, for the sake of their children. Schools, however, as they are presently constituted, are detrimental to children in 40% of the cases.
This is an important issue, because the "personal responsibility" crowd, i.e. corporations seeking deregulation, the entertainment industry, and those who seek to end government supports for society, (including public schools) blame parents for everything, and put all the burden on parents, while offering freedom to corporations to not conduct themselves in a responsible manner.
In the case of the schools, the edu-crats have been given so much power, that they will not address the real problems, but instead blame parents, and this is a bad thing for our society. And our politicians believe and embrace this idea. It's the citizens who are at fault, in other words, in their minds, therefore we must clamp down on them and otherwise do nothing.
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Post by camaxtle on Feb 13, 2005 15:16:29 GMT -5
You make some good points. I will admit public education needs to be fixed. How? You mentioned dysfunctional parents, and I understand what you mean, but you see when you look into the home life, you begin to understand why certain students are under achievers. I mean with the mess that they have at home, (abusive parents, drug addicted, alchoholic) school is free time, a time to just hang out and be with people you like and who like you. Worrying about grades and all that is not important, and alot of what is going on at home is never addressed, and the way they are treated in school because they won't try, just reinforces their feelings, and the students who need the most help never get it and just continue the cycle. I live right on the Mexican American border, right outside of El Paso. I mean our school is in sight of the border. Why is that important? you ask. Well you get poor people coming across from Juarez. They land in Sunland Park, they are often times, young unwed mothers who don't speak english. They send their children to the school, their children when they enter kinder, can barely speak their first language, spanish, so they first have to speak spanish, and then are taught english. It's difficult. It's like these children in a lot of ways feel like outsiders from the beginning. They see others succeeding and they are failing so I imagine they feel school is something that they have to do but it wasn't made for them. If you ever get the chance you should come down here and check it out. I want to research this town and write a book on my findings. I think 80% of the adult population in this town is monolingual spanish and are only residents, not even citizens. You see more Mexican flags being flown here than you do American.
Okay thats enough.
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Post by Moses on Feb 14, 2005 17:52:11 GMT -5
Wow-- you really put your finger on something big.
Here in the wealthy suburbs on the border of DC, many many children are made to feel the same way, and not just the ones for whom English is not native language.
One of the most pervasive feelings children are getting from the schools (elementary level) is that there is a right way, and a wrong way, to be.
It may in fact be the most destructive aspect of public school.
Of course it is much much much much much worse now, with NCLB, and the Business Roundtable making these determinations.
I had hoped it would go in the other direction: a recognition that humans are born unique and with diverse talents, and that we need it that way.
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Post by tombldr on May 13, 2005 13:12:23 GMT -5
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Post by Moses on May 13, 2005 22:07:54 GMT -5
Interesting. Especially "Sofazappa"'s enthusiastic cheerleading (but with a post of a Saudi slam-- to my knowledge, Sibel Edmonds has never implicated the Saudis)." Sofazappa" is a cog in the party machine -- maybe he is just sucking up to a celebrity -- he doesn't seem to have any knowledge of the substance?
I can't recall who Barry Crimmins is-- but if they usually publish his stuff, that may be why they posted this particular article.
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Post by Moses on May 14, 2005 18:28:36 GMT -5
DoubleHelix Nails Bughead:
Posted: 2005-05-11 12:28
Bughead 1 wrote:
1. I'm not a Republican.
I think a disclaimer is in order. It is not you that I am attacking when I write this, it is your particular ideology. When I use the word 'you', it is interchangeable as far as this particular point is concerned with 'your ideology'.
With that being said, I am genuinely convinced that certain aspects of your particular political ideology really are not that different from what the Republicans believe. Furthermore, I think that your own statements actually support this as a reading.
You wrote:
Posted: 2004-03-20 15:24 Skull and Bones at Yale
Your question demonstrates a fundamental lack of insight. One does not struggle to the top of the heap out of a mass of 300,000,000 humans, a mass replete with all the failings of human beings, without being of, or becoming through the process one of, the "Power Elite."
The trick is to back the best "Power Elite."
Colin Mattoon Lewiston, Idaho
This, bluntly stated, is precisely what the Republicans as they exist right now believe. Itís just that they draw different conclusions as a result of it as an assumption. In their case, this baseline assumption is interpreted in two different ways:
1) That whatever the power elite does, by definition, is right because power is the only thing that matters. What follows from this statement is that there is no other relevant standard of ethics, and nothing else exists except what you can enforce on people outside the elite. This is the underlying philosophical position of the neoconservatives and their theocratic analogues, the Dominionists. For them, the best ìPower Eliteî is the one that they belong to and their logic is basically circular in nature.
