California Moves To Block Texas' Textbook Changes 857
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.'"
Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't fight them... Put a fence around and let them devolve in peace.
Is anything not political? (Score:5, Insightful)
"apolitical nature of public school governance"
Say what?
Apolitical? (Score:4, Insightful)
"apolitical"? (Score:3, Insightful)
"a threat to the apolitical nature of public school governance and academic content standards in California."
"apolitical"? Huh?
There's no such thing in an organization that exist solely via government, aka "public schools".
Sarcastic summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Because something that is widely accepted is always true.
Re:Is anything not political? (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what?
Even better, in TFA he follows it up with:
Gotta love the evil conservative hyperbole there. I really wish people would vote for people with less of a flair for the dramatic.
Re:Apolitical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and this is a serious problem. There is no such thing as an apolitical view of history, as among other things, every viewpoint has its own judgments of the same events. There is no way to teach history independently of those judgments; the best you can do is point out where the judgments are and hope that the students will figure out what to take with a grain of salt and what not to.
To block "deviating from the accepted teachings" is really nothing more than an attempt to cement one's own judgments into the curriculum. I'm no fan of what Texas is doing here, but this particular solution is not an acceptable way of blocking it. Go back to the drawing board.
Heck; I'll give you a new hook. Go after the bit about the US being "chosen by God as a beacon" as a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, because if it's not a case of a government entity (the school board) establishing a civic religion, I don't know what is.
Apolitical my Aunt Fannie (Score:4, Insightful)
Brrring...hello Texas? This is California...umm...you're black. I offer into evidence the California teacher spouting off a few days ago about how California is "stolen occupied Mexico". Guess that guy never heard about the Mexican American War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War) which Mexico lost. Apolitical? How about historically accurate? Try that for once.
Thats the way its supposed to work. (Score:2, Insightful)
Texans seem to want it one particular way. Thats fine, they can vote and agree to have it that way.
California doesn't want it that way. THATS FINE, they can vote and agree to have it THEIR way.
Thats the advantage of having state laws rather than federal laws for things like this. People can dictate how THEIR community is ran and thats perfectly fine within reason. While you and I may not agree with it, the majority of Texans do so let them do what they want and stop trying to push your agenda on to them.
If you don't like it, live somewhere else or get enough Texans to agree with you to change the law.
One of America's biggest problems is everyone in it thinking their way is the only way and that everyone else in America should do and act the same way.
History has a lot of opinon in it. (Score:5, Insightful)
History education as a whole is terrible and really all too often is used to teach an agenda.
A great example is the Atomic bombing of Japan. A good friend of mine went to a very good college. When she told me about what she was taught about WWII was was shocked.
It seems that the the US was racist and that is why we nuked Japan and that we treated the Germans with much more respect.
When I asked her about the Batan death march she had never heard of it.
When I asked her about the rape of Nanking. She had never heard of such a thing.
When I asked her about the threats to kill all the POWs in Japan if the US invaded she never heard of that.
But she did tell me that they told here Japan was willing to surrender before we dropped the bomb if we would have promised them that they could keep their emperor. "BTW that is a myth. The goal of negotiations was to prevent the occupation of Japan and not to just preserve the status of the Emperor".
It doesn't matter it is all slanted.
The teacher brought in a old woman that was a child when the bomb was dropped... That will help bring balance.
Truth is that with the exception of Japan and Germany in WWII the villains tended to not be as bad as history teaches and the heroes then to not be as pure. Notice that I left Italy out. Frankly they where just your average tin pot dictatorship and not really all that evil. The just fell in with a bad crowd. Oh and yes Stalin was just as bad as history says. Heck the only reason that Germany really lost on the Russian front was because Hitler was the on person on the planet that treated the Russians worse that Stalin did!
I get the feeling that all too often History is taught as a way to make use feel superior to those that went before us. Frankly that is a dangerous and stupid thing to do.
I would love to see a history class about the atomic bombing where they actually tried to teach the students to understand why Truman thought dropping the bomb was a good idea. What information he had and what was going on at the time.
Maybe then we could actually start learning form history instead twisting it to make us feel so much more enlightened than the historical figures from that past.
Re:Note to the President (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats a really freaking ignorant statement.
You think everyone should see it your way. Unfortunatly you are a minority of one because no one else sees it exactly your way. Everyone has their own views and opinions.
If Texans have a way they want to do something, LET THEM, and don't live there if you don't like it.
Wow ... just fucking WOW ... there is absolutely nothing correct about any part of that entire statement. Get a clue.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem. Texas buys the most textbooks, and thus has undue influence on the industry. Thanks to scorched earth capitalism, making money is more important than making sure that textbooks are accurate. Anyone who does 10 minutes of research will find that the whole notion of the "Cristian Nation" is laughable. If anything our nation's ideals came from John Locke and his "The Two Treatises Of Government" through Thomas Jefferson.
Re:Get rid of textbooks already (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, textbooks are dangerously biased so lets set the elementary aged kids loose to learn everything from the internet. Seriously? There's so much noise that gets thrown around the web that most adults have trouble identifying what is and isn't real (if I had a dollar for every email I get telling me that cleaner X is going to kill my pets and babies I wouldn't have to worry about the mortgage). Letting someone run free to learn on the internet is like saying "go find information that you agree with", that's all that 99% of people are ever going to do.
