WEINER: You aren’t paying anything in that case because you’ll be dead.

Which while heartless, actually seems logical at quick glance.

In critical thinking however, one must always think about context.  To use a very basic example, take numbers.  If I say, 1.8 trillion dolloars spent on federal government in one year.  Seems meaningful, but it’s really meaningless without additional information.

For instance -

1.8 trillion dollars spent on federal government in 2010.  We got off cheap.

1.8 trillion dollars spent on federal government in 1950.  Well… we probably would’ve collapsed by now.

& lastly, for Mr. Weiner and the government in general, they as using the tax code to incentivize certain behaviors.  Tax breaks for small businesses, helps spark business creation.  Tax breaks for home ownership, helps home sales. 

So if you work your whole life, make a decent amount of money yearly, but live furgally, and retire after 30 years with 10 million dollars, this tax is an incentive.

Just not sure what kind of society you want to build when the incentive is blow all your money before you die instead of leaving it to your family

…For the fifth consecutive year, school resource officer Nick Pasquarosa recognized those seniors who had enlisted in the military. “While Nick was speaking, one faculty member held up a sign saying “End war” and another female teacher stood beside her,” said Assistant Principal Ann Knell. “The two faculty members sat down and did not clap during a school-wide standing ovation for those students.”….

It’s truly unbelievable we have such dolts teaching our children.  I guess it’s sort of analogous to the blind leading the blind, but in this case the students knew better than the teachers so it’s more like… the blind leading the seeing?

Please don’t misunderstand – I could care less about their actual stance and more about the time, place, manner, and assumptions with which they decided upon this course of action.

First, it’s well known that public schools are NOT bastions of free speech, nor are they paragons of oppression either.  But through time and court precedent, educators should (and most likely do) know that the primary responsibility to the children is education.  So any free speech that disrupts that process can be prevented and/or punished.

For instance, if I went to school with a pro-drug message, I would be sent home.  If I wore a blank arm band in memory of fallen soldiers, I would likely still be sent home, but ultimately win.

Second, and in my opinion more importantly, is the arrogance with which the teachers acted.  Keep in mind, that this is their employer giving an assembly which they believe brings value to their students (clients).  Yet they still protested?  I use the term arrogance, because I think we can safely say they assumed, and possibly correctly so, that they will not be fired.

This is what really gets me.  Not only did they believe they were in the right to disrupt a school proceeding, but they seem to believe it’s about freedom.  When in reality, if any company in the world decided to gather its employees to spotlight process X, a protest would certainly be met with immediate firings.  This would also be true in a private school setting.

Yet these teachers are claiming a right to do this and that it’s a teaching moment.  I would submit to them they should use it as a learning moment it should be instead instead of arrogantly attempting to parlay this into a “teaching” opportunity.

The statement given ignores any of the real issues.  Like all political statements, they even pretend something is true that they know isn’t.  Their school & their decisions, are anti-free speech and to pretend otherwise should be seen as the absurdity it is.  He then talks about being “proud” of the students for handling the media coverage…

You mean the ones’ who protested, to get media coverage?

…On Thursday, May 6, about 50 students, many carrying the Mexican flag, walked out of classes. The students told reporters that they thought it was disrespectful for the students to wear the American flag on their shirts while others were celebrating Cinco de Mayo….

First, what the hell were they protesting?  Maybe it’s just me, but if Joe Friday sticks by the facts it seems it went like this:

1. Some students wore American flag t-shirts on a Mexican holiday.
2. Some fragile students complained that they were “hurt” by this.
3. Incompetent management then forces the students to change or go home.

For all intents and purposes, it seems the idiots protesting won the fight.

But yesterday, according to the  statement…. “they (the students) wore purple and white for solidarity”…. so all is well I suppose.

Meanwhile, you still have children who were “taught” in this “teachable” moment that they should never, ever have to be disrespected.  I’m unsure where this belief about respect has come, but I believe it’s a dangerous and intolerant belief.  I seem to recall when respect was earned, not deserved, but I digress.

