“I shall Defend The Rights Of Parents”
“I shall Defend The Rights Of Parents”
This is what new Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin said when he made an executive order on the first day of his term to ban school systems from having mask mandates. Some systems will not go along, including that in Arlington and mine in the city of Harrisonburg. He claims to be defending the rights of parents, somehow not noting that he is violating the rights of parents who do not want their children be forced to be in school with unmasked children, thus raising their chances of getting Covid-19.
He also ended the mandate that all state workers be vaccinated. This affects me personally. Indeed, a message has come from the president of my university, which is a VA state one, that there is now no vaccine mandate. My own safety will now be compromised, thanks to our new governor.
Of course, he has gone on Fox News to brag about this handiwork of his. Will he be running for president as some suspect in 2024?
Barkley Rosser
Running for POTUS in 2024? What happened to Trump? After McAuliffe beat Cuccinelli in 2013 ending the tradition of a VA governor of the opposite party as the new POTUS, then people wrongly assumed that Virginians actually liked Terry. Virginians just could not stand to have Tea Party Ken around any longer. Youngkin was gifted his office, not actually elected by his own popularity. Disgusting is as good as politics gets.
Maybe Youngkin does not know the difference between defend and offend.
Barkley:
I am with you. My wife and I still seclude ourselves, distance, make our visits brief, mask up, and vaccinate. I am compromised and Covid would endanger me and plant me in the hospital for sure.
I do not wish ill will on anyone. First, let Governor Youngkin get it and lead the way.
i wonder can employees sue their employers if they are the state/local/federal agencies for having a hazardous environment? cause it seems like that the way governments have been responding to covid, is making the environment that works are in are much more hazardous that back in 2019?
I am seeing in WaPo polls showing like 70% support for school mask mandates in VA. This seriously raises the question what Youngkin thinks he is doing, alienating so many voters right up front. WaPo said he is appeasing “Trumpism,” but why?
The guy is smart. My guess is that he realizes he does not have much chance for prez in 24, but he might have a chance for VP. Heck, Tim Kaine was Hillary’s VP candidate, part of that to appeal to swingy VA, which having gone Dem, such an appeal might want to be made by the 24 GOP candidate, whether Trump or DeSantis or whomever. And if GOP wins, well, VP is a pretty good way to get to the WH, and then, who needs voters of VA aside from the Trumpist base?
if 70% of voters kept their kids out of school it might make a difference.
if they wait to vote him out, it will be too late.
Coberly,
Youngkin is only the governor and VA’s legislated mandate for masks in schools is beyond his pay grade. The legislation states that K-12 schools must follow CDC guidelines for Covid-19 health and safety. He still can do (i.e., screw) state employees, but the courts and legislators and school boards are challenging Governor Stupid on K-12. The TV news coverage here is relentless. In show business all publicity is good publicity, but in politics that is demographically dependent. Youngkin is a hero to the freedom fighters and an idiot to anyone with a clue.
[From the horse’s mouth.]
https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?ses=212&typ=bil&val=sb1303
2021 SPECIAL SESSION
SB 1303 Local school divisions; availability of virtual and in-person learning to all students.
Introduced by: Siobhan S. Dunnavant
SUMMARY AS PASSED:
School boards; in-person instruction. Requires each school board to offer in-person instruction to each student enrolled in the local school division in a public elementary and secondary school for at least the minimum number of required instructional hours and to each student enrolled in the local school division in a public school-based early childhood care and education program for the entirety of the instructional time provided pursuant to such program. The bill contains certain exceptions to the abovementioned requirement. The bill requires each school board to provide such in-person instruction in a manner in which it adheres, to the maximum extent practicable, to any currently applicable mitigation strategies for early childhood care and education programs and elementary and secondary schools to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 that have been provided by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The bill requires the Department of Education to establish benchmarks for successful virtual learning and guidelines for providing interventions to students who fail to meet such benchmarks and for transitioning such students back to in-person instruction. The bill also requires all teachers and school staff to be offered access to receive an approved COVID-19 vaccination through their relevant local health district. The bill has an expiration date of August 1, 2022…
Ron
thanks for letting me know. there is hope.
i suppose it is too much for me to hope the parents would revolt..partly because people don’t do that, and partly because they want their kids in school because it makes their lives too hard when they are not. and because they still believe in education [as do I, but not in a religious way…not, at least, the way it was done to me].
