- Cellar Dwellers.
- Collective Decision-Paralysis.
- Bad theology and bad politics.
- School Reform and Class Warfare.
- Malevolent immortals.
- Cutting to the Chase.
A short piece at Scientific American explain (or tries to explain) why support for redistribution has plummeted during the recession: nobody wants to be at the bottom of the heap. They call it “The Last Place Aversion.”
Because it’s Scientific American, it’s got data, but it’s not impenetrable regression analysis or nuthin’.
The Occupy Wall Street folks are (at long last, or has this been going on for a while, unreported?) trying to come up with a list of demands:
But the very nature of Occupy Wall Street has made that task difficult, in New York and elsewhere.
Although Occupy Seattle has a running tally of votes on its Web site — 395 votes to “nationalize the Federal Reserve,” 138 for “universal education” and 245 to “end corporate personhood,” for example — Mike Hines, a member of the group, said the list would soon be removed because the provisions had not been clearly explained and because some people were not capable of voting online.
This lends some credence to an account one of Rod Dreher’s friends gave from sympathetic, first-hand observation:
The protesters were a disorganized mess. They’re so ideologically opposed to authority and committed to collective decision making that it takes them forever to deliberate and to decide the most basic things. My friend said that his pal came away from his time with the Zuccotti Park people certain that they weren’t going to amount to much, because they are so allergic to authority of any kind that they are basically sucking their thumbs.
If anything, the New York Times story is more depressing that Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative. The only two broad rubrics OWS has agreed on so far, according to the Times, seem to be “jobs for all” and “civil rights.”
Sounds modest enough, but (1) self-employment with ownership of the means of production is more sustainable and humane than a “job” in the industrial machine, and (2) the rhetoric of “civil rights” has long since become incoherent, with every swinish or elevated desire getting a little lipstick and the label “civil right.”
American Exceptionalism is not the equivalent of patriotism. If it were, then patriotic citizens of other nations would be expressing their own version of excpetionalism—Russian Exceptionalism, German Exceptionalism, Egyptian Exceptionalism, etc.—and while these nations might have some notion of exceptionalism, to suggest that this is equivalent to American Expectionalism is to speak heresy, for American Exceptionalism is, well, exceptional.
… American Exceptionalism is the belief that America has a special status among nations. It is a nation that stands apart, qualitatively different from other nations and possessing a special destiny with global significance.
… Yet when the theology of a chosen people is combined with a profound sense that American is a unique nation among the nations, the stage is set for bad theology as well as bad politics.
If I have any sense at all, I’ll stop yammering about how dumb the rhetoric of “American Exceptionalism” is and just point to Mark Mitchell’s definitive essay with the summary “American Exceptionalism is bad politics and bad theology.” If he missed anything big, I can’t think of it at the moment.
Lifelong acquaintance Randy Triplett, a political scientist, has increasingly been taking to the letters column of the local paper.Monday, he had this to offer:
School reformers or class warriors?
In a 2009 New York Times article, Catherine Rampell states: “Much has been written about the relationship between SAT scores and test-takers’ family income. Generally speaking, the wealthier a student’s family is, the higher the SAT scores.” This relationship has been known for nearly a century; Nicholas LeMann, in “The Big Test,” points out that “ever since Walter Lippmann’s attack on IQ tests back in the 1920s,” testing has “on the whole favored prosperous youths and penalized poor ones.”
In “The Trouble with Diversity,” Walter Michaels includes a chart illustrating that SAT scores and family income “rise in tandem.” It is likely that such a chart for other standardized tests would yield a similar pattern.
In spite of these facts, many self-righteous school reformers piously persecute teachers as the people responsible for low scores. How convenient for politicians and those whose interests they serve to threaten and denounce teachers, ridicule teachers, humiliate teachers, scapegoat teachers, demonize teachers and subject teachers to a public degradation ceremony. All such pious propagandizing is publicly performed to divert people from confronting the actual problem: poverty.
Testing regimes reflect and reinforce the prevailing socioeconomic stratification while providing an appearance of legitimacy to a caste system.
Testing and teaching to the test are perverse corruptions of the educational process, brute-minded rituals performed to validate the privileged and insult and injure the disadvantaged. Only by acknowledging these facts will clarity of purpose be obtained in educational reform.
I support educational diversity, including private religious and secular alternatives. But that’s because:
- I believe parents have a constitutional prior right to rear and educate their children.
- I believe the government schools will always incline toward politically correct, secularist, utilitarian, vocation- and consumerist-oriented education.
In the Christian Reformed denomination from which I came to Orthodoxy, there is a concurrent obligatory promotion of Christian day schools and such a high regard for teaching that many members spill over into the public schools (the Christian schools can’t hire them all). It is not a concomitant of supporting private schools to oppose, or to unfairly criticize, government schools that educate (by default) those children whose parents will not or cannot provide a broader, more humane, or more religious, education.
It’s Tuesday, so pattern-spotters may be expecting some James Howard Kunstler. They’d be right.
But except for the introduction, I’m not sure there’s anything new this week:
It was amusing to see President Obama try to align himself with the OWS movement. The genial Millard Fillmore update asked them not to “demonize those who work on Wall Street.” Of course, demonization proceeds from the failure of this president and his appointed agents in authority to subject those who work on Wall Street to the laws that mere mortals are supposed to follow in money matters. Hence, those who work on Wall Street appear to be something other than mortals. And since their work (on Wall Street) has had a malign influence on the common weal, some might leap to the conclusion that they are malevolent non-mortals, i.e. demons.
On a related topic, someone (was it the local letters column?) said OWS was obviously more disreputable than the Tea Party because they get arrested’n’stuff more than Tea Partiers.
Can you think of any alternative explanations why OWS would get arrested more than Tea Partiers? I thought you could.
I missed it in the Wall Street Journal, but caught on the Mirror of Justice blog what’s at stake in last week’s Hosana-Tabor argument:
Most debates over church-state separation deal with such peripheral issues as saying the pledge of allegiance in class. This case goes directly to the core of what Americans have understood about religious freedom for centuries.
…
[Quoting Justice Sotomayor in a 2nd Circuit opinion]: “Federal court entanglement in matters as fundamental as a religious institution’s selection or dismissal of its spiritual leaders risks an unconstitutional ‘trespass. . . on the most spiritually intimate grounds of a religious community’s existence.'”
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Bon appetit!
To save time on preparing this blog, which some days consumes way too much time, I’ve asked some guy named @RogerWmBennett (weird name) to Tweet a lot of links about which I have little or nothing to add. Check the “Latest Tweets” in the upper right pane or follow him on Twitter.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 