The federal bill at least had some motivation behind it that wasn't a specific attempt to trample on minority rights—in fact the opposite. It it intended to prevent the federal government from building on native american sacred lands, or otherwise restricting the access of those who follow indigenous religions to their sacred sites and practices. It applies only to carve out exemptions of federal law.
On the other hand, in Indiana, this bill explicitly allows private business to act as religious organizations and therefore exempt themselves from all kinds of legal requirements about nondiscrimination. The clause was probably inspired by a court case in another state, New Mexico, which in theory has a similar law on the books—but in which the case of the business that wished to discriminate on the basis of sexuality was rejected.
You've said the same thing three times now. Here are some things you should consider:
1. sometimes words are used by different people to mean different things!
For instance, “patriarchy” was used by me above to fill in the missing actor in your original post, with a rough definition given above. The word can also be used to refer to the patrilinial systems of property or government that existed in Europe before modern systems of law. It can also be used to describe systems of government in general in which power is largely in the hands of men. It is also sometimes used in a more theoretical sense to describe a system, process, or tendency that causes these other forms to sustain themselves. One time, some woman on the internet used it to refer to “an ugly, self-sustaining, omnipotent invisible force that explains everything” but seeing as this is not a definition used by anybody else it's pretty clear that it was a straw man designed just so she could write a huge screed about how it is an unfalsifiable theory.
You seem completely unconcerned with which of these is being discussed when you call it an unfalsifiable theory, despite most of them referring to observable tendencies or things, or even formalized systems of law.
Please don't lecture people on definitions when you don't understand how words work.
2. maybe you should think about reading the criticism section of that wikipedia page you linked instead of holding up a concept not generally accepted by philosophers (of science or otherwise) as the End of All Arguments?
3. If you are really so worried about being bullied and called names, as mentioned in the first post, I would invite you to consider that maybe the lack of support you say you receive could be connected with the fact that when people try to apply their own tools that they find effective for fighting oppression in order to explain, address, and ideally point a way to resolution of the ”ghettoization” that you describe yourself in, you seem most interested in chasing them away with unrelated wikipedia links, a patronizing tone, and a tremendous chip on your shoulder.
Like, what is the correlation between being called a neckbeard and telling people they are wrong about things they clearly understand better than you?
4. bonus round: maybe if you are going to hold every response up to a ridiculous standard of logical completeness you shouldn't lead with a rhetorical strategy of ”that's what they want you to think” by listing some actions that you seem to want to attribute only to an unnamed ugly, self-sustaining, omnipotent invisible force that explains everything. Because that sounds an awful lot like an unfalsifiable theory.
Or maybe you know, don't complain about things you clearly don't want to change?
lol no i'm not. I knew it wasn't worth my time to type a definition of how I used the word because sure enough you didn't read it.
in the meantime, i'll be sure to tell everyone i know in the humanities about Karl Popper and how you can read about him on wikipedia I don't think any of them has ever thought to do so before nope not even once. ciao.
I don't care if you like the word or not: you didn't use any term to describe who is performing the three steps in your post:
Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech Step 2: Watch as that stigmatization isolates and ostracizes people in tech as "nerds" "dweebs" "dorks" "losers" and so on Step 3: "WHY AREN'T THERE MORE WOMEN IN TECH?!!!!"
so I offered the one that seemed closest to hand and is often used to describe a similar abstract group that seems to directly or indirectly pull the strings of our society.
Tech fields aren't some fortress designed to keep women out, they're a ghetto that unattractive or non-conforming men were shoved into.
Why is this an OR? Power functions in multiple directions at the same time; if one barrier can negatively impact the mobility of non-conforming men as well as simultaneously push women even farther away from economic power that seems like a tremendous win for the patriarchy.
No, “First Nations” does not refer to Inuit peoples, nor does it refer to the Metis. These three groups collectively make up what are called Aboriginal peoples in Canada by the constitution act of 1982. The other broad term you might use if you are not sure about, or are talking about several sub-categories or nations, is indigenous people(s). Or you know, just ask people how they want to be referred to.
"Indian" still has weight as a legal term in Canada because it is the word that was generally used in law prior to 1982.
