Elementary, Dear Donnie

Donnie has been kind enough to rebuttal my last dazibao. This response isn't a dazibao, because then I'd have to cram a summary of his initial rebuttal, my last dazibao, and his rebuttal to my rebuttal of his rebuttal all in one piece that could, theoretically, be physically distributed. It's much easier to keep it on the internet where I can just say read this link: http://redcityblues.blogspot.com/2008/12/elf-education-liquidation-front.html I suggest you keep both this blog and his open in seperate windows so you can go back and forth, since I address his blog directly without quoting it in my own pretty often.

First things first: I'm actually a guy.

My rebuttal to the first paragraph solid of his post, about progress and how the free market inhibits it, is "prove it." Global warming? Between 1920 and 1940, arctic temperature anomalies spiked upwards with absolutely no corresponding spike in CO2. So what causes global warming? We don't actually have the evidence to find out. Maybe CO2 (and, thus, capitalism) does have something to do with it, but maybe not. Obesity can be attributed to capitalism? Proof, please, I think prosperity is the cause of obesity, whether that prosperity is brought on by the free market or not (unless, of course, you're advocating that everyone should be miserably poor, which would explain why you seem to like the Soviet Union). The oil crisis can be attributed to capitalism? So if we weren't capitalists, we'd magically have more oil? Or are you once again contending that people should be poor? Credit card debt can be attributed to capitalism? No, credit card debt can be attributed to a lack of foresight. If they thought about what they were doing in advance, if they thought like capitalists, people would realize that credit cards are a bad deal and the whole industry would go under. The fact that our schools are grotesquely underfunded has nothing to do with capitalism: school funding is a government function. That problem can be attributed to socialism.

On to the second paragraph: I think I said already that my philosophy is heartlessly realistic. You've failed to give me any evidence that my purely capitalistic outlook on the world is incorrect, and given the massive amounts of progress that came out of the US and Europe immediately after World War II (just about every modern appliance in existence) compared to that of the USSR (they invented the Klashinakov assault rifle, a killing machine. Hooray for them), I think there's some precedent for capitalism and progress going hand in hand. Besides, I never said that High School students had to succeed or die, merely that they had to adapt or die, that they can't just keep trying the same thing over and over again and expect it to magically start working someday. That's also my take on communism, by the way.

Now in the third paragraph you point out a common misconception that a quick look at history will rapidly prove horribly incorrect, that teenagers have no discipline. Well, they certainly had discipline in Han Dynasty China, where the age of adulthood was fifteen, and in certain Native American tribes, where it was thirteen. They had discipline as young as fourteen or fifteen in medieval Europe. People have a marked tendency to live down to low expectations, however. Because they're asked to be nothing more than drones in school and expected to be idiots after it, most teenagers do exactly that. When expected to be competent adults, as in the Han Dynasty, teenagers did so. They adapted. So yes, I believe teenagers are fully capable of handling the challenge. You give them far too little credit. I don't think being thrown into the real world at the age of fourteen would be significantly more traumatic than being thrown into it at eighteen, besides which I'm not suggesting we make them live or die by success, only by their capability to adapt. I'm simply suggesting we teach them the rules of the real world instead of forcing them to learn as they go once they become adults.

Next paragraph: You're being pretty vague here, but you're kind of implying that Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Iraq, all three countries that are famous for their mass graves, aren't really that bad. Are you serious?

You've contradicted yourself in the next paragraph. Your incentive for respecting the math teacher is that he has power over you, as you said, which means there could be nasty consequences for failing to respect him. I never said the free market was a bureaucratic dictatorship. Housing, actually, is an area wherein the bureaucracy is rapidly crumbling thanks to the power of the internet. You can compare housing prices yourself, now. The secrets held by the real estate bureaucracies are out, and everyone wins except the bureaucrats.

The school system is made to educate? What's the purpose of education? You aren't seriously advocating that we shove random trivia down students throats for no reason whatsoever? If we're going to do that, why not make it trivia they're interested in, at least? Teach them HALO and Paris Hilton, because if the only purpose of school is to fill their heads up with information unrelated to reality, there's no point in not making it a fun experience.