Slashdot Mirror
California Moves To Block Texas' Textbook Changes
eldavojohn writes "Yesterday the Texas textbook controversy was reported internationally but the news today heats up the debate as California, a state on the other side of the political spectrum, introduces legislation that would block these textbook changes inside California. Democrat Senator Leland Yee (you may know him as a senator often tackling ESRB ratings on video games) introduced SB1451, which would require California's school board to review books for any of Texas' changes and block the material if any such are found. The bill's text alleges that said changes would be 'a sharp departure from widely accepted historical teachings' and 'a threat to the apolitical nature of public school governance and academic content standards in California.'"
The next time a southern state wants to secede from the union.... LET THEM!!!!!!!!
Seriously, the country is better off without them.
They take all our tax money and return nothing. They dumb down the rest of the nation, and they are also probably largely responsible for most of the failed mortgages.
Yeah! Because Detroit is kicking some serious ass right now.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I would suggest that those "probably largely responsible for most of the failed mortgages" would be the US Government. By forcing banks and lenders to loan money to people without the ability to pay it back or face stiff penalties.
(sarcasm) YAY trying to legislation equal results! (/sarcasm)
A Christian foundation is laughable? How so? One of the prime leaders of the revolution was Samuel Adams, a christian preacher. The writings of George Washington contain frequent references to "God" and "our Creator". Thomas Jefferson, as president, signed his documents: "on this date 180x, in the year of our lord, Jesus Christ". He even created his own bible called the Jesus Bible which focused on quoting Jesus of Nazareth.
That doesn't mean everyone should be forced to be a Christian. Be whatever you want (I am atheist). BUT at the same time to deny the reality that the founders of this country were Christians who devoutly beloved in God and a Christ/Messiah is ALSO a bias, and that bias has perverted our textbooks for decades.
Why is THAT bias any better? The answer: It isn't.
History is about facts, and getting as close to the truth as possible. To pretend the Founders were not Christians is anti-truth and makes you no better than the Texan book-writers.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
i think the guardian has successfully trolled /., this story happened almost a year ago. i can't think of another reason in this day and age that a newspaper would report a year old story as a new story unless it was a troll.
if it is as bad as all the hippies have said then california is doing the right thing in choosing the textbooks they want, just as we have chosen the textbooks we want. in the end the cream will rise; the stupid kids will dig ditches and smart kids will be engineers, lawyers, etc.
lose != loose
You claim that California (pop 36,961,664), Texas (pop 24,782,302), and New York (pop 19,541,453) are the states which define what goes into textbooks.
Entertaining this claim as being true, we see that TWO highly liberal states (California and New York) are also warping what goes into text books.
I'm pretty sure that regardless of which state you were educated in, that 2 is greater than 1, and that 56 million is greater than 25 million.
So what we've got here is Texas moving to remove the liberal bias from the textbooks forced upon them by California and New York. Remember that we have assumed that publishers put bias in the text books to garner favor from these 3 states, ergo the bias that we must conclude is already there, is currently very liberal.
Now, you were saying about Texas being a problem? Its only a problem if you want to maintain the bias. Its not a problem if you want things to be more centrist. We as a nation benefit if Texas gets changes made, and are harmed if California blocks those changes.
"His name was James Damore."
Too bad Canadians don't...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
And do you seriously believe that textbooks, and/or teachers are neutral ?
How about teaching the truth about evolution ? Not just "it means Jesus is dead", but the real, full truth :
1) you have babies
2) a significant portion of them die*
3) successfull mutations "on average" do better
Somehow I doubt that point 2 is "correctly" represented in those Californian textbooks. The "kill or be killed" part of evolution ... always curiously absent in any such discussion. And the P.S. especially will be considered herecy by democrats :
* any (successfull) attempt to reduce or eliminate the dying part of evolution will immediately cause the population to eat up every last resource. This will in short order (certainly less than 5-10 generations, so perhaps a century) result in the mass-consumption of non-renewable resources, which will, at some point, exhaust anyway, resulting in a mass famine.
How about making it extra super juicy ?
Discuss how this "P.S." detail applies to unemployment benefits and/or national health care, or any form of interference, including government interference, that "equalizes opportunity regardless of genes" ? (ie. discuss how it will affect any population that attempts to equalize opportunity regardless of race)
And the real "burn him at the stake" discussion :
Discuss the ability of congressional laws, or other government policy to change the effects of evolution ? Discuss what will be the consequence of the "... will in very short time exhaust any and all available resources ..." on any population that attempts to follow such laws that attempt to interfere with evolution.
He didn't have to spell the formula out in full. That he did it anyway, does suggest, he was perfectly "in" Christianity — as is the GP's point.
BTW, every President since has also been a Christian. The current one was, reportedly, quite devout too — at least, until he moved to the capital.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You expect Canada to want those parts of the country with the least natural resources? Of course you could immigrate, but why would Canada want you either?
While you paint a dire picture of the "south," are your eastern values better? You have fewer pregnant teens because they are more likely to get abortions, you give up your guns to the government because you are afraid of yourselves, and you pray to Darwin because you don't want to think that you might be responsible for anything. Yes, I think Canada already has more than enough of you.
Do you honestly believe the nonsense you're spouting ? Do we really have to go through the exercise of showing in an actual simulation what happens when you "help the less fortunate" ?
When you "help the less fortunate" (your words, not mine), your resource utilization curve becomes exponential. That must be trivial to see, right ? You see, the less fortunate have kids, and due to copying problematic genes (*and* memes), they will have a strong tendency to be less fortunate themselves.
But that's not the end of it. "Helping" does something else, something far, far worse than merely causing mass-casualty famines through resource exhaustion and the total environmental destruction that preceeds it. In normal evolution you have mutations. Group A has mutation A, group B has mutation B. Either group A dies, or group B does, depending on which mutation is best adapted to the real world. Obviously the other group would be considered a lot "less fortunate".
So what happens when you help the "less fortunate" group ? Well, obviously, if you succeed, 50% of the population will have mutation A, 50% will have mutation B. Then a second mutation occurs. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat ...
The end result, obviously, is that for any gene (any allel would be more correct, but hey), it will be randomly and universally distributed throughout the population.
This effect is sometimes called "de-evolution" since it erases the information evolution has placed into our genes, it erases it by randomizing it.
It might even be compared to a species-wide "death". You see what happens at death is that your "soul" (as expressed by amplification factors on neuronal connections) becomes randomized. At death, all the physical representation of the information that defines who you are is randomized, and therefore erased. This process then repeats for your individual cells until your entire body is metabolized by something else.
Well "helping the less fortunate" randomizes all the physical representation of the information that makes us human. It randomizes the human DNA, to no benefit, towards no goal.
We can only thank God (heh) that we're not all that good at "helping the less fortunate" yet. Or we'd long have destroyed ourselves. It might even be argued that several huge historical disasters occured because people tried -and failed- to "help the less fortunate", but they did not fail before they created a huge number of "less fortunate", resulting in massive civil war when they did fail. Evolution theory says that such failure is unavoidable without infinite resources (and not just any infinite will do, it does not merely expand linearly into infinite, it expands exponentially into the infinite).