My too often nonsensical and forever unenlightened reflections on people and life and everything else I understand as well as I understand everything else. Not well at all, in other words. Love thy neighbor, is my motto. Unless something better comes along. Make sure to say so when you find it.
This is my favorite line of analysis in this poorly reasoned article:
"In his nearly three years in the District, Janey has drawn praise for imposing rigorous systemwide standards on what should be taught at each grade, a curriculum to accomplish that and a testing program to measure its success. That reversed a trend of letting each school set its own path, which was widely criticized in education circles."
The results from those efforts?
"Tests show that in reading and math, the District's public school students score at the bottom among 11 major city school systems, even when poor children are compared only with other poor children. Thirty-three percent of poor fourth-graders across the nation lacked basic skills in math, but in the District, the figure was 62 percent. It was 74 percent for D.C. eighth-graders, compared with 49 percent nationally."
The District spends $12,979 per pupil each year, ranking it third-highest among the 100 largest districts in the nation. But most of that money does not get to the classroom. D.C. schools rank first in the share of the budget spent on administration, last in spending on teachers and instruction."
Wow. I can see why Superintendent Janey got all that praise.
At some point, don't you look at this situation and say, "Maybe we've failed. Maybe we need to try something new."
Not if you are the D.C. public schools or their staunch supporters.
That's the problem with politics. Bad ideas and bad situations don't just get too much play. They get imposed on everyone.
This is tragedy, all around. This mom was trying - in a way that I would not, but trying, nonetheless - to make sure that her teenage boys were not drinking and driving and otherwise getting in trouble or worse.
And now she's going to spend 2 years in prison.
What's wrong with us that we have lost any sense of perspective or decency to understand this mother's concern for her children? Or to believe that we always know best for others how to handle such situations?
This is not an America that I am proud to be a part of. This is an America of self-righteous scolds who don't deserve the power they have legislated for themselves.
Burning the village to save it is lunacy. Destroying families to save them is self-righteous insanity.
We will need forgiveness after this is all done, for all of the destructiveness we offered up instead of genuine concern.
And I have to say that the more I see the Post cheerlead this kind of bullshit, the more I need to look for a new daily newspaper to keep up with.
I hope my work will better fit that bill and contribute to the on-going discussion of how state power should be used to promote liberty and should not be used in the name of power for its own sake, especially in places like Lebanon, Egypt, Iran and other emerging Middle Eastern democracies where the need for individual freedom is so much clearer when liberal values are respected so much less.
I have to say that if this more libertarian direction - freeing Lewis Libby and all -is the direction the National Review will be taking in the coming years (their talk about border fences is a little scary to me, frankly), then I might find some renewed hope in the National Review.
Jonah's brilliant deduction for why Great Britain, uniquely, is attracting the beer and liquor scolds and nannies: the National Health Service.
And he's right. As he argues:
"Britain still subscribes to a system where health care is for the most part socialized. When the bureaucrat-priesthood of the National Health Service decides that a certain behavior is unacceptable, the consequences potentially involve more than scolding. For example, in 2005, Britain’s health service started refusing certain surgeries for fat people. An official behind the decision conceded that one of the considerations was cost. Fat people would benefit from the surgery less, and so they deserved it less. As Tony Harrison, a British health-care expert, explained to the Toronto Sun at the time, 'Rationing is a reality when funding is limited.'
But it’s impossible to distinguish such cost-cutting judgments from moral ones. The reasoning is obvious: Fat people, smokers and — soon — drinkers deserve less health care because they bring their problems on themselves. In short, they deserve it. This is a perfectly logical perspective, and if I were in charge of everybody’s health care, I would probably resort to similar logic.
But I’m not in charge of everybody’s health care. Nor should anyone else be. In a free-market system, bad behavior will still have high costs personally and financially, but those costs are more likely to borne by you and you alone. The more you socialize the costs of personal liberty, the more license you give others to regulate it."
It's true. And it is an important reason to be very skeptical of national health insurance. Canada and other countries with socialized medicine have similar problems with costs and available technology for even serious and life-threatening health conditions.
I've rediscovered Reason magazine, lately, which leads, today, with the cover article and perspective that I've been wanting to read for the last year:
That's the direction the country needs to take. And it's gratifying to see the National Review following the lead of Reason and Andrew Sullivan and other more openly libertarian thinkers and publications.
Now if only the country would give up its government-as-daddy complex and learn to grow up, be responsible for themselves, and let each of us be responsible for ourselves, we'd all be better off.
And finally figure out that Prohibition era mentalities that regulate alcohol, smoking, drugs and the like are the direction of regress, not progress.
A brilliant blog post by Reason contributor David Wiegel, yesterday.
I have to say that libertarians are looking more and more sensible the more I listen to liberals and conservatives trying to prove just whose tougher, these days.
Think it doesn't matter if love and sex are consensual or not consensual? Then you are likely one of those who doesn't think it matters if anything is voluntary or consensual or free or not.
And people like that scare me in a way that gay men who have conensual sex in prison never could.
I've been more than a little disappointed with the leadership of Margaret Spellings as President Bush's Secretary of Education. She has, up until now, been an almost unqualified cheerleader for the No Child Left Behind Act, which, no matter how much journalists like those at the Washington Post celebrate the consolidation of education policy in Washington, D.C., has, by the accounts of most teachers you will talk with who are required to implement this well-intentioned but counterproductive effort, been a miserable experience which has correlated, though not been caused by, higher assessment scores, but which has been simultaneously undermining the most critical functions of education, namely to develop independent, critical thinking for a liberal democratic society.
Margaret's rebuttal to the poorly reasoned Washington Post lead editorial that assumes correlation of NCLB with higher assessment scores means the success of NCLB -post hoc ergo propter hoc or the fallacy of false cause is probably the most common fallacy that partisans engage in; they want to believe that their favored efforts work, so they look for evidence to make their case rather than engaging in a more rigorous questioning of whether or not their ideas are correct, the higher standard that social sciences aspire to meet - moves in the right direction.
Spelling argues, correctly, that one-size-fits-all and stiffer national standards create a scary universe of Washington-run education (George Orwell would piss his pants if he heard of partisans arguing that Big Brother should be in charge of a nation's education system) and that such authority should be devolved from federal control.
This is where conservatives can be much more genuine classical liberals than political liberals. Where liberals are constantly emboldened by their romance with FDR and his consolidation of everything good and correct in the Federal government, conservatives tend to be more skeptical, for good reason. It is exactly this kind of consolidation of power that more genuine liberals like Lord Acton warned the world against. Journalists like too many at the Washington Post - David Broder, especially - and too many politicians in Washington arrogantly disregard the persistent and wide-spread concerns by teachers about the tendency of NCLB to drive all curriculum, to encourage teaching to narrow tests rather than for a broader liberal education, to press teachers in directions that are counterproductive to the broader purposes of an education that both cares for students' individual goals and needs and which teaches independent, critical thinking.
And my most serious concern is the hubris by the less intellectually-inclined, like the editorial writers at the Washington Post and too many politicians in Washington (though, to the credit of many political representatives, the tide is turning against NCLB and has been for quite awhile), deciding for the rest of the country what should be required curriculum and instruction through assessment. It's an arrogant grab of power by a group of folks who, generally, have not demonstrated a propensity to engage in the most rigorous intellectual thought, at least not by the standards of academic scholarship.
I, personally, would be skeptical of even philosopher-kings in the academy deciding for the country what should and should not be studied. But I would listen to their ideas much more readily than I would to the editorial board of the Washington Post (no offense to the smart, but too clever by half members of that editorial board).
Margaret Spellings has not gotten much right in her tenure as Secretary of Education. She has persistently cheerleaded No Child Left Behind over the objections of teachers, administrators, superintendents, and critics all over the country. But she has figured out what the Washington Post has not figured out in its recent period of flexing its journalistic muscle: to listen to the people your laws impact.
Those who ignore people whom are impacted by their favored legislation engage one of the most persistent forms of abuse of power that democracies experience: the desire to will out over others rather than to listen to and engage them.
It is a tendency that a truer liberal, Bobby Kennedy, warned us about months before his death in 1968. The wielders of force seek to control their neighbors rather than live and work in common effort. And their hubris should be rebuffed and treated with the skepticism that Margaret Spellings offers it in this column.
The power of the press, as Alexis de Toqueville observed over 200 years ago, is one of the most serious powers in molding the morality of a nation of any in a democracy.
But it is a mistake for independent-minded people to cede the authority to decide such important matters to anyone but their own independent consciences and judgments.
It is time for liberals like the writers at the Post to take more seriously the independent, critical judgment that education is supposed to nurture.
Bobby Kennedy has a beautiful quotation in his impromptu eulogy announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King, anticipating the impulse to violence in the country and appealing for white Americans and black Americans, to do what the Greeks had written so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world.
The day after King's assassination, Bobby gave this beautiful speech to a world shaken and likely jaded by the inexplicability of such a terrible tragedy.
"To often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force. Too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of other human beings. But this much is clear. Violence breeds violence. Repression breeds retaliation. And only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our souls. But when you teach a man to hate and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color, or his beliefs, or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your home or your family, then you also learn to confront others, not as fellow citizens, but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation, but with conquest, to be subjugated and to be mastered. We learn at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens. Alien men with whom we share a city, but not a community. Men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in a common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.
Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in this land of ours. Of course we cannot banish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life, that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness winning what satisfaction and fulfillment that they can. Surely this bond of common faith, surely this bond of common goals can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at the least, to look around at those of us of our fellow men. And surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again."
The older I get, the more I become aware of the darker and sharper edges of civilization and middle class America and the world as much as the clearly darker underworlds in the West and throughout the world and in a violence-obsessed and harsh, sometimes barbaric traditional developing world and the romanticism of violence and harshness and revenge and mean-spiritedness that is still all too present in all parts of the world, liberal and illiberal. I become more aware of how all of us – liberal and illiberal peoples, alike – rationalize our basest, harshest, most vengeful and ugly impulses in the name of our most decent and strongest virtues. And, tragically, how we persistently debase our most decent impulses – especially virtues like forgiveness, love, compassion, decency, and humanity - in our efforts to make our ugliness look more pretty than it really is.
I do not want to root out those basest impulses. Such an effort is fruitless and counterproductive. It is the essence of repression, which only buries our feelings. It does not resolve them. It leaves the ugliness in our hearts and has us pretending that it is more resolved in our hearts than it really is. I want to soften those sharper impulses, not eliminate them. I want to love them, to accept and forgive them and us for them. I want to tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world.
Bobby Kennedy, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, articulated the most decent, gentle, loving message of people and their common destiny of any American politician I have ever encountered. I have plenty of policy disagreements with Bobby, as I do with all politicians and people who are politically-minded. But Bobby Kennedy was one of the most decent people who ever aspired for the Presidency, virtues and vices.
And this speech, with music from the 2006 movie by Emilio Estevez about Senator Kennedy, is one of the most beautiful that he ever spoke and is one of the most beautiful speeches I have ever heard a politician speak, save perhaps his impromptu eulogy for Martin Luther King.
To tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world. It is the most decent instinct that could ever animate a liberal democratic world and a world of common humanity.