It seems logically obvious that true freedom is to allow things you won’t/don’t like.  Allowing freedom actually means  (please read carefully you spoiled little brats) people are going to do things you don’t really like and there’s absolutely nothing you can or should do about it.

Additionally, on the plethora of things you should be grown up enough to deal with in a free society, speech by way of t-shirts is the least intrusive and offensive thing I can think of.  Seriously, I have what some would call a pretty dark sense of humor, and the things I can think to wear if I were to purposefully wanted to disrupt Cinco De Mayo…. well, let’s just say while it make me laugh, my imagination can lead me to t-shirts which might actually be cause for a protest (assuming the school allowed it).

In a free country, not only do we not allow the cops to arrest people simply for demonstrating their beliefs, but we also respect freedom in general.  For instance, when some comedian or cartoonist creates something satirical, yet disparaging to the Catholic Church, no one demands protests, no one demands censorship, and no one ever demands death.

Sure, people rightfully offended might debate about it, write about it, might boycott products, but they don’t close schools to protest over being disrespected.  They prefer to get their respect through their actions towards helping others, not through mob scenes.

What’s also buried in here,  is that no one (especially the “Mexican” students) seems to understand the holiday has nothing to do with Mexican independence and its history is actually a shared American/Mexican holiday for a Mexican victory of one battle over the French.  It was a hard fought victory for 4000 barely-trained Mexicans over 8000 well-trained and well-equipped French.  So the holiday was never meant to be “celebrated” exactly, as it was meant to be more like a D-Day remembrance.   (Mexican Independence day is the 16th of September)

Indeed, to be really offensive students could’ve chosen to have worn French flag t-shirts, not American flag t-shirts.

Back to the history:  It was used in early American history, mid-1800s, by Mexicans & Americans in California to tick off the French.  Now, I’m all for doing anything that irritates the French, but that obviously died out over time.  The holiday, then became almost nonexistent.

However, with money to made…. over the past 30 years or so, corporations & a willing populace have changed everything.  The remembrance, which should come from such a bloody, yet surprising victory, was turned into a holiday to sell more Mexican food, beer, and flags;  just like St. Patrick’s day might have one time had something to do with St. Patrick, but now serves only as a reason to drink green beer and buy “Kiss me I’m Irish” stuff.

My point: that looking at this from each angle seems to show the American public should be angry at one thing only.  How high school kids, in a well-funded school system, in one of the richest states in one of the richest countries in the world are so… frustratingly ignorant of their ancestral history and know nothing about even about the basic idea of freedom itself.

]]> http://detailedabstractions.com/2010/05/11/noneducation-in-america/feed/ 2 http://detailedabstractions.com/2010/02/10/marcella-mroczkowskis-warped-view-of-herself/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=marcella-mroczkowskis-warped-view-of-herself http://detailedabstractions.com/2010/02/10/marcella-mroczkowskis-warped-view-of-herself/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:29:22 +0000 Michael S. Langston http://detailedabstractions.com/?p=749 Sometimes a more interesting way to find out how people truly view the world, is not to have them tell you where they stand on certain issues.  Another informative way to analyze someone’s critical thinking skills is how reflexive they are to disbelieve facts that counter their world view or agree with facts which confirms their world view.

Seeing their reactions to overly simplified answers which not only confirms their world view, but also their ego, you can use it to analyze that person’s tendency towards confirmation bias.

Before going further, a general disclaimer:  we all, every human falls for confirmation bias.  We want an ordered world and want to understand things and want to be right.  So patterns of random events become, after the fact of course, a series of events who destiny is their present state.

However, for those claiming to know more, claiming to impart important information to the masses, the truth as they see it – for those people, confirmation bias shouldn’t be as obvious.

For our example of people who lack critical thinking skills this time, we have Marcella Mroczkowski, a self described lawyer, activist, and Huffington Post Citizen Journalist.

