tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post5582329304550003104..comments2024-03-28T07:58:16.979-07:00Comments on CONTRARY BRIN: Those seven planets... what a universeDavid Brinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comBlogger82125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-10838931301609866662017-04-13T11:37:51.072-07:002017-04-13T11:37:51.072-07:00 I agree with PaulSB’s glass-half-empty critiques ... I agree with PaulSB’s glass-half-empty critiques of US public education, which is only (and shamefully) half as effective as it would have been if teaching was treated with respect.And yet of course ironies abound. <br />1) that the glass is way half-full compared to all of human history, in the spectacular levels of knowledge and skill now possessed by the portions of society that would have been peons in any other society. <br /> And sure, a certain fraction are devoid of curiosity and hence “peons” by personality and not born social class. We’ve just seen the eruption of hostility by these confederates against the smarty pants castes who made them stay in school. Still and despite all that, the US always scores in the top 3 in adult science literacy. half full indeed.<br /><br />2) If our schools are so awful, how come we have 80 of the 100 best universities on ht planet, and nations all over send expeditions to investigate how our young people get so creative? And why do the Education Ministries in Beijing, Tokyo, Delhi and so on send out hundreds of minions, each year, begging teachers to teach their classes in a more “American manner”?<br /><br />3) The locum silliness of raging against an education system that has only “failed” according to the rising standards of an enlightenment society that knows it ought to do better-still.<br /><br />===<br /><br />ANOTHER MATTER: Guys. I thought I had eliminated the stupid online thing that replaces the word “c l o u d” with “b u t t” … only the damned thing is back. Remind me how to get rid of this noxious thing?<br /><br />Give advice in the NEXT comments section!<br /><br />Onward<br /><br />onward<br />David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-78517320303250179962017-04-13T11:09:56.739-07:002017-04-13T11:09:56.739-07:00Let's talk about a little more about this WEIR...<br />Let's talk about a little more about this WEIRD-o insanity type.<br /><br />Even more than the EU standard, Portugal has dedicated itself to family planning, public health, social welfare & global otherness wherein (1) the term 'family planning' refers to a radical depopulation agenda which results in a Portuguese below-replacement birth rate of 1.28, (2) the term 'public health' signifies the relatively selfish & sterile extension of individual life expectancy at the expense of social fecundity with the Portuguese median female age being a peri-menopausal 44 years, (3) the term 'social welfare' represents a society that encourages the individual to act selfishly & take more from society than they give, and (4) the term 'global otherness' (globalism) which leads to population replacement by immigrant, the associated devaluation of native Portuguese labour & an inevitable economic collapse due to a non-sustainable dependency ratio.<br /><br />That's not to say that I disapprove of all-of-the-above actions in principle because I do not. Being a WEIRD-o myself, I most certainly approve of family planning, public health, social welfare & global otherness on the condition of moderation. It is unfortunate, however, how the EU (in genera)l, Portugal (in specific) & the typical US progressive obsessive tend to take such views to an insane extreme, much in the same way that the moderate health benefits of weight loss by the obese can become 'death by starvation' when taken to the insane extreme of the mentally-ill anorexic.<br /><br />And, to what purpose does Luis_S dedicate his life? He pushes the WEIRD-o agenda to its current extreme in the beneficent name of family planning, public health, social welfare & globalism; and, by doing so, he ensures the destruction of his social order, nation & all of the best that western WEIRD-ness has given unto humanity. <br /><br />Such Insanity springs from imbalance, whereas Sanity is synonymous with equilibrium & moderation.<br /><br /><br />Bestlocumranchnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-24154502066503424772017-04-13T07:11:17.637-07:002017-04-13T07:11:17.637-07:00It's quite sad how members of an insane societ...<br />It's quite sad how members of an insane society tend to accuse the sane of 'insanity', yet this is exactly what Robert does when he simultaneously demands & bemoans the collectivism of people acting against their own individual interests for the betterment of others, even though this is the classic progressive demand: <br /><br />That the individual should, ought & is supposed to put the collective 'greatest good' interests of humanity before their own.<br /><br />Luis_S terms this type of illogic 'iterative', whereas I would term term it 'recursive' as it is circular & self-sustaining in the manner that David violates conditional logic by arguing that the 'q' of social policy must necessarily lead back to the 'p' of science -- assuming 'If P, then Q' -- even though 'If Q, then not necessarily P'.<br /><br />It should come as NO surprise to anyone, including Robert & his insane clown posse of self-referential WEIRD-os, that the Other may define the 'best interests of the collective' in a different and 'otherly' manner.<br /><br /><br />Best<br />locumranchnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-70154998461686983062017-04-13T06:46:00.251-07:002017-04-13T06:46:00.251-07:00Catfish,