But if the state legislature revolts, that may be almost as good…as good as we can expect, and, given the realities alluded to above, exactly what we elected a legislature for. I just don’t trust legislatures .
But if they ome through on this I will trust them more.
Again, thanks for letting me know.
re trust in legislatures, trust in schools
i ran across a you tube filmed aboard a British destroyer: apparently the days of captain bly are over, this ship was a model of working together … could have been an episode of Star Trek. and I had some reason to see it coming. Long ago ran across a book “human factors in undersea warfare” discussed very rationally how to have a happy ship that got the job done. maybe we are getting more civilized in quiet ways i don’t notice. not sure i would be able to live in such a world myself. but better than the one we had (captain bly), and the one we have (trump and all that we see in the news).
Coberly,
[Trust is a many splintered thing. Trust begat betrayal; IOW, without implied trust there can be no betrayal, merely disappointment which we derive internally from our own expectations.
That said, then there is a source generally considered by many experts to be more trustworthy than any individual that we may respect, even if we do not know them. Honestly, who knows anyone? I certainly did not know wife number one or wife number two, an honestly wife number three has betrayed me in every other way except screwing around and packing her bags. So, who can we really trust?]
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wisdom-crowds.asp
Wisdom of Crowds
By Clay Halton
Updated December 03, 2021
What Is Wisdom of Crowds?
Wisdom of crowds is the idea that large groups of people are collectively smarter than individual experts when it comes to problem-solving, decision-making, innovating, and predicting. The idea is that the viewpoint of an individual can inherently be biased, whereas taking the average knowledge of a crowd can result in eliminating the bias or noise to produce a clearer and more coherent result…
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/175380/the-wisdom-of-crowds-by-james-surowiecki/
The Wisdom of Crowds
By James Surowiecki
About The Wisdom of Crowds
In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.
With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world…
*
[The wisdom of crowds is the secret sauce for our system of electoral republicanism. Remember our system is not democratic and it even lacks proportional representation in both chambers of Congress, most obviously the Senate, but do not overlook small states in the House. Within each federated state of our nation exists fiefdoms within fiefdoms within fiefdoms and so on all the way down to towns and school districts. But we have crowds on many levels which is a large part of why we are what we are as a republic, both good and bad insofar as a governed nation-state goes. Just as important is all that fine real estate that northern Europeans stole from primitive natives to carve out this great nation.]
Ron
well, yes and no. The Framers did not believe in the wisdom of crowds, but they did believe in checks and balances. Meanwhile, the crowds gave us Trump, if not Buchanan and Pierce (also Jackson, whom you ma remember, then Bush-Cheney
and, dare I say, Obama.
Meanwhile all the widom of crowds proves about the stock market is that whoever guesses the next move of the crowd can make a lot of money.
Newton may have stood on the shoulders of giants, but they were giants.
And while the crowd may have ended the Ancien Regime, it also gave us the Terror and Napoleon, and, as noticed, seems to be bringing them all back at once.
on the other hand, i don’t see any way to escape the “widom” of crowds, but Egypt seems to have done so for the last five thousand years.
I see I started this by mentioning trusting a legislature more.
Difference between trusting and trusting-in.
If the Virginia legislature can beat Youngkin I will trust them (i have no choice) to do the right thing…a little more…which is different from givng them my complete trust…just ratcheting up my expectations from complete despair to a little hope that democracy can work sometimes.
Coberly,
Well, you are correct about the Framers. That is why we have a polity that causes enough of the crowd to stay home that even if the structure of Congress were proportional, then Congress would still not be representative of the general public. There are multiple reasons for that. Improving voting rights including general access to mail-in voting would be a start. Ending private political election campaign financing would be a huge step. Better education on the processes of political government along with the primary functions with which those processes engage public interests is also huge. We would not exactly be starting from scratch, but it is way too damned close for my comfort. As it is, then the margin between our party system’s two mobs of true believers is dwarfed by the crowd of nonbelievers.
