Yet another argument based on moving goalposts and insufficient purity of intent or zeal, which will get its own treatment.
What about next to last place? 40th instead of 50th? Second place? First? At what point will you allow us to say, O arbiter and czar of decency and liberty, “our children might not score as high as some states’, but stop shaming us for this perfectly respectable ranking, because it is not the only metric?” Education is important, even for people who may not be college material, but in a day and age where there’s a lot of training to blame capitalism (or “the heads of capitalism,” who I take to be not George Soros or Bill Gates and formerly not the Donald) for every human failure in history and conditioning to divorce personal responsibility from lifestyle outcomes, I’d be chary of making comprehensive moral judgments on the basis of a testing statistic.
I mean, really:it’s not fair to prioritize one issue, even life, and refuse to acknowledge the value of others, but you’re literally saying “the children we don’t kill do better on standardized tests than yours.” Wow, way to set the bar, there. It’s not like any true Scotsman would criticize the rope he was getting hanged with for being new, after all.
As for the mass shootings thing...the New York Times as of May 9 reports eight school shootings in the US, one being in Alabama. These have resulted in four deaths and seventeen injuries. Wikipedia has some more interesting statistics: 124 events total