I realize you specifically call out primary sources, but do you really think that such sources aren't just as politically bent as modern sources. I guarantee you that you can find primary sources that describe the Kent State incident as everything from a horrible accident, to an violent demonstration, to murder of innocent college students. There's no way that a young kid is going to be able to sift through it and find the facts of the situation, that's why we pay professional historians to gather the facts in the first place.
Re: Note to the President (Score:5, Insightful)
The next time a southern state wants to secede from the union.... LET THEM!!!!!!!!
'Cause we always wanted a third world country comprised of gun-toting Rednecks led by religious whackjobs right on our border.
Re:Is anything not political? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wish I had mod points.
The Texas revisionism is a reactionary policy, brought about by the resurgence of the "us-vs-them" mentality. Whether justified or not, they are scared, and are lashing out in reprisal. And the reaction that this evokes, is further vilification of anyone who dares call themselves conservative by the representative of the left.
How can any voice of reason expect to be heard, when they will be labeled a "bleeding heart liberal" by the right, and "extremist right-winger" by the left?
This isn't meant to justify the changes Texas plans to its curriculum - they are atrocious to be sure. But Mr. Lee's response to it simply reeks. He'd like to protect against the conservative revisionism by ensuring the leftist revisionism.
It's not about a "flair for the dramatic", it's about getting votes by creating an enemy against which you can unite the masses. For the Democrats, it's the Republicans. Likewise, for the Republicans, it's the "eastern elites" and "liberals". We can't run the country this way anymore, as it's clear that we're running it into the ground.
Re:Thats the way its supposed to work. (Score:5, Insightful)
This post misses the point of the entire debate.
Texas is such a large market for textbooks that publishers bend over backwards to produce texts catering to Texas' standards. Other, less populous states don't have the population to force publishers to make any sort of changes. They are mostly stuck with textbook standards set by big states like Texas or California. You can say "live somewhere else", but that's precisely the problem - short of states like New York, California, or Texas, you can't live anywhere else that has an effective say on textbooks. These states are the ones that, through sheer size, drag everybody else along. So, heaven forbid you decide you want to live in state with low population density where you're not surrounded by insufferable right wing nut-jobs or by liberal hippies.
Exactly what CA is known for (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, that's why that San Francisco school sent home the students for wearing American Flags on Cinco De Mayo. Completely apolitical.
seriously (Score:3, Insightful)
that joke map showing canada absorbing the west coast and the east coat down to maryland, calling the south and the middle "jesusland" was a funny internet meme at one time, but as of late, is looking more like a serious cause
i admire canada's healthcare, it's sober banking rules, it's pragmatic international policies. and meanwhile i am stuck in this country with these fucking morons in the south ruining this country with neocon presidents, religious fundamentalism and ignorant libertarian wish fulfillment fantasies of the market just taking care of itself with unicorns and rainbows
give the south and the plains their assault guns and their abstinence education leading to lots more pregnant teens and their creationism denying leading to ignorance of basic science, and let them sink into the third world hellhole they so fervently desire to be
canada: give them alberta for the northeast usa, pretty please?
i honestly feel more affinity with canadians, in terms of morality and values, then i do with faux news zombified morons in the lower regions of my own country
i seriously, seriously have a major problem with some of my own countrymen who live in some sort of medieval parallel universe of prideful ignorance
Re:Apolitical my Aunt Fannie (Score:5, Insightful)
the California teacher spouting off a few days ago
You really don't understand the difference between one teacher's opinion and a standard textbook distributed nationwide?
Re:Note to the President (Score:3, Insightful)
> By forcing banks and lenders to loan money to people without the ability to pay it back or face stiff penalties.
That's just stupid racist nonsense.
All the feds did was to outlaw redlining. Banks were simply forced to use the same standards regardless of the skin color of the applicant.
The fact that banks chose to throw out well established standards is another matter. No penalty is going to force a bank to write bad paper. The only thing that will encourage a bank to write bad paper is if they can sell it to some other sucker.
Banks that did not resell loans did not make bad loans.
Re:Note to the President (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense, the primary responsibility for the irresponsibility in home loans is...the American people. They signed papers they didn't understand and reveled in being ignorant, they bought houses they could not afford, they bought second houses, they took out the equity in their current dwelling, they did everything they could think of to make a buck before the game of economic musical chairs stopped. Now that they got caught holding the bag, they are looking for scapegoats.
That doesn't mean they were not enabled by the federal gov. and by Wall Street securitizing loans and thus removing the connection between risk and collateral. They were ill-served by builders, realtors, local banks, mortgage companies, rating agencies, etc. All that, yet no one put a gun to the American dolt's head and said sign here or else. They did that all by themselves and I (being one myself) do not believe we should let us off the hook for cleaning up the mess.
Re:Is anything not political? (Score:5, Insightful)
My understanding was that this bill was intended to prevent the specific changes proposed by Texas from making it into California textbooks. That is not leftist revisionism. Mr. Lee might be a bit heavy on the rhetoric but unless his bill specifically includes proposed changes to the existing curriculum (which, to the best of my knowledge) I don't think its fair to call him revisionist.
