Why not?
(My edits in italics.)
The fact is that our votes increasingly mean less and less. The politicians are not making laws based on the populace’s desires, but based on corporation’s and rich folks’ wishes.
The Devil does not need you to advocate for him…he can advocate for himself.
It may be a meme (I’ve not seen it, if it is), but you are doing my message a disservice by not quoting the entire sentence, and by leaving out the context of my entire reply as commentary of Melz’s comment on Jim Crow’s legacy.
My apologies for not quoting you in full, but I was only trying to point* out meme complexes influencing any discussion like this, and in the end how they deeply influence educational funding, not attempting to characterize your comment or respond to it as a whole. (And remember discourse lets one click the quote or uparrow to get full context.)
*not originally my point, full credit to Dawkins who writes far more intelligibly and eloquently than I.
There’s interesting and diverse opinion on the “white liberal guilt” meme here, here, and here. Or you can google “liberal guilt” or “everyone is a racist” and find millions of articles, many of them completely contradictory, which is typical of extremely strong sociopolitical memes.
I was thinking about how we call powerful, wealthy Russian “oligarchs” as a mix of recognizing the truth of Russian politics and plain old name-calling.
I wondered to myself, why don’t I say, “Charles Koch, an American oligrach…” I imagine the parallels are near complete.
I don’t see why not. The levels of extreme inequality aren’t yet as evident (or are better hidden) in America as they are in Russia, but the Kochs and other billionaires are indeed oligarchs.
I really need to stop fooling around, and make that into a tee-shirt already.
I thought it started with description of regimes like Mobutu Sese Seko and Ferdinand Marcos. Leaders who used the GDP as their personal piggy bank in the 70’s and 80’s.
I first heard it from people who’d fallen in love with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I increasingly hear it in the context of right wing rants characterizing all taxation as theft. Online these screeds are usually couched as Austrian economics (and indeed, they highlight the failings of that school) but in meatspace I find that such rants are even less coherent and have a better than 50% chance of veering off into racist bigotry or weird crypto-Christian nuttery.
I heard it first from reading about the Congo prior to the “African World War” of the late 90’s. The entire economy of that country was built on bribery and stealing everything not nailed down. Especially from foreign mineral extraction companies.
Ugh! Those links were the most ridiculous things I have read in the last few hours.
Cannot stand the “Taxation is theft” Ayn Randoid garbage.
The people who ascribe to these right wing screeds are ones who literally turned taxation into theft. Giving tax breaks to the wealthy and major corporations at the expense of everyone else. Robbing from the middle, working class and poor to give to the rich.
Definition of kleptocracy: Government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.
Regardless to how any term gets ‘co-opted’ by opportunists causing it to take on negative connotations, (like “incel,” for instance) words still have specific meanings.
And there can be no doubt that the current governing body of the US has been corrupted to the point that the term is quite accurate.
Getting back to the actual topic at hand, the intentional underfunding of the public education system will only continue to have even more of a detrimental impact on our society.
Same here, from outside the meme’s influence it’s obviously nonsense.
But pointing out that the memes are fallacious doesn’t do anything but discredit your input with those infected - all the big successful memes work that way, including the ones that you and I are infected with. That’s what makes them successful, in large part; and it’s the real explanation for those studies that claim to show people double down when their mistaken ideas are confronted. Successful memes protect themselves.
Memes I’ve identified as driving the destruction of educational opportunity in the USA include:
- I don’t have kids so I shouldn’t pay for schools
- Throwing money at schools doesn’t help children
- Public schools are just communist training grounds, children learn best at home
- Public schools are unsafe for my children to attend, so I should not have to financially support them
- My money was already taxed when I earned it as income, taxing it twice is unfair
Every one of the above was presented to me with an air of providing true enlightenment <eyeroll> and it was expected that if I was a right thinking person I would immediately agree.
This is one of those statements that a lot of automation fatalists believe. Robot welding is great for repetitive work. It isn’t great for an awful lot of specialty, one-off, and/or repair weld jobs. I’m not trying to be a sneering critic. Just mentioning that we really are a long way off from “Robots stole my job” for a lot of skilled trades work.
Robots are great at repetitive work. Humans are great at specialty production.
You need to get to know America better and talk to some people who’ve experienced the blunt end of these trends. School systems are more segregated now then they were in the period of busing. You really need to open your eyes and stop denying the truth.
Speaking of which…
God damn it, Joe Biden…
The period of busing in Delaware is now. It has not ended, although only the poor and lower middle class are truly subject to it, at this point.
Biden was right, in the narrow sense that Judge Schwartz’s busing order meant a degradation of the public school system, a degradation that has not been remediated and continues to erode educational opportunities in the state. Busing truly was “the atom bomb of anti-discrimination weapons” and I can speak to this personally, as I was at ground zero. My own high school was forcibly desegregated in my sophomore year, and my children quite recently attended a majority-minority high school in a predominantly white neighborhood.
But Murray Schwartz was right, too, in a much wider sense - the political establishment in Delaware then was not like it is today. Today, rampant discrimination based upon class and economic status is openly practiced at all levels and disproportionately affects people of color, but in the 60s and 70s it was explicitly and demonstrably racist, with the Old Boys in power (primarily Democrats, then and now) purposely flaunting court orders intended to provide equal educational opportunities for non-white children. Despite the damage that court-ordered busing has done and continues to do within Delaware’s public education system, there was probably no other way to break color line racism in our schools. The quality of education for the white poor and middle class had to go down in order for the quality of education for non-white children to rise, because of the extreme racism of the political establishment and populace, particularly at the school board level, where it has not entirely been eradicated today.
tl;dr version: Joe did what he had to do to stay in politics, which was acknowledge the extreme damage to Delaware’s educational system that probably had to happen in order to begin the (yet unfinished) job of providing equal educational opportunities to children of color.
(BBS is blocked on my other computers, so I probably won’t get to add anything more to this today - but I’m pretty well informed regarding Delaware’s schools, so I can provide more info if any of the above isn’t clear. Just ask!)
