BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

rmnka447, on 2017-October-16, 20:41, said:

I don't think that this one lines up much with the liberal / conservative fault lines; rather much of this material was sacrificed in order to prepare kids for ever more rounds of standardized testing. From what i can tell there's a lot of blame to be cast at both sides of the aisle.

hrothgar, on 2017-October-16, 23:48, said:

I would rather like to hear Elianna's take on the matter. The most blame I have heard of in recent years goes back to the NCLB, which was GWB's re-authorisation of the ESEA. I am confident that the drafters of these acts had no intention of reducing civics offerings, just that this has been the result of greater focus on "core subjects" in the currently popular STEM methodolgy.

Another interesting question is precisely what civics education should look like. While Winston talks about it as teaching critical thinking, red states seem much more inclined to think of it as teaching children to be "good citizens" (love the flag, respect the establishment, etc) and often state that civics classes are used to promote liberal propaganda. Just how useful will extra civics classes be if they are simply used to reinforce the biases of the state's (red/blue) colour?

What is clear from the statistics is that children from rich educational backgrounds are generally not failing in civics. The numbers for the rest are, frankly, fairly appalling. That might suggest that the solution is not to remove resources from STEM subjects to civics but rather to sort out the funding of low-middle income schools. But that may well be completely wrong and in any case is not going to happen with the current WH, Congress and educational structure. But does anyone seriously believe that increasing civics classes at the expense of STEM subjects while keeping the current funding structure and testing regimes will greatly improve the education received by students? Because I have this great second-hand bridge...

From a reliable news source, like and share so that all your friends believe it's true. I've heard this is how facts are made:

https://www.newyorke...his-impeachment

diana_eva, on 2017-October-17, 05:47, said:

Reminds me of a recurring bit that John Oliver has been doing on "Last Week Tonight", where he catches Trump in a huge, obvious lie, announces "We got him!", and there's all sorts of hoopla on the stage. Then he realizes that Trump is still in office and there will be no repercussions (because the truth is irrelevant in Trump's America), so he has to stop all the celebrating.

https://www.youtube....h?v=WVce3juIDyc

rmnka447, on 2017-October-16, 20:41, said:

You may want to consider why you treat every problem as requiring a binary blame - us or them. Resolving that tribal instinct may well resolve many of our problems with civics.

diana_eva, on 2017-October-16, 13:25, said:

I am responding twice to your post because I believe you touched on a critical issue of our times: from where do we receive our believable information? The reason this question is critical is that it goes to the issue of how much damage did the Russians do to our past election by their disinformation warfare? If facebook shares and twitter retweets are a major source of a person's information, then the information sabotage may well have turned the tide by infusing enough hatred and fear of Clinton (which is expressed by Kaitlyn) to energize more voters to go to the polls to try to make certain Hillary did not win, while demoralizing enough potential Clinton voters to stay home due to doubt.

Preventing a repeat attack on the next elections should be priority one for this government; unfortunately, because the majority party benefited from the interference, there is no sense of urgency to try to repair the problem. It is a conundrum.

Zelandakh, on 2017-October-17, 00:25, said:

I think you have hit upon an important point that the infusion of state-sponsored cultural influence is impacting and has impacted education. In many of the red states, Protestant religious influence, which, to be fair, is a strong majority in those states, is introduced into the schools while critical thought is muffled as criticism of "open discussion" and "alternate values and ideas".

Separation of church and state is critical to state education; truly, separation of church and education is critical to reason.

Zelandakh, on 2017-October-17, 00:25, said:

I wouldn't necessarily blame the greater focus on STEM, but more the insistent focus on testing. As Civics/Government is usually a 12th grade subject (at least in CA), it never got tested, and therefore not emphasized. As Zelandakh says, students from a rich educational background don't get shortchanged on this, because there is an AP Government test that ensures that they will get an education in Govt/Civics (and AP tests usually require critical reasoning, not just memorization of facts.

I really hope that Common Core will help with this, with the greater emphasis on critical reasoning. All courses are supposed to support this, so even if students aren't taking a government course until 12th grade, hopefully they'll at least be experienced in critical reasoning and will be able to apply it in Civics/Govt class even if they're not tested on it by the state.

As a side note, my Government class (and it was even labelled AP, and at an otherwise good public school) was rubbish. I studied for the exam anyway, and passed, but only two other students in the class of 30 did that. The teacher was terrible, and made no attempt to teach us. I complained to the principal and my sister reports that he was slightly better, but I do wonder if others had the same experience. But more details likely don't belong in this thread.