It seems to me that you are engaging in exactly the behavior you are calling out.
Re:Note to the President (Score:4, Insightful)
To imply that Texas can make these changes without impacting the education of the rest of the nation is to be completely ignorant of the way in which textbooks are produced.
Re:a sharp departure from widely accepted.... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are departures from fiction, and there are departures from fact. The geocentric model of the universe was not arrived at through modern skeptical scientific inquiry.
But this issue goes much deeper. It's not just that they are removing references to the progress America has made intellectually, socially and culturally, but they are replacing these references with inferences of their own, alleging that America is a Christian nation, recognizing the accomplishments of pro-slavery confederates and rationalizing McCarthyism as justified by some of the results.
However, it's not liberal bias to say that America is not a Christian nation. It simply isn't. There is not a single reference to the words "god", "Bible", "Jesus", "Christian", "religion" or "Church" anywhere in the Articles of the Constitution, and the single reference to religion in the Bill of Rights is the Establishment Clause which prohibits Congress from enacting any law concerning religious institutions, Christianity being one of them. This isn't a liberally-biased viewpoint. It is a fact. Just like evolution is a fact. We can debate how precisely either occurred, but that they are is a fact.
The problem with certain appeals to emotion, such as the "equal time" argument is that all opinions and arguments aren't equal. Some views, such as Intelligent Design, have zero scientific merit whatsoever, at least in the manner in which their proponents have presented them.
I know that we live in the Age of Entitlement, but no... not all opinions are equal. Some are substantiated in fact far better than others.
Re:Is anything not political? (Score:5, Insightful)
In modern politics, one finds it essential to consider the opposition either stupid, evil, or both. That way we don't have to listen to them anymore.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
He didn't say the founders weren't Christians. He said the founding principles aren't Christian. The founders were smart enough to see how politics corrupts religion and vice versa. They built the government without inserting much if any Biblical principles into it. See anything in the Constitution about coveting wives, worshiping on the 7th day or giving up worldly wealth?
The claims this country is a "Christian" country is very much false. The founders were smart enough to separate their religious beliefs from what they learned through history and philosophy as functional, fair and resilient government.
Re:Note to the President (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly the kind of thinking and behavior that leads others to do things like, I don't know, threaten to secede. They assume the rest of the country knows absolutely nothing about them and is completely willing to disparage them for no reason, and it's usually due to willful ignorance like the kind you're displaying.
You've obviously never been to the south and have only seen it on television. Not everyone is a redneck or extreme conservative, the percentage of people who have guns is comparable to the rest of the nation, the foreclosure rate is comparable to the rest of the nation, we pay taxes like everyone else. Educational standards are similar to other parts of the nation, and yet it's true that there tend to be more dropouts, but it's not because the kids are stupid. It's because they're told their whole lives that they'll never be anything but dumb, failed rednecks by bigots like you. (That's right, YOU'RE the bigot here.) Try having that shoved at you, day in and day out, by the media, other Americans, even politicians. It certainly doesn't make most people want to go to school and be an overachiever just to prove everyone in the world wrong, because they're not going to recognize it anyway. Southerners will still be dumb old hillbillies who don't do anything for this country.
But you know, next time you think about some place where you imagine people ride on 4-wheelers all day with guns, who live on welfare and are willing to live with intolerance for those not like them, I'll point to this entire country, because you go an hour outside of any major metropolitan area in the U.S. and you can find people who are exactly the same. And you can come here, to the south, and see beautiful cities, people who work hard for nice things, people who vote based on how they feel, not how their preacher tells them, all those things. Because not everyone is the fucking same.
Re:Fight them (Score:4, Insightful)
Not me. I learned the U.S. Founders were "Deist" and believed in a Supreme Creator but not christianity or Jesus. It wasn't until I was an adult and started reading the actual letters/writings that I discovered how wrong that is. The textbooks we have used these last several decades are simply wrong. They DO need a rewrite.
(Not that I think the Texas proposal is the solution.)
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
So the area now known as Texas rose out of the gulf in 1836? Or was there a conflict in which settlers fought for independence from Mexico?
The latter. But the larger point is that the poster I replied to was making the case that the United States "stole" Texas from Mexico, because the settlers in Texas came from other US states.
This is a false argument on two fronts; one, the settlers left the US to start new lives, literally in another country. This wasn't some secret plot by the United States government... "OK, you guys go live in the Texas territories for 20 years, then rebel, then form your own republic for 10 years, then join the Union. Our plan is foolproof!".
