American Thinker has a piece today, on how a recent preposterous global warming report on the PBS NewsHour hints they’re overplaying their biased coverage of the issue. The addition of it to the tally of NewsHour discussion segments absent of skeptic climate assessments suggests a media malfeasance problem too big to ignore.
Excerpts:
My tally of the NewsHour mentioning global warming and other ‘climate change’ variations continues to grow. I’m probably short in the count, as the NewsHour has expanded its online-only material significantly in the last year or two, and I’ve probably missed some of their blog content. Of that 350+ count, it can only safely be said that one more skeptic can be included in the overall total, meteorologist Anthony Watts in his September 17, 2012 appearance alongside ‘former skeptic’ Richard Muller, which drew howls of “PBS Channels Fox News“
At what point will the public see such biased reporting as nothing more than a desperate partisan attempt to keep the issue alive? Did we witness it just recently at the NewsHour? Or will they cross that line by reporting how ‘the smell of the ocean is endangered by climate change’?
See:
Jumping the Shark on Global Warming: The PBS NewsHour paints itself into a corner.
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@DrTucci78
The warmists very often argue that the conservatives object to the theory of AGW because of the policies and costs of “combating climate change.” In other words, it is typically argued that conservatives reject the science for political reasons, and then find sceptical scientists who affirm their doubts.
Your claims that conservatives object because of “reflexive” or “instinctual” reasons is a bit of dime store psychology with very little distinction from the latest accusations that conservatives object to the theory of AGW because they are anti-science and many of them “deny the lunar landings.” Really, the hostility of your other remarks about conservatives is over the transom. Part of this picture is the desire of the extreme left, and the middle, to cull the Taxed Enough Already conservatives out of the GOP. This has already been done to the major parties in Canada, Australia, and the UK, where the parties do not differ on socialized medicine, energy mandates, and the deconstruction of marriage. “You can’t get a cigarette paper between them.”
At 12:18 AM on 31 August, Zeke had addressed me with:
No argument with that. It’s been a rather robust practice among the “Liberal” fascisti ever since this preposterous bogosity came to be perceived by them as a fraud of political utility. And financial profitability. With that understood, it was to be expected that these “cork-screwing, back-stabbing, dirty dealing” leftie-luzer specimens would employ such a variation on their usual-and-customary Alinsky Rules for Radicals tactics to evade the obligation to actually prove the validity of the AGW contention.
This route of attack has worked for the “Liberals” primarily because when considering the patterns of American conservative political behavior in response to the scientific examination of the phenomenal universe, it’s impossible to evade acknowledgement that the “social” conservatives have been reliably godstruck. The “Liberals” cherished model is Inherit the Wind (1955, 1960, 1988, 1999), based on the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” and the “social” conservatives – damn them! – have risen to the bait with the reliability of whatever idiot biting creature one cares to name in analogy.
“Intelligent design.” Borjemoi! Why not super-intelligent purple space squid, for pity’s sake?
This is chiefest among the reasons why these traditionalist “social” conservatives make unreliable – even treacherous – co-belligerents in the debates against the rent-seeking sons of dogs pushing the CAGW crapola.
There are definitely practical reasons for attacking the cost-effectiveness of CO2 emissions curtailment (and Mr. Monckton has made such arguments with scathingly effective technical factual support), but when the ruck of American conservatives voice such a contention, they can’t back it up with reasoned argument. They only decry the costs as such, leaving the Watermelon “Liberals” free to play the utterly bullpuckey “precautionary principle” card by arguing that the long-term costs – somehow, at some unspecified time generations hence – will be greater still, continuing to make of this hobgoblin a Menckenian excuse for panicking the populace.
Traditionalist conservative fervor absent scientific literacy (and with a soupçon of religious whackjobbery) keeps proving a recipe for the “Liberals” favorite dish: opposition en brochette.
I was not the party who brought “instinctual” into the discussion, but I’ll readily admit to “reflexive.” It has long seemed to me that the “social” conservatives respond to many stimuli without evidence of electrical activity above the level of the spine, much less the hindbrain.
But the usages are figurative, if only just a little. The alternative is to concede that these conservatives are actually using their grey matter, and still they can’t pour night water out of the proverbial boot by examining the sole thereof.
