False equivalence. Helping people where "they are behind" is not the goal. The area where boys are behind that the new school purports to help is not as conducive to good jobs as the girls school.

Like you said in another post, nobody's helping people get into the toilet cleaning industry, because that's not really a worthy goal.

If there's a boys school that focuses on STEM, then it's fine, just like separate bathrooms are fine. In this article, the boys school is going to be focused on language skills.

And that's the same reasoning as why the boys language school is not good enough.

I think segregation would be okay if it were optional and not mandated by the state. If all boys and all girls (or all blacks and all whites) must attend segregated schools, that's not nice. But if there were options available so that you could attend whichever type of school you want, the arguments made in Brown would not apply.

Separate facilities are already funded inequitably because of the way school funding works in most areas.

By this logic of "It didn't work out like the theoretical model and still has a lot of inequality, so we should ban it" we should ban non-segregated schools I guess. Maybe ban public schools in general? I don't know. The logic of making something illegal because it didn't work as expected just doesn't make sense. It can work in principle, that's what counts.

If you're worried about a situation where public officials start making boys schools really awesome and girls schools really bad, then make THAT illegal. Put mechanisms in place to protect against THAT. Do you think that can't be done for some reason?

I know plenty of gender-segregated schools that seem to work out pretty well.

http://education-law.lawyers.c...

Gender-segregation was explicitly carved out as an exception to anti-discrimination laws. "If a private school gets federal funding, it can’t discriminate against a student based on his race, sex (unless it’s a single-sex school), national origin and religion."

There are plenty of single-sex schools that A) operate legally and B) even get federal money.

So clearly segregation works and is seen as "ok" in some cases.

Did you not read the rest of my post?

Size, attention, funding. Those are important characteristics of the movements. Since the movements to help men are much smaller, leaving out those salient points and just saying "Oh yeah, movements are afoot to help men, it's fine" is misleading.

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence):

"A common way for this fallacy to be perpetuated is one shared trait between two subjects is assumed to show equivalence, especially in order of magnitude, when equivalence is not necessarily the logical result."

Do you think that because at one time "separate but equal" was not really equal, that it *can't* be?

Separate but equal failed in the US because of widespread racism and lack of accountability among public officials. Do you have any argument to show that the same thing would happen now?

What would be wrong with single-race schools if there were equal alternatives? I guess race is harder because there are so many races and only 2 genders... but in principle it's not bad.

I've read studies that show girls (and boys) learn better in single-sex classrooms, and also when their teacher is the same sex. I think segregated schools like the one in this article are a great idea. There's nothing wrong with "separate but equal" if they're really equal... and that's the big problem here. The boys' school is not the same as the girls' school.

"Movements are afoot" sounds like a false equivalence. What's the relative size of the movements? How much attention and funding do they get?

Actually that fits in well with the prevailing black/white dichotomy in most race discussions. If Hispanics and Asians do well with teachers of different races, then we can continue to ignore them.

That would only be true if students were proportionally represented in every classroom, but they're not.

Aside from the negative connotations, there's nothing specifically wrong with that. We do have optionally segregated-by-gender schools and they seem to work out pretty well. As long as the segregation isn't mandated by the state, what's the problem?

Yeah right, race consciousness never existed in non-capitalist economies. I recall reading about an isolated tribe whose name for themselves basically meant "human" and whose name for other people who didn't look like them (like white anthropologists) meant "non-human."

The person I replied to described him as "likely as a typical internet tough guy."

Terrorists generally operate as parts of a larger group. Your argument is like saying "Well the 9/11 hijackers could not have *individually* hijacked all the those planes, so there was no ability on anyone's part to actually commit the crime, so clearly 9/11 was not a crime!" Obviously that's wrong.

If this guy was going to pull the trigger, and another guy was going to build the bomb, and another guy was going to plant it somewhere, then AS A GROUP they have the means, motive, and opportunity. The FBI was supplying some of that as part of a group, which is normal for terrorists.

No they can't do *whatever* they want, but testing him by putting him in a situation that he thinks is real that would be illegal for him to do is fine.

This kind of work does keep people safe. Your bar is set too high.. you want the FBI to actually catch terrorists with their thumb on the trigger after having deployed actual live bombs, with no pre-knowledge. You've been watching "24" too much or something -- it's just not realistic.

These ARE terrorist plots. When you plot to plant bombs somewhere and blow up innocent people, that's a terrorist plot. WTF?

No, and you're right that we have to stay vigilant. This is crying wolf though. It's not entrapment, it's not illegal for the FBI to do. They caught someone who was dangerous to our safety.