What you wrote here should be published i...Catfish,<br />What you wrote here should be published in some much wider forum, somewhere that millions of people will see it. That model of 1st - 4th Americas looks pretty convincing, especially the bit about connecting 4th with 1st, an idea that will have appeal to many conservative people, the kind of Caucasians who go to church with minorities and don't have a problem with that.<br /><br />Larry,<br /><br />"They will have to suffer enough pain themselves before they realize "If it hurts when I do this, stop doing this!"<br />- That might completely backfire. People who are that reactionary are victims of the Dunning-Kreuger Effect. As long as the weasels of Washington have their claws deep into Hollywood, commercial radio and the Internet, they will continue to spew propaganda that blames all their pain on the very people who are trying (though not always very intelligently) to solve the problems that created their pain. So the worse it gets, the more stubbornly they vote for kleptocrats, and insist that anyone who claims to be helping them is really a Stalinist in liberal clothing. This is a democracy's version of the kind of feedback loops that kill civilizations. The Dems are going to have to try a whole lot harder to win back the hearts and minds of these people. I can't think of anything else that might help besides investigating the corruption of these weasels and exposing it publicly. Remember when someone recorded a secret conversation between Mittens Romney and a cadre of rich donors and released it on the net? We need more sleuth work like this - things that make it painfully obvious even to D-K types that they are nothing but a gang of thieves.<br /><br />Donzel,<br />I just decloaked yesterday...Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-39095624976612817642017-04-13T05:26:54.986-07:002017-04-13T05:26:54.986-07:00@Robert: you're missing a good portion of *why...@Robert: you're missing a good portion of *why* they are willing to vote against their own self-interest. And it's very simple.<br /><br />To them, liberals, big-city denizens, non-Christians (or at best non-Judeo-Christians), and quite often non-white people -- or at least, any non-white people that don't try to pretend as hard as possible to *be* white people -- <i>aren't Americans</i>.<br /><br />Every cycle (yes, I'm going back to a modification of the Strauss-Howe model for a second) America redefines who "Americans" are. In the last (third) cycle, we dropped opposition to Irish, Italians, Greeks, Jews, eastern Europeans, Catholics in general, and pretty much any other "swarthy European types", who were formerly excluded from the WASP consensus. In 1960, JFK's election was seen as much of a breakthrough as Obama's was in 2008 -- after all these years, a Catholic was sufficiently accepted to be elected President! <br /><br />To the conservative-reactionary mind, that's still the definition of "Real Americans".... Europeans who underwent assimilation. They count. Others -- blacks, Hispanics -- don't fit the Ellis-Island-Assimilation legend. They're out. Liberals, via the New-Left "crypto-commie" movements of the 60's and 70's, are considered to have effectively renounced citizenship for themselves and their physical and intellectual descendants. They're out. And "real Americans" adhere to some sort of Judeo-Christian religion and practice it wholeheartedly. Freethinkers, atheists, members of other religions -- not sufficient trustworthy. Possibly can be seduced by foreign powers. They're out. (This hurts my brain at a time when Putin's agents are playing on traditionalist Christian appeals to recruit, but there you have it.) There are gray areas -- Asians might or might not be all right, especially if they are eager and skillful capitalists and/or Christians. No one really knows what to do with Indians or non-Muslim Middle Easterners (as several friends of mine can attest)... an edge case that demonstrates the fundamental silliness of the American concept of "white": people from the actual Caucasus can be rejected as non-Caucasian. <br /><br />The Legend of Third America, though, is no longer a good description of America. There is now a Fourth American Legend, one that describes also the immigration wave starting with the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. The people who dropped everything to come to America. Who wanted our economic freedom, our political freedom, our religious freedom, our tolerance, our self-constructed polity, our faith in humanity. It is the genius of "Hamilton" that ties this Fourth American Legend to the First American Legend, the one that our ancestors constructed in order to have a nation at all. And eventually, it will become America's self-concept.