Second, that land didn't originally belong to Mexico. Nor did the land in Southern California, Arizona, or New Mexico. Mexico invaded those lands and conquered the local Indian tribes to get it. Mexican troops had a reputation for utter brutality among the Indian tribes. You think the Indians hated the US? Ask an Apache, Pueblo, or Hopi what he thinks of Mexico.
that would be ok if (Score:3, Insightful)
there were a giant wall separating texas from the rest of the usa
but as it is, what texas decides to do has an effect on me. thus, i have a right to say on what texas decides to do. if texas is going to unleash a bunch of propagandized holy warrior children into the usa, i want to clear my throat and say "no, texas, you don't get to whitewash history and zombify your children, because the influx of propagandized morons affects my life: these people vote, they make decisions, large and small, in loca, state and federal government, that affect my quality of life, and you will not drag me and my country down to third world status"
the lie is that state rights somehow have a superior advantage to federal rights. they only valid rights wall exists between the individual and society. the idea that state rights has some sort of validity is a false construct, that somehow the decisions a state makes is somehow superior or less superior, in terms of trouncing on indivudal rights, or upholding them, as compared to federal decisions
in other words: individual rights is the paramount issue, correct?
in that regard, how is it possible that what a state decides can somehow protect the individual, or trample on the individual, to a better or worse degree than a federal decision? on what logical basis is that possible?
state's rights ia c ontrived false construct, if you are truly motivated by the only morally and intellectually defensible cause: individual rights. state's rights cuts both ways. it is neither more for individual rights, or more against them. its a red herring to confuse the two concepts
Re: Sarcastic summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, let's start by physics. Which part of what was widely accepted as true two thousand years ago ended up being true?
This would be a good point, if we were teaching class 2000 years ago.
All I want in my classroom is the best information we have at the time - no-one's asking for The One True Truth here. (Heck, you only have to go back 10 years to find differences in physics - we lost a planet, didn't ya know.)
I wouldn't object to religion being taught in school - just teach *all* of them, and put it in "Religion" class.
Re:Thats the way its supposed to work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
The tradition of religious freedom in the US stemmed from the fact that a number of important early colonial efforts were established by Non-comformists who were being heavily persecuted in England. The inspiration for the 1st Amendment was, by and large, the response to the absurdities of Catholics and non-conformists have to attend Anglican masses at least once a year, and of what amounted to religious tests for most high offices in England (in fact, the highest still denies the throne to a Catholic).
That's what makes so much of this so sad. The Founding Fathers believed well and truly that the State had no business meddling in what went between a man and his god(s). Some of the Founding Fathers were Christians, some stood at the margins and some were clearly not Christian (Jefferson was a Deist, and actually had a rather dim view of Christianity, not uncommon among Enlightenment thinkers). They're job, in their eyes, was to create a government that protected but did not intrude upon what they felt was a fundamental liberty; the right to worship as one wished to. That meant no religious tests, no indoctrination. The State, in their eyes, had no damned business teaching religious beliefs. There are churches aplenty to do that.
That is, I suspect, why Jefferson is such a substantial target, because he was the first to substantially explain the Establishment Clause in his letter to the Danbury Baptists. Here we have one of the major formulators of the Bill of Rights telling people exactly why they had written what they had written, and he's been the chief obstacle in any number of battles between religious fundamentalists, reconstructionists and all manner of whacked-out religious malcontents and reactionaries. The obvious thing to do, at that point, is to minimize his role. The Soviets used to do the same thing, becoming experts and expunging important figures from the historical record. It's odd how fanatics of all political stripes end up acting just about the same.
Re: Sarcastic summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Surprisingly many. In fact, the wonderful thing about science is that it really was true to observation. There are just certain conditions that it doesn't work for. The idea of atoms, geometry, planetary bodies, etc. all come from the Greeks and for the most part, are true today. Euclidean geometry is simply true for certain scales of size and time and energy levels. It doesn't describe things at high energy or small size very well.
The Earth was known to be round-ish (still true today, last I checked), the Sun was the center of the solar system (still true) and the planetary bodies orbited in an elliptical orbit (still true).
But that's not even the point here. It isn't just "commonly accepted" data that is being rejected by Texas. It's knowledge reviewed, scrutinized and accepted by historians who've devoted their lives to studying this field. Those "experts" that Texas has to "stand up to".
The correct name would be (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:seriously (Score:3, Insightful)
I read things like this (from both the Left and the Right), and I wonder how we can survive as a nation when we no longer share the same goals, or even a common feeling of belonging to the same group. Frankly, if might be better if we broke up into several nations.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the "settlers" were illegal immigrants, and the actions where they slowly took over land was called filibustering.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
So?
Was there or was there not an independent nation called Texas from 1836 to 1846?
Louisiana Territory was full of Americans. That doesn't mean we didn't get it from France.
Yes, but we bought the Louisiana Territory. Texas would be the equivalent of Canadians moving into Michigan, then claiming Michigan as an independent nation, and finally taking the independent nation and joining Canada.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
Texas wasn't WON, it was TAKEN from the mexicans
Mexico wasn't WON. It was TAKEN from the Spanish. (Who had taken it from the Indians.)
The US wasn't WON. It was TAKEN from the English.
We can do this all day.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Very few people at their times in the west were not christians. Mostly because not long before, there was a strong correlation betwen not giving the right answer to the question and a sudden downturn of life expectancy. Heck, punish disbelief in anything with death for a few hundred years and you can create a society of believers in it, no matter how ridiculous it is. Easter bunny, M&Ms, virgin birth, doesn't matter.
