Testing Chat V: The Final Mysterious Island: Miami Beach

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Some of you may find this interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/educ ... eague.html

A taste:

"Every year, TFA installs thousands of unprepared 22-year-olds, the majority of whom are from economically and culturally privileged backgrounds, into disadvantaged public schools. They are given a class of their own after only five to six weeks of training and a scant number of hours co-teaching summer school (in a different city, frequently in a different subject, and with students in a different age group than the one they end up teaching in the fall). College and university faculty allow these well-meaning young people to become pawns in a massive game to deprofessionalize teaching. TFA may look good on their resumés and allow them to attain social capital for their bright futures in consulting firms, law schools, and graduate schools. But in exchange for this social capital, our students have to take part in essentially privatizing public schools."


"In contrast to my TFA experience, more and more TFA recruits are now being placed in charter schools, where they are isolated from communities of experienced local teachers who can help train and ground them. “Veteran” teachers at charter schools administered by TFA alumni tend to have only three to four years of experience under their belts. The principals often have just a year’s or two years’ more experience than the teachers."

[adr]

whelp i just got off the phone with the google guy

i had to turn them down. he started listing their locations with various programming and system administration openings and how great they are.... but none of them were my house.

oh well, the budget deficit continues.

[Jung]

Contrarianism of the day:

Such findings have led some political scientists to entertain a heretical idea called the Capitalist Peace. The word liberal in Liberal Peace refers both to the political openness of democracy and to the economic openness of capitalism, and according to the Capitalist Peace heresy, it's the economic openness that does most of the pacifying. In arguments that are sure to leave leftists speechless, advocates claim that many of Kant's arguments about democracy apply just as well to capitalism. Capitalism pertains to an economy that runs by voluntary contracts between citizens rather than government command and control, and that principle can bring some of the same advantages that Kant adduced for democratic republics. The ethic of voluntary negotiation within a country (like the ethic of law-governed transfer of power) is naturally externalized to its relationships with other countries. The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader's freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinksmanship. And whether or not a leader's power is constrained by the ballot box, in a market economy it is constrained by stakeholders who control the means of production and who might oppose a disruption of international trade that's bad for business. These constraints put a brake on a leader's personal ambition for glory, grandeur, and cosmic justice and on his temptation to respond to a provocation with a reckless escalation.

Democracies tend to be capitalist and visa versa, but the correlation is imperfect: China, for example, is capitalist but autocratic, and India is democratic but until recently was heavily socialist. Several political scientists have exploited this slippage and pitted democracy and capitalism against each other in analyses of datasets of militarized disputes or other international crises. Like Russet and Oneal, they all find a clear pacifying effect of capitalist variables such as international trade and openness to the global economy. But some of them disagree with the duo about whether democracy also makes a contribution to peace, once its correlation with capitalism is statistically removed. So while the relative contributions of political and economic liberalism are currently mired in regression wonkery, the overarching theory of the Liberal Peace is on solid ground.

I don't find this implausible.

I find lolberts and Randroids and the general "fuck the poor!" sensibility pretty odious, but I'm pretty skeptical of the notion that exists on some corners of the left that the existence of merchants and bankers is fundamentally a disease on society. It's an idea that starts to look rather less liberal when you think about its pedigree ("merchants and bankers are parasites because they don't make stuff, of course I'm a warrior aristocrat who exists to live in luxury on the products of poorer people, wage bloody wars for my own ends, and terrorize the populace with torture and murder, but I'm a totes necessary God-ordained part of the system! A lot of them are Jews anyway, so fuck them!").

[Bakustra]

Contrarianism of the day:

Such findings have led some political scientists to entertain a heretical idea called the Capitalist Peace. The word liberal in Liberal Peace refers both to the political openness of democracy and to the economic openness of capitalism, and according to the Capitalist Peace heresy, it's the economic openness that does most of the pacifying. In arguments that are sure to leave leftists speechless, advocates claim that many of Kant's arguments about democracy apply just as well to capitalism. Capitalism pertains to an economy that runs by voluntary contracts between citizens rather than government command and control, and that principle can bring some of the same advantages that Kant adduced for democratic republics. The ethic of voluntary negotiation within a country (like the ethic of law-governed transfer of power) is naturally externalized to its relationships with other countries. The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader's freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinksmanship. And whether or not a leader's power is constrained by the ballot box, in a market economy it is constrained by stakeholders who control the means of production and who might oppose a disruption of international trade that's bad for business. These constraints put a brake on a leader's personal ambition for glory, grandeur, and cosmic justice and on his temptation to respond to a provocation with a reckless escalation.