<br /><br />But not as long as we have so many people clinging to the old Third American Legend. And it's that desperate need to keep the Third American Legend -- and all the perceived privileges and rights and self-identity and self-worth and self-concept that go with it -- that make people want desperately to vote against their own self-interest. Third America is Real America to them, and to vote against it would be to vote for something <i>not</i> American.... something foreign, something that cares nothing for them, something that would cast them aside. Or so they think. <br /><br />Obama tried to link Third and Fourth America, but failed. The victory of the Union will come with someone can link Fourth America to Third, and build a policy that convinces all that the Fourth American Paradigm is not only here to stay, but will serve all Americans regardless.... and despite all the neo-Confederate forces trying to build a New Confederacy out of the old Third America.Catfish N. Codnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-68603056723753772782017-04-12T21:10:40.958-07:002017-04-12T21:10:40.958-07:00Alfred: "I’m not sure what you count as ‘mod...Alfred: <i>"I’m not sure what you count as ‘modern’ insurance. Once the Dutch had limited liability corporations and insurance for the commercial fleet, I count that as pretty modern."</i><br />Both important steps, but not quite the same game changer as the Scottish widows and orphans fund, which itself adopted actuarial-driven processes and accounting for the first time. Spreading risks among a vast pool through that required intense computation...a problem that ultimately justified a large part of the investment into logic systems that resulted in computers, or so I was led to believe. Indeed, the driving logic behind the "Scottish widows and orphans" fund - and national health insurance - the ultimate expression of the enlightenment and valuation of the bourgeoisie (and their dependents).<br /><br /><i>"Once people adopt the bourgeois version of the virtues (started with the Dutch), though, I suspect some social engineering via elaborate plans got under way."</i><br />My read of the intellectual history operates in parallel to yours on this - the concepts were there, but how to do it properly? Hence, new tools to measure, refine the measures, and compute...<br /><br /><i>"I’m not sure what you are arguing for, though. I’m not a cynic."</i><br />LOL, that wasn't an argument, more of a hat tip. I certainly wasn't accusing YOU of being cynical, at least, not intentional. And that is the difference between the Scots, and many other groups that actually did fall into fairly entrenched cynicism (esp. when their feudal lords reestablished themselves - e.g., 19th century France, among several others).donzelionhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05991849781932619746noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-19197213769513517672017-04-12T20:30:17.294-07:002017-04-12T20:30:17.294-07:00Robert:
And they will gleefully dance while this ...Robert:<br /><i><br />And they will gleefully dance while this country burns just to say "fuck you" to "liberals" and minorities and anyone who isn't them. They won't give a flying fuck that they are killing themselves and their children and their grandchildren, just so long as they get to watch everyone else suffer.<br />...<br />Nor do I have any idea how we will stop these bastards... outside of getting the sane and more mature people (and the minorities, oh so very much the minorities!) to vote... consistently. To drown out that voice, to never again let down one's guard. <br /></i><br /><br />You and I can't stop the voters who enable those bastards because of the reason you stated. The mere fact that we are upset, saddened, frightened, or angered is exactly what motivates them. They will have to suffer enough pain themselves before they realize "If it hurts when I do this, <b>stop doing this!</b>"LarryHartnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-80602112652897247622017-04-12T20:25:41.186-07:002017-04-12T20:25:41.186-07:00Alfred Differ (revisited) :
That sort of attitude...Alfred Differ (revisited) :<br /><i><br />That sort of attitude is turning some in the protector caste against your cause. Our submariner said as much. Your feelings on the legitimacy of the election are not widely shared, thus YOU are the perceived threat to the Constitution. I understand where you are coming from, but even I disagree with your position. Trump did win. He didn’t break rules to do it. He broke traditions. <br /></i><br /><br />Then with all due respect, I will wait patiently for you and the protector caste to realize that I was right and you were wrong. I say this as someone who prefaces most assertions with "I might be wrong about this..." and I accept the possibility that I might be wrong about this one too. But I'm as confident as I was when I knew that the few congressional votes against Iraq War II (Bernie Sanders) would turn out to be political assets, as opposed to the overwhelming majority (Hillary Clinton) who felt that even if they'd rather not rush to war, a no vote would be political suicide.<br /><br />LarryHartnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-73511359951914648132017-04-12T20:00:33.014-07:002017-04-12T20:00:33.014-07:00Robert:
The problem is... I have too much faith i...Robert:<br /><i><br />The problem is... I have too much faith in my fellow humans.<br /></i><br /><br />And yet, you knew the election would be an upset back when I thought for sure that Hillary would get over 400 electoral votes.LarryHartnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-84745897218825551882017-04-12T19:36:15.401-07:002017-04-12T19:36:15.401-07:00I will admit I was one of those fools who believed...I will admit I was one of those fools who believed the Republican Party would fall apart and become a regional party.<br /><br />The problem is... I have too much faith in my fellow humans.<br /><br />I could not conceive that people would willingly and blindly continue to follow people who do not have their best interests for them and who repeatedly and continually betray everything they claim to hold dear. I see the Party of Family Values caught with their pants down over and over and over again until this is no longer the Party of Family Values and the Republican Party no longer even tries to claim that title.<br /><br />Yet people didn't turn away.<br /><br />I see people being betrayed, losing their jobs due to Republican policies and views, see people losing their way of life... and they continue to blindly support the Republican Party.<br /><br />I believed that education and the fact they continue to have the same thing happen over and over again would keep people from following in this insanity.<br /><br />But that is what it is.<br /><br />Insanity.<br /><br />A good-sized portion of the United States... are insane. <br /><br />And they will gleefully dance while this country burns just to say "fuck you" to "liberals" and minorities and anyone who isn't them. They won't give a flying fuck that they are killing themselves and their children and their grandchildren, just so long as they get to watch everyone else suffer.<br /><br />My suspicion is they believe when they die, they will go to a better world and be able to lord it over everyone else because they were "good Christians" even though they long ago abandoned anything Christ held dear.<br /><br />Nor do I have any idea how we will stop these bastards... outside of getting the sane and more mature people (and the minorities, oh so very much the minorities!) to vote... consistently. To drown out that voice, to never again let down one's guard. <br /><br />Trump has revealed to the American People that this insanity exists and that it is widespread. And while I still believe he will end up resigning or having impeachment proceedings start within his first 100 days (200 at most)... people are no longer sleeping. <br /><br />I just hope they don't lose faith and give up entirely.<br /><br />Rob H.Acacia H.https://www.blogger.com/profile/07678539067303911329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-28142732906104642462017-04-12T12:41:15.778-07:002017-04-12T12:41:15.778-07:00Much as I loved the old "Firefly" series...Much as I loved the old "Firefly" series, it used to annoy me that there would be so many different habitable planets seemingly within a few weeks or even days travel of one another. It defied everything we knew about the nature of solar systems.<br />But it turned out Clarke was right: it wasn't that it couldn't exist; it was that I couldn't imagine it might exist.Zepp Jamiesonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03024670772812706971noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-24253630190623921392017-04-12T09:05:56.751-07:002017-04-12T09:05:56.751-07:00Paul SB: my mail is my last name without the "...Paul SB: my mail is my last name without the "o" at either google or hotmail.<br /><br />My wife is a kindergarden teacher (with master degree in special education) and any information about experiences in other countries will help her work<br /><br />I agree that there are too many confounders however the value of education is now percieved very positively in rural areas, it wasn't so 30 years ago but now specially after the crisis and the return to agricultare things are starting to look diferent. It is in the suburbs that things are worse.<br /><br />Which reminds me, Dr. Brin: regarding the tendency to feudalism, I´ve noticed that during the worst of the economical crisis many poor people without resources turned to farming for subsistance, those that could returned to abandoned ancestral farms. But many unemploid suburbanites had no such option instead they ofered their services to landowners in exchange to keeping a portion of their production, thus assuming a vassal position instead of starving.Luís Salgueirohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09639187787702431357noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-39345904798105240132017-04-12T08:20:13.067-07:002017-04-12T08:20:13.067-07:00Luis,