In any case, the Inuit are fairly clearly not "first nations" because they are clearly not the first people to live where they live now; they displaced the Dorset peoples from most of Canada's arctic relatively recently when compared to the settlement of the Americas—recently enough for the Dorset to have had contact with viking traders, for instance. Inuit tradition calls the Dorset "Sivullirmiut" or "First Inhabitants".
I don't know a thing about law in Europe or England but is a man required to respond to questioning when accused
In Swedish law, yes. The UK agreed to extradition even though he hasn't been charged because they considered the request for questioning to serve an equivalent purpose under Swedish criminal law, and that the authority to call him in was real—because the actual laying of charges comes later in the process than it does in Anglo-style criminal systems.
No not really. You've successfully used three different sources two of which are known for excessively strong anti-conservative leanings, for the sake of being anti-conservative. Both the CBC & G&M have an axe to grind.
The Globe and Mail endorsed the Conservatives in the last three elections. So I'm not sure in what circles they are known for disliking them.
Elective or cosmetic surgery isn't necessarily a natural monopoly: unlike, say, emergency care where you tend to go wherever the ambulance takes you, or GP care where quality is difficult to judge without spending years with a particular service, or even insurance where you suddenly find out that the service sucks when your life, or at least your quality of life and your employability, is on the line and they drop you or screw up your coverage. People getting cosmetic and elective procedures have plenty of leisure time to shop around, and because they aren't things that you need to have to live, they do marketing and directly compete on price. It's part of why lots of countries with nationalized care (single-payer or otherwise) make exceptions for those services and they are covered by out-of-pocket, private insurance, or maybe only a partial subsidy.
Eye care (and sometimes dental) are often caught in the middle ground between true electives and the core system. I wish they were better covered here in Canada, because they seem necessary enough to me, but I recognize that not everyone agrees with that—and that in both cases there are lots of tricky aspects that shade between necessary and elective, like when your orthodontist is trying to upsell you to “improve” your jawline when really you just want your gums to the healthy.
He's interested in researching the topic that he is in fact researching—how damning. What?
Re:correlation without causation, but why?
on
Art Makes Students Smart
·
· Score: 3, Informative
...and 'critical thinking skills' (which, without context, means nothing).
I'm not sure what kind of detail you read the article in then, because it describes the students being given an essay-question test. And if you read the links given you'll find out how the test was blindly scored looking for certain specific techniques as evidence of critical thinking: “observing, interpreting, evaluating, associating, problem finding, comparing, and flexible thinking”. They even built in a test for their system, having separate researchers score overlapping samples so that they could make sure they were producing consistent results.
And here's a little bonus:
A large amount of the gain in critical-thinking skills stems from an increase in the number of observations that students made in their essays. Students who went on a tour became more observant, noticing and describing more details in an image. Being observant and paying attention to detail is an important and highly useful skill that students learn when they study and discuss works of art. Additional research is required to determine if the gains in critical thinking when analyzing a work of art would transfer into improved critical thinking about other, non-art-related subjects.
I'm not sure why the summary doesn't include a direct link to the study, as is present in the NYT article, but there you go. There's more detail in there about what they mean by empathy and tolerance (specifically including a measurable decrease in the student's support for government censorship).
I would assume that the theory here is that other things affect the demand for books as well. By protecting publishers, authors, and local booksellers with connections to their community, they are hoping to create cultural value on books that will encourage reading despite the prices. Those seem like reasonable goals to me.
I'm sorry, but saying "but but but other people break the law too" isn't saying you don't approve of what bike riders are doing, it is trying to excuse it.
OK good thing that the person you are arguing with said exactly that and nothing else. Certainly not anything about unclipping his pedals on an almost completely different topic.
I guess you must be really are annoyed by some cyclists who run red lights sometimes and since you can't argue with them on the streets you want to do it here.
Who said anything about court? If you want to go there, how does the logic "it was inconvenient for me to have to unclip my feet from the pedals" work in court, were any bicyclists ever given tickets for failing to bother to even try stopping at a red light?
Did you not understand the comment? The annoying thing is that the author has already stopped at the stop sign and has to awkwardly stand there waiting for the driver who has right of way before eventually determining that the driver is waiting for him. Cars thinking that cyclists are unpredictable is annoying at best for the cyclists, at worst dangerous. But at least they see us, which is more than I can say for lots of drivers.