At their times, the important difference wasn't whether you were a christian or not, that was pretty much a given, but how much power you wanted to grant the church over everyday life. On the one hand, some people wanted the middle ages back, where the pope crowned kings and was generally the #1 bigshot. On the other hand, some people wanted the church to attend to matters of faith and the state to attend to matters of state. I think there's no doubt where the founding fathers stood on that debate.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:seriously (Score:1, Insightful)
i admire canada's healthcare
Too bad Canadians don't...
http://chibi-marrow.deviantart.com/ [deviantart.com]
Current Residence: Atlanta, Georgia
So says the person living in the southern US...
Re:Sarcastic summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, and therefore there's no difference between what a large number of learned historians consider true, and what a small group of people whose entire motivation is to restructure history in favor of their political ideology are willing to say is true.
But hey I'm sure that's not your point, since that would be stupid. You're just pointing out that, in general, number of people who agree with something is not an indication of veracity. That's all well and good.
Now let's bring this out of the hypothetical realm of pure logic where an existence proof (long since proven) is all you need to demonstrate the imperfection of historians. Let's talk about this specific case.
In this specific case, the historians are right, and the ideologically motivated revisionists are full of crap.
Re:Apolitical? (Score:3, Insightful)
Texan books decide to marginalize the civil rights movement as being associated with the Black Panther movement, and you're advocating for "your rights remain[ing] untrampled"? Do you see that Texas is putting Jefferson Davis up there as a righteous individual alongside Abraham Lincoln and giving his words a platform? Do you see that they're suggesting McCarthy was justified in his persecution of people because of their beliefs? Do you see them removing hiphop, and inserting country as influential in American culture? Do you hear them netioning that the equal rights movement created "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes"? Did you hear them try to remove any mention of Thurgood Marshall, the first black supreme court justice? Did you see them trying to remove Cesar Chavez, a mexican who led the creation of farmer's unions? Japanese-American internment is being called "the regulation of some foreign nationals". They're replacing large portions about Thomas Jefferson with John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas.
Do you not see that most of their revisions are seriously skewing history towards the view of white Christians rather than mentioning that a whole lot more shit went on in this country than this racist school board wants students to hear about?
Get your hands off my future.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
So accepting evolution because the overwhelming majority of scientists, and all but a vanishing minority in any discipline related to biology is just mindless groupthink?
Well I am reasonably well versed on most evolutionary concepts and I can tell you flat out that anyone who denies the veracity of evolutionary theory is either a liar or a fool, and that anyone who advocates teaching Creationism or Intelligent Design or tries in any way to minimize the importance of biological evolution as one of the major theories of the last four hundred years to try to bolster non-scientific notions of origins in a science class is doing so simply to use the powers of the State to indoctrinate. The First Amendment, and a number of key court decisions, but most importantly Edwards v. Aguillard made it clear that the teaching of such nonsense in public schools is illegal.
There will always be people that accept things simply because. But I'll wager the average accepter of evolution theory probably knows more about that theory than the average denier does.
Re:Is anything not political? (Score:5, Insightful)
There has been a slow rise in us-vs-them mentality since the wealthy and powerful noticed around the time of Reagan that if they pumped the religious and abortion issues hard, they could keep the other 99% of the population split 50/50 on everything.
This was a perfect situation for them. They managed to get 50% of the population voting against itself in the face of mass unemployment and increasing concentration of wealth and income among less than 1% of the population. For some reason, multi millionaire talk show hosts can get people making $46k to vote against themselves using these issues.
Re:Get rid of textbooks already (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't disagree with your theory, but have you actually been in an elementary or middle school classroom in years? Budget cuts mean classrooms of 35 or so kids who don't have extracurricular activities and too much energy. Oh, plus unions means no firing of teachers. This all adds up to too little energy to put into teaching beyond the given curriculum for most teachers.
Re:Texas a lot like Peru in the 80s (Score:5, Insightful)
What you have here is a buncha people who are independent and are tired of government encroaching on civil liberty and forcing "help" on us.
The huge problem with this argument is where was this outrage when we had 8 years of unchecked infringement on our civil liberty's, government expansion, insane government spending, and a host of other issues. (I'm not going to even go in to your "help" bit as that rebuttal could fill up a whole other post.)
What you are saying rings so hollow in the wake of a lot of crazy things that went on. Instead only because now the media wing of the far right has gone on the warpath are you all acting as if our governments are acting contrary to their purpose. And furthermore because the far right is feeling so threatened we get what happened in Tx, Az, and what is happening in the GOP primary's now. Sure the far left has it's batch of crazy's but your blind if you don't see that it's the far right at this point that is, and has done, an insane amount of damage to the US in almost every way possible.
Re:Apolitical? (Score:2, Insightful)
Interestingly enough, that's precisely the work that historians are working towards. It is these historians who provide the information for the base textbooks. While you can't remove judgment, more often than not history is distorted in incredibly subjective ways (the winner writes the history books, as it goes). So, yes, point out that there are limitations on presenting an entirely objective view of history. That doesn't justify the current Texas revision of history books or the general call to more subjectivism. You'd think Christians, especially the Evangelical kind, would have a problem with the writing of history books when it translates to, for the readers, the subjective reading of books or bibles.