Winstonm, on 2017-October-17, 09:03, said:

But isn't that exactly what you are doing by your comments about Trump supporters. Believe it or not, there are many well principled, moral, and intelligent people who disagree with your liberal/progressive viewpoint. You choose to go low and label them with various terms that are nothing more than that old propaganda technique known as "guilt by association". So, in your own way, you're engaging in the very tribalism that your attributing to me.

rmnka447, on 2017-October-17, 10:24, said:

I assume you're talking to Winston only because he's the only one that's not too far gone? Most of the board dismisses me (and probably the other conservatives; I know JonOttowa got trashed here) as a raving lunatic whose education was lacking (to put it nicely.) And yet, I am arguably intelligent (average 135 on IQ tests), and well principled and moral enough to go to the director after I "won" a tournament event and convince him that he had factored so that boards we did well on counted more than the others and that we should only be second (it might be pointed out that most people wouldn't even notice.) I have recently been labelled as nauseating (this comment got a positive reputation from one of your more respected and supposedly nicer members), uneducated, lazy, a troll, and uninformed. And to be honest, this shabby treatment of me is extremely mild compared to how most treated Jon. However, even though I catch a little of that from Winston, he seems to be among the most reasonable in the discussions.

It's no surprise that conservatives who which to discuss issues usually go elsewhere. The same initial post from Ashley Johnson on another, usually more caustic, board has led to a serious discussion in how to eliminate the disadvantage that blacks currently suffer in our society. Being conservative on a mostly liberal board makes my posts more valuable since I can offer input into which ideas would be palatable to conservative voters.

Kaitlyn S, on 2017-October-17, 10:50, said:

Kaitlyn, I think most of the board likes you.

Jon was a raving lunatic, you are not. Please stop associating yourself to him. Jon was intentionally posting BS, he knew it was wrong. He was also keen to hurt people, I doubt you would ever do such a thing.

You seem to genuinely fall for all sorts of ridiculous claims and conspiracy theories. It just makes no sense to me at all how can an intelligent person like you believe the conspiracy theories and propaganda that turned Hillary Clinton into a worse and more dangerous candidate than Trump. I don't think you realize how absurd and laughable this is to basically everyone outside of US.

Kaitlyn S, on 2017-October-15, 19:50, said:

I'm still waiting for explanations of:

1. If this is all about the Supreme Court, where are the 5-4 decisions which would've destroyed our country if there was just one more liberal justice to swing the vote the other way? Are you afraid that the Court might rule that unlimited corporate political donations are not in fact protected by the first amendment? That the Court would restore the principles of the Voting Rights Act and allow minority votes to count as much as white votes? That maybe they'd put a ban on extreme political gerrymandering? Or maybe that they'd rule the 2nd amendment doesn't protect automatic weapons? Is there something I'm missing here?

2. Last I checked we needed Senate approval for a Supreme Court Justice anyway. With Republicans controlling the Senate (and their refusal to even debate the relatively moderate Merrick Garland) why do you think a President Hillary Clinton could even have put a liberal Justice on the Court?

3. If it's not about the Supreme Court, why do you think Hillary Clinton would be any worse than Barack Obama or Bill Clinton? She had pretty similar policies (she was kinda running for Obama's third term). The economy (and the stock market) did pretty well in both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidencies, we didn't get involved in any new wars... I can understand if you don't agree with all their policies but it seems pretty far out there to say the last eight years were such a terrible disaster that four more would destroy the country?

4. If you're somehow worried that Hillary is "in the pocket of Wall Street" or something like that, look how many Wall Street people Trump has appointed! He's basically handed over running the government to a bunch of rich CEOs and a few generals, with Goldman-Sachs alums all over the place. And he's very obviously using his office to make money for himself and his family. I'm not sure how Hillary could be worse than that.

5. Anyway, you have to admit that Trump is pretty erratic. He pulls us out of global agreements, says wacky things that make little sense, gets in twitter wars over all kinds of dumb stuff. He seems to enjoy antagonizing North Korea. Don't you think an experienced and steady hand on the foreign policy controls would make us a lot safer?