It is a logical fallacy to claim that the illegal thing you are doing is ok because a few other people do other illegal things.
Yeah, you are assuming that the poster is making excuses for breaking the law when in fact they are going out of their way to explain to you that they don't approve of doing so. It's not a false equivalency to point out that two people running red lights are both running red lights. It's not an excuse, it's an observation.
This is one reason why dedicated trails and sidewalks are more dangerous for cyclists than the road. I know that the most dangerous place on my commute is similar, whether I stop or not before the road, visibility is poor and more importantly many drivers just aren't looking (never mind that the cars have a yield sign while I have a stop sign so it's wonderfully ambiguous).
Recently opened bike network is probably a sign of increasing ridership—between it being built for increasing numbers of cyclists and its presence encouraging more. So no wonder the accidents are growing faster than population, if more and more people are starting to ride.
Cans of shit? We are expected to keep a straight face?
What does keeping a straight face have to do with art?
Please don't try to educate me about conceptual art. Maybe instead of telling us about your magic power to determine what art is objectively the best, you should educate yourself about why many people who love art disagree with you.
I understand that many people don't like projects like this. That's fine. Others might disagree. But no matter what—there's no reason to insult the entire discipline because you don't like one project.
As an artist whose work is very different than this, I still can't help but be disgusted every time I see someone talking about "artists" in quotes, or with an extra "e" on the end (as they do elsewhere in this discussion), or making silly comments about blank canvases and reductive caricatures of conceptual art and uneducated statements about what art "has" to do—that's actually the position that the onion comment is making fun of: the conservative assertion that inauthentic "crap" art and artists are damaging society (in a classic moral formation as "sicko painters" and in a contemporary misguided-fiscal-conservatism way).
Even if those imperative statements were unproblematically true, they still wouldn't answer the just-this-side-of-trollish questions at the top. Why not drive around for half a day collecting random crap, then toss it all in a public square? What if that was beautiful?
I'd love to fund universities if they weren't so busy trying to pump out BA/BSc students who only want those letters to get a job and have absolutely no interest in the education or any research at all.
That's the same problem: reducing public subsidies to educational institutions encourages them to feel desperate and start trying to maximise their other income. It leads to them treating students as customers, where tuition payment becomes a simple transaction which pays for an entitlement to a degree title.
Better public funding is absolutely part of the solution to declining academic cultures and performance standards.
The new CGI effect example in the article is terrible. The article notes that the animated ship looks noticeably different from the model in the rest of the episode, but it also looks like junk on its own merits.
1. On the 95% number, the actual quote from Ron Paul's 1992 newsletter is: "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
So, "at worst...disingenuous, but still true"? There's also some good stuff about how Paul's longtime staffer and likely ghostwriter of these articles is famous for saying that the only thing wrong with the Rodney King beating was that it was videotaped, etc.
I don't know what you're defending with your comments about my statements being unsourced, given that I just critiqued the linked article for being a bad example and even went on to suggest ways that you might find more of the content (given that we're talking about years of newsletters, it's a bit much for a random comment). But I posted simply to correct any misperception that that may have caused, despite your rather high expectations that I was going to instead offer an encyclopedic counter-example. The content of the newsletters is public knowledge; you don't need me to google for you. But when I said before that the sources were a few clicks deep into the post's references, I wasn't kidding, I clicked a link in the first paragraph, and scrolled down to where the second author was recommending excerpts and commentary, and clicked on that. It took maybe a couple of minutes.
2. Moving on to your fight: "Once these kids are adults out in the world, how does [giving them access to the sytem] help them?" Well, it means they are qualified for jobs based on the piece of paper that they now hold. This is another matter and despite your attempt to bring it up here it is not really what Paul's newsletters are about except in a passing "look what else they are doing to us!" way. Despite your long explanation and justification the reason why you disagree with people about it is because the idea that giving the underprivileged access to the educational system is the same as "lowering standards" or "artificial equivalency" is in fact the part that is in question—your paragraph is a classic example of begging the question, leading with the conclusion couched in a quick, easy statement and constructing an argument based on tautology.