Now I know – looking for critical thinking on a site like the Huffington Post is much more difficult than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, but I still thinks it’s useful to remind us all of the tendency.

In her February 9th piece titled Why Americans Must Defeat the Right’s Culture of Hate: Understanding the Science And History of Demonizing Hate gives you a pretty good idea of her logical consistency, but for some reason, I read further.   To save you the trouble, I’ll summarize:

Using one poll, which she claims proves a large, but minority, percentage of Republicans are prone to believe things like Obama isn’t a natural citizen.  From there, she lumps the birther movement in with those who believe Barack is a socialist.  Tie that to the freedom-increasing destruction of the Fairness Doctrine, or in her parlance, the end of untainted free press and equality and an increase in corporate slavery.

Tie that to talk radio, through it, use nominal facts like people tend to get more fanatic during recessions and hate is a primal emotion.

Jump from there to leaders who can exploit man’s primal tendency to hate others through dehumanzing, such as Hitler!

& viola – people who don’t believe like Marcella are not just Republicans, but hate filled Republicans who are being exploited by Hitler’s reincarnation.

So with that said, I think objectively we can say that if this sample is her normal standards, then Ms. Mroczkowski’s skills in critical thinking are demonstrably lacking. We can also say, again, assuming this piece of hers is representative of her other writing & analysis, but with that assumption, she’s also a little full of herself.  Narcissistic even.

I mean even I try to assume the role of her – try to think, a liberal would agree – what do they see worth agreeing to?  Her non-familiarity with logic becomes apparent, as even if I agree with all her logical leaps, to believe the underlying assumption that her beliefs are perfectly right and her opponents are evil and full of hate is just too perfect to be believed by any nominally objective person.

I mean seriously – when the snake oil is packaged and marketed that it will grow your hair while shrinking your waistline and increasing your cognitive abilities – critical adults are naturally and rightfully and forcefully skeptical.

Or as others have said before, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence… or at least should for those pretending to provide “truthful” claims.

The interesting thing however is the polling data itself.  The data she uses to springboard her attempts to conflate Republicans and their mouth pieces with evil hate speech, is completely flawed.   First, it comes from Daily Kos, which should be an obvious sign to anyone approaching or attempting to approach objectivity.  They have an obvious bias and a quick check on their facts demonstrates it.

With simple math, we can take DailyKos’s own figures, 2008 voting records, and see if the percentages of respondents coincide with the actual percentages in the last election.

So in those states they label the NE, in the 2008 Presidential election, a total of 28,836,059 were cast for President, roughly 40% for McCain, or 11,458,616.

Those 11 million votes for McCain in that region, were out of the 59,948,240 votes cast for him nationally.  So the 11 million represents 19% of the total republican vote.  Not exactly a perfect measure of the percentage of Republicans living in the NorthEast, but likely more accurate than DailyKos’s attempts to minimize that part of country’s respondents to only 11%.  & my numbers were also two years ago – I think one can objectively say the Democrats aren’t doing as well as they could be and are in less favor now that prior to the election.

Regardless, they not only undervalue the opinions of those Republicans in the NE, but they also exaggerate the weight of the south, giving them 42% of the weight of the poll questions, whereas using the same basic analysis, those same states only made up 36% of the total Republican vote cast for McCain.

There are other signs in there as well, but ones I didn’t feel like researching… but to the eye, I’m not sure if 89% should be white or that 56% should be men, though I’ll admit both might be possible.  Using a full 70% of respondents aged 45 and up however, defies logic.  A cursory glance shows voter registration for that age group making up a little less than 50% of all registered voters and while I’ll be more than happy to concede the idea that the makeup of the Republican party isn’t a complete demographic mirror of the national population, I’m pretty sure we can safely say the 70% is exaggerated as well.