Democracies tend to be capitalist and visa versa, but the correlation is imperfect: China, for example, is capitalist but autocratic, and India is democratic but until recently was heavily socialist. Several political scientists have exploited this slippage and pitted democracy and capitalism against each other in analyses of datasets of militarized disputes or other international crises. Like Russet and Oneal, they all find a clear pacifying effect of capitalist variables such as international trade and openness to the global economy. But some of them disagree with the duo about whether democracy also makes a contribution to peace, once its correlation with capitalism is statistically removed. So while the relative contributions of political and economic liberalism are currently mired in regression wonkery, the overarching theory of the Liberal Peace is on solid ground.

I don't find this implausible.

I find lolberts and Randroids and the general "fuck the poor!" sensibility pretty odious, but I'm pretty skeptical of the notion that exists on some corners of the left that the existence of merchants and bankers is fundamentally a disease on society. It's an idea that starts to look rather less liberal when you think about its pedigree ("merchants and bankers are parasites because they don't make stuff, of course I'm a warrior aristocrat who exists to live in luxury on the products of poorer people, wage bloody wars for my own ends, and terrorize the populace with torture and murder, but I'm a totes necessary God-ordained part of the system! A lot of them are Jews anyway, so fuck them!").

Pinker is either too stupid or too self-assured to enumerate the assumption that non-capitalist countries are inherently undemocratic that his analysis relies on- after all, if stakeholders can arrest war in a capitalist economy, then why wouldn't they be able to do so in a socialist economy? Because he's assuming that socialist economies are inherently too authoritarian for citizens to count as economic stakeholders, or more charitably he's only using historical analysis, but that would still seem to require noting the paucity of data in some way, and he counts India as having been socialist under the INC, which is, uh, reaching a bit.

But let's go closer to the basic problem here- this presumes that the capitalist class has no reason to promote wars, which is pretty naive in a cultural context where the term "military-industrial complex" is still floating around, and this is almost certainly operating on a limited set of data- if you look at the USA of the 1800s, it was essentially continuously at war until the massacre at Wounded Knee. So where most, if not all, of the colonial powers. Of course, the basic thesis is that violence has declined, but this should still be noted in the context of proposing capitalism as a peacemaker.

But when we get down to it, the biggest problem with the peace is that it relies on fundamental misunderstandings of how markets work. To begin with, the idea that markets are entirely about voluntary negotiation is willfully ignorant in the context of industrial society, and would have been willfully ignorant in the context of Gilgamesh's court. First of all, there are involuntary demands of the body- food, shelter, water- which necessarily cannot be negotiated for indefinitely and so produce inflexible demands upon the buyer. But these are in theory (and undoubtedly cartels are deprecated here) so widely produced that they are effectively kept low in price, and in any case they are secondary to the nature of the market.

Negotiations can only be purely voluntary if we assume that disparities of power do not constrain the weaker person. Because the nature of markets, which grant power in proportion to wealth, is all about disparity of power. The negotiator with the greater wealth may thus constrain the freedom of the other, by simple means such as dictating what prices they will sell or buy at. Of course, if the wealth was regularly distributed out completely evenly, then this would vanish, but that seems to miss the point of the market entirely.

So much for the disciple of Christina Hoff Sommers and other such reactionary thinkers. In any case, I don't think your critique holds as substantial for anyone beyond actual children. I mean, merchants? Really? I do want to write a meatier response, but I really don't want to end up boring you and me with 101-level stuff, either.

[Infinity Biscuit]

Is Pinker the guy who wrote that big book on how democracy and freedom is tied to being literally perfect or am I confusing him with someone else?

[Bakustra]

Is Pinker the guy who wrote that big book on how democracy and freedom is tied to being literally perfect or am I confusing him with someone else?

He did write one about how postmodernism was responsible for the Holocaust, and he did defend Larry "dump all the pollution in Bangladesh" Summers when Summers declared that women just weren't interested in STEM fields. edit: Also, an article in which he pretended that there was no such thing as secular ethical philosophy that wasn't some sort of scientific ethics.