Worse than that, you wrap it up with "...instead of dealing with the underlying problems..." which is a flat-out insult to the people you seem to think you are arguing against, because in your effort to fight off their imagined attacks you are telling them that they are denying reality and that they haven't done anything useful. Because their personal experience and their own efforts to fight social problems are getting in away of your imaginary objectivity, "the ability of society to properly assess the matter and move forward" which I'm sorry to say doesn't have a very good record of eliminating oppression quickly in the US or anywhere.
Again, I'm not sure what you are defending. Maybe, given your eagerness to bring up your white-with-a-conscience cred you are protecting your privilege and sense of righteousness by loudly declaring yourself to be not racist. Maybe you just really really love Ron Paul. In any case I doubt that most people who are seriously working on solving racial inequality care about you and the way that you write off their efforts, because they know that white people do that all the bloody time.
That article is kind of a bad link, since it doesn't actually talk about the content at all, and assumes a background knowledge. You've got to click a few links deep into its references or do a google to find the bits that are causing trouble. Like the part where his newsletters claimed that 95% of black men in DC are criminals, or that statistics has proven that only 5% of black people have "sensible" political views. Or other longer more complicated bits, like the part where they talk about black youth carjacking as a trend and reprints advice about how to shoot them and get away with it, or laments the victimisation of whites time and time again, or brings up random bizarre individual crime stories in a way that suggests that, say, black girls running around randomly sticking whites with used hypodermic needles, is a thing that is happening all the time and the fact that we don't hear about it more is because they don't want us to know cue spooky music.
And yeah, meanwhile Paul was using these newsletters to build his support base and also make a whole ton of money at the same time because they cost. Either he's a racist or the most slippery manipulative politician you've ever seen who's happy to use this material for his own purposes.
Oh yeah: and when he's challenged about it, he doesn't always bring up the "I didn't write it" angle, sometimes he says something along the lines of: "but no actually probably 95% of them are criminals with no sensible beliefs, that's not an unreasonable thing to say at all, because I'm an old privileged white man and I think 95% of everyone is criminal (but especially black people)".
Slashdot Mirror
The federal bill at least had some motivation behind it that wasn't a specific attempt to trample on minority rights—in fact the opposite. It it intended to prevent the federal government from building on native american sacred lands, or otherwise restricting the access of those who follow indigenous religions to their sacred sites and practices. It applies only to carve out exemptions of federal law.
On the other hand, in Indiana, this bill explicitly allows private business to act as religious organizations and therefore exempt themselves from all kinds of legal requirements about nondiscrimination. The clause was probably inspired by a court case in another state, New Mexico, which in theory has a similar law on the books—but in which the case of the business that wished to discriminate on the basis of sexuality was rejected.
So yeah, it's not the same at all.
ah you've caught me at lunch, i'll bite.
You've said the same thing three times now. Here are some things you should consider:
1. sometimes words are used by different people to mean different things!
For instance, “patriarchy” was used by me above to fill in the missing actor in your original post, with a rough definition given above. The word can also be used to refer to the patrilinial systems of property or government that existed in Europe before modern systems of law. It can also be used to describe systems of government in general in which power is largely in the hands of men. It is also sometimes used in a more theoretical sense to describe a system, process, or tendency that causes these other forms to sustain themselves. One time, some woman on the internet used it to refer to “an ugly, self-sustaining, omnipotent invisible force that explains everything” but seeing as this is not a definition used by anybody else it's pretty clear that it was a straw man designed just so she could write a huge screed about how it is an unfalsifiable theory.
You seem completely unconcerned with which of these is being discussed when you call it an unfalsifiable theory, despite most of them referring to observable tendencies or things, or even formalized systems of law.
Please don't lecture people on definitions when you don't understand how words work.
2. maybe you should think about reading the criticism section of that wikipedia page you linked instead of holding up a concept not generally accepted by philosophers (of science or otherwise) as the End of All Arguments?
3. If you are really so worried about being bullied and called names, as mentioned in the first post, I would invite you to consider that maybe the lack of support you say you receive could be connected with the fact that when people try to apply their own tools that they find effective for fighting oppression in order to explain, address, and ideally point a way to resolution of the ”ghettoization” that you describe yourself in, you seem most interested in chasing them away with unrelated wikipedia links, a patronizing tone, and a tremendous chip on your shoulder.
