- Nice article:
Why teachers should aspire to be scholars
- Some teaser excerpts:
Sowell has commenting on this for decades…
This guy actually has a few videos of various stunts like this he did in class on his channel. Pretty cool.
April Fools 2011: Complex Numbers in Math Class
Yesterday afternoon I did another video trick for my Nature of Math class at Biola University. What’s the difference between the real and the imaginary?
2 Seattle men stopped at border for illegal candy
TSA Agents Allegedly Strip-Search Woman, Fiddle with Feeding Tube
Just wow. Both of these are fucking stupid.
@gotlucky: So sad, particularly the second story. I just hope these inevitable outrages start to wake people up.
Clayton -
'Tis the season for electoral bread and circuses… so let’s remind ourselves what a bunch of ass-clowns these “rulers” of ours really are:
This is a follow up to John James’ post regarding ABillyRock. I’ve just started watching this PoliPop debate and so far so good- Amanda really knows her stuff.
The girls in the middle represent the statist POV. There are times where I want to throw my laptop at the wall with what they say and there are times where it sounds like the girl to the right of Amanda, at least, actually seems curious about the market. The girl to the left of Julie Borowski (TokenLibertarianGirl) seems to be of the opinion “Well, I’m a med student. We talked about this in school and all my classmates are for it. Look, the health care situation in this country is bad, this law is supposed to change that and I’m a med student, so I’m for it” (occurs at about the 13:30 mark; the beginning of the video starts off with the recent passage of the PPACA and the girls’ thoughts on relevant subjects).
Sidecar app turns your car into a cab.
Not sure if anyones posted on this before just heard about it on the radio. Looks like they get around the cab monopoly/medallions by asking for donations rather than charging a fare, so I guess someone could get away with not paying once, but then who will ever pick them up again?
Exactly. A Med student. As in a twentysomething who’s spent her entire life in academia studying hard science. And because her classmates, a bunch of other kids who fit her description think some policy is a good idea, she’s for it. Forget what people actually working in that field might have to say. No, the students who’ve barely spent time in a hospital have all the answers.
It’s like a kid claiming “well I’m an entrepreneurship major and all my classmates think Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank are a good idea, so I’m for it.” As if a person who’s never run a business or practiced medicine knows what would be good with regard to the economics of commerce.
Find me an actual doctor who’s been practicing for 25 years and then we can talk, sweetie.
^^ Amen!
And thank you for posting the video, and thanks to JJ for introducing Amanda BillyRock to me. She does a good job holding her own, and I love that it’s obvious she studied up on the history as well as economics (talking about the AMA way back when); she really just blew that Jackie and Jacqueline out of the water!
who will ever pick them up again?
You mean the cabbies will take pictures of the offenders and save them in some online database to reference?
I actually hadn’t heard about this, but apparently: "Rush Limbaugh launched a tirade against The Dark Knight Rises for supposedly using the character Bane to criticize Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital. Here are five comic book villains who are much closer to the GOP Presidential candidate."
Five Comic Book Villains Who Are More Like Mitt Romney Than Bane
Everything You Love You Owe to Capitalism
Lew Rockwell did a great job in this one. It’s a bit long, but I think it’s worth it.
My point precisely, John James. She kept referring to her school with respect to most of the topics as if that vindicates anything.
I just finished watching the 'bate and thought it was pretty good. Amanda and Julie worked great as a tag team although Julie was kind of quiet at times. If there was a list of what I would change about the debate it would be to settle Jackie’s concern regarding theory vs. reality and to consider the alternative view regarding the “gender gap” in wages by entertaining the radical proposal that wages are not assigned to individuals based on gender.
Jackie clearly has no understanding of the difference between “a hypothetical” vs. “a theory” or “reality” vs. “utopia.” She’s of the mindset that there’s a reality, which consists of the government we have, and that that’s the end of it. She’d like to change the state of affairs towards the libertarian perspective, but to entertain libertarian ideas is childish, odd, impossible, and utopian. Clearly, the government can only work in reality (i.e. in its present form). Yes, she’s so patient with Amanda and Julie that she reluctantly admits that she “gave up on repeating that [‘hypotheticals vs. reality’] on every single topic” as it is just such a damning blow to the freedom side (55:15). She nicely wraps up this argument by stating that “in the world we live in now, it’s not illogical [to favor the state leave the affairs of women’s health and concurrently support the PPACA].” The best part, I actually laughed, was when she finished this talk by remarking that Amanda’s claim of Jackie’s position as illogical is ‘a little condescending and unwarranted’ before moving on to say that she believes that “Obama is the strongest person for women’s rights” and [not] relaying to the everyone present what Obama’s tremendous platform on women’s rights is. At least Jackie is bold enough to state, so confident is she that she says this almost casually, that “Obama, I would say, is more in favor of giving women the freedom they deserve” and later on that “Obama has all these things for women’s rights” (53:29; 54:39). I mean, to be honest, what a liberator he is! Remember, that time, when he liberated those women?
