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.'"
Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Good, let CA and TX fight it out. (Score:5, Interesting)
If the liberals that are ruining the USA are fighting the conservatives that are ruining the USA then the rest of us can have some peace and quiet for a while.
Who decides where political neutrality is? (Score:2, Interesting)
Textbooks should assumedly be 'politically neutral'. Who decides what is neutral? Isn't that an incredibly powerful position politically, because all deviations from neutrality will be erased by default unless enormous prestige in the face of strong opposition to partisanship is faced down?
One of the changes that was found non-neutral is that the textbooks will include a 'suggestion' that the McCarthy anti-communist policies 'may' have been justified. Should textbooks similarly not include what may be interpreted as a 'suggestion' that the French Revolution 'may' have been justified (e.g. "lots of people were poor and poor people tend to get upset when others are extremely rich" - a pure bona fide justification for the bloodbath)? Or what may be seen as 'suggestions' that the Soviet or Maoist uprisings 'may' have been justified? If there are _existing_ suggestions of this kind, is it OK for Texas to remove them?
Should they include a 'suggestion' that hatred against the US and violence against US citizens in the Middle East 'may' be justified? Or is this banned already?
Re: Fight them (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can't fight them... Put a fence around and let them devolve in peace.
Or just invoke Mohnihan's Law: they're entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.
Waste (Score:1, Interesting)
None of this would matter if the government didn't control education. What a waste of money.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Interesting)
...another fine bit of "historical spin".
It was American settlers that were doing the original settling and subsequent rebelling.
Re:Good, let CA and TX fight it out. (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently found a book that belonged to my grandmother, titled "The strange tactics of extremism" (H&B Overstreet), written in the early 60s.
It basically deals with the John Birch Society and Communism of the era and their tactics, but reading it, you see the EXACT same tactics being used by the extreme liberals and extreme conservatives in this country today.
I thought it was an interesting read, anyway.
Texas a lot like Peru in the 80s (Score:5, Interesting)
In Peru, in the 80s, there was a group of maoist nutjobs called the "Shining Path," who vowed, among other things, to surround the cities from the countryside. What they were and are is a rural terrorist organization.
I've traveled in rural Texas recently. What you have there are a lot of poor, uneducated, disenfranchised white people sporting racist tatoos buying knives and swords at stands by the side of the road. The gun trade is a bit more private but still quite active. The textbook changes just reflect a wider change in worldview in the rural south. What they are poised to do are to become the next generation of terrorist nutjobs fobbing bombs at wealthier people, mostly in cities. They're just waiting for the next corn-pone Hitler, which the networks that gave us the Becks and Palins of the world will be all too happy to provide.
Re:Fight them (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm having trouble seeing how this is spin - you forgot to mention that there were several native Mexicans who were also settled in Texas.
Calling the War for Southern Independence a civil war is an example of historical spin. That would be the equivalent of calling the war for Texas' independence a civil war in Mexico.
Learn your history.
Re:Fight them (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Will students dismiss academics as political BS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Studying stuff you know you will never use seems unappealing enough. Now students will understand that their studies are not only useless, but a load of half-truths made to fit whichever political agenda is in control.
Just memorize stuff long enough to regurgitate it on the exam, and if you can get away with it: cheat. I mean, why not? It's nothing but a lot of useless lies anyway, right?
Maybe, just maybe, subjects like math will not be overly politicized. But that stuff is all being offshored to the world's "best and brightest" i.e. cheapest.
Re:Get rid of textbooks already (Score:2, Interesting)
Summary: "Wouldn't work."
Guess what? You're wrong. I know of several high schools and at least one college that does exactly what you describe - they let the children go to the source material and read the actual words. Of course the teacher doesn't let them "flounder" around the internet. She assigns the reading material.
The advantage is the students learn the ACTUAL words of the historical figures, rather than have it filtered (and censored) by textbook writers. The students read Jefferson's words about how he thinks the Church is corrupt, but he still believes Jesus was the messiah, rather than a textbook summary that falsely-claims Jefferson was an atheist (or deist).
