What the hell happened to Texas?Follow

My favorite part of the discussion was how Gbaji didn't have any of the "dots" since he was basing his "conclusions" solely off a summery of a conclusion. I had actually looked up the study itself via a journal search (from my old college account) and could read the entire study. I pointed this out to him numerous times.

Then he started saying the data didn't matter at all

I'm pretty sure it was. But you need to use scare quotes around "expert" each time so you'll know they're not nearly as qualified as him.

I was most amused that someone with a lot of intellectual skill but absolutely no intellectual traits was trying to claim his job was what gave him superior critical thinking abilities.

You are really suggesting that a school curriculum should be based on direct democracy? You don't realize how this could be a bad idea?

Edited, Nov 2nd 2011 7:48am by Lubriderm

Of course I realize how this could be a bad idea. But it's less bad than the alternative, which is a group of appointed social engineers setting the curriculum instead. And... In case you missed it, this very problem crops up because we have a school system which gives parents very very little choice about where their children go to school.

Ideally, I'd prefer the consumers of a product (education in this case) to have many choices and pick the one they like the most. If the government came in tomorrow and made it so that only the wealthy could afford to buy anything but the state issued standard shoes, you can bet that there'd be just as much political fighting over what style, colors, shapes, etc those standard shoes came in. We create this conflict because we have an education system designed pretty much directly to maximize the amount of control the government has over what is taught.


The conservative answer is to not do this in the first place. And sometimes, the only way to get liberals to realize what a bad idea our current methodology is, is to propose changes to it that they don't like. Pretty straightforward IMO.

Gbaji (and people like him) don't want the government to interfere in his life. Just the lives of others.

I'm not sure how you arrive anywhere remotely near that conclusion based on my statements in this thread. I'm advocating a course of action to minimize the degree to which government gets to decide the specifics of any/every child's education, by giving parents greater choices regarding which schools they send their kids to. WTF?

Funny how you've convinced yourself that so you can still use a mirror

Ah... So because people are too stupid to make good choices for themselves, lets take their choices away. It's for their own good!

Ah... well! If the stake of the country's survival is at stake, I guess that whole "liberty" thing is just overrated. By all means, let's give up our liberty to those who will make better choices for us than we will..... NOT! Sorry, I happen to believe that whatever dumbing down may be occurring is being caused by the increase of a government that protects the public from the consequences of their own choices. We need less of that, not more.

Suddenly home schooling and private schools are illegal?

But bang that "Liberty!" drum harder. After all, you don't have to hear anyone else's opinion when you're whaling away on a drum

I'm against an option that's curriculum involves removing choices. Why do you think people are too stupid to realize you're for social engineering and removal of choices when it's a Republican talking point?

Edited, Nov 3rd 2011 5:23pm by lolgaxe

Could you repeat that in English? I honestly have no clue what you're trying to say. What we teach in sex ed doesn't "remove choices". It affects what children are taught. That's not the same thing.

Unless you're arguing that parents should not have a say about what their kids are taught in school? If so, then who gets to decide this? You don't see how that leads us to conflicts over curriculum? If we gave parents more choices, then we'd have less fighting, and more people would be happy.

It's always amusing that any argument that Gbaji can't counter is "irrelevant".

It's even more amusing when someone assumes that when I (correctly) point out an irrelevant argument this somehow means that I can't counter it.

When the argument you are using works equally well for either position being taken, your argument is irrelevant with regard to those positions. Joph's argument that it's ok to have a public school system which allows only one type of sex ed curriculum because parents can always home school or send their kids to private school applies equally well regardless of which one type of sex ed curriculum is being taught. Thus, it's "irrelevant" if one is trying to argue for a specific type to be the one that is taught.

I thought I explained this clearly enough in my initial response, but apparently not.

So you admit it's not some great loss of liberty. That's good. Now we can drop that stupid emotional canard and maybe talk like grown-ups.


So it goes with many things. There's an opportunity cost to buying a book rather than checking one out at the library. There's an opportunity cost to hiring private security at my business rather than relying solely on the police.

That said, when someone wants to inject kids into society who've been taught creationism and abstinence-only education, I don't have many worries about them paying a premium on that.


The other day, I called the fire department because of a grease fire. They were trying to use some godless chemical foam to put it out but I insisted that they use good ole fashioned American water. Supposedly their "experts" knew better than me and said water was a poor choice but I demanded that these were my tax dollars and my liberty was at stake if they were going to use their godless foam chemicals with my tax dollars.