Your historical references fall short primarily because mobs are not crowds, in the sense that crowds in this context are a euphemism intended to reference a large subset of the population with diverse interests. Mobs are a small subset of the population with very specific interests; IOW, just the opposite of “crowds.” Long ago in a time now forgotten, the “crowds” (in the stated context) lived in the countryside, while elites with their sycophants lived in cities tormenting the poor and powerless while they ran their nations into inevitable oblivion.
wow. a difference of opinion.
i am not a great believer in “majority rule,” at least not in the way the Left talks about it. Of course I am not a believer at all in “white” rule or “rich rule.”
i think the framers used the idea of mob rule as a reason to limit majority rule.
from what i see of political dialog today i don’t see much difference myself. of course “mob” implies spontaneous, violent action by perhaps a smallish crowd of those normally “ruled” against “the rulers” or perhaps only against a smaller crowd (or crowd of one) of also powerless “ruled.” but we have seen quite recently a willingness of a dubious minority (or Minority) to impose their will on “the other side” (whether numerically majority or minority) by force and pious faith in their own moral purity. And, it has always been eaasy for would be tyrants to work up such a “base” among the less empowered. The Constitution was carefully crafted to present just such a tyrant or faction from succeeding.
It was an accident of history that at the time blacks and indians were not considered people. women were considered people, but not taken seriously.
Pause here: i am currently reading Graeber and Wengrow, “The Dawn of Everything,” which I recommend, not because it isn’t boring, but because it might give all of us some different ideas about the march of history and the peculiar ideas that other people have even though we know they are completely wrong. It won’t chaange their thinking, of course, or ours, but it might make us all a little more conscious of possibilities we might not have considered.
Good place for me to stop. I don’t mind the unbelievers so much, except when I wish I could convince them to join me in my fight against the infidels, who are dangerous to my safety and happiness.
oh, while carefully designed to prevent the rise of tyranny, the Constitution seems to be unable to prevent just such a rise of tyranny in our time. Not a good reason to start throwing out the Constitution for trivial “faults” we see today because we are so much cleverer than the Framers at post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.
I tend to think it’s not so much the Constitution that is failing us so much as our own failure to maintain intelligent vigilance. as well as failure to overcome our unbeliever’s lethargy in the face of pervasive violation of “minority” (human) rights that don’t affect us.
“The Dawn of Everything” is biased disingenuous account of human history (http://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity ) that spreads fake hope (the authors of “The Dawn” claim human history has not “progressed” in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system… so there’s hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book’s dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavor geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history has “progressed” by and large in linear stages, especially since the dawn of agriculture (http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This “progress” has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (http://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html ) which the fake hope-giving authors of “The Dawn” entirely ignore, naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we’ve been “stuck” in a destructive hierarchy and unequal class system (the “stuck” question is the major question in “The Dawn” its authors never answer, predictably), and will be far into the foreseeable future.
A good example that one of the authors, Graeber, has no real idea what world we’ve been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn’t know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they’ve been wanting that for thousands of years (and that’s not the only ignorant notion in the title). Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
“The Dawn” is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked “science,” served lucratively to the gullible ignorant underclasses who crave myths and fairy tales.
Zeung
well, since I said that we ought to try to respect the opinions of others as much as we would like them to respect ours..
your essay here seems to me to be at least as fantasy based as mine.
Coberly,
[Likewise the subset of securities investors does not fit either the contextual test of diverse interests nor the general population representation, which is redundant but crucial if it is wisdom that we seek from crowds. OK, lots of households own some stake, but how much is what matters. So, this excerpt below the link is the smoking gun.]
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2021-03-15/who-owns-stocks-in-america-mostly-its-the-wealthy-and-white
…When measuring the value of stock holdings, wealthier Americans have more money invested in the market. Families in the top 10% of incomes held 70% of the value of all stocks in 2019, with a median portfolio of $432,000. The bottom 60% of earners held only 7% of stocks by value. The median middle-class household owned $15,000 worth of stock…
*
[Owning 7% of stock value is far from the madding crowd.]
to be sure. but not very far at all from “the wisdom of crowds” theory.
Regarding “wisdom of crowds,” while they are often wiser than experts, sometimes they are not so wise, e.g. see all those speculative bubbles that have blown big time.
But on the matter of them bringing us Trump, I do note that he lost the popular vote by over 3 million back in 2016.