It’s hardly “over the transom” to acknowledge this. It’s more charitable, in fact, to consider the possibility that they’re psychoneurologically impaired than to admit that they’re just willfully (shall we say “religiously”?) stupid.
As for the informal and genuinely grassroots “Tea Party” movement that arose in 2010 out of widespread public outrage over the economy-crushing nationalization of 17% of the nation’s GDP – Obamacare – be assured that I and almost every other libertarian in our republic rejoiced in the “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” expressions of rage that brought a proper and necessary whiff of boiling tar and sacksful of poultry slaughterhouse offal into the “town hall meetings” of sweating, panicking incumbent congresscritters all over the country as these career prostitutes – Red Faction and Blue Faction alike – realized not only that they might not get re-elected in November but that they’d be lucky to avoid disappearing into a shallow grave somewhere in the woods.
Unfortunately, there was more promise than delivery in the uprising, and the hideously corrupt “go along to get along” Republican “establishment” has moved with its usual swinish expertise to co-opt it.
Pity, really. Still and all, there’s the option of “voting from the rooftops,” isn’t there?
Thus the libertarian defense of the unalienable human right to keep and bear arms.
Libertarians love to talk a fair streak about the distortions, dislocations, and unforseen consequences of government coercion in markets. They are masters at analyzing all of the unseen and destructive consequences of mandates and subsidies for example. But when it comes to social issues, there are no such thing as unseen consequences for libertarians in the US. None.
The facts are that legalizing drugs, prostitution, and deconstructing marriage all become part of the educational curriculum – starting in Kindergarten, and the more graphic the better, according to the NEA. Now who is getting into whose bedroom here? Who is forcing their Bacchanalian Cult on the rest of us? Who is requiring discussions of sex and drugs with children from the tender age of 5? And requiring me to pay for it through threat of force and imprisonment? And who is now claiming that preaching against all of this in church is a crime, punishable by fines or imprisonment?
It is totally obvious on its face who the militant agressors are in the area of pushing into everyone’s bedrooms. It’s the Libertarians and radical left. They just have to tell Suzy she can be a whore and Johnny can marry a m-n or have 4 wives. And look at this fake ire and invective about not respecting privacy. It is a real sham, because this is what is really the result of what is being advocated: National standards, force, and fines to push obscene, Bacchanalian cultic preferences and practices into our families.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/begin-sex-ed-kindergarten-says-new-national-standards-report
Ce qu’on voit, et ce qu’on ne voit pas. It’s not just for economics.
At 1:43 AM on 31 August, Zeke is heard from in his self-righteousness:Libertarians love to talk a fair streak about the distortions, dislocations, and unforseen consequences of government coercion in markets. They are masters at analyzing all of the unseen and destructive consequences of mandates and subsidies for example. But when it comes to social issues, there are no such thing as unseen consequences for libertarians in the US. None.
To the contrary. There are always consequences for the individual on these “social issues,” as there have always been. With rights come responsibilities.
What the normative “social” conservative like Zeke can’t stand is that with those rights and responsibilities comes the recognition of that individual’s authority to make decisions for himself.
An authority that Zeke wants to pre-empt by ordinative force of law, in clear and unequivocal violation of the desires of the heretic who disgusts him by going to hell in his own peculiar handbasket – and not uncommonly in breach of the public peace.
Nope. The word isn’t “legalizing” (which carries with it the implication that the private person requires some government thugs’ approval for the practice to which Zeke – will-he, nill-he – objects), but rather decriminalization, which emphasizes that the previously persecuted practitioner is removed from the unwarranted attentions of Officer Friendly and his SWAT squad buddies.
That’s what’s got Zeke upset. No warrant in law to use deadly force in the suppression of those heretics at whom he’s cranky so as to disallow whatever it is that’s yanking Zeke‘s chain.
Why, you, Zeke. Who else?
Not libertarians. Explicitly not libertarians, in fact, who have spoken for the discontinuation of coercively (taxpayer) funded government “education” (meaning no forcible discussions “with children from the tender age of 5” as well as no “threat of force and imprisonment” imposed upon unwilling little old Zeke to bleed him for the hideous boondoggle that is “public school”). And emphatically not libertarians, none of whom can ever be found calling for the criminal prosecution of religious whackjobs “preaching against” subjects such as “sex and drugs” on behalf of their Great Sky Pixie.
