yes I'm an idoit. idoit allll night long.

@georgia
bush.gif

@l0wk3y classic

@georgia

@l0wk3y I miss the decider

@georgia As much stuff as he messed up, he does have a lovable quality to him.

He's really hard to dislike personally.

@l0wk3y

@georgia @l0wk3y something something "keep in mind that Bush 2.0 has done far more objective harm to the country than DJT could dream of doing"

@georgia @l0wk3y 2008 crash; "patriot" act, destroyed US education, the entirety of the iraq war, katrina, massive reagan-level tax cuts used to bribe the nation, that time he fired a bunch of attorneys for seemingly no reason outside of personal gain & said "i'm the president i come before the courts" when ordering his lackeys to not testify to the House

There have been worse presidents, but few that have done more broad damage. Most of the current problems were first demonstrated with him!

@kick @georgia @l0wk3y

>destroyed us education

No Child Left Behind was a reaction to how terrible American schools were, not the cause. The purpose of standardized testing was to establish a lower benchmark and remove accreditation from particularly bad schools. It was a bad bill but schools were bad far before NCLB.

@moonman @georgia @l0wk3y American schools were terrible but NCLB destroyed it, IMO. Pre-NCLB there were still remnants of schools that resembled decent in rural areas.

@moonman @georgia @l0wk3y Gifted funding tanked post-NCLB which seems to have set the US back decades alone, let alone how poorly it worked out for normal students.

NCLB served as a way of cementing school-as-factory line & leaving the nation's most valuable resource (people who can be tricked into finding it fun to do math problems to blow up other nations) depressed and pretty worthless.

@kick @georgia @l0wk3y I understand where you're coming from, but we get our asses kicked in education by countries that are far more invested in "factory schooling" than we are so I feel like the problem is somewhere else.

@moonman @georgia @l0wk3y The countries that consistently score above the United States offer ways to excel past conveyor-belt education for most students, which is the high-order bit when it comes to outcomes.

@kick @moonman @georgia @l0wk3y

The one thing that USA does better than anyone else, as far as I can tell, is entrepreneurship.

@nerdman @georgia @l0wk3y @moonman The USA has fantastically-good opportunities for the wealthy. All of the most valuable companies in the United States were started by people with pre-existing wealth*. Entrepreneurship on its own isn't great if it's reserved only for the wealthy.

* Sometimes people try to respond to this with "But Steve Jobs!" and I point out that Jobs had upper-leaning-middle class parents in the middle of the period of the US that had the *most* economic mobility it's had since the 1920s, *and* that his co-founder had an upper-class engineer as a father.

@kick @georgia @l0wk3y @moonman

This is true of every society. Being the son of an apparatchik in USSR made you get better stuff automatically.

Taxation will never result in a drop of inequality. The only thing that will is the elimination of heredity. Good luck with this.

@nerdman @georgia @l0wk3y @moonman This wasn't a conversation about taxation so I'll avoid the bait.


However I'm absolutely going to take the bait on the "This is true of every society" line.

It's empirically not true of every society, and it wasn't even always true of the United States. Societies that encourage ambitious people to act on their ambitions still have the problem of inheritance, sure, but they allow genuine economic mobility; it's not unrealistic for someone to jump to the ruling class from nothing. The USSR was controversial, sure, but it had economic & class mobility more than the US does presently. That's not even implying the USSR was even remotely good; it's that the US has adopted what is more or less an invisible caste system.

@kick

> saying something vaguely positive about USSR

COMMUNISM! Brain turned off.

@georgia @l0wk3y @nerdman @moonman