With all the inconsistencies, it’s hard to even subscribe to a benign notion such as incompetence.  It appears much more likely that they moved the numbers around until they could get results which showed what they wanted.

Of course to normal people, hearing or reading “A poll from the Daily Kos showed….” could be followed by “the Earth is round” and be right to be skeptical.

Using that poll as evidence of something however is another story entirely.  Here again, I’d like to think this is an innocent mistake, but I think hiding the poll through another link (she linked to Huffington Post site which discuss the poll, which linked to the poll), picking only two questions out of the litany asked and acted as if the rest of it was overwhelmingly convincing of her basic point, then logically stumbling about to equate Republicans with hateful, primitive thinkers who are just following Hitler’s rise to power…. well, that might say more about her motives than even her reflexive belief.

The problem is that only slightly off people like me will dig around for all those numbers to prove or disprove our assumptions.  & that percentage of people currently testing their assumptions versus those voting… well, let’s just say it’s probably pretty small.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that mind you – our marketplace of ideas is full of different people with different opinions and tripe like this will always be seen by objective people for the hollow and shallow self-confirmation it truly is.

The only real sad part is some people, probably more than I want to admit to, will read and blindingly believe.  Not because they don’t have an extra hour to research voting numbers and compare then to polling – they will believe it for the same reason it was written – it will confirm something for which they already believe.  Republicans are primitive & evil.

Yep, using a big dose of self-delusion for courage, they will believe completely in such a hateful point, without even noticing the hateful point is being stated in an article decrying hate.

Well, apparently legislators might have a compromise to pass a bill including an “opt-out public option” (@theHill.com):

Democratic senators continued to remain bullish on the chances of creating a government-run public option as part of health reform….

…Schumer echoed the calls of several senators who this week said that Democratic negotiators has garned the 60 votes necessary to invoke closure on the measure. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) last week put it in even stronger terms, saying that Reid had 60 votes for a “robust” public option.

…According to Schumer, Reid “is leaning strongly” toward including a provision that would allow states to opt out of public health insurance if they want to keep private insurers.

Schumer added that the liberal senators are “able to live with” an opt-out public option under which states could decline to participate in a public program….

So there we are;  in a compromise between moderate and liberal Democrats only, a public option seems likely.  Not only has the White House and Democratic leadership dropped any pretense of working across the isle, but people at large seem unwilling to question the claims of their leaders.

One suc spurious claim, is that this option will result in increasing competition:

…”We need some competition for the insurance companies,” Schumer said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” A government-run insurance plan would “have to play by the same rules as the insurance companies and it would negotiate rates with the providers,” Schumer said. Having a public option would bring competition to states that only have one or two insurance providers, Schumer said….

Proponents everywhere continue to take this stance, even though a public option is logically inconsistent with their stated goal of increase competition.

If Mr. Schumer and others truly wanted to add some competition for insurance companies, adding a new company would not be necessary.  In deed, removing the laws the disallow selling of insurance over state lines doesn’t cost the tax payers one single dime, yet increases competition dramatically, both in the total number of competitors and the speed at which they can begin competing.    Additionally, given the benefits a public option will have over its private competitors, this isn’t really competition.

As Michael Tanner wrote over @ Cato, this support for a public option isn’t likely what it seems (@Cato):

Cognitive dissonance is defined as holding two completely contradictory ideas at the same time.

That seems to be the case with the American public, with a new poll showing rising support for a so-called public option in health care, even as the public continues to oppose greater government control over the health care system….

All in all though, the Democrats hands seem to be very strong hand right now with recent polls showing 57% of the country expressing approval of a public option.   With uninformed voters, an uninformed and uninformative press, and politicians more worried about winning than engaging in honest debates, this compromise might soon become law.

That’s freedom for you – as unfortunate as it seems, whether most people truly understand what the public option entails is irrelevant.  So long as they are willing to approve things they know little about and skip any hard work necessary to critically analyze the problem and various solutions, this new government boondoggle will just continue going forward.