2) For everyone else, the ëbest power eliteí is the one that will reward them by doing whatever theyíre told, when theyíre told to do it. This is the underlying philosophical position of the ìGood Germansî/average fundamentalist that votes Republican. Throw someone else to the sharks (or even better, be one of the sharks) and you get privileges that the shark bait doesnít get. Hate who youíre told to hate and you get to go to heaven while everyone else writhes in fire for eternity.
You, in comparison, reason from this assumption that there is such a thing as a ëbestí power elite, and that by supporting it you are somehow achieving something positive. What are the common traits of a ëpower eliteí, though? I would say that they are the following:
1) While they may have internal differences, they are unified in order to defend their own power against everyone that doesnít have it.
2) They make decisions using their own power to benefit themselves and people who look like, or are like, them. In other words, if the members of the ëpower eliteí are all Christian, they will make decisions that will benefit other Christians and shortchange everyone else.
3) They are, as the name suggests, ëeliteí. In other words, they wield a disproportionate amount of power and influence over the lives of others when compared to their actual numbers and they are not selected by any kind of democratic process. Often theyíre ëgrandfatheredí into the system by holding power before any semblance of democracy ever came into existence.
With all of that being said, the problem with governance isnít just which power elite rules; itís that weíre ruled by a power elite at all, because they simply canít help but make the kinds of decisions that theyíve made that are utterly disastrous and lethal to everyone outside of it.
You also wrote:
This is "Anyone But" Politics At Its Most Clear Posted: 2004-04-17 11:55
Non voters are fundamentally and intellectually disconnected. An overt appeal to the poor is an appeal to people who won't vote.
Colin, is it more that the poor wonít vote, or is it more than you donít want the poor to vote because if they did, they might want things that the power elite have no intention of ever giving them? Again, the Republicans donít want poor people to vote either. They have a more activist philosophy regarding preventing the poor from voting (active, legal prevention) than you do. Your philosophy, in comparison, is to practice a style of politics that actively discourages the involvement of the poor by claiming that liberalism is also an elite political philosophy instead of something that can be explained very simply: namely people outside the elite, as a group, defending themselves through political action against the rapacity of the unrestrained wealthy.
And finally:
Caterpillar faces an intifada Posted: 2004-05-14 10:05
As the son of a man who once supported the family farm as a "Cat" mechanic, let me first say that the Cat D9 was designed as a piece of construction equipment, not a tool for destruction of people's homes. It is purchased by militaries, but that isn't its primary purpose, and Cat isn't primarily a military contractor.
Secondly, as a Democrat, let me say that the people who work the assembly lines to build Cat's products are ordinary Americans who are already having enough trouble keeping their jobs in the face of a sour economy and foreign competition in the heavy construction equipment market.
Go after the governments who support Israel's policy if you like, but remember that the people who are hurt by going after Caterpillar are innocent American workers who have been victimized by the neo-cons and their policies of labor abuse.
With this logic, though, youíre essentially advocating that nobody should boycott any corporation that employs Americans if they engage in conduct that supports repression either here or elsewhere in the world. When you say this, what you are basically saying is that you donít think that most boycotts are ever justified. Simoultaneously, since the boycott is one of the more effective (and peaceful) means of creating some measure of change against those with power, your position is essentially one of disempowering people.
In fact, your history of advocating positions that actually hobble liberalism goes far beyond this.
You donít believe in self-defense either; weíve argued about that.
You excoriated Dean last year for attracting ëthe wrong types of peopleí. Dean definitely wasnít perfect, and some of his recent actions have certainly demonstrated that, but he was one of the last hopes that your party had, although you refused to recognize it.
Youíve condemned populism and refused to draw any distinctions between economic populism and cultural populism.
Youíve persisted in the defense of unappealing candidates and claimed that this, in a real sense, was what liberalism is about.
Itís small wonder that before Commodore Strong Closer got selected by Iowa one of your catchphrases was ìDonít fall in love with any candidateî. People who fall in love with candidates for serious reasons have expectations of them. If those expectations arenít met, their supporters are likely to get infuriated at them and try and find someone who will better answer their expectations.
But then, if you think that peopleís expectations, fundamentally, can never be met, then thereís no point in trying to appeal to them or even take them seriously, is there?
Neither do you believe in any kind of fundamental reform of a governmental system that, at this point, has demonstrated itself to be a deep and abiding failure; incapable of dealing with the problems of endemic corruption, corporate domination, and a deadly combination of virulent racism and historical amnesia.
A big deal was recently made on another thread about attacking Democrats. However, one very salient point that wasnít mentioned was that Kerry attacked the Massachusetts legislators first although they were doing the right thing. If he hadnít attacked them, in a real sense, there wouldnít have even been a topic. However, since Kerry is a member of the ëbest power eliteí by your standards, you seem to be committed to defending him no matter what he does wrong, and no matter how many people whose actions are demonstrably more successful, more ethical, than his own, that get stepped on in the process.