Eventually my house burned down as did my neighbor's and I blamed the liberals.

Edited, Nov 3rd 2011 6:10pm by Jophiel

Nope. Just showing that your counter argument is irrelevant to the question of whether or not there's a loss of liberty involved. There absolutely is a loss of liberty when you take my tax dollars from me, then provide an education containing curriculum I don't agree with, and the only alternative is that I can always throw away the money I already paid for the public education, and then spend even more money/time on private education or homeschooling.

Give me a tax credit (not deduction) for the exact amount I pay for those things, and you've got a deal! Strange that liberals don't want to give up their tax dollars when indoctrinating children is on the line though!



How about we start with you dropping the ridiculously flawed logic?



So you agree that if I'm paying for some public service, I ought to have some say in how that service operates? Just checking, cause you seem to be veering off course again.



If the premium is that they are unprepared for life and therefore fail, then that's great. But the problem is that this doesn't tend to happen. Despite all that great education and knowledge held by liberal thinkers, for some bizarre reason, folks who are taught creationism and abstinence-only still seem to manage to be quite successful in life. They run thriving businesses, and... worst of all... they are members of happy families who aren't as likely to become dependent on the government! (oh the horror!!!).

What you're advocating isn't allowing the natural consequences of what someone teaches to their children to occur, but rather deciding first that what they're teaching is wrong/bad/stupid, but since the natural world doesn't support your assumption by hurting those people, you've decided to have the government step in and do it instead! Because despite all the social statistics and whatnot, there must be some trick going on here, because your college professors all told you what children should be taught, and they're not doing it right, but for some reason their lives aren't turning out horribly like you think they should. So let's make it more expensive for them to do what they're doing artificially since nature isn't being kind enough to do the right thing.


What a load of self-righteous crap!



This would be a wonderful analogy, except that the folks who want to put the fire out in a different way, don't end out with their homes burning down. In fact, their methods often work as well, or better than the methods the "experts" think they should use. And this apparently infuriates those experts and all of their followers who don't want to think that they could possibly be just wrong or anything.

Cart leading horse Joph. I honestly don't give a rats ass what we teach in sex ed, but if sufficient numbers of people disagree over what should be taught, then we ought to have some system for managing that instead of just fighting from on high for a "winner take all" government solution. That's a great way to ensure that half of the damn population is pissed off, is all.

ITT: We discover that telling kids about contraception is indoctrination.

Protip: Abstinence only education doesn't work. The USA has what is essentially the highest teen pregnancy rate in the world.

When the number of those parents become such a majority that the science curriculum has to be renamed to "non-science plus" in order to trick people into supporting it, you'll have a point.

There's a "loss of liberty" any time any tax dollars are spent how you don't like. Most times you don't even have the option of an alternative. Cry me a river.


Give me a tax credit for every single thing I don't like or feel like paying for. Oh, wait, that's retarded.


Sure. Should you have complete say in how it operates even to the extent of it operating contrary to the public good? Nah.


But it's not great. An uneducated populace is detrimental to the society as a whole.


...said the guy crying giant crocodile tears about "liberty" to justify pressing his conservative social engineering

I just have trouble understanding the whole abstinence-only thing.

Kind of a weird aside, but I grew up in a conservative small town, and went to a religious school for most of my early education. We still learned about condoms and other birth control methods. I mean, obviously, they empathized the abstinence part. It was more in line with the Bible, can't get diseases or pregnant if you don't have sex, blah blah, etc. but that didn't stop them from teaching us the other stuff as well.

Still don't understand why it is such a big deal now if it wasn't then. Maybe I just lived in a bubble.

No, I have a point now.

Since you're so fond of anecdotal "data", I'm willing to bet I know more parents than you just because I've got two kids of my own and I interact with more parents (school functions, sporting functions, etc.) And the talk always turns to the kids and usually school. And also let me point out that my experience with these parents spans almost a generation, since my oldest is 21 and my youngest is 9. In that time, I may have met one mom that was against sex ed in school. That means the majority of parents I know are for it. And none of us were tricked into thinking it was something it's not. Hell, even back in the dark ages of the 70's and 80's *I* was taught in school about condoms, the pills, the peepee goes into the other peepee...

And I'll be honest here and say that I saw something shiny and I've lost my train of thought, but I think I was going with something that supports most parents wanting sex ed. in the schools.

Or maybe they want more wine in schools. Both?

No one can, because whatever stance you take gbaji will google the opposite and then spew it at you.

Again, devil's advocate. Wishy washy and annoying.