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes but Jefferson also added "Jesus Christ" to the end of his presidential signatures, NOT a standard practice at the time.
Jefferson did lots of things that were non-conventional... like wearing casual clothes to State dinners. He was radical, but far from being an atheist (or anti-christian) as many modern textbooks falsely claim. After I finished college I really thought Jefferson hated both God and the Church. It wasn't until I started reading his actual letters/writings that I discovered the college texts/profs had essentially lied.
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Interesting)
Mexico did not exist as a country until 1821, when it declared independence from Spain and became the first Mexican Empire. Mexico did not become a Constitutional Republic until 1824. In 1835, General Antonio López de Santa Anna seized control of Mexico and abolished the Constitution of 1824.
Stephen F. Austin began his Anglo settlements in Texas in 1821, the same year that Mexico first declared independence from Spain. Texas won its revolution from Mexico 15 years later, in 1936.
It is really hard to argue from a historical perspective that Americans stole Texas from Mexico, when American settlers were in possession of Texas from the beginning of Mexico's existence as a country.
I've thought this too. Civil War was Pyrrhic (Score:2, Interesting)
As a German I've wondered why Germany was able to move on, more or less, from devastating defeat to become a modern country. Whereas the states of the former Confederacy seem mired in the past, even though the American South was also devastated in losing their war. And both National Socialist Germany and the Confederacy could point to impressive military achievements (Rommel the Desert Fox, General Lee, etc). As an outsider I see these differences though:
1) In the American South, the former slaves (the raisin d'etre of the US Civil War) were present and part of life after the war. Whereas the countries Germany tired to conquer were far away from the lives of average Germans. It is probably an unfortunate part of human nature that when you have been oppressing someone, and that person is now free and you see him every day, that constant reminder brings guilt, which brings unhappiness, and eventually anger and resentment. Rather than contrition
2) Germany was actually lucky to not have a slave-based economy (despite the best efforts of the National Socialist regime and Albert Speer). The German blue and white collar workforce was able to easily build things that the world wanted. So, for Germans the war's end meant: keep working that drill press, keep making those precision optics. Whereas I think for the whites in the American South, they did not have many skills to fall back on when the black slaves were freed. If you have been primarily a slave watcher, when the workers are gone, you are pretty much hosed.
Longer term, for the American South to move on to modernity, I suspect a big part of the answer will be for Southerners to acquire a new identity to be proud about. Today I think only New Orleans has a culture that is desired and liked. I think many parts of the South have tried to rely on American football as an outlet for a drive for excellence, but that is really not enough. The American South really needs something about its culture, or something about the work they do, that would be "world class" enough to let them cut their ties with the baggage of hate and resentment from the Confederacy. Either that or the former Confederacy will prove to have been indigestible by the United States, and the U.S. will turn away from science, and it will indeed cease to be a great power. Which would be a travesty! The U.S. has so much potential, if only the crazy haters in the geographical basement could be reset somehow.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Interesting)
Pardon? It was both a civil war and a war for independence. If the south would have succeeded in seceding it would be called a war of independence today. The unionists prevailed, so because the primary feature of the war was that it was between two groups who were part of the same country both before and after the conflict, it is accurate to call it a civil war.
I don't go picking fights with people who insist on calling is a war of independence (because as I've mentioned it was), but I do consider that they're trying to make it something more noble than it was. The only thing that irritates me is people who persist in flying the battle flag of the confederacy. I know that they've been taught that it's a sign of southern heritage, but this is a perfect example of politicization of history. It's a battle flag. It symbolizes rebellion against the United States of America. The only heritage it is attached to is a heritage of racially motivated anti-government sentiment. What really cracks me up is people who fly the flag of a failed rebellion and yet claim to be patriots.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a good guy? Not a good president?
Oooo-kay. He submitted year-after-year to the Virginia government laws to abolish slavery (which of course got turned down every time). He was firmly anti-slavery (as we many of the Founders like Washington, Adams, etc) He added the Right of Freedom of Religion to the Virginia Constitution, in spite of stern opposition from the official State church. He (along with his successor) paid off the U.S. National Debt for the first and only time in history.