[xon]

From that quote, all I can take away is that Pinker has a rather delusional and limited view of captalism.

"The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy.." Why don't he just confess he wants to say the "invisible hand" of the freemarket?

Also, what type of person would attempt to argue that modern stock markets have transparency in the face of sub-millisecond high-frequency trading, deliberately opaque derivatives and other toxic "financial products", 'black' trading exchanges with no official visibility and banks with cling to mark-to-myth for evaluations of thier assets?

[Jung]

So I was looking up some stuff on life in the Roman Empire this evening.

From the Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome by Lesley Adkins, Roy Adkins pg. 274:

In the pre-Christian Roman period, there was no word for religion: the word religio meant reverence.

What practices are so ubiquitous and embedded in our culture that we have never had to articulate them as words?

[Civil War Man]

What practices are so ubiquitous and embedded in our culture that we have never had to articulate them as words?

Wouldn't it be hard to answer that question specifically because we've never had to articulate them as words?

[Infinity Biscuit]

I'm not sure it's the same thing but on a similar line look at all the words that have had to be pushed by social justice movements over the years (and the resulting blowback from it). Years ago it was "I'm not 'straight', I'm normal", now it's "I'm not 'allistic'/'cisgender'/etc., I'm normal".

[evilsoup]

no, I think that's spot-on as an example
also classism, which is interesting because before the left imploded with the end of the cold war there actually was some comment on that stuff; now it's limited to academia (speaking for the UK here of course).
Like
today on the radio there was some government type saying how schools should ban slang because their students need to learn 'proper' English in order to get on in life. On the one hand, yeah, that's the world we live in; on the other hand, there was nobody challenging him with things like 'actually, 'innit' is perfectly easy to understand, the only reason you don't like it is because of the work of dozens of smug middle-class comedians mocking and degrading working-class dialects plus your own internalised snobbery, you toffee-nosed oxbridge bastard'.

also the whole chav thing

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

'allistic'

While probably a hundred times better than 'neurotypical' I clearly need some kind of RSS feed for keeping up with the hip jargon

[Infinity Biscuit]

Yeah I only heard of it like a week or so ago, myself :L

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

I have to admit that when I first learned the 'cisgender' term I spent a few minutes trying to decide how it should be pronounced

And being slightly concerned that it sounded like a variant of 'siscon'

[Infinity Biscuit]

You know I've never actually looked it up but I've always pronounced the prefix "cis-" like the first syllable of "scissor" (roughly "siz" if it's different in other accents). I suppose I should go look that up some day :L

Edit: The dictionary says I'm wrong but everyone I've talked to in person has used that pronunciation too (but then again maybe they learnt it FROM ME dun dun dunnnnn)

[evilsoup]

I've always thought it was pronounced 'sis', that's what I remember from chemistry in school anyway

[Losonti Tokash]

I always said sizgender so fuck

[Infinity Biscuit]

Well the dictionary is descriptivist so if enough of us keep going on eventually we'll be right anyway :L

[evilsoup]

I've always thought it was pronounced 'sis', that's what I remember from chemistry in school anyway

on the other hand I failed that class so

[Glass Fort MacLeod]

'allistic'

While probably a hundred times better than 'neurotypical' I clearly need some kind of RSS feed for keeping up with the hip jargon

I need an autocorrect just to *remember* not to use the wrong terminology. I don't get much IRL use using correct terminology. I have a hard enough time catching myself and not using 'I'M A JUGGALO WOOP WOOP' as another term for 'stupid' the way most people do. I've almost even managed it.

[Losonti Tokash]

haha i was so fucking confused until i remembered that word filter from ages ago

[joviwan]

...What word filter?

retard?
moron?
idiot?

EDIT:doesn't seem to be any of those.

fag?

EDIT: okay someone help me out here, what word is being filtered

[Infinity Biscuit]

Please stop

[The Spartan]

'allistic'

While probably a hundred times better than 'neurotypical' I clearly need some kind of RSS feed for keeping up with the hip jargon

Wait, when did this one happen?

[Infinity Biscuit]

I'm not sure of the etymology but it came from people being dissatisfied with "neurotypical" as a word (and while it doesn't affect me so I don't really get much say I can see where that distaste comes from)