It would be dangerous to simply type your e...Luis,<br /><br />It would be dangerous to simply type your email address on the blog here, as there are malicious programs that could intercept it and flood your computer with spam, viruses, ransomeware ... But a few of us here have passed along their email addresses by sort of "mouthing it out" as it were (one guy called it "decloaking" but I don't remember who). Mine would be my first initial followed by my last name (shenbrown) at the service provided by Google. I can't guarantee I can help you a whole lot, though. I'm just a teacher. I am considering a run for Doctor of Ed., which might give me the kind of information you would need, but I have health issues I have to deal with before I could possibly start such a program. If you send an email to me, though, I would be happy to share what I have. As Siddhartha Gautama once said, "Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of that candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared." Looks like the Buddha understood positive sum thinking 2500 years ago.<br /><br />I'm afraid economics isn't a specialty of mine, so I can't help you there. I agree on the recycling, though there are some recycling processes that produce very serious pollution. Here in the LA area we have been having some serious issues with battery recyclers dumping hexavalent chromium, which is quite nasty. Unfortunately simple-minded people here something bad about one type of something (in this case recycling) then overgeneralize to everything, pitching millions of babies with a few gallons of bathwater. The efficiency of recycling many materials not only saves money by the metric ton, it also usually does much less damage to our life-support system (a.k.a. the environment).<br /><br />Mega schools in ghettoes are hardly going to help those citizens integrate, are they? I don't want to dismiss your example, but with something as complex as a nation-wide education system has a whole lot of confounds - teacher quality being just one of them, to say nothing of cultural differences in educational expectations between different segments of a population (rural, agricultural people often see little value in education because they don't see it helping their livelihood, just like segregated minorities in ghettos). The jury is still out, and likely will be for much of this century.Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-70082264494466539432017-04-12T07:54:37.714-07:002017-04-12T07:54:37.714-07:00DrBrin: PaxAmericana and millitary spending: That ...DrBrin: PaxAmericana and millitary spending: That is absolutly true. Portuguese defense spending is currently around 1% of the budget and the vast majority of the population is pushing to decrease even that. During the colonial war though, the military industrial complex hired hundreds of thousands of people, due to the embargo, and all weapons, vehicules and uniforms were produced in factories owned by the fascist regime or their pet oligarcs (kept on a very short leash). When the war ended, the economy took a very bad hit, causing portugal to go bankrupt in the eighties even though we had the worlds fifth largest gold reserve (which was shiped to the US in 75, by insistance of the CIA, so it wouldn't fall to communist hands, and rests securely at the bottom of the Fed Reserve in NY tyll this day)Luís Salgueirohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09639187787702431357noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-18878128755998254382017-04-12T07:54:27.922-07:002017-04-12T07:54:27.922-07:00Paul SB: Thanks for the answer. How can I send you...Paul SB: Thanks for the answer. How can I send you my email?<br /><br />The health literacy project started only a couple of months ago, and is turning into a governmental flag (for a population of 10 million we had 100 million medical consultations last year, even though we have a relatively low per capita health budget with very good results compared to other OCDE countries it's stressing our national budget and we are coming to the conclusion that the portuguese are chronically hipocondriacs)<br /><br />We have tried in other projects to create classrooms for patients. The results are bad. Attendance is low and even though there are improvements in health indicators they are temporary, the messages fade with time the only programas that work require repeted classes over time. That may work for small selected pathologies, not on a global scale.<br />We are aiming to create a number of teaching materials to disseminate to schools, healthcare centers and mass media. We'll see how that goes.<br /><br />Regarding your proposition for small classes we do have some experience with that. Starting in the 60s a massive public education progam took place in Portugal, with the end of the dictartoship in 74 the program accelerated so by 1980 every small village (as little as 500 peolple) had at least a basic school, with quicly declining births from 1985 onwards many of those schools ended up with less than 10 students. There is very little reliable research into this but an analysis of the scores of children from those small schools compared to larger ones is not favorable to the small schools. Some districts (with 500 000 to 1 million inhabitants) with very scattered populations failled to have children have high enougth scores to enter some of the most prestigious universities. In some instances excepcional teachers managed very good results but most teachers that end up in those small schools are the ones that failed to be hired in other places, and that, not the small size of the classes can explain the bad results. However I'm convinced that teacher preparation and teaching curricula and techniques might have a greater impact than smaller classes.<br />Regarding mega schools with more than 3000 students there is some that that suggests amplification of social problems in those settings. However those schools tend to be located in ghetos with foreign populations with integration problems.