Live and let live, y’know. It’s manifestly a concept which traditionalist “social” conservatives like Zeke have trouble grasping, but it beats the snot out of pointing guns at people because you don’t like what you imagine they do to consenting partners (or even barnyard animals) in their bedrooms.
Tsk. Conflating “live and let live” with “pay your taxes and shut your trap or else!”
There’s another reliable behavioral characteristic of the “social” conservative. Myopia.
And why not? To get Jeffersonian, whose pocket is picked? Whose leg is broken? And how the hell is it that “man” becomes a dirty word for the “a” to be elided?
To what extent have libertarians ever opposed voluntary “National standards” (whatever in hell the “social” conservative might conceive these to be)?
As for deadly “force, and fines to push obscene, Bacchanalian cultic preferences and practices,” there’s the usual “social” conservative failure to perceive libertarian adherence to the non-aggression principle.
We don’t “push.” We’re certainly inclined (and try always to be able) to shoot back, but we don’t “push” anything on anybody except violent aggressors, and then the discussion devolves upon issues like how we should exert those ergs: hollow-point versus full-metal jacket, .40 Short & Weak versus 9mm Parabellum, etc.
Not for a self-anointed, in-your-grill, holier-than-thou “social” conservative like Zeke.
It’s a matter of dominance.
Tucci78 says:
August 30, 2013 at 9:42 pm
“Ah, but I emphatically do understand. Are you attempting to say that one of these “social justice” smarmers – seeking “the creation of the socialist man” – are ever going to voice hearty support for the exercise of their prospective victims’ unalienable right to the ownership, carriage, and operation of weapons suitable to rest the forcibly coercive imposition of socialism? Ever? ”
No, of course not. By the time they are done with hijacking the word Libertarian, it will mean the opposite of what it means now.
64 comments with much discussion about ideology, and not a single instance of the word “progressive”. I don’t have major issues with the various points of view as long as there can be free and informed debate. It’s those who seek to stifle informed debate who are a scourge of humanity. I came across this video some time ago, and found his contrasts between liberals and progressives to be very moving:
Pokerguy
When we read the history of French IndoChina it is difficult to imagine any outcome for our nation re the evolution of Viet Nam, other than armed conflict in South-east Asia. {The NYT’s Tom Friedman was correct, ONCE: Eisenhower justifiably sent troops to Little Rock and not to Viet Nam.} JFK and the CIA altered the equation in Saigon: thousands died defending the Pacific from communist atrocities. In for a dime,in for a dollar.
In re George W. Bush: the failed theology student, Gore, was not an option. Further, had team-W succeeded in reversing two decades of banking interference, the economic adjustments to the credit debacle would certainly have been less harrowing. He told us how to avert disaster; you supported the malfeasants: own up to your mistake, lad.
It is a busy morning: unable to read all comments; I apologize if this has been addressed, before.
John Moore
With only 1% of the vote in the 2012 election, it’s hard to believe that libertarians have much impact on public policy. Anyway, the libertarian position on education is a voucher system, whereby each parent can select the school of his/her choice.
The facts are in, Tucci. Obamacare and the public school system require participation and are enforced by the IRS, which has power to fine, imprison, confiscate property, and garnish wages. I am now being forced to pay for the smut peddlers and obscenity addicts to “educate” children in “health” class, pass out morning after pills to underage girls, and pay for the tools of eugenics/population control to be placed in the hands of the executive branch which has illegitimately seized far too much power already.
This is “what is not seen,” and I am perfectly justified in pointing out these direct results of the destruction of local control and governance, which is where these laws against coke, meth, pot, and narcotics come from. Local people also choose to defend marriage by as much as 60%, in states that have voted on it.
And I do not use the public school system for my children. I have to pay for their education on what is left of our single income after heavy taxation and rising fuel and food costs. Many people are choosing to live on two incomes and trusting the experts to raise their children. Pushing these destructive policies for drug legalization and the deconstruction of marriage destroys education, and most people think they cannot afford not to use the public schools. And if you read the article, the smut programs are through the use of National Standards, another brutal blow against local governance and control of education and law.
At 9:19 AM on 31 August, Zeke persists:
Yeah, them “Liberal” fascisti are some kinda vicious bastiches, ain’t they? And the Red Faction “loyal opposition” (with entirely too goddam much emphasis on the “loyal”) have done nothing for the citizenry other than the equivalent of whimpering that we be permitted to drink no more than half the herd-of-buffalo-killing jugful of cyanide our Illegal-Alien-in-Chief and his accessories are forcing down our metaphorical throat.
