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Comment Re: Are we in a "post-information age" now? (Score 1) 68

If you think you can avoid politics when discussing anything important, you are delusional.

Everything important has political relevance.

It's a well-known fact that Reagan first shit up education in California and then went on to do it nationally. It's a less well-known fact, but still a fact, that it was done for the purpose of getting rapeublicans (which hilariously autocorrected to "trollbags") elected by avoiding an "educated proletariat" (those are the search terms that will get you more citations than you can eat.)

You can't avoid politics when talking about how shit education is in America because it is for fundamentally political reasons.

Comment Re: Cui Bono (Score 1) 68

I live in Humboldt which is chock-full of maggots. It's sad. I've seen more Confederate flags here than I did in Texas, even year on year. Plus a shitload of "dead pedophiles don't reoffend" stickers on obvious rapeublicans' vehicles, fucking weirdo hypocrites.

But California is still majority blue, so it's not all that relevant.

What I think is more interesting is states like TX where they are only whatever color because of bullshit maps.

Comment Re:I'm still wondering (Score 1) 179

There are people he who think that you are deranged you know. Same with me.

Yep. I do know that. But that's not what I'm talking about here.

You might not like it, but your idea that we actually attack people and in large part because we politically disagree with them

I'll readily admit to [verbally] attacking people whose politics are directly comparable to the Third Re!ch.

is how we get the deranged (in my opinion) idea that young people are smart, and older people are senile.

I feel like some steps are missing there.

So what do you propose? Involuntary Euthanasia? A person hits 65, and it's over?

I already proposed competence tests. They should be medically designed, not politically, but naturally a bipartisan committee would have to argue about that and would probably fuck it up. That doesn't change the principle, though.

Yes, term limits are a sideways solution, but one that doesn't allow the Feinstiens and McConnell's and a few others to make it a career out of government.

No, they don't solve the problem anyway, because a person who was just elected can be incompetent.

What determines competency to hold office? I want people better than basic.

I do too, but I don't think we can reasonably hold people to an even higher standard. If the voters want to be represented by someone just like them, that's their prerogative, even if it's stupid.

But since you think my methiod is bad, how bow outlining yours, from local to presidential. What tests, what to do with failures.

I am not qualified to determine what tests we should use. I want that determined by medical professionals, not some asshole on a website, even if that asshole is me.

Comment Re:They always blame the wrong thing(s) (Score 1) 68

When I was in elementary school I played a game on the Apple IIs where you had some machines you could put in a row and your part would go through them and get rotated, punched or painted. You'd get a shape and you had to place and configure the machines in sequence to make it. Some shapes could be made in various ways, some only had one right answer. As far as I know, only I ever played it at my school.

Even more usefully, those of us in GATE got inductive word puzzles and were taught how to solve them with diagrams. This person is this thing and this other thing but not that thing, the person who did these things didn't do that but did do this, etc etc. Nobody else got to do this.

Another thing I was lucky enough to get to do was be trained to speed read using a machine that took a film strip and scanned across the text to limit what you could see at any given time. Then they'd test us to check our retention.

There's lots of activities like this which kids could be playing if there was time, but the curricula don't leave room for that. Instead we make sure they're force-fed whichever "facts" we want them to retain, with nothing to hang them on. In particular we teach kids in elementary school a bunch of utter bullshit about how the world works and why our government did things. Then we act surprised when they can't navigate reality. Well, it doesn't fucking work like we told them!

Comment Re:deploy broadband? (Score 3, Informative) 43

AFIK, ATT has NO plans to provide fiber to the entire state.

That's not relevant to net neutrality, though yes, you're right. And they have taken literally hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars for that purpose (government grants, not customer payments) which they then clearly handed out to shareholders and/or executives because they obviously didn't spend them on last mile internet.

Comment Re:I'm still wondering (Score 1) 179

One way that doesn't attack anyone's mental state is term limits.

It's inappropriate not to attack anyone's mental state. Their lack of competence is exactly the problem. We need for everyone in government, not just congress, to be able to pass at least a basic mental competency test. The People should never be paying for an incompetent to hold a public position, and that's arguably the least important principle at issue.

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