Friday, November 2, 2007

It's like Burning Shit for many arguments (Pt 3.)

.... wait. That didn't come out right. Anyway.

Addenda:

I don't. Care. About. The. Teachers.
Or about being being consistent in using capitalization and periods after each word in a sentence for emphasis.
Also, Megan isn't inherently opposed to the existence of public schools, except insofar as she is inherently opposed to their existence and is just lazy about it.
If the public schools in inner cities were managing to educate more than a handful of the students, this would be somewhere on my list of priorities around "privatizing the post office". The existence of public schools qua public schools simply doesn't interest me.
I love when this little stylistic tic of Megan's pops up, because they are rare moments of unintentional honesty. She doesn't feel pressed to do anything about it, but a public post office is a bad idea, to Megan. Next week, Megan begins her series on why shootings at Post Offices are due to the existence of a public postal system. But first, a passive aggressive admission that her self righteous posts about vouchers this week haven't accomplished anything. (Perhaps like her charity for poor kids whut poor kids can't afford?)*
Now I'm done talking about vouchers. Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don't. My model of voucher beliefs predicts that people will get angry at me when I challenge their beliefs without changing their minds, and indeed, they are right. And myself, I'm too angry on the subject to do much good. The people saying that they want details before they'll commit: look, obviously design matters. If you concede the right of exit, I'm happy to debate details. But until you do, it's a waste of time.
If you agree to play Calvinball with me, we can play.

*- Nope, not gonna drop that one anytime soon.

No exit:
The critique also fails because the fact that I think (as I do) that the government should buy education for those who cannot does not mean that I think it should buy every other good out there.
Heh.
Mainly, this post is about Megan ignoring the implicit point in lunch-table clique buddy Ezra's taking issue with acting self-righteous about the welfare of poor kids, while arguing against giving their parents health care. (Remember Megan pretends to be in favor of health care for kids, probably mostly because she saw what happened to the Malkin thing.) Hypocrisy is whatever Megan says it is, not anything she herself does.

Tarzan confused: Atlas shrugs.
[Megan voice] I totally think there's gonna be a recession, only I'm too aware of how incompetent I am at my job to have the vaguest idea of when it'll happen. You need a bunch of, like, facts and numbers to figure that stuff out, and I'm a girl! Durh dee durh doop durhp. (Misogyny unnecessarily inserted for lack of recent blatant expression here by the wimmin hating me.)

It's the system, man: Remember, hippies say "man", and hippies are automatically dumb, so Megan is trying to explain herself to stupid people who don't see why vouchers are the only way to save baby Jebus from the burning mummies.
This echoes the accusation that I want to "Destroy the public school system". There's an implication that conservatives have no reasons for this -- just a wanton desire to destroy anything good, especially if it goes against their weird, talismanic belief in the markets.

Forgive me if I suggest that this itself implies a weird, talismanic belief in the superiority of the status quo. A lot of the articles I read from the left simply assume that the school system, or the social security [sic] is worthy of defense.
Because opposition to Megan means YOU ARE AN ANTI POOR KIDS NAZI and want them to stay in the unimaginable hell that is their local public school. If you don't want to try radical, untested solutions, you don't see any problem. Megan, however, could fix everything if given the chance.
If I were designing a system to serve these ends from scratch, would they look anything like the current system? No, obviously, because I'm a libertarian; my solution would look a lot like a means-tested voucher. But even a liberal trying to put together a school system or a retirement program would be very unlikely to design anything even remotely like what we have today. So why are they so hysterical about "destroying the system"? I'm interested in the people it serves, not the bureaucracy and the buildings.
Bulllllllllllllshit, Megan.
Also, who would possibly design an educational system where kids are grouped together according to age and geography and brought to local buildings to be taught by people who have been trained to teach kids? One of the main reasons I think Megan is ultimately motivated by the belief vouchers will lower her school taxes is she has never once asked basic questions such as whether class size and staffing shortages have anything to do with the problems of inner city schools, and whether proper regulation and more money for teachers would have an impact. But we all know her answer, that the eeeeeeeeevil teachers' unions will simply embezzle it all.
In the meantime, last we checked, Megan is in favor of continuing the occupationwar, and probably wouldn't understand why I bring that up.

Sadly, still more to come.

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