“Compromise” is good for us, right?
And this has anything to do with libertarians and libertarians precisely…how?
Particularly inasmuch as libertarians have been attacking all this flagrantly and malevolently socialist crap for the past half-century and more while you conservatives had been brokering deals with the invidious incumbents of the authoritarian left in order to barter away the birthright of your fellow citizens in exchange for their cooperation in Republican Party banksterism, mercantilism, imperialism, and overall “Rotarian socialism.”
Yet again with the normative numbnuttery of the “social” conservative, now claiming – fantastically – that the abatement of “local” blue laws and other small-scale Officer Friendly jackbooted thuggery to punish Zeke‘s neighbors for doing stuff (absent any intimation that anybody’s rights to life, to liberty, or to property had been breached) which Zeke doesn’t like.
‘Cause Zeke is working the will of the Great Sky Pixie. Or “tradition” or something. Yeesh. I wonder if Zeke leads mobs to stone those of his neighbors who gather firewood on the sabbath….
And making oblique reference to Bastiat’s “What is Seen and What is Not Seen” (ca. 1850) even as he continues to evince his lack of familiarity with how Hazlitt had used the “broken window fallacy” as the starting point in his even more explicitly libertarian Economics in One Lesson (1946 et seq.
And again, drug decriminalization (not “legalization”) and obliging government thugs to recognize the binding legal status of the contractual relationship called “marriage” when said contracts are entered into by people of conditions which don’t satisfy the religious (but otherwise unsupported) arguments of Zeke and similar traditionalist whackjobs has precisely what to do with the destruction of “education” (specifically government “education,” for the abolition of which all and sundry on the libertarian side have argued), and with “heavy taxation and rising fuel and food costs” resulting from (among other things) Federal Reserve System currency debauchment, normative “bipartisan” aggressive political intervention deranging the market process, and pillaging crony “state capitalism”?
(Er, Zeke, d’you have any kind of reference to these “smut”-stomping Comstock-ian pecksniffian “National Standards” which are supposed to provide some kind of magical “social” conservative panacea for all that ails us?)
As usual, not only malice here, but confused and ignorant malice.
What I am attempting to point out, pokerguy, is that one of the one of the unseen consequences of destroying local control of coke, meth, pot and narcs, and the traditional preservation of marriage, is the destruction of the school curriculum. Just like adding disruptive technology such as worthless intermittent wind turbines raises costs and diminishes supply, destroying existing sensibilities and local laws also has extremely disruptive results for everyone. These results are here, and they are not theoretical.
There are plenty of people who can simultaneously claim they are for renewable energy, and not for rising costs. Likewise, this virulent and angry form of libertarianism (not all libertarians hold these positions) can claim they are for school choice, but the results and observations are in: the schools are forcing sex and drug ed on young children, schools are becoming more centralized, and participation is not voluntary, and becoming less and less voluntary. You’ve had your social experiment. Now acknowledge the results.
At 4:03 PM on 31 August, Zeke had asserted:
But is there any causality involved in decriminalizing (not “legalizing”) certain Scheduled psychoactive substances – as well as getting Officer Friendly’s grafting thumbs off the throats of people otherwise – to be linked to the degeneration of the already degenerate government indoctrination centers posing as “public schools”?
Sure, there appears to be correlation. But – as we keep reminding the AGW puckers – correlation is not causation. Something like a reasoned argument has yet to emerge in any of your posts in this regard, Zeke. You expect your bigotries and griping to be received without at least some illusion thereof?
Oh? I’m calling for the ABOLITION of government schools (which you keep cement-headedly evading), and I’m supposed to be the one “in a dream world and in denial,” am I?
Let’s presume that, like most “social” conservatives with that perpetual itch to shove their bigotries down their neighbors’ throats, you want the government schools to continue running, to continue sucking up tax money, to continue sending out truant officers to compel attendance.
You just want that coercive machinery run to your tastes and purposes.
Hm. And these conservatives wonder why they’re received in reasoning discourse with all the enthusiasm accorded a six-days-old dead rat discovered in the pantry….