Like, what is the correlation between being called a neckbeard and telling people they are wrong about things they clearly understand better than you?
4. bonus round: maybe if you are going to hold every response up to a ridiculous standard of logical completeness you shouldn't lead with a rhetorical strategy of ”that's what they want you to think” by listing some actions that you seem to want to attribute only to an unnamed ugly, self-sustaining, omnipotent invisible force that explains everything. Because that sounds an awful lot like an unfalsifiable theory.
Or maybe you know, don't complain about things you clearly don't want to change?
lol no i'm not. I knew it wasn't worth my time to type a definition of how I used the word because sure enough you didn't read it.
in the meantime, i'll be sure to tell everyone i know in the humanities about Karl Popper and how you can read about him on wikipedia I don't think any of them has ever thought to do so before nope not even once. ciao.
I don't care if you like the word or not: you didn't use any term to describe who is performing the three steps in your post:
Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech
Step 2: Watch as that stigmatization isolates and ostracizes people in tech as "nerds" "dweebs" "dorks" "losers" and so on
Step 3: "WHY AREN'T THERE MORE WOMEN IN TECH?!!!!"
so I offered the one that seemed closest to hand and is often used to describe a similar abstract group that seems to directly or indirectly pull the strings of our society.
Tech fields aren't some fortress designed to keep women out, they're a ghetto that unattractive or non-conforming men were shoved into.
Why is this an OR? Power functions in multiple directions at the same time; if one barrier can negatively impact the mobility of non-conforming men as well as simultaneously push women even farther away from economic power that seems like a tremendous win for the patriarchy.
Parent post: women "feel" assaulted. That doesn't mean they actually were!
This post: other people say women were assaulted. That doesn't mean they feel assaulted!
Damned if you do/damned if you don't.
No, “First Nations” does not refer to Inuit peoples, nor does it refer to the Metis. These three groups collectively make up what are called Aboriginal peoples in Canada by the constitution act of 1982. The other broad term you might use if you are not sure about, or are talking about several sub-categories or nations, is indigenous people(s). Or you know, just ask people how they want to be referred to.
"Indian" still has weight as a legal term in Canada because it is the word that was generally used in law prior to 1982.
In any case, the Inuit are fairly clearly not "first nations" because they are clearly not the first people to live where they live now; they displaced the Dorset peoples from most of Canada's arctic relatively recently when compared to the settlement of the Americas—recently enough for the Dorset to have had contact with viking traders, for instance. Inuit tradition calls the Dorset "Sivullirmiut" or "First Inhabitants".
I don't know a thing about law in Europe or England but is a man required to respond to questioning when accused
In Swedish law, yes. The UK agreed to extradition even though he hasn't been charged because they considered the request for questioning to serve an equivalent purpose under Swedish criminal law, and that the authority to call him in was real—because the actual laying of charges comes later in the process than it does in Anglo-style criminal systems.
No not really. You've successfully used three different sources two of which are known for excessively strong anti-conservative leanings, for the sake of being anti-conservative. Both the CBC & G&M have an axe to grind.
The Globe and Mail endorsed the Conservatives in the last three elections. So I'm not sure in what circles they are known for disliking them.
Elective or cosmetic surgery isn't necessarily a natural monopoly: unlike, say, emergency care where you tend to go wherever the ambulance takes you, or GP care where quality is difficult to judge without spending years with a particular service, or even insurance where you suddenly find out that the service sucks when your life, or at least your quality of life and your employability, is on the line and they drop you or screw up your coverage. People getting cosmetic and elective procedures have plenty of leisure time to shop around, and because they aren't things that you need to have to live, they do marketing and directly compete on price. It's part of why lots of countries with nationalized care (single-payer or otherwise) make exceptions for those services and they are covered by out-of-pocket, private insurance, or maybe only a partial subsidy.
Eye care (and sometimes dental) are often caught in the middle ground between true electives and the core system. I wish they were better covered here in Canada, because they seem necessary enough to me, but I recognize that not everyone agrees with that—and that in both cases there are lots of tricky aspects that shade between necessary and elective, like when your orthodontist is trying to upsell you to “improve” your jawline when really you just want your gums to the healthy.