What your entire political philosophy boils to do is really that you donít think that people have real choice, or, in a real sense, deserve it. The only choice that matters to you is between ëbest power eliteí and ënot-best power eliteí. Or, using the style of circumlocution that normally characterizes your statements, between the current power elite and ëan elite that is slightly leftist in an American contextí-which, of course really means very little leftism at all since by considering a strictly American context, you omit that there have been very successful leftist movements elsewhere in the world that are worth emulating.
Fundamentally, your ideology is the underpinnings of ABB. It has failed dismally.
No elite is going to save us from themselves. In fact, theyíd have more efficient control over us if most of us were dead and the survivors controlled with a birth-to-death theocracy/feudal society, since Christianity has demonstrated itself to be one of the most efficient and stubbornly resistant to revolt systems of control that they have so far devised. This is precisely where weíre heading once we run out of oil, and nothing that youíve had to say, so far, presents any kind of insight or practical action to do anything about it. If someone like Kerry canít even bring himself to stand up in the Senate for your vote, what on earth makes you think heíll stand up for you when the Republicans can offer him a ëpeace settlementí of exile on one of the last flights out of the USA ever? Courage is like a muscle; donít exercise it, and it atrophies.
2. Shadowthief didn't research.
I think he did research. Furthermore, him researching you was an act that your behavior and your advocacy of de-anonymizing everyone on this site practically invited.
Of course, now weíll never know, will we? I suspect this was the point, considering the charmed life that Saint Mattoon has lived at this site.
3. That isn't why Shadowthief was banned.
Allegedly he was banned for verbally attacking you...even though youíve attacked far more people than he ever did, and the archives were hacked apart because it was alleged that he came back under another name. This is despite the fact that you admitted on a thread that you had a second identity and nothing has happened to you at all. In fact, youíre so confident that youíll never be banned for anything that you do that youíve joked about it previously.
4. It didn't hack apart the entire archive.
Of course it did. Shadowthief had well over 5000 posts to his name on most of the major topics of discussion on this site, and he was more of an essayist than a brief-response writer. Although Iíve had my share of disagreements with him, making it so all of his responses were invisible simply couldnít help but hack apart the archive because people responded to him and now canít see what he wrote originally.
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Post by POA on May 14, 2005 22:22:17 GMT -5
Thanks for the compliment. Two things really stood out in terms of the reaction to that post:
1) I still can't believe I haven't been banned yet, considering how many people have gotten banned for saying far less than I have.
2) I get the feeling that a lot of people sort of...chose to ignore it. Whistling past the grave, as it were, again.
I seriously wonder how anyone can hold the Democrats in high regard after the vote last week where all of them, without exception, voted for the 'Real ID' bill. More than anything else that I've ever seen them do in my lifetime, that was the utter last straw as far as me considering any of them or anything associated with them being worthwhile. They did even worse than when only one of them (Feingold) voted against the 'Patriot' Act. It's like the spineless and the venal ones are corrupting the ones that might not have been quite as bad, but then 'not quite as bad' is the whole problem, isn't it?
I guess I'm venting.
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Post by Moses on May 14, 2005 22:34:47 GMT -5
Considering that even the Republican leadership in the Senate was supposedly against the REAL ID being in the supplemental, one wonders how did it get put back in during conference? It's almost like the pols agreed to give themselves cover.
In any case, instituting fascism is something they should have filibustered about whether it was in the supplemental or not. They knew that it was an unpopular measure, and would have gained supporters, not lost them. They have nothing to be afraid of, as the "obstructionist" label has become a compliment, given the unpopularity of the Bush dictatorship and the stuff he is shoving through congress.
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Post by RPankn on May 15, 2005 5:35:03 GMT -5
I'm curious: did anyone actually confirm that was Sibel Edmonds posting on SC, or did people just assume that because someone was using that name on a totally anonymous board, it was her? Wayne Madsen posted on DU one night, but his identity was verified by one of the moderators first before he could actually post and say "I'm Wayne Madsen."
I noticed "Board Nanny" edited the post a couple times and I wouldn't put it past her, or rather him, to try and pull one over on SC's members.
And no, Edmonds never implicated the Saudis, nor do I recall her ever mentioning them as part of the network of drug and weapons trafficking and "terrorism." Her most telling clue is mentioning she speaks Azerbajani, when she doesn't implicate that country in this network. But a check of the American Azerbajani Chamber of Commerce is quite revealing when u consider its strategic position in the region in terms of the oil pipelines being constructed and the flow of heorin trafficking from Central Asia into Europe.
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Post by tombldr on May 26, 2005 13:20:51 GMT -5
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Post by Moses on May 26, 2005 14:25:26 GMT -5
Great thread-- Should be interesting to watch-- I am among the honored banned.
It might be interesting to compare threads from DU and Kos on this topic-- which is of course a critical one, for the country, and for the Democratic Party, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and lives ruined thanks to the control of the Israeli influence on our political institutions.
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