Nah. Think of them instead as ineffective occupiers of political posts (having “voted over 30 times to repeal Obamacare” without yet having made the point that our Mendacious Marxist Mamzer is himself on this matter personally and ex officio in criminal violation of so many laws on so many counts that multiple grand juries should have long since been empaneled to seek true bills of indictment).
The Red Faction “political elite” (which is kinda like calling dregs “scum”) aren’t much more than an excuse for the alleged conservatives wearing Republican uniforms in the eternal game of “go along to get along.”
Egad. Is there anybody reading here unaware of the fact that I’m a medical doctor?
Does anyone – even the blitheringly stupid – conjure that I could ever possibly benefit in any way (material or otherwise) from the “Liberal” fascists’ meatgrinder machinery grinding down on the economy in general and on the destruction of my profession in particular, threatening the lives and well-being of my patients?
And I’m supposed to need “contraceptives,” too?
To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke (’cause he used the full Anglo-Saxonism, and Mr. Watts frowns upon such pungencies): “WTF?”
Rogerknights, granted the libertarian party is small, but so is the Constitution Party. Yet the Social Libertarians are far, far over-represented in the expensive national media, and this is very handy for the progressives, and globalist wing of the GOP. The policy of destroying the Taxed Enough Already conservatives is being enforce top-down in the GOP by Rove, by funding “electable” candidates and attacking local conservatives who run in state and local elections.
The Constitution Party also supports school choice, as well as abolishing the IRS and the Fed Reserve. And speaking of libertarians, the UKIP supports the definition of marriage because as soon as marriage is deconstructed, the courts sue churches for crimes against humanity, either for teaching or for refusing to employ people in those lifestyles, or for refusing to perform “marriages.” It follows like night after day.
Tucci, you are spot on. Best critique I have read in a long time.
@tucci –
No, my novels are not sci-fi – they were set on another planet only because the stories would be implausible on Earth, in terms of place names, dates of action and the like. The planet I write about is a little more economically/technologically and politically advanced than Earth, but it is not a utopia. It is simply a place that would seem familiar to people on Earth, but with a society which works a little better than ours on Earth. And it is only the locale for stories that differ in every possible respect from anything in Williamson’s stuff. What you call “thoughtful” in his books comes across to me as unconvincing, whereas people who have read my drafts confirm the realism and logical consistency of the world I’ve created.
Zeke, are you really that daft? What part of anything Tucci has posted would give the impression she, or any other libertarian, approves of Obamacare? For someone so anti-libertarian, you sure are ignorant of the philosophy. Not one thing you have said actually applies to libertarians for that matter. You are either wholly incapable of understanding her due to some sort of reading deficiency, or just an .
Roger Knights: not really, the actual position is NO public education (or healthcare, or just about any other “service” provided by our saviors, the government, other than protection of our rights). Vouchers are simply the only way to get around the current system.
Speaking of public education, I wonder why, if things were so much better 50 years ago, don’t just go back to what was being taught then?
Mark
And the last should be first. At 1208 PM on 31 August, Chad Wozniak had objected: No, my novels are not sci-fi – they were set on another planet only because the stories would be implausible on Earth, in terms of place names, dates of action and the like.
Damn, but I’m exchanging correspondence with a mundane.
Let it be understood that if you have to set your characters and plot somewhere other than on Earth in the present or recorded past for the sake of writing speculative fiction about actions and conditions significantly divergent from “real world” phenomena, unless you’re writing it in the fantasy genre, you’re writing science fiction, and so it will be taken by editors, publishers, readers, and reviewers. This you cannot evade by the thin fiat of a handwave.
When they’re referred to as “sci-fi” (pronounced “skiffy”), it’s a denigration. Lots of stuff is written with the trappings and superficial tropes of science fiction (commonly abbreviated “SF”) but are noted to be nothing more than work that could be milled through a word processor in an hour or two (less, with global search-and-replace) to be just as workable – or not – as “mainstream” crap.
When “world-building” in speculative fiction (both fantasy and science fiction), a big part of the writer’s duty to the perspicacious reader is to understand – even if, especially if he’s not going to lard the text with expositional lumps and/or footnotes – the underpinnings of the plenum in which he’s set his story.