He's interested in researching the topic that he is in fact researching—how damning. What?
...and 'critical thinking skills' (which, without context, means nothing).
I'm not sure what kind of detail you read the article in then, because it describes the students being given an essay-question test. And if you read the links given you'll find out how the test was blindly scored looking for certain specific techniques as evidence of critical thinking: “observing, interpreting, evaluating, associating, problem finding, comparing, and flexible thinking”. They even built in a test for their system, having separate researchers score overlapping samples so that they could make sure they were producing consistent results.
And here's a little bonus:
I'm not sure why the summary doesn't include a direct link to the study, as is present in the NYT article, but there you go. There's more detail in there about what they mean by empathy and tolerance (specifically including a measurable decrease in the student's support for government censorship).
I would assume that the theory here is that other things affect the demand for books as well. By protecting publishers, authors, and local booksellers with connections to their community, they are hoping to create cultural value on books that will encourage reading despite the prices. Those seem like reasonable goals to me.
I'm sorry, but saying "but but but other people break the law too" isn't saying you don't approve of what bike riders are doing, it is trying to excuse it.
OK good thing that the person you are arguing with said exactly that and nothing else. Certainly not anything about unclipping his pedals on an almost completely different topic.
I guess you must be really are annoyed by some cyclists who run red lights sometimes and since you can't argue with them on the streets you want to do it here.
Who said anything about court? If you want to go there, how does the logic "it was inconvenient for me to have to unclip my feet from the pedals" work in court, were any bicyclists ever given tickets for failing to bother to even try stopping at a red light?
Did you not understand the comment? The annoying thing is that the author has already stopped at the stop sign and has to awkwardly stand there waiting for the driver who has right of way before eventually determining that the driver is waiting for him. Cars thinking that cyclists are unpredictable is annoying at best for the cyclists, at worst dangerous. But at least they see us, which is more than I can say for lots of drivers.
It is a logical fallacy to claim that the illegal thing you are doing is ok because a few other people do other illegal things.
Yeah, you are assuming that the poster is making excuses for breaking the law when in fact they are going out of their way to explain to you that they don't approve of doing so. It's not a false equivalency to point out that two people running red lights are both running red lights. It's not an excuse, it's an observation.
As it happens, walking is more dangerous per-mile than cycling.
This is one reason why dedicated trails and sidewalks are more dangerous for cyclists than the road. I know that the most dangerous place on my commute is similar, whether I stop or not before the road, visibility is poor and more importantly many drivers just aren't looking (never mind that the cars have a yield sign while I have a stop sign so it's wonderfully ambiguous).
Recently opened bike network is probably a sign of increasing ridership—between it being built for increasing numbers of cyclists and its presence encouraging more. So no wonder the accidents are growing faster than population, if more and more people are starting to ride.
However, most users are not qualified to speak about nuances of user experiences nor technical specifications.
They are perfectly qualified to speak about their own, personal, user experience. No one better.
Cans of shit? We are expected to keep a straight face?
What does keeping a straight face have to do with art?
Please don't try to educate me about conceptual art. Maybe instead of telling us about your magic power to determine what art is objectively the best, you should educate yourself about why many people who love art disagree with you.
Some art is bad. Doesn't make it not art.
I understand that many people don't like projects like this. That's fine. Others might disagree. But no matter what—there's no reason to insult the entire discipline because you don't like one project.
As an artist whose work is very different than this, I still can't help but be disgusted every time I see someone talking about "artists" in quotes, or with an extra "e" on the end (as they do elsewhere in this discussion), or making silly comments about blank canvases and reductive caricatures of conceptual art and uneducated statements about what art "has" to do—that's actually the position that the onion comment is making fun of: the conservative assertion that inauthentic "crap" art and artists are damaging society (in a classic moral formation as "sicko painters" and in a contemporary misguided-fiscal-conservatism way).
Even if those imperative statements were unproblematically true, they still wouldn't answer the just-this-side-of-trollish questions at the top. Why not drive around for half a day collecting random crap, then toss it all in a public square? What if that was beautiful?
I'd love to fund universities if they weren't so busy trying to pump out BA/BSc students who only want those letters to get a job and have absolutely no interest in the education or any research at all.