That's pretty ironic. The drawing board is precisely where this whole debate started. Experts (in this case, historians) presented texts to be used in textbooks. This information "[deviated] from the accepted teachings" as far as the school board was concerned (consider what the word "conservative" means); more precisely, they were offended by the progressively more unbiased labeling actions of the US (not that this specific cycle in textbook revisions is the one to start using those labels). So, remove "propaganda" from the US for WW1. Change "capitalism" to "free enterprise" to avoid "capitalist pig". Change US "imperialism" to US "expansionism". Because technically it was the men who voted for women suffrage, let's just ignore how hard women worked to change the minds of men. The same for the civil rights movement.
In short, take words that accurately fit the behavior within history and been used pejorative (because they've been bad behavior at times) and either politically correct them to take out the bite of the words or just delete them. Reverting those changes would be to go back to the drawing board. Reverting those changes would be to deviate from "accepted" teaching--as the Texas School Board likes to note, they're democratically elected and hence "represent" the people and hence the "accepted" view (and these reversions to what experts say would be an acceptance of expert's attempted for unbiased views, not of the views themselves).
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolution is just as much about cooperation as it is competition. Evolution is not simply "kill or be killed." In fact, that simplification is no more than a justification used by social Darwinists to excuse brutality towards the less fortunate. Better cooperators make better survivors. As we have developed culture, we succeed not by letting our elders die, but by keeping them alive to pass on their knowledge.
You seem to think evolution is directed, that it moves form some less good state to some better state. Not true at all. Fitness criteria change all the time. What is fit today may not be tomorrow. If we cooperate better, and make sure everyone has equal opportunities, we are changing the fitness criteria. That will not cause the human race to 'devolve' as that is not even possible. Evolution does not have a direction, it can't go 'backwards.' What will happen, is that evolution will favor cooperation more, and it will favor sociopathic monsters less. That's a good thing, IMHO.
We can not 'interfere' with evolution, as interference comes from outside a system, and there is nothing outside the system of evolution, that we know about. All we can do is change the fitness criteria, which change all the time anyway.
In short, you have an incorrect and dangerous view about what evolution is. It is the exact same view that some of the worst monsters in history have used to excuse some of the worst atrocities ever committed.
Re:Fight them (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be missing the point, perhaps willfully. The point is not whether or not the Founders believed in the Christian God, fairies, witches, unicorns, or any magical thinking.
The point here is whether or not the Founders intended for Christianity to be the basis of the government. From their writings, they clearly wanted a government based on reason, not religion.
Re:Fight them (Score:4, Insightful)
You have no idea how evolution really works. It is not directed. It does not move from 'less evolved' to 'more evolved.' Fitness criteria change all the time. What is fit today is unfit tomorrow. Cooperation plays more of a role in evolution than competition. By being better cooperators, we are not making our species weaker, we are making it stronger. We are changing the fitness criteria so they don't favor sociopaths, but decent, loving, cooperative individuals. Your false ideas about evolution serve only to excuse your own selfish belief system and do not represent reality.
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Insightful)
Then again, taking little snippets of speech from the founders where they mention God and then blowing that up to mean Evangelical Christian Nation is about as outrageous as taking one line from the Bible and saying that homosexuals shouldn't get married....oh wait.
Re:seriously (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with you completely.
Except to you, _I_ am one of those religious libertarian nutjobs.. and yes, I've been spending the last 2 years amassing firepower.
If you want to understand "us" better you'll need to understand that it's a bit bigger of a tent than you realize: I don't have any kind of TV service at all so I'm certainly not beholden to Fox News or Glenn Beck or whoever it is you claim programs me [wasn't it Bill O'Reilly 2 years ago, and Rush Limbaugh for the previous 15?].
Me, and others like me, also either didn't vote for GWB in 04 or did so regrettably to make sure that a blow-hard dipshit Kerry didn't ruin the country _even faster_ than GWB was doing.
What you're missing is that the angst in America didn't start when Obama won the election; it was in full swing when a lot of Americans realized that McCain was the "best" answer the establishment would give us to run against Obama. It was simmering back when GWB decided that "to save" America he would have to destroy everything that made it worth Saving.
It was uncomfortably hot -- and almost boiled over -- when Clinton and Reno _murdered_ families in Texas and Idaho -- and in the latter case, used soverign immunity to prevent the murderers [real ACTUAL murderers -- not like the Wikileaks disaster, btw] from facing the criminal charges that the soverign state govt of Idaho had filed against them.
Where was the outrage from "you" when fucking _tanks_ shot up a house full of children and burned it down? AMERICAN CITIZENS -- people that have the same right to a trial as you do. Is your hatered for anyone claiming any kind of religion so intense that you stand by happily when tanks and helicopters and machine guns murder doezens of women and children? Not "well, it's a war" accidental casualties, but actual coordinated assaults on isolated homes of people who just want to be left alone?
Was it a proud day for the left when "one more gun nut" had is wife taken out by a federal sniper _while she was holding a baby?_
For some of us, it started back when Reagan, who ran on a platform that included abolishing the ATF and ending the Dept of Education [check your history -- he actually ran and got elected on that platform!], failed to do anything of the sort and instead blew federal spending sky high and got is tangled up all over central America. To his credit, none of us have bomb shelters any more and the Warsaw Pact is a fading memory. We'd take him over any of the current crop of losers, but we hate the system so much that even he is now fair game for criticism.
