Turning schools into profit-making enterprises has been a disaster, not only in the U.S., but also in Sweden. Applying Taylorism to schools makes perfect sense to the high modernist education reformer like Michelle Rhee or Arne Duncan, but does nothing positive to address the real complexities of the classroom.
In this week’s Diplomat column I think a bit about how to approach Thucydides:
If we start by acknowledging that the parts we’re taking are all archetypes, then literal fidelity to the narrative record becomes less important. And from this starting point, we can take a few important lessons; the dangers of power transition, the potentially dire effects of war on a democratic polity, the folly of strategic escalation, and the critical role that the whims of fate and human frailty play in geopolitics.
However, this approach also opens the question of why we should rely on Thucydides, rather than other available narratives. For East Asia, we have ready-made accounts that can provide the same kind of archetypes, mostly coming from ancient Chinese history. The Records of the Grand Historian detail conflicts, betrayals, and power shifts every bit as legendary in their complexity as those Thucydides describes. And perhaps we could productively understand China’s emerging A2/AD system-of-systems in the context of Mohist concepts of defensive “just war.” Such an examination might, at the least, give us a better appreciation of how policymakers themselves approach these complexities.
This is a fascinating piece on African-Americans negotiating the Jim Crow South by putting a turban on their heads and claiming they were Indian. Which worked, as they avoided the racial laws. Also, you can read about who must be the only black Lutheran in history.
This has the potential to be great, if by great you mean questioning whether to ever fly again.
The NFL constantly manages to show how little it cares about its players’ best-interest. When it comes to its relationship with college football, it also works hard to keep its free minor league system. Now the NFL has decided to cut back on the pre-draft evaluations it gives players, theoretically to protect them from making decisions about their own life declaring for the draft too early, but really from having to evaluate players earlier in their careers. Of course, some players are delusional about their prospects and declare too early (although a lot of these players are people already on their way out of their school for various reasons), but this has the effect of ensuring that the NFL has less of a chance of wasting resources while forcing a longer system of free labor that the NCAA relies upon.
For awhile back in the 2000s, it looked like Australia would become a world leader on progressive legislation, especially on environmental issues. Then Tony Abbott took over and decided modeling himself on George W. Bush would be quite a bit farther to the left than he was comfortable with. Evidently, enough Australians are cool with this that he keeps on trucking:
Conservative prime minister, climate change denier, and accused misogynist Tony Abbott was elected in September. He started working as the nation’s leader almost immediately, but he had to wait until this month for newly elected senators to take their seats. Abbott’s (conservative) Liberal party still doesn’t control the Senate, but it has found Senate allies in a powerful party that was founded just last year by kooky mining magnate Clive Palmer. Palmer held a press conference with Al Gore last month to announce that he opposed some of Abbott’s climate-wrecking policies, and that he wanted a carbon-trading program to replace the carbon tax. That now seems to have been smokestacks and mirrors. When it came to repealing Australia’s $US23.50 per metric ton carbon tax, the immodestly named Palmer United Party fell into line on Thursday, helping the repeal pass the Senate by a vote of 39 to 32, without demanding the establishment of any alternative.
But let us not pause to denounce sad falsehoods when the glorious truth beckons with her fiery lamp. How can one experience the perfect sexual experience?
In order to understand the perfect sexual experience, we first must say what sex is: it is copulation, the process by which two halves of a sexual whole find complement and completion, and reproduce. The sex act is the act of sexual union in sexual reproduction. The sexes, however, are spiritual rather than physical: men are masculine in psychology and mind and soul, masculine in speech and deportment and nuance in all they do just as women are feminine. The sexual union is spiritual, ordered toward the end of reproduction.
In other words, no gay-pill-buttsex.
Since sex is ordered toward reproduction, anything that hinders it is an imperfection. Prudence, if nothing else, would warn potential mother and potential fathers not to do the act which makes you a mother or a father until you have a household and loving union ready to rear children.
I don’t know this Prudence person is, but she sounds like kind of an asshole and maybe she should keep her fucking mouth shut.
If you are artificially sterile, or using contraception, you are holding back, you are not passionate about the sex, you are trying to use the sex rather than surrender to the sex.
You are trying to have sex without really having sex, and this alters your soul and body in countless subtle ways, and the woman knows it, and senses the mistrust, the misgivings, indeed, the fear — the nagging thought that the contraception might fail hangs across the passion and prevents total surrender to passion. And if she is using the pill, her hormones, the ones directly related to fertility, sex, sexual passion, and love have been interfered with. But even if she is not using the pill, she is using you and you are using her, trying to get the union of sex without the physical sex act and the physical results.