That's the same problem: reducing public subsidies to educational institutions encourages them to feel desperate and start trying to maximise their other income. It leads to them treating students as customers, where tuition payment becomes a simple transaction which pays for an entitlement to a degree title.
Better public funding is absolutely part of the solution to declining academic cultures and performance standards.
The new CGI effect example in the article is terrible. The article notes that the animated ship looks noticeably different from the model in the rest of the episode, but it also looks like junk on its own merits.
1. On the 95% number, the actual quote from Ron Paul's 1992 newsletter is: "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/ron-pauls-shaggy-defense/250256/
So, "at worst...disingenuous, but still true"? There's also some good stuff about how Paul's longtime staffer and likely ghostwriter of these articles is famous for saying that the only thing wrong with the Rodney King beating was that it was videotaped, etc.
I don't know what you're defending with your comments about my statements being unsourced, given that I just critiqued the linked article for being a bad example and even went on to suggest ways that you might find more of the content (given that we're talking about years of newsletters, it's a bit much for a random comment). But I posted simply to correct any misperception that that may have caused, despite your rather high expectations that I was going to instead offer an encyclopedic counter-example. The content of the newsletters is public knowledge; you don't need me to google for you. But when I said before that the sources were a few clicks deep into the post's references, I wasn't kidding, I clicked a link in the first paragraph, and scrolled down to where the second author was recommending excerpts and commentary, and clicked on that. It took maybe a couple of minutes.
2. Moving on to your fight: "Once these kids are adults out in the world, how does [giving them access to the sytem] help them?" Well, it means they are qualified for jobs based on the piece of paper that they now hold. This is another matter and despite your attempt to bring it up here it is not really what Paul's newsletters are about except in a passing "look what else they are doing to us!" way. Despite your long explanation and justification the reason why you disagree with people about it is because the idea that giving the underprivileged access to the educational system is the same as "lowering standards" or "artificial equivalency" is in fact the part that is in question—your paragraph is a classic example of begging the question, leading with the conclusion couched in a quick, easy statement and constructing an argument based on tautology.
Worse than that, you wrap it up with "...instead of dealing with the underlying problems..." which is a flat-out insult to the people you seem to think you are arguing against, because in your effort to fight off their imagined attacks you are telling them that they are denying reality and that they haven't done anything useful. Because their personal experience and their own efforts to fight social problems are getting in away of your imaginary objectivity, "the ability of society to properly assess the matter and move forward" which I'm sorry to say doesn't have a very good record of eliminating oppression quickly in the US or anywhere.
Again, I'm not sure what you are defending. Maybe, given your eagerness to bring up your white-with-a-conscience cred you are protecting your privilege and sense of righteousness by loudly declaring yourself to be not racist. Maybe you just really really love Ron Paul. In any case I doubt that most people who are seriously working on solving racial inequality care about you and the way that you write off their efforts, because they know that white people do that all the bloody time.
That article is kind of a bad link, since it doesn't actually talk about the content at all, and assumes a background knowledge. You've got to click a few links deep into its references or do a google to find the bits that are causing trouble. Like the part where his newsletters claimed that 95% of black men in DC are criminals, or that statistics has proven that only 5% of black people have "sensible" political views. Or other longer more complicated bits, like the part where they talk about black youth carjacking as a trend and reprints advice about how to shoot them and get away with it, or laments the victimisation of whites time and time again, or brings up random bizarre individual crime stories in a way that suggests that, say, black girls running around randomly sticking whites with used hypodermic needles, is a thing that is happening all the time and the fact that we don't hear about it more is because they don't want us to know cue spooky music.
And yeah, meanwhile Paul was using these newsletters to build his support base and also make a whole ton of money at the same time because they cost. Either he's a racist or the most slippery manipulative politician you've ever seen who's happy to use this material for his own purposes.
Oh yeah: and when he's challenged about it, he doesn't always bring up the "I didn't write it" angle, sometimes he says something along the lines of: "but no actually probably 95% of them are criminals with no sensible beliefs, that's not an unreasonable thing to say at all, because I'm an old privileged white man and I think 95% of everyone is criminal (but especially black people)".