Barkley,
Fortunately for me that in my life I have never encountered a “crowd” of speculative investors. Well, actually I am working class enough to have never known even one.
Barkley
I would have put it “he lost the popular vote by only 3 million..” How big a mob do you need in order to call it a mob? Are you so committed to the idea of “majority” rule that you can’t see the danger of an energized minority?
Do you think that if we eliminaed the electoral college, the R’s would have any trouble adapting their tactics to win the urban vote? For that matter, if the “Minority” becomes an effective “majority” do you think they will be any less corrupt or abusive than the old majority?
[I read some early stuff on “wisdom of crowds.” It did not seem to have much to do with democracy, but rather more like getting three hundred million people to think about quantum theory and getting better answers than einstein. Or, getting a million people to think of a lottery number and placing your bet on the average.]
Coberly,
Some things make a lot more sense when considered with the context boundaries of reality. Also, carrying around a reality checker can be worth while. My favorite two are “Where are we now” and “What are our actual alternatives?”
E.g., we can either have faith that the general population of our fellow citizens will eventually learn and do what needs to be done or not, but either belief is uncertain. OTOH, it is far more certain that some omnipotent power is not coming down from the heavens to set all the wrongs right. Even the biblical second coming has a far more apocalyptic prelude than that.
SO, then what realistic choices do we have? A fix to voting rights comes to the top of the list. Ordinary Joe is trying, but needs our support to elect Dems in the coming mid-terms, so that he can get stuff done. Education and media are huge problems for us, but unfortunately each is both broad and deep and must evolve rather than be reformed. IF we can get Congress on our side, then campaign finance reform will be what it takes to achieve lasting change. Nothing else matters because nothing else can be accomplished without first taking care of these things. If we had a Congress, then fixing the M&M’s and SS problems would be a walk in the park.
Coberly,
IF we accept that “The idea is that the viewpoint of an individual can inherently be biased, whereas taking the average knowledge of a crowd can result in eliminating the bias or noise to produce a clearer and more coherent result,” then whatever we consider our crowd to be requires it to be diverse enough to eliminate the bias. Clearly, this has not gotten through since the idea of investment crowds has arisen, albeit perhaps my bad for linking to Investopedia, which might be taken to implicitly support rational markets, but that was not my intent. It was just a definition, one likely not understood well at its source. There is no such thing as wisdom of crowds in a large group of investors because functionally it would ignore the wisdom of those wise enough not to be invested. This is what my favorite instructor called the sweatshirt test because he used a college sweatshirt worn inside out as an example of how people can reach the wrong conclusion when their view of the problem is completely backwards. Groups brought together by common interests cannot possess the wisdom of diverse crowds.
Ron
my understanding of the omnipotent power is that he (it, her, they, whatever) does not want to interfere. in fact, he does not even want us to believe he will, reward us if we are good or punish us if we are bad, or be sure he even exists. i hope i am not giving away his secrets. in the first place there is no reason to believe he is “omnipotent” in the way most people seem to think. on the other hand there is evidence i may be wrong.
on the other hand, i have no particular reason to believe any of us have any sure basis to believe our perception of “reality” is accurate, much less “complete.”
on the other other hand, we have to act as if we know what we think we know. and what i think i know is that other people think they have as good a basis for what they think they know as I have, and that things work out better if we give them as much respect for their feelings as we woul like them to give us for ours. this does mean, exactly, that dismissing their feelings as “fe fe’s” is as dangerous as it is repulsive. which is one reason i am disinclined to have any faith in crowd sourcing my beliefs or hopes for sanity.
i do understand, think i understand, that there is some reason to blieve that taking into account the beliefs of a large number of people might check and balance the errors of any one person or small number of persons. But we have more evidence that a large number of people become an insane mob than we have that some omnipotent being will save us from them or ourselves. however, “the wisdom of crowds” is the basis of democracy, and with checks and balances and an dedication to minority rights and individual rights…is the best we can do.