I guess you and we agreed back during Nixon. Everyone agreed that Nixon sucked. He was a crook and a liar. But apart from having your headquarters broken into, I don't understand _your_ objection; Nixon got elected by promising food price controls and delivered wage controls as well. That's socialism 101, and that's what you guys want more than anything, right?
I want my church and my law to stay the hell away from each other -- but if I have to pick my church or YOUR chuch, well, I know which one I am picking.
I don't care WHAT you or the Texans are putting in school textbooks; I am homeschooling my kids because government controlled education is a dismal failure [after all, it made me, who you have written off as an unworthy moron]. _You_ will invariably want to control exactly how my kids are indoctrinated, I won't ever accept that. I'd literally shoot you first. If you want to terrorize kids with horseshit contradictory ideas that play out in some hybrid prison warden/lord of the flies petri dish, go ruin your _own_ children. Leave me and mine out of it.
The dilemma is unfolding roughly as follows. _Most_ people, left and right, want a big powerful government that gives them what they want and takes from others. But what many people on the right are finally realizing is that when "their team" is running the show, they don't actually get what they want. It turns out, their team was "small government" all alon
Re:Sarcastic summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Christian founders != Christian nation (Score:2, Insightful)
Very good points.
I'm often irritated by people who like to say "the founders were Christians so the USA must be a Christian nation". The founders did not have a completely homogeneous notion about the role religion in government in the first place, but I find it particularly errant when people talk about Thomas Jefferson's ideas about the USA being a Christian nation. Jefferson was a Christian and he was deeply absorbed in matters of faith--yes, he did publish his own edition of the Bible that was focused on the works and wisdom of Jesus Christ. These facts are evidenced by a large volume of his own writings.
The fact that he Thomas Jefferson was a Christian doesn't say ANYTHING about how he thought a government should work.
Jefferson's position on the role of any religion (Christian or otherwise) in government has been explicitly defined in his published writings. He knew that any institution of man is vulnerable to corruption and his objectivity allowed him to see that both governments and religions are institutions of man. He saw the influence of religion on government as a cancer to any free society. You can see this fact very clearly in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was authored by Thomas Jefferson, that says it is not the right of the government to leverage religion and vice-versa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Statute_of_Religious_Freedom
Jefferson, in particular, was a Christian and a founder who knew that intermingling of governments and religion was an abomination against both and he said so. To deny this and argue that the USA was founded as a Christian nation is to betray Jefferson's stated ideals and those of many other founders.
Re:Texas a lot like Peru in the 80s (Score:3, Insightful)
What you have here is a buncha people who are independent and are tired of government encroaching on civil liberty and forcing "help" on us.
But you're not independent. This fantasy is the source of your confusion.
For the most part we believe in personal responsibility and feel that you should reap the benefits of your work as well as the consequences for your actions.
But the people you elect to office don't actually believe that. They just use you because you're so ready to believe it.
Re:Sarcastic summary (Score:1, Insightful)
Widely accepted by experts. Then there is no fallacy.
Re:Is anything not political? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, most of the politicians on both sides of the aisle ARE stupid, evil or both. Do you seriously think the US Congress could withstand a combination IQ / US constitutional history competency examination as a prior qualification to hold office?
Re:Thats the way its supposed to work. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Except you're missing an important point. Neither New York nor California passed laws telling history book writers what version of history they were allowed to include nor what religious or political slants were required by the state. Texas did, forcing California to react in order to put an equal and opposite pressure on textbook publishers, to prevent Texas's slant from being pushed into their state by the new Texan law and their large influence on the market. Now other states have to decide if they're going to follow suit one way or another in order to try to have an unbiased or specifically biased version of history taught. It sets the stage for textbooks not written primarily by the best info of historians, but instead by political bodies as political game pieces. It will almost certainly result in less accurate textbooks in many places along with higher prices for those books.
Now, you were saying about Texas being a problem? Its only a problem if you want to maintain the bias.
Textbook publishers were not required by law to have a bias prior to the Texan law. You can claim they did, but you need to support that hypothesis with real evidence. We know textbooks are being forced to have a slant now, because a law was passed requiring specific things determined by politicians, not historians.
Its not a problem if you want things to be more centrist.
Are you so blindly partisan? I don't want centrist textbooks. I want accurate textbooks based upon the best info historians have and the best supported interpretations of that info.
We as a nation benefit if Texas gets changes made, and are harmed if California blocks those changes.
We as a nation have less well informed children if Texas gets it's changes made and less well informed children everywhere if other states pick up this trend. We also have less economy of scale and so more expensive textbooks for kids. That helps no one.
Re:Texas a lot like Peru in the 80s (Score:2, Insightful)
I live in rural Texas. What you have here is a buncha people who are independent and are tired of government encroaching on civil liberty and forcing "help" on us.
Right. Those independent folks just want to be left alone to make their way. No help needed from the government.
Do you have paved roads leading to and from town? Many of those roads were paid for by folks not in your town or county. Electricity? You might want to thank those meddling bastards-- especially this one [wikipedia.org]. Postal service without a drive to an actual city? Phones? Hospitals? The list goes on.