<br /><br />Regarding the economic dillema the situation is very complex, the current model collapses without incressed expanditure and increassed debt and credit because insuficient currency is introduced in the system to compensate for increced production. In fact only through credit is new currency introduced in the system. If the credit is at 0 interest rates than reduced consumption can be achieved if not the system enters a deflationary cycle that destroys the banking establishments. I've yet failed to glimpse an alternative model that dosn't sends us back to the stone age.<br />Portuguese ecological fingerprint was reduced by half during the current crisis due to reduced comsumption and increased use of locally produced food.<br />However I don't understand some of the oposition to recycling. It is an immensely lucrative business. Some of the richest people I know made their wealth from creating recycling plants, some of those in Africa. The profits are imense, they get paid to take away the "trash" and after processing it the resulting materials are sold at a premium. The rentability is higher than that of a gold mine.Luís Salgueirohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09639187787702431357noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-34734835210051531512017-04-12T07:26:39.463-07:002017-04-12T07:26:39.463-07:00Alfred Differ:
That sort of attitude is turning s...Alfred Differ:<br /><i><br />That sort of attitude is turning some in the protector caste against your cause. Our submariner said as much. Your feelings on the legitimacy of the election are not widely shared, thus YOU are the perceived threat to the Constitution. <br /></i><br /><br />Maybe sort of. What he said was that a movement to recognize someone else (Hillary) as the actual commander in chief puts the military in an untenable position.<br /><br /><i><br />I understand where you are coming from, but even I disagree with your position. Trump did win. He didn’t break rules to do it. He broke traditions. <br /></i><br /><br />Trump himself didn't break rules, but the Republican Party did. That is, if one perceives voter suppression to be a breaking of rules. Also, the FBI may not technically have violated election rules, but they violated their own rules when they released details of an ongoing investigation of Hillary but sat on the worse details of an ongoing investigation of Trump and Russia.<br /><i><br />It turns out that many of our fellow citizens are dipsqueaks and voted for him. Ultimately, that his win is legitimate isn’t what bothers me. What does is that my neighbors thought it was a good idea that he be elected. It’s hard to fathom their collective insanity, but I don’t brush it aside. It happened and Trump won. My neighbors are nuts.<br /></i><br /><br />Ok, on this I'll agree (without the emphasis on the win being legitimate), and I've said so here. I was stunned on November 9 by the number of my fellow Americans who (in my assessment) hate America.<br /><br /><i><br />"Their core values are low taxes, no regulation, and courts which side with corporations over humans."<br /><br />Maybe. I’ve learned not to accept what someone says is a personal or group core value and look instead at how they behave. When I do, I see 50 different GOP parties. Often more. There are distinctions between factions and states. Unity is an illusion. On top of that, I never felt that Reagan or his people (most anyway) were big fans of the oligarchs. <br /></i><br /><br />Agreed. Reagan forged an alliance of pro-America jingoism, social/religious conservatism, and believers in laissez-faire capitalism. One might think of those as three separate parties who formed a coalition and agreed not to step on each other's issues in exchange for solidarity among voters.<br /><br />I do think that hindsight shows a corporatist "man behind the curtain" pulling many strings to insure a rise to power of a Republican Party friendly to their interests without calling too much public attention to themselves.<br /><br /><i><br />Okay. Maybe you didn’t drink the koolaide back in 2008. I don’t understand why people thought the GOP wouldn’t recover, though. <br /></i><br /><br />I didn't think they'd recover so quickly, is all.<br /><br />A caller to Norman Goldman's radio show stated the obvious last night--that Republican voters, at least a large subset of them, vote Republican out of habit and identity. They're suspicious of Democrats at the very least, and often perceive them as enemies of America. So Democratic strategy is useless when it tries to appeal to Republican voters, even by playing to those Republicans' own values. Democrats need to convince their own voters not to be apathetic or hostile to their own candidates. Hillary wasn't going to get Trump supporters to switch sides no matter what, but she would have won if she had convinced Jill Stein voters not to cede a victory to someone they hated worse than herself.<br /><br />I'm not saying that to blame the voters. The Democratic Party has lessons to learn about the electoral process. Unfortunately, they tend to learn the wrong lesson--that they have to swing to the right to attract Republican votes rather than that they have to give anti-Republicans something to root for.LarryHartnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-9761501420674533902017-04-12T07:10:50.504-07:002017-04-12T07:10:50.504-07:00My brain!