When dealing with the praxeological details of economy, culture, technology and politics (particularly if this wish-world is supposed to have “a society which works a little better than ours on Earth” – and to which “ours” are you referring?), devising a credibly viable society requires a knowledge of human nature, and of that knowledge (especially the unaggressive perversities attending thereupon) I submit you’ve shown no indication of possessing. Or even hoping to develop.
F’rinstance, I’ve observed that one of the characteristics of this monotonous setting (only one society on a whole friggin’ planet? very Star Wars-ian…) as you’ve described it thus far is a definite “top-down” ordinative political economy which can only operate by having a Governing Class (the Archons, the Old Ones, the Wise Masters, the Owners, They-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, whatever) above the ruck and roil of hoi polloi to tell the hewers of wood and drawers of water explicitly how to order the division-of-labor functions in their anthill parody of a human society.
And anent the “calculation problem” (previously mentioned, and also known as the authoritarian knowledge problem) you merely evade.
That’s really crappy world-building, don’tcha know? Unless you’re writing “for the trunk” or for free promulgation on the Web (same thing) it is feckless to assume that readers – and editors, who have to anticipate their readers’ desires – are going to be as carelessly and blithely illiterate – not to mention willfully ignorant – as you’re showing yourself to be.
I do not expect that your fiction will not “differ in every possible respect from anything in Williamson’s [Freehold series] stuff,” but rather that what Williamson had done in Freehold and subsequent novels in his fictional plenum had demonstrated a conscious and concerted appreciation of both the physics and the praxeology of world-building, striving with some success to engineer and leverage the characteristics of his settings to optimal dramatic effect.
What’s more, Williamson has put these works (and others) through the editorial process at Baen Books, which had also entailed the caustic feedback of the barflies at the Baen’s Bar site, who comprise a large cadre of quite literate, quite widely educated, and scathingly articulately critical SF readers operating in an informal give-and-go to detect and provide feedback on flaws which an author (and even an editor) might not have perceived in media res.
What I submit is that you could profit from critique other than that provided by the “people who have read [your] drafts [to] confirm the realism and logical consistency of the world [you’ve] created” because it appears that what you’ve gotten is little more than studiedly inoffensive “that’s nice!” comments and naught that would really benefit either your process in particular or your development as a writer in general.
There’s a difference between hearing what you’d like and hearing what you need.
At 8:58 AM on 31 August, rogerknights had written:
Regarding government thuggery dressed in the guise of “public education,” the libertarian position is not the implementation of “a voucher system” except – perhaps – as a mitigatory measure en route to definitive remediation, just as the ever-more-prevalent (and ever more undeniably effective and cost-efficient) practice of homeschooling is laudable chiefly as a matter of withdrawing uninfected individuals from exposure to the vectors of the “Liberal” fascist disease.
If there is anything to be considered as “the libertarian position” on the educrat-run, politically manipulated, coercively funded Skinnerian rat-runs we call “public schools,” it’s abolition, not efforts to salvage edifices best treated as are the remnants of Konzentrationslager Dachau and the “Death Railway” sites at Kanchanaburi.
Why play at palliation when what’s manifestly required is getting down to the root of the cancer and ripping it out entire?
I have simply pointed out that one of the many unseen consequences of legalizing meth, coke, pot, narcotics, and what ever else, as well as legalizing prostitution, and deconstructing marriage, has been put into the school curriculum by nationalized programs. You can ignore that fact if you want, but that is the result of your policies. Local people do not want this.
And they do not always have a charter school, or another option. Charters and vouchers are not available everywhere. In many cases, they are under stricter and stricter control of the very Unions they are designed to compete against and provide an alternative to. You are really in a dream world and in denial of the destructive problems you are pushing.
Now regarding the conservatives you have excorciated ruthlessly: These are people who have voted over 30 times to repeal Obamacare in the House, and, as they were sent back by their voters as a reward for doing the right thing in 2012, they are now in a great battle with the political elite in the republican party to defund Obamacare. They are the last ones standing against Obamacare. These scorched and salted earth methods of yours are being directed at the only people now standing between me and Obamacare. Conveniently enough for you, I would then be forced to pay for your contraceptives and a–tions under threat of Jail time. This is really transparently hypocrytical of you to claim to oppose Obamacare and yet with the other hand benefit from it and destroy your political enemies.
Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back for opposing public schools and supporting school choice. People across the entire political spectrum believe that in our country, it is the ultimate right and duty of the parents, and not the state, to raise and educate their own children. As many as 80% of Americans support parental rights and educational freedom.
Conservatives and Christians along with many others are working to pass an amendment which would protect that right, and prevent parental rights from being completely undermined by a treaty with the UN, CRC. I suggest you quit worrying about drug dealers and obscenity pushers, and sign the petition to protect states rights and parental rights from massive federal and foreign usurpation of the education of American children. And why don’t you say a kind word about the conservatives and Christians who are working to EXEMPT AMERICA, DEFUND OBAMACARE, REPEAL OBACARE, and THROW IT OUT as unconstitutional.
Yes, here is the reference I provided earlier:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/begin-sex-ed-kindergarten-says-new-national-standards-report
Excerpt:
(CNSNews.com) – By the time they leave elementary school, children should be able to “define sexual orientation,” and by the eighth grade be able to “define emergency contraception and its use,” according to a report containing controversial new recommendations for sex education in U.S. public schools.
“Ideally, comprehensive sexuality education should start in kindergarten and continue through 12th grade,” says the “National Sexuality Education Standards” report, drawn up by a range of advocates, academics and public education officials.
The Future of Sex Education (FoSE), an initiative started by sex education advocates, developed the standards “to create a strategic plan for sexuality education policy and implementation.”
Also involved are the American School Health Association, the National Education Association Health Information Network – the non-profit arm of the nation’s largest teacher’s union, the NEA – the American Association for Health Education and the Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education.
An advisory committee includes senior officials from Planned Parenthood and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).
The 45-page report determines “age-appropriate” guidelines for comprehensive sexuality education in the areas of anatomy, identity, pregnancy, sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) and others.
“Specifically, the National Sexuality Education Standards were developed to address the inconsistent implementation of sexuality education nationwide and the limited time allocated to teaching the topic,” reads the report.
The authors argue too little time is devoted to instruction in HIV, pregnancy and STD prevention – a median total of 3.1 hours in elementary school, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
– See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/begin-sex-ed-kindergarten-says-new-national-standards-report#sthash.aiXyejpj.dpuf
Ref: http://www.parentalrights.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={EC9944B8-96D9-4581-A9AE-06DD3173C964}
Excerpt:
NEA to UN: More Graphic Sex-Ed Needed
“Perhaps you thought public school sex education programs are graphic enough as it is. Not so, according to a statement by the National Education Association’s (NEA) Diane Schneider to a U.N. panel last week. According to a report by C-FAM, Schneider told the audience at a panel on combating homophobia and transphobia that “[o]ral sex, masturbation and orgasms need to be taught in education,” and that anyone opposing homosexuality is “stuck in a binary box that religion and family create.”
In other words, schools need to rescue children from “indoctrination” by their parents and religion, and the U.N. should see that they do. Schneider also “claimed that the idea of sex education remains an oxymoron if it is abstinence-based, or if students are still able to opt out,” the article states.
ParentalRights.org disagrees with the notion that schools know better than parents what is best for their children or what their children can handle. We disagree with the idea that schools should undo all the character building and value instilling that parents do at home. And we adamantly oppose the view that the United Nations should take a role in any of it….
What We’re Doing to Address This
The NEA can sway the U.N. more easily than they can persuade the American people. They know that if they establish something at the U.N., they can find progressivist judges who will uphold it here as “Customary International Law.” And they must hope to see us ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), thus obligating ourselves to uphold whatever standards in child education the U.N. might dictate.
But we are championing a resolution in the U.S. Senate to prevent CRC ratification. As of Friday it had 5 original co-sponsors, but we expect that number to be closer to 30 when the resolution is introduced in the next week or so. When we reach 34, any effort to ratify the CRC will effectively be killed.”
PROPOSED PARENTAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT
TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
SECTION 1
The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children is a fundamental right.
SECTION 2
The parental right to direct education includes the right to choose public, private, religious, or home schools, and the right to make reasonable choices within public schools for one’s child.
SECTION 3
Neither the United States nor any state shall infringe these rights without demonstrating that its governmental interest as applied to the person is of the highest order and not otherwise served.
SECTION 4
This article shall not be construed to apply to a parental action or decision that would end life.
SECTION 5
No treaty may be adopted nor shall any source of international law be employed to supersede, modify, interpret, or apply to the rights guaranteed by this article.