Kaitlyn S, on 2017-October-17, 10:50, said:

I agree a lot with your comments. Winnie does come up with some very solid arguments for his point of view. However, there are times that he simply engages in name calling and demeaning comments about conservatives and/or Trump supporters. There are also other times that he offers a lot of stuff that simply is people with a point of view just going through a series of logic to prove what they thought in the first place. To me, that stuff is sadly reminiscent of Captain Quigg from Herman Wouk's novel "The Caine Mutiny" sans the steel ball bearings.

Like you, I'm no dummy. Not sure of the exact IQ number, but definitely well above 115, the top end of "normal" IQs.

The interesting part about IQ and being ill-informed is that there seems to be essentially no correlation. You need to be fairly intelligent to be a 9/11 truther, since all the conspiracy theories are fairly convoluted and require quite a bit of information to process before you can really get into them.

Of course, IQ is not the same as intelligence.

Kaitlyn S, on 2017-October-17, 10:50, said:

Who said anything about education and IQ? As I wrote in my previous post, it is completely possible to be a well-educated racist asshole and score highly on IQ tests. IQ isn't enough to overcome your biases and blind spots. ("Intelligence" would help, if that word were well-defined.)
rmnka is a good example. He writes well, knows a lot, he is clearly "intelligent". But often he writes things that make it obvious how much he is living in an echo chamber far removed from reality that he has no clue how ridiculous his arguments look to someone from outside his world.

And btw, maybe the case of Jonottawa should cause you to reconsider. Quite a few of us---well ok, I can speak for myself here if you prefer---considered him (as in Jonottawa the poster - obviously I had no idea whether that bears resemblance to his real life persona) an obvious racist. There was something completely off about his arguments - but they completely made sense if you assumed he was a racist.
You thought otherwise. Ok fair enough, you can come to different conclusions, such a judgement is always indirect.

Then it turned out that he (as in his public twitter persona) is an outright fan of neo-nazi groups, regularly retweeting racist posts (most recent theme: "The US constitution won't survive a non-white majority.") Shouldn't that, perhaps, lead you to reconsider your previous judgement?

rmnka447, on 2017-October-17, 10:24, said:

I recognize there are conservatives who support Trump; however, I also am aware of many who are dismayed by him and think he should not be in office. My question is do you make this separation? I also realize that there are many on the more liberal side who did not like Hillary at all but who belived she was a safer choice for the country than Trump. I also know there are many young, open-minded liberals who would not mind testing Sanders's style democratic-socialism. In that same mix, there are those of a liberal bent who do not want to see that type of excess.

For me, I have always been at least a mild supporter of the John Kasich school of conservatism. I am an adamant enemy of the Ted Cruz brand of conservatism. I recognize they are not they same. I wonder if you recognize their differences.

Kaitlyn S, on 2017-October-17, 10:50, said:

JonOttowa got trashed he because he deserved it personally - he tried to get a fellow poster fired from his job because Jon could not effectively refute Mike's arguments! There is a limit to free speech and action - see "civics" discussion.

rmnka447, on 2017-October-17, 14:27, said:

I make no bones about not personally ever supporting Donald Trump; however, I do quibble with the the claim that I have always denigrated Trump supporters; I, in fact, have posted to one Trump supporter in particular that he was intelligent but had fallen for Trump's scam. It wasn't until after the first 90-120 days or so in office that I began calling out continued Trump support as being truly deplorable. And I stand by that claim.

That does not mean that I think they are stupid - misguided is a better term, and misguided in the sense of a misunderstanding of how interconnected all species are, including all humans.

At heart, I think Trump supporters have juvenile thinking patterns, and I wouldn't say that unless I, myself, had been in their shoes until well into my late 40s. So if I call you a moron, it's because I was a moron once myself.

It is ever so cute wathcing people attempting to brag about their IQ scores.

The tests are pretty much meaningless, especially when comparing across socio economic groups or different ages.

With this said and done, i would dearly love to see both Trump and Tillerson take an IQ publically. Better yet, make them take some appropriate version of the GREs or even the ASVAB.

hrothgar, on 2017-October-17, 20:21, said:

And even if the tests are meaningful, the things they test have little to do with the ability to govern well.

The only point in having them take the tests would be because I'm fairly certain that Tillerson would win "bigly", and it would just be another chink in Trump's armor. But I also expect he'd find a way to spin it as not important (and in this case he'd probably be right).

A personality profile test would probably be a more useful test for Trump. But what's the chance that Trump would answer honestly and we'd get an accurate picture of his narcissistic personality disorder?