He formed the Democratic Party. He founded a university and allowed several of his students to attend for free. When Washington was burned to the ground, he denoted his entire personal library to rebuild the LOC. He stood against the power of Megacorps and the Central Bank, and vetoed it out of existence (I wish our current president would do that).
TJ not a good guy? YES he was. I wish he was running for president today. He'd have not only my vote, but also my free services as a volunteer to help him succeed. Jefferson was not a perfect man, but he was still a far better president/statesman/freedom fighter than any we've had since 1900.
Re:History has a lot of opinon in it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course we are lucky in a way. The big lesson to be learned from WWII was that it was caused by an unjust peace and an unfinished WWI.
That is why the Western Allies didn't go out of their way to punish Germany and Japan at the end of the war. The Marshal Plan, UN, and NATO are all proof that at least somebody did actually learn from history.
In the end that is probably why there wasn't a WWIII.
Of course you are right we may soon forget those lessons on a flurry of revisionist history.
I wonder how many people today will look back and the Korean war and say that was a bad idea?
Just comparing North and South Korea should be enough one would thing.
Oh and yes I know it took too long for South Korea to get that democracy thing down but they have.
Re:Note to the President (Score:3, Interesting)
Lovely. Zero to 'racist' is 4.3 seconds. What a lovely rhetorical tool! Almost as good as tossing out "nazi" or "Hitler".
Let's not have an honest discussion...
Some background [forbes.com]
Re: CRA
You:
Way to totally ignore the amendments to the CRA -- particularly those made during the late 80's and early 90's. It set silly and arbitrary targets lenders must make by location and race. CRA forced lenders to lend to uncreditworthy persons to satisfy the CRA.
Now, I'm not suggesting the CRA was the SINGLE cause -- but it certainly was a major contributor. As well as many other points of government involvement.
Do you REALLY want to discuss? Or just be an ignorant name-calling prat?
Re:Fight them (Score:4, Interesting)
The Spanish government had been active in those areas before there was a Mexico. And I'm not sure pointing at Mexican atrocities is a particularly effective way of defending American atrocities (not that the Indians were simply quiet, innocent victims, there was plenty of violence from lots of corners). The whole thing is one of many historical messes I am glad to say that I did not take part in.
My point was mostly that your response still painted an overly simplistic view of the situation (which I would say is the wrong tack to take when you are complaining that they have poorly characterized things).
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
You are fairly correct. The founders knew that a state religion would be a bad thing. Imagine the turmoil that would have erupted when Kennedy was elected as the first Catholic. Would the state religion change to Catholicism? This is what the Establishment Clause was meant to stop. It was not, however, intended to ban religion from government entirely. A mention of God is not unconstitutional. A cross at a government owned cemetery or national monument is not unconstitutional.
Who would know what is and isn't considered Constitutional. Well, a Supreme Court Justice should know. An author of the Constitution should know. Let's ask someone who was both, John Jay. John Jay was President of the Continental Congress from 1778 to 1779 and, from 1789 to 1795, the first Chief Justice of the United States and he co-wrote the Federalist Papers with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. I figure he would be an authority:
"Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest, of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers."
Now you may or may not agree with him, I'm sure some of the other founders did not, and this quote is certainly not law. But the fact that founding father used the phrase Christian Nation means that is not out of the question to describe this country as such and it is certainly not unconstitutional. It also shows that it is not improper to say that this country has Christian roots in a historical context.
So, your statement that "The claims this country is a "Christian" country is very much false" is false.
Re:Fight them (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, if you examine history closely, you'll find that most settlements and colonisations(by Anglo-Saxons at least) follow this exact model. Settlement is ostensibly a completely private enterprise, but usually has the tacit approval of government and the explicit backing of powerful elements within or around government. The settlement of Texas was always supported and sold as part of the American manifest destiny franchise, and everyone knew it--especially the Texan settlers.