Thank you, Dr. John C. Wright!
The only way to make the contraception infallible is to agree to hinder the sex act by killing the child once he is conceived but before he is born, an act so horrific and unthinkable — even the Spartans did not make the baby’s own mother toss the helpless baby into the pit of the Apothetae — that no more need be said of it. If you doubt me, I’d like you to imagine holding your beloved in your arms, and whispering tenderly in her ear as the erotic passion mounts, “I love you and adore you and after I make mad, passionate love to you, we will kill Junior. We will kill him together! The doctor will pierce his delicate skull with scissors, and vacuum up his wee little brains!” — I am guessing that will kill the mood.
Right. We know what gets John C. Wright in the mood, don’t we? Lots of spittle-producing talk about those wanton, pill-popping liberal women and buttsexing men, I bet.
For her part, she must vow to love and honor and obey.
And if you do not understand about that obey part, you do not understand women. She wants a leader, an alpha male, a chief, a Christ, and you must be willing to die for her as Christ was willing to die for you, or she will not feel secure in your love. If she does not swear to obey, you are not a couple, not a dyad, not a unit, but are still two sovereigns dealing with each other at arm’s length, not intimate, and she cannot trust you fully, cannot love you fully, not with a divine and self-sacrificing love. And she knows you don’t love her fully, not with a love that is more than madness, more than sense, more than the universe.
Let the record show John C. Wright wants someone to obey him. Kinky.
Sex is spiritual because sex is divine.
OMG, John C. Wright only has one act, doesn’t he?! Sex is divine. Pooping is divine! Thomas Kincade paintings are divine! This soup is divine! My ass itches–HOW DIVINE!
Jesus Christ, this guy is a freak.
FROM THE COMMENTS!!:
You sir, are a modern Socrates! GREAT read!
31 historical terms for sex going back to 1351. I am familiar with “getting my ashes hauled” because it comes up in old blues songs. The rest are far older and I was not familiar with.
Kathleen Geier, Sarah Jaffe, and Sheila Bapat have a great discussion of how the Hobby Lobby and Harris decisions conspire to undermine women’s economic security. You should definitely read the entire thing, but Sarah’s piece is especially valuable. In part:
It should go without saying that the decision to have a child or not is one of the most profound economic decisions most of us will make in our lifetimes. The Supreme Court this week made it harder for lower-income women to be able to make that choice for themselves. While I support those who argue for the right of all people to enjoy sex on their own terms, we have spent far too little time elaborating the ways in which the “culture war” is a class war.
Take Hobby Lobby. The hashtag #NotMyBossBusiness gave me some hope that the discussion of this case would turn not on religion, hypocrisy or even just on corporate personhood but on the place where Americans’ freedoms are most curtailed: work. It is, after all, the boss, not the government, who has the most say over what we do and say, whether we can pay the rent or feed the kids, the boss who has increasingly sought the right to influence our political choices and what we wear and track our every move and keystroke.
Instead, I have watched photos of people going into Hobby Lobby stores to rearrange letter-blocks to read “pro-choice” flit across the Internet as if the workers who will have to put those blocks back away are unaware of their boss’s power over them. If we were more aware of this decision as one that will affect women not simply as women but as workers, we might stop and ask ourselves what it would mean to actually be in solidarity with the people who work at those stores, to help them get what they need.
The separation between abortion care and other healthcare that I commented on above plays out in Hobby Lobby, which attempts to paint birth control not as a legally required part of a worker’s compensation package, one that allows women to work on an equal footing with the men, but as something outside, different and worse. Or, in the voices of some dismissive commentators, simply less important, not a big deal, something easy enough for women to buy on their own.
If we recognized Hobby Lobby as a workplace issue, we might reply that the people who work at Hobby Lobby stores make between $9.50 and $14 an hour (and those are actually fairly good wages when it comes to retail work) and that $25 a month (if it’s actually that cheap; that depends on which form of contraceptive you’re using) is a significant extra expense if one is, say, raising children on the wages from that job.
I think the connection between the culture war and class war especially valuable since the culture war is very much a war against poor women seeking to control their own bodies and who lack options once the effects of the culture war are literally growing inside them. And the kind of activism that just makes Hobby Lobby workers have to labor harder while doing nothing to affect the company is the sort of the buying thriftshop clothes to protest sweatshops that might not be counterproductive but don’t really do anything to help the situation.
As I stated earlier, I don’t necessarily see the UAW-Volkswagen agreement as a major victory. It’s certainly a positive thing for the workers involved, but as something to celebrate, I’m less than sure. Others however disagree (as they did in comments to the original post). Joe Atkins:
The UAW knew that withdrawing its objections to February’s tainted election, in consensus with Volkswagen, would expedite the company’s decision on the new product line,” Casteel said in a formal statement. “The fact that the new line is being announced four days after the rollout of UAW Local 42 in Chattanooga reinforces the consensus that the UAW has reached with the company.”
Casteel said “a cornerstone of Volkswagen’s business model” is the Global Groups Works Council that provides employee representation on work-related issues at Volkswagen plants around the world.
In fact, Global Works Council chairman Bernd Osterloh, a strong supporter of union representation at the Chattanooga plant, was recently appointed to the board of directors of Volkswagen’s American operations. At one point, Osterloh said he would work to prevent the new SUV line from coming to Chattanooga if workers there didn’t get union representation.
Local 42 will not collect dues for the time being, and participation is voluntary. However, the UAW hopes membership will grow to a size that gives it weight in representing workers’ concerns at the plant. No formal agreement exists with Volkswagen regarding the local, but a “consensus” exists that allows the local to work with the company in the future, Casteel said.
This non-traditional approach to worker representation is somewhat similar to other efforts across the South to help those who have no collective voice vis-à-vis management. Examples include the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, both of which have won agreements with major corporations despite the fact that farm workers aren’t covered in the National Labor Relations Act.
The victories by FLOC and CIW are significant not only because of region but because of the type of laborers and industry involved (migrant immigrants in a heavily exploitative industry existing far from the view of most Americans). Comparing the UAW deal to those unions actually depresses me because these are workers with more power, with a long-standing powerful union backing them, with the extremely unusual arrangement of international labor unions and the company supporting them, and on a big shop floor, traditionally a relatively easy place to organize, at least compared to the fields or small shops. The innovation is definitely something I support, but I still have trouble seeing it as a big win.
Last month, a tweep asked me what I thought about arguments made by the National Review‘s Ed Whelan about Bruce Allen Murphy’s new Scalia bio. I had forgotten to look into it, but taking some time to finish the book I came across a dumbfounding passage that I immediately knew must have been the one under discussion.
As many of you already know, Scalia’s dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld is one of his finest hours on the Court, the bizarro version of his Bush v. Gore stay opinion. Scalia, joined by Stevens, argued that as an American citizen Hamdi had habeas corpus rights unless the writ was suspended, a power Scalia’s opinion locates in Congress. That Scalia wrote an opinion cutting against his both his general ideological and partisan preferences because he believed the law bound him to do so in this case was admirable, and the dissent is therefore both interesting in itself and an opinion that anyone writing about Scalia’s jurisprudence needs to pay careful attention to.
Murphy, however, portrays Scalia’s dissent as arguing “in favor of a ‘blank check’ on behalf of total presidential power.” According to Murphy, for Scalia “Hamdi was a traitor who was working with the enemy in times of war, and thus was not afforded [habeas corpus] protections.” (Both p. 319 in my uncorrected proof; apparently, this argument hasn’t been modified in the final version.) Whelan has further grim details, but…it’s every bit as bad as he says. We all make mistakes, but this is like saying that Dred Scott found all state slave codes to violate the 5th Amendment or that Lawrence v. Texas reaffirmed Bowers v. Hardwick. It’s mystifying. (When I read the “blank check” sentence my first thought was that Murphy was confusing Scalia’s Hamdi dissent with his Hamdan dissent, but he quotes from the former directly so that can’t be it.) It’s the kind of mistake that forfeits a reader’s trust.
I didn’t encounter another mistake of this magnitude, but in an extreme form it illustrates why Scalia: A Court of One is a major disappointment as a follow-up to the excellent Wild Bill. Murphy’s Douglas bio had two major advantages: 1)the subject lived an unusually interesting and eventful life for a Supreme Court justice, and 2)we have a lot more access to the inner workings of the Courts Douglas served on that we do of the contemporary Court. Dealing with a subject whose personal life isn’t particularly interesting, a lot of the book is taken up with Murphy’s analysis of what Scalia contributes to the United States Reports, and this really isn’t Murphy’s strong suit. Again, the hash be makes of Hamdi seems to be an outlier, but he’s sometimes shaky on basic concepts (“the Court defers to a state’s laws because a rational person would agree with them” isn’t really what the “rational basis” test means) and even when his doctrinal analysis is unobjectionable it’s pedestrian. So what you’re going to get out of the book depends on how interested you are in Murphy’s extensive discussion of Scalia’s Catholicism and its impact on his jurisprudence, and for me a little goes a long way. It’s a book I expected to be a lot better.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