Please sign here.
http://www.parentalrights.org/index.asp?SEC={2CC263EB-DB6D-446B-9B0E-FC0A4C2778D3}&Type=B_BASIC
At 4:49 PM on 31 August, Zeke had provided a bolus of extraction from the Cybercast (formerly “Conservative”) News Service focusing on the National Sexuality Education Standards, a decidedly “Liberal” fascist project entrained in 2007 “to create a national dialogue about the future of sex education and to promote the institutionalization of comprehensive sexuality education in public schools.”
The gropers go on to say that “Public schools were specifically chosen because they are venues through which most young people can be reached.”
So the “National Standards” previously mentioned by Zeke aren’t Draconian guidelines for censorship, but rather “Liberal” scheming toward indoctrinating the prisoners of the government educationalist gulags according to their peculiar picture of what the average “low-information voter” of the future should drool over.
So what’s the hoo-raw? No government schools, no “National Sexuality Education Standards” to be imposed on the unwilling and disgusted offspring of resentful and/or indifferent parents.
There y’go. Solved problem.
(I’m minded of SF writer Orson Scott Card – a devout Mormon – who for decades has opposed prayer and other forms of religious worship in the government schools not because he objects to religious belief among little kids but because the unionized ex-Education majors and other thugs of these “educational” hell-holes screw everything else up. Card simply doesn’t want his kids – or anybody else’s – to have the exercise of their unalienable right to freedom of conscience poisoned by the incompetence and malevolence prevailing among the educrat establishment.)
I posted, in response to Zeke’s claim that libertarians were affecting the content of school curriculums, “With only 1% of the vote in the 2012 election, it’s hard to believe that libertarians have much impact on public policy. Anyway, the libertarian position on education is a voucher system, whereby each parent can select the school of his/her choice.”
But, if those media libertarians are also supporting a voucher system, and mostly not taking a position about what schools should teach, then they aren’t the villains in this case.
I’d prefer abolition, but I believe that’s a politically impossible “sell” at the moment. I think that once a voucher system was established, and public schools were funded entirely–or almost entirely–from the voucher payments they received (which I should have spelled out initially as being implicit in what I was saying about a voucher system), attendance at public schools would be halved. I think that about half the population would stick with public schools, at least for a few decades. (I believe Sweden has something close to this already.)
At 4:43 AM on 1 September, rogerknights had written:
One of the selling points employed by advocates of voucher programs has been the potential of something like real competition – the facilitation of financially practicable parental choice with regard to the education of their offspring – would have an improving effect on the penitentiary lockdowns (“Don’t you dare nibble that Pop-Tart into the shape of a handgun, little boy!”) being foisted upon us as substitutes for real schools.
I hold that such would not be possible without provisions in every voucher system – ab ovo – which defunded each “public school” district to an increment equal to the monetary value of each voucher issued to a child resident in that district.
When you play the “carrot-and-stick” game, the stick has gotta sting if it’s going to be effective, and thus far voucher systems proposed and implemented have not (to the best of my knowledge) incorporated any schemes to bleed the tax-sucking educrats as punishment for inducing their “customers” to get the hell away from them.
If “attendance at public schools would be halved” (or reduced even more) by the implementation of voucher systems to facilitate an increasing number of private sector education services providers, for-profit and eleemosynary, then the budgets of which the various government school boards are empowered to dispose have got to be cut proportionately.
And shall we discuss the various ways in which these government school districts deliver a humongous source of “legal graft” for politically connected service and materials providers, from cafeteria catering companies to bus transportation outfits to janitorial supplies vendors?
The howls of these petty mercantilists – who expect megabuck returns on the “campaign contributions” they’ve been making for years – should reverberate across the nation, shouldn’t they?
I stopped listening to “this American life” about two months ago, following its hour-long program promoting climate change activism.
At 11:06 on 1 September, rogerknights had responded to pokerguy‘s comment about NPR’s This American Life with:
For the sake of completeness, I looked into the archives of This American Life and discovered a program broadcast on 17 May 2013 titled “Hot in My Backyard” (program 495), of which both transcript and downloadable audio recording are available (the latter for a $.99 charge).
Perforce, I recommend the transcript.
So much debate is two people screaming approximately the same thing, but not realizing it because they assign different meanings to the same words.