Re:Fight them (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Umm isn't that how we got all of the territories in north and south America? I seem to remember a big thing in the US called the Trail of Tears.
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Interesting)
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!".
Much in the manner that Russia is encouraging much smaller neighboring "states" to seek independence so that it can absorb them. [wikipedia.org] (Any Georgian citizen in South Ossetia is eligible for a Russian passport. [telegraph.co.uk] By the way, if we were smart about it, we would encourage the same trend in Mexico and use it as a pretext to seize Mexican territory but, hey, we don't do that anymore, right? And besides, none of the white folk would stand for all those new brown US citizens, right?) You can sit there and spout that idea that that Texas was an independent nation all you want but the larger goal of the US government was territorial expansion and the Texans were a tool in that goal.
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.
Which is interesting, because you're trying to say that the US is different from any other power in the paragraph prior to this one (Texas wasn't forced into the Union nor was Texas any part of an assault on Mexican sovereignty), while in this paragraph, you claim that the US is no worse than the Mexican government. Well, if you consider ethnic cleansing to be superior to forced integration, I suppose that's true.
Final point, in case you're thinking of jumping down my throat for being all "anti American". The past is the past. The country was far more nationalist (and less secure in itself) 200 years ago. We're a different country and it's unlikely that we'll repeat past mistakes but it's a good idea to understand that the US did some pretty rotten, nasty things in the past. Slavery was one, the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous peoples was another, the list goes on but only if we know the list and can put it into context can we avoid making those mistakes again.
Re:History has a lot of opinon in it. (Score:1, Interesting)
Even that is a far more revisionist viewpoint than you would probably like to believe.
The reality likely is that Japan wouldn't have surrendered if they hadn't gotten some (faulty) intelligence about the U.S. having 9 more bombs. That's even with the impending Soviet invasion. It was a fantastic bluff fed into their "secure" military communications channels (thanks to Desch and his NCR crew's Enigma cracker).
There are several documentaries that show up in rotation on PBS about these things, and they're more interesting and less U.S.-centric than you might expect.
The one about the Enigma crack team is great for geeks. Basically, Desch and his team at NCR invented RAM to create a faster brute-force decryption machine than was possible previously. It outpaced and outscaled the Bletchley Park machines built by Turing. (This had the effect of pissing Turing off to the point he refused to cooperate with them any more until the military brass basically put a gun to his head.) They were several orders of magnitude faster, and when the 3-dial Enigma was replaced with a 4-dial Enigma, they retooled the bombes and had them up and running within 3 months. Turing's machines would've required a complete redesign and rebuild.
The documentary about the lead-up to VJ day shows that Truman was fairly clueless about the details of the war and wanted only to avoid a nasty invasion of Japan but still end the war. The "test" invasion of Okinawa was extremely costly and only marginally successful. The bomb was seen as the lesser of two evils, in that only a few hundred thousand Japanese would die from the bomb, rather than a million or more on each side in an invasion. The U.S. military hadn't figured out the whole "fallout" thing yet, so they didn't factor that in.
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Interesting)
one, the settlers left the US to start new lives, literally in another country.
You have to be careful about such generalizations. All of them? Clearly not. Some of them? Obviously. A majority? Probably but if so, not overwhelmingly so.
Sam Houston, the first president of the Texas Republic, favored annexation. The Republic declared its independence on March 2, 1836. The Republic put its first proposal for annexation to Washington in August 1837. The US was not ready for war, and so did not accept and the proposal was rescinded the following year by an anti-annexation Texas President. Five years later an American President came out in favor of annexation and Texas *immediately* responded with a proposal. This was initially rejected by the US Senate by a Whig bloc that opposed adding more Democratic seats to Congress.
In 1845 a new US Congress passed a joint resolution in favor of Annexation and the Texas legislature approved almost unanimously (only one dissent). The annexation ordnance was put to the popular vote and won easily.
I don't want to oversimplify this. Certainly some people probably wanted to live in an independent republic. But there were also people all along who wanted annexation.