There’s a fairly annoying segment regarding the “gender gap” in wages. Thankfully, no one cites that B.S. 7/10 ratio of wages between women and men (damnit, I was just browsing for quotes and found that Jacquelyn brings it up at 26:49), but it doesn’t stop the two in the middle of the screen in the argument from assuming that wages are established from what aggregate statistics are. Just after commenting on what car she wants (30:00), Jackie informs the viewers that “all the studies show, pretty clearly, that women are underpaid […]” and proclaims: $12,000 [according to Jacquelyn, this is the average difference in wages between male and female doctors with men earning more] a year is a lot of money to lose out just because, sorry to be crass, you know, you were born with the wrong body part, so to speak. It’s very nice to see the girls so comfortable in making these blank assertions. Amanda delivers a pretty good rebuttal starting at 31:17 with what is said by Jackie, but could have also touched on the idea that women, if they are paid less, cost less to hire and will therefore tend to be hired more frequently than men. In other words, the employer must bear a monetary cost if he wants to discriminate. Amanda calmly explains that if employers do not hire the best potential empoyees for the job then they will go out of business in short order. In other words, Amanda is on Jackie and Jacquelyn’s side, but they’re not.
Then there are just odd discussions in the health care section where Julie brings up charity (Amanda cites the overwhelming outreach of voluntary contributions after the Japanese earthquake a few years ago) as an option to government welfare. The critical thinking girls in the middle are skeptical of the idea that people will reach out to help their fellow men, citing the KONY 2012 movement and others.
And the ethics of the two in the middle are based on non-sequiturs. I’d like to see Jackie consider that it doesn’t follow from “I’d prefer a state of affairs in which the poor are helped” that the state ought to use aggression to take from A to pay for B. As a basic law of economics, whatever is subsidized (illness, alcoholism, AIDS, mental ailments, etc.) in the form of government welfare can be expected to increase.
(I try to recall my French lessons below; be warned) Jacquelyn mentions that,
[O]ne of the [libertarian ideals] that [she] just can’t seem to connect with is this free-market idea of everyone, in this like utopia, this idea of people giving to charity and how that would be more beneficial to people who need it, like people who are on welfare right now, and how that can solve all these problems- I just don’t see it. Like, I mean, you think people would be more charitable and giving. But I just, that just, to me that seems way too idealistic and not practical from what I’ve seen. I mean, like I just feel like, maybe, we’ve had different experiences or you know different people than I know or something. But that’s just such a fundamental difference in ideals that I can’t relate to that and I don’t feel like that would be a good thing to rely on. If I needed help, if I were, you know, like disabled or I had something seriously wrong with me where I absolutely needed support, I would not want to rely on the good will of people to help me out. I would want something more concrete and reliable than that.
First, it’s very clear that Jacquelyn wants to emphasize that she has different experiences from everyone there: she’s a med student; she’s in med school. These two in the middle don’t think straight. They’ll cite various outstanding charitable groups and then say how the idea of charity contributing anything to society is unfounded. For fuck’s sake, the above quote is from the one that wants to be a doctor. As John James and I point out above, she really seems incapable of not bringing her fellow med students in the argument and how they agree that something should be done about the poor in this country regarding healthcare. The thought processes of these two is almost to the point where I question that Jacquelyn really is a med student (okay, she probably is but she doesn’t seem like it from her demeanor and reasoning skills). I’d like it if the girls in the middle would someday see the contradictions in their arguments.
But, hey, Jackie wants a Jaguar.
This is just a confession of faith. “I support the health-care reform because its supporters said it’s supposed to help/fix the health-care situation in this country and I trust those people.”
This is just another confession of faith. “I trust certain things (e.g. the government) and not others (e.g. private charity), and you trust different things than me.”
What would really be interesting to me is if these girls had a discussion of what/who they trust and why. (I’ll go ahead and venture a guess: the girls who trust the government do so because it’s supposedly a “democracy”, which supposedly means they have some amount of control over what it does.)
SPIN METER: ‘Middle class’ turns fuzzy in politics
A look at some ways to define the middle class
Zimmerman says he was not pursuing Trayvon Martin
New welfare restrictions target booze, tattoos
Scalia says no ‘falling out’ with Roberts
Nolan defends fans angry over ‘Knight’ reviews
THE RACE: Spat over Romney’s taxes could hurt him
Parallels between the film and the shooting
Security increased at movies following shootings
Your logo here: How a logo becomes an icon
Microsoft reports first loss as public company
Shooting at Colo. theater shocks movie industry
Hot: Former Clinton Keynesian Economics Adviser Hangs Up the Phone on Me
Mitt Romney looks to gain credibility with Ron Paul supporters through hollow tweet, doesn’t go over very well
You mean the cabbies will take pictures of the offenders and save them in some online database to reference?
I’m not sure if I heard it in the video, or the talk on the radio, but all users have an account where drivers, and customers post feedback, and ratings of each other. I assume this will be based upon their phone number, but it was also mentioned that customers must use a credit card. I jumped to the assumption that:
1)A customer would be able to refuse to pay a fare, since it’s called a donation, and
2)Anyone denying to pay the fare would end up with negative feedback on their account leading other drivers to not pick them up again.
Depending on how much feedback people can give this could end up being great for the drivers i.e. Cheap fare, paid donation, no tip, vs Friendly guy, great tip thanks