Napoleon was a better leader for france than either all the Louis(-es) or the Directorate….until he turned into just another tyrant. Then it was not “the crowd” that took him down, but the British army and navy, not themselves known at the time for their respect for human rights. Which seems to be the story of history.
on a practical level, we need to stop the assault by the R’s on voting rights. if we can’t do that, we are going to have to learn how to live in a country that is idistinguishable from what we said about Soviet Russia in terms of rule by force or threat of force. We can do that…other people have had to. There may be a short period before the window is shut that the people could stop it by crowd action…somewhat more sophisticated crowd than we have seen so far. We need a leader at least as smart as FDR…who was no saint, but a damn good politician who saw what was needed and possible at the time. with a little help from Eleaanor.
I could be missing something important, but I don’t think campaign finance reform is very important. money has always ruled politics. money already knows how to get around the law. all we change with the cchanges the mob is calling for is somemonor matters of the mechanics of how money gets things done. and Money is in the strongest position it has ever been in.
Enough for now. I can’t see anything I have wrotten here so the typos and thought-o’s are upto you to figure out.
Well we agree about voter participation, but I have less faith in dollar democracy than you although I must admit it was effectively institutionalized in the US Constitution.
Ron
I have no faith in dollar democracy at all. What I have faith in is that the post hoc proper hoc “fixes” to the Constitution or the law on offer today will not reduce the power of money in politics and more likely will make it harder for some future minority (us) to effectively oppose the power of the powerful.
The Framers did not instituionalie the power of money. They hoped that they had devised a system that would limit the power of different factions to rise to absolute control of the government. I have no doubt they expected those different factions to each represent some monied interest, but I don’t think they anticipated that “the” monied interest would become so united and determined that it would overcome the checks and balances and render the Constitution moot. No doubt they smile (the monied interests) smile in satisfaction watching their enemies (victims) call for the very measures they themselves expect will seal their power for the next five thousand years.
As far as I know it was President Jackson (no saint either) who was the first to point out the danger of the moneyed interests. For him this would not have required as much “foresight” as it would have required of the Framers, since the moneyed interests had grown in visibility over the 45 years or so between their time and his.
I doubt the Framers thought of the Southern planters as a moneyed interest. And there is some reason to believe they (or enough of them) thought they had set the slave-interest on the course to extinction. This seeems to have been Lincoln’s view, but it is no longer popular on the Left, who are happy to aid the moneyed interest in the politics of divide and conquer…without of course knowing what they are doing.
The Framers would of course have recognized the Southern planter class as moneyed and as having a more or less permanent interest, but I don’t think the term “moneyed interest” , or the concept it represents, would have occured to them, as it would have been assumed as “the way things are.” as long, of course, as the un-monied ignorant masses didn’t cause too much trouble.
When I lived in Massachusetts I had to drive down Shay’s Highway to get home from work.
after looking at the Wiki article on Shay’s rebellion i can certainly see why you (any of you) would say that the Framers intended to protect the money interest.
all i can say to that is “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
which leaves me with nothing to say except that the Constituion was written in a way that eventually allowed the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act, not to mention the election of Jackson and the election of Lincoln. So, so far, in my opinion, the only thing that stands between us and the Dictatorship of the Moneyed interest is…the Constitution. Be a little careful in villianizing the Framers and making just such changes to the Constitution that will make it easier for any future administration to ensconce itself permanently in power.
The fault is not in our Constitution, but in ourselves, our inattention to the government we have, and our willingness to ignore abuses to the powerless…or to perpetrate them ourselves.
The reasoning of the current Sypreme Court…as does much of previous Courts…stinks with language twisted to arrive at interpretations of “the law” that favor the power of the power that appointed them. This can be done with any law, any constitution, as long as the people let them. usually through indifference to the rights of others whom they may imagine are threats to their own comfort and safety…without realizing that those abuses can be turned against themselves according to the order of time.
actually, you don’t have to “make such changes” to the Constitution.
all you have to do is waste your time calling for such changes.
or even thinking they are the problem.
or indulging the hate that fuels such thinking.
this not the same as opposing the obscenity of the R’s attempt to steal the next election by their own brand of vote fraud. you do have a chance to do something about that. you have no chance of changing the electoral college and accomplish noting by demonizing the Framers or …
well, it’s funny that Florida (?) has written a law making it illegal to make white people feel bad. but its not funny that they should think such a law will help them win the next election. what do you suppose put the idea into their heads?