Now look at this from the Mexican standpoint. They invited Americans to come live under Mexican law. The American "Texians" flouted that law (of course the Texians had legitimate grievances). From the Louisiana Purchase on, the U.S. Government had been trying to get control of Texas, the only issue was one of means... the U.S. preferred to buy Texas. As soon as the Texians obtained military control of their territory they requested annexation, but the US administration was dealing with the Panic of 1837 and could not afford a war. The instant the U.S. Government was ready for annexation, the Texians wasted no time in accepting. Then the US followed up with a war of annexation to extend their new "possessions" all the way to the Pacific, forcing Mexico to sell all its coastal possessions north of Tijuana.
If you were at all inclined to sympathize with Mexico, the whole business can be painted in an extremely tawdry light.
As for the Indians who lived in Texas ... well, it's a bit late to bring their interests into the debate, unless you are talking about some kind of reparations. "The Mexicans were worse than we were" is not a reasonable basis for any legal claim to Indian land.
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Interesting)
Many of the Founding Fathers were also Freemasons, who strongly support the separation of church and state while admonishing each man to be steadfast in the faith of his acceptance. That is, atheists cannot become Freemasons but trying to impose your religion on others or even talking about religion within a masonic lodge is the quickest and surest way to be expelled.
That ethic infused the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and has been with us more than 200 years. We take it for granted now, but the practices the Founding Fathers took from Freemasonry and placed at the heart of the Republic formed the foundation of the powerful multicultural society we know today.
It's quite sad to see that foundation being assaulted in Arizona and Texas. Well, they'll learn quickly how futile and counterproductive this sort of behavior is.
Re:Fight them (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the correct term for most of them is "Free Thinker". E.g, Jefferson was very interested in religion and philosophy. He was a Deist AND a Mason AND a Christian (and probably other things as well)...and above all, a politician. But a politician with philosophical ideals.
Calling Jefferson a Christian is like calling a liberal Unitarian a Christian. He'll accept the label, but it's not really very descriptive.
FWIW, I doubt that MOST Christian faiths deserve to be called Christian, even though that's the traditional term. They've got precious little to do with J.C., even though they worship his words (usually in some particular translation). Worship doesn't imply any degree of understanding. It just implies that you can find some phrase that can be used out of context to justify what you have decided to do for other reasons. The more someone claims to be a Christian, the more I think of "Honest John's Used Cars".
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, the fact that he worked closely with Alexander Hamilton means that I'm not very willing to trust either his ideals or his honesty on anything, without independent grounds for belief.
Remember, Hamilton is the guy who founded the national debt by writing the government a check he didn't have funds to cover (money didn't yet exist), and then having the govt. pay him back for his loan with interest. (Anyone who's followed the banks over the last couple of years should have an idea of how this can make one lots of money.) And if I'm not wrong, he was secretary of the treasury at the time (or the equivalent).
Re:Fight them (Score:3, Interesting)
Cooperation and competition have very differing worth in selection, depending upon the niche maintained by the evolving group.
While many groups gain dramatically from cooperation, some groups must be highly competitive against say a prey, and thus the more competitive the animal is, the more strong their genetic line becomes.
This is kind of the reason why the most equivalent representation of sexual activity amongst highly-niched carnivores is best described as "rape". Specifically, among felines and sharks.
Felines have a barbed penis, which rakes the inside of the feline vagina when removed. This sucks for the female, but has become necessary for triggering their ovulation. This triggered ovulation means that female cats don't need to waste energy ovulating until there is a likelihood of fertilization. This competitive sexual activity means that not only are the animals engaged in predator-prey competition with their preys, but also simply for reproduction. It thus, gives felines a leg up on catching prey. (Yes, I know some felines engage in social groupings, however for instance with lion packs, when a new group of males take over a pride, they kill all the children. Competition again remaining still more important than cooperation.)
Sharks I know less about, however I do know that the males usually need to bite and hold the female, in order to insert their penis. Again, this sexual competition creates an advantage for them in catching prey.
But walk out of the Felidae family and even the (relatively) closely related hyena goes straight back to social packs with cooperation being more important than competition.