Archive for February 4, 2009

Confluence Needs to Learn Law. And Discretion. And SO Much More.

Also how to deal with grief. In a recent post, Confluence’s resident thirteen year old “takes Obama to task” for failing to make retroactive his provision capping executive pay for companies receiving bailout money. The operative sections below:

That little detail [about non-retroactivity] makes the proposed compensation cap about as effective as a morning-after condom.

Can anyone here tell me what’s wrong with blaming Obama for failing to cap salaries at companies that already received bailout money? Anyone with something greater than a third-grade education?

Yes, you in the back: yes, that’s right. You can’t condition money you’ve already given, and Barack Obama especially can’t be blamed for failing to condition money already given out by the Bush administration. Admittedly, the problem with Confluence’s argument is pretty nuanced: it only becomes clear once you realize that time moves forward.

Losers.

Update: I get a mature reply, wherein the author of the original post completely misses the point:

Ame(les)s: You’re a putz. The point of the post is that Obama is taking credit for locking the barn after the horses died of old age. It doesn’t matter when they died, they’re dead.

Quick reply. Obama never purported to be fixing the Bush bailout. He’s not taking any credit, and you’re still blaming him for something he never did.

Words Matter: “Extraordinary” Really Means Something

On Sunday, February 1, the L.A. Times featured an article claiming the Obama Administration was intent on continuing rendition as a tool to combat terrorism. The article referred to several anonymous “current and former U.S. intelligence officials” who claimed the program is likely to expand. It continued to state:

The decision to preserve the program did not draw major protests, even among human rights groups. Leaders of such organizations attribute that to a sense that nations need certain tools to combat terrorism.

Was the article referring to rendition policies that have been used by several presidential administrations, or was it focusing on the last administration’s use of extraordinary rendition, where suspects are abducted and taken to secret CIA-run facilities, operating in foreign countries that are willing to play host, and then subjected to anything but the rule of law, including torture, indefinite detention, and isolation from legal representation? I could not imagine human rights groups would let this matter slide if, indeed, Obama was continuing some form of Bush’s extraordinary-rendition policy. At best, the article is a case of sloppy journalism because this distinction is not clear.

With more questions than answers, Ames and I sprang into action on Sunday, attempting to get to the bottom of the issue. (I would like to paint a picture of us using all sorts of contraptions in a Batcave-esque “Candid World HQ,” but really, we were stuck with email and IM.)

Ultimately, the article is highly misleading. Glenn Greenwald sorts is all out, but as his posts tend to be quite long, I’ll summarize: Obama’s executive order ends extraordinary rendition. Reading right-wing blogs, though, tells another story. They have absolutely embraced the LAT article as truth. Greenwald links to several of these, who “damned well told” us “pro-torturing, posturing, hypocritical Leftists” Obama was going to follow Bush policy, presumably because liberals have zero skill in maintaining national security.

Greenwald ends his post with an excerpt from the Rachel Maddow Show. It’s a good clip, perfectly capturing the “WTF!” Ames and I were spitting on Sunday.

(On another injustice front, Verizon FIOS subscribers — yours truly — in large swaths of the NY/NJ area do not get MSNBC and, therefore, are sadly bereft of Maddow each weeknight.)

Teach the Process, not the Controversy

Galileo was right. Teach your kids why.

A while back, I had a brief GChat debate with a young creationist. He complained to me that his biology teacher was teaching evolution as “fact” when, he said, it is no such thing. There we agreed. In science, the only ideas properly regarded as “fact” are those ideas central to the discipline (in math, parallel lines don’t intersect), or those observations or quanta of data that gain meaning only when illuminated by a theory. Because it fits neither of those categories, of course evolution is not a fact – it’s a theory, an intellectual construct that, after vigorous research, reconciles various observations within a natural framework. Evolution may not be a “fact,” but it’s as close as modern humanity can get to “fact.”

So the young creationist noted above is right, but for the wrong reasons. If teachers gloss over the scientific method in the process of “teaching to the test,” or ensuring comprehension of modern scientific discoveries, they’re doing their students a disservice by unwisely divorcing science education from an understanding of why science matters. Students don’t benefit in the long-term from being taught that any theory – evolution, genetic, gravity, thermodynamics – is a fact. Such pedagogy secures the student’s specific understanding at the expense of their abstract comprehension, and leaves students vulnerable to their own unguided questioning, or willful miseducation by agenda-driven hacks. On the other hand, a healthy emphasis on the scientific method – including an explanation of what it is, and why (historically) we value it – not only solves these problems by encouraging students to “think responsibly,” but inspires the scientific curiosity that drives achievement higher education. From this perspective, teaching science with an emphasis on the method is a winning proposition – so long as the teachers take the time.

Of course, that’s the problem: any pedagogical theory that depends upon quality teachers builds in its own Achilles heel. In the hands of a teacher like John Freshwater, curricular guidance to teach the applicability of the scientific method alongside scientific theories could become an invitation to the type of “strenghts & weaknesses” dialogue that not only subverts the theories, but undermines the scientific method. And even taught correctly, renewed emphasis the scientific method could provoke fundamentalist outrage at the pervasiveness of un-Christian materialism (Conservapedia, for instance, takes that cue). So it’s not a perfect idea. Education only takes, after all, if your belief system isn’t predicated on independent thought being evil.