You're not independent. Like so many others, you're tired of government "help" only to the extent that you dislike the help they offer.
Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me California would have more important things to worry about.
Texan's Leverage (Money/Mouth Equality) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The correct name would be (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm partial to "War of the Rebellion." Puts the traitors in their place.
I'm not sure I'd call wanting to split off into another country 'treason'. If a state wants to secede, I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be a legal process for them to do so. They had to vote to JOIN the union in the first place, no? If someone wants to leave, let 'em leave, else they'll be a lot more trouble than they're likely worth. (see also: Civil War, Presidential elections of 2000 & 2004, etc). Just think how nice it would be to not have to apologize for FL, AL, MS, NC, SC, TX, WV, etc. It gets exhausting. Let them form their own country, fly the Dixie flag, and devolve into a third world country which we can gleefully ignore. In 2 generations, it'll be like Mad Max down there, and really, that'll be entertaining to watch. Without the financial drain of those failed states, USA will do much better (especially if we can pawn Detroit off on Canada).
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Insightful)
The settlers were invited in to help displace the Comanche in the under-populated (by 'civilized' people) Texas area. The General Colonization Law expressly made it easier to immigrate to Texas from America and get land.
Texas revolted, essentially, because Mexico outlawed slavery, and the Americans brought slaves (thereafter called indentured servants for life) into Texas.
Re:Note to the President (Score:3, Insightful)
The size of the subprime mortgage market is ~ $1.3 trillion.
The losses from the subprime mortgage currently stand at ~$850 billion and stand to grow to ~$1.5 trillion. No, not the losses to the economy as a result of the financial crisis, the write-downs on sub-prime mortgages.
Read that again. The losses in the market are currently at 65% of the size of the entire market. Do you think that >65% of subprime borrowers defaulted? And remember they've made some payments, and the house is worth something. And it's growing. It seems likely that at the end of the day the losses are going to be larger than the original market. That means that if every single sub prime mortgage holder failed to pay the first cent of their mortgage and if every single foreclosed sub-prime house had an actual value of $0, that won't explain all the eventual losses.
How then do you explain the losses? Zero-sum bets (bad ones). On $1.3 trillion of mortgages there were $4 trillion of zero-sum credit default swaps. When a few sub prime mortgages started to fail the amount of money somebody owed somebody else started to explode, and it had little to do with the homeowner.
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Insightful)
The environment is constantly changing. What is a threat today might be an ally tomorrow. This plant obviously had some characteristics that Jane found useful, those characteristics become the fitness criteria. If the plant had not appealed to Jane, it would not have been the one that survived. Now, just like the plant that got blown to a new island, this plant faces a different environment, one dominated by the whims of Jane rather than climate and predation. Evolution still happens. The plants that appeal more to Jane will be selected for.
And then the environment changes again, now the whims of Jane do not matter and the environment does again. First: so what? If the plant was adaptable enough to change genetically in the course of one environmentalist's lifetime, it obviously has a whole host of unexpressed genes just waiting for the right opportunity, and it will have an easy time shifting back as well.
Second, these random mutations combine and recombine in different ways. Even something that is a disadvantage can be an advantage when combined in novel ways with other mutations. Say a species develops a protein pathway that synthesizes a weak poison, which damages the individuals survival rate. Unless it is a guaranteed killer, it won't be selected out entirely, it will remain in a small percentage of the species.
Now, we have another mutation. This one strengthens another protein pathway, making the poison virulent. Guaranteed death for any individual that inherits both. But finally, we add in another mutation, one that protects from the poison. If an individual gets these three mutations, they are now in possession of a very nice defense.
So, even 'bad' mutations, when combined in all the trillions and trillions of combinations possible in each generation, may form something good. You can not even say what is good and bad until you see the results. By removing one set of selective pressures, all you are doing is letting another set of criteria come to the fore. It is simply not possible to remove all selection pressures.
You see, your "Jane" story happens all the time in the real world. Environments change, fitness criteria change, things adapt, and then have to adapt again as the environment shifts back. There is nothing wrong with that. It is entirely natural.
Again, all you have demonstrated here is how little you understand about evolution. Unfortunately, you are just repeating hoary old arguments that were debunked hundreds of years ago. It makes responding to you like shooting fish in a barrel. So... did you read that site yet? Here, just in case you missed it before, and to make sure no one reading this becomes confused by your fantasy of evolution: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/evolit/s05/web1/mheeney.html [brynmawr.edu]
Re:What does this have to do with textbooks? (Score:1, Insightful)
Let the historians decide if what Texas is doing to textbooks is wrong.
Um, historians wrote the textbooks that politicians are changing.
Re:Apolitical my Aunt Fannie (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Insightful)
"Christian" hasn't meant "do what Jesus did" for almost 2 millenia now - not since Christians decided they'd rather stop feeding the lions with themselves, and started feeding them with their opponents.
I'd say that, today, the most reasonable definition of Christian you can get is that it's someone who subscribes - or would subscribe if presented - to some (at least one) of the editions of the Nicene Creed. This seems to be mostly corresponding to actual "common sense" definition - i.e. Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox are Christians, while e.g. Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons are not.
If you have a better suggestion, share it.