I was going to add that there is a kind...My brain!<br /><br />I was going to add that there is a kind of cancer that is contagious - HPV. If we go with a health analogy, what does that say about the US and the rest of the world? What would Wallerstein say? What does it say that the highest office in the US is occupied by a rapist?Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-22631533671153566642017-04-12T07:08:33.142-07:002017-04-12T07:08:33.142-07:00Alfred con.t,
What do American economist always t...Alfred con.t,<br /><br />What do American economist always tell us? That if the economy stops growing it dies. Do we die when we stop growing? The only things that never stop growing are obesity and cancer. Natural systems normally reach equilibrium, a sort of plateau of stability, but the US has convinced itself and the world that only endless growth is stable.Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-18158465696966442052017-04-12T06:54:11.890-07:002017-04-12T06:54:11.890-07:00Alfred,
That last comment I made to Duncan brings...Alfred,<br /><br />That last comment I made to Duncan brings me to your comments on tradition. Pretty much everything you said I have known for a long time. Even as a teenager I was never really a radical tradition resistor - I just resisted traditions that I thought were dumb. <br /><br />No, traditions are not to be dumped out of hand. Traditions grow for reasons that were (sometimes) adaptive in certain times and places. I say sometimes because many traditions are really maladaptive, but it may take many generations for them to do enough damage to society to leave it tottering on the edge of extinction, facing a choice between stubbornly clinging to the traditions that are now destroying them or trying to innovate their way out of extinction. Thus the Einstein paraphrase. And yes, this happens. I have frequently commented on how the conditions that create civilizations also lead to their downfall. Need I bring up conspicuous consumption/competitive emulation again? How about the collapse of the Maya, with their competitive temple-building tradition that led to overpopulation and runaway soil erosion. Their response? Build bigger temples! In one century they went from around 30 million to around 10 thousand people in a calamity of epic proportions.<br /><br />And what does America do? Build more sky scrappers, more office buildings, more business schools. Today we have the scientific skills to see what is happening. That system you speak of that began in 17th C. Netherlands and migrated to the rest of Europe and America was adaptive in that it broke the power monopoly of the aristocracy, but now it has created its own aristocracy, and they are sucking the world dry no less than the old nobility. And even though we have good science to point out this failure mode, most people plug their ears and go "Dah dah dah dah dah" whenever they point out facts that don't match the propaganda they have been enculturated to believe. Traditions can be adaptive at one time, in one place, but become deadly maladaptive in other times and other places - either when they speed from the places where the originated or when something about the physical or cultural environment changes sufficiently. Population growth is the most typical change, as increases in population increasingly tax natural resources down to critical levels from which the environment needs millennia to recover (the Yucatan being a clear example, once again, but you could look at the Roman Empire or any number of extinct civilizations), or when their culture starts to cause serious health issues for the human beings that comprise the civilization (the rat-like behavior of humans that comes out under conditions of overcrowding like violent street gangs, indifference to the fates of fellow hominids, or our current mental health calamity). Usually they go hand-in-hand.<br /><br />Any approach to accepting or rejecting traditions cannot be the usual blanket approach - accept all traditions or reject all traditions - but this is sadly what most people end up doing. Pay careful attention to the circumstances under which a tradition developed, rather than just shrugging your shoulders and refusing to make any changes, the fatalistic cry of "need more data!" We have to work with what we have, while always accepting that any conclusions we reach could turn out to be wrong when we get the more data. Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-570600150650945562017-04-12T06:18:04.107-07:002017-04-12T06:18:04.107-07:00Duncan,
I couldn't agree with you more, excep...Duncan,<br /><br />I couldn't agree with you more, except that we are also battling an obesity epidemic of epic proportions. I would not do away with PE entirely, but the high school meathead to pro sports pipeline is really bad, especially in an increasingly narcissistic culture that replaced official government religion with the worship of the Almighty Dollar. This is especially problematic for ethnic minorities. It is almost a universal that state-level societies create minorities to have handy scapegoats for times when they can't figure out how to fix their real problems. When they aren't actively persecuting their minorities, they are most definitely restricting minority roles in society, sometime by laws but mainly by stereotypes. And there are two features that turn up very consistently - music and sports. I once read an article about stereotyping in the Aztec Triple Alliance, and it was the same thing back then. Boys absorb the BS and plan their entire lives around forlorn hopes of becoming the next Kobe - along with about 30 million other boys, and it becomes the excuse for never, ever doing homework and screwing around in class.<br /><br />Keep PE, but you're right, keep the stadium sports out of high school. I would go further and not allow the PE classes to even teach football, futbol, basketball, baseball or hockey. The slope is too slippery and the temptation to get more money by corrupt administrators to profit off school children is too great.<br /><br />I would keep music programs - the neurological benefits of learning to play instruments & sing well are too great to give up, but there is still a slippery slope here - just nowhere near as bad as with sports.<br /><br />Another thing I would insist on is adding self-care skills to the curriculum. You don't build mental resilience in children by throwing them to the wolves, as our throwback trogs believe. You build resilience by teaching skills - emotional self-defense. B between dramatically reducing the stress of being surrounded by too many immature peers and teaching stress-reduction techniques, that depression/bipolar/anxiety disorder epidemic can be staunched. It won't be fixed by continued emphasis on cutthroat competition. As old Uncle Albert said, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-20339441680728865582017-04-11T22:20:14.779-07:002017-04-11T22:20:14.779-07:00Hi Paul SB
Re - Education in the USA
One simple c...Hi Paul SB<br />Re - Education in the USA<br /><br />One simple change that would (IMHO) massively improve the US education system<br /><br />BAN "professional" level sports from High Schools and Universities<br />Disband all sports teams and demolish all sports stadiums<br /><br />After a generation you could re-establish school sports and teams at a more sensible level but you current system is massively out of hand and is distorting your whole system duncan cairncrosshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14153725128216947145noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-85788552044428313662017-04-11T20:52:06.613-07:002017-04-11T20:52:06.613-07:00I'll try to get back to others in the morning....I'll try to get back to others in the morning.Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-87757860382222168022017-04-11T20:51:30.522-07:002017-04-11T20:51:30.522-07:00Luis,
It looks like the first part of my post mys...Luis,<br /><br />It looks like the first part of my post mysteriously vanished yesterday (thus the “Luis con.t”) so I will have to try to remember what I wrote yesterday. But before I do that, I should try to get to your answer to hold of my comments. I can never be too sure how long my brain will hold out.<br /><br />You are right that uncorrupted data can be hard to come by, especially since education is one of those services people tend to feel very strongly about, which means that politicians try to manipulate to their own advantage. And even when you can get clear data, from what I have seen of education researchers, they seem to be working from the same assumption bases as most people. They look to psychology to provide them all the answers, ignoring the fact that schools are fundamentally social (as are humans - in spite of locum’s witless tirades). Thus attempts to prove the obvious correlation between class size and school failure has focused on class-size reductions to around n=20. Sure, that’s an improvement over n=37, but it is almost 3 times the scalar stress number<br /><br />Can I ask how your patient education program is conducted? Is this more like a classroom setting or more like tutoring? Unfortunately I don’t have access to my pedagogy library right now, but if you were willing to pass me your email, I could send you a pdf of strategies I use. It would take too much to explain here.<br /><br />Okay, now let’s see if I can remember what I wrote yesterday. I probably repeated some stuff about human nature that I have written about many times here - probably much to the dismay of the readership. There are many, many flaws to our education traditions, but the key one that has to remedied before any of the others can do more than just nibble at the edge of darkness is class size. If you have read some of the things I have brought up about oxytocin, you’ll know what I am talking about. Well-intentioned people have been working for decades to fix pedagogy and curriculum, but none of those fixes amount to much if the class size problem isn’t solved.<br /><br />My idea would be to get rid of all these high schools that have 4000 students and go to a dispersed model. Have many small buildings - could be old, renovated houses - with only enough room for 2 or 3 classes, with classes no more than 8 students (and possibly 2 teachers). Individual buildings would be no more than a block or 2 apart, so one building could have facilities to teach (and not merely lecture, which barely qualifies as teaching at all) math, science and social science, while the next building over has facilities to teach history (which is not social science, in spite of being relabelled that way back in the Bush Admin.) language arts and foreign languages. More specialized facilities like athletic fields, swimming pools, shop facilities and specialized vocational programs would be shared among several groups of school buildings. A shuttle service might be necessary to facilitate transportation between buildings. Currently school busses run in the morning, have a long, wasted break, then again in the afternoon. This would be more efficient in that sense, at least.<br /><br />Students would move between 2 class buildings & the specialized facilities each semester but would change schedules each semester. This would help build more of a sense of community and teamwork, rather than the ‘us vs. them’ mentality that dominates the relationship between students and teachers. But with semester rotation, and more class choice on the part of the students, it could also provide more flexibility in terms of what students can learn. You might play with the frequency of rotation (quarterly, trimesterly, etc) and experiment with course options and the efficient distribution of teachers and learning facilities, though with internet access and some subscription databases, there is a whole lot that can be done with just computers in the classroom.Paul SBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-8732893073146628662017-04-11T20:21:24.477-07:002017-04-11T20:21:24.477-07:00Regarding Dr Brins comment on Meiji transformation...Regarding Dr Brins comment on Meiji transformation a lot of that success was because they instituted liberal enlightenment policies like universal education and healthcare and a strong central government. All of which had been opposed by the feudal overlordsBrother Doughttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15727922721856786711noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-7810090005842049132017-04-11T19:45:48.247-07:002017-04-11T19:45:48.247-07:00The feudalists don’t destroy science directly. The...The feudalists don’t destroy science directly. They shackle it and give it a designed purpose. Their design. It’s not just the Princes who do this. The Priests did too. Before roughly the 16th century, science served them both if it did much of anything.<br /><br />Modern Science is a very bourgeois thing. It already has a purpose, but it isn’t a designed one. It is a mirror for our desire to comprehend when we can and eliminated false knowledge when we can’t.<br /><br />For Feudalism to return, they MUST repurpose Science. As with all bourgeois traditions, they will have to co-opt them.Alfred Differhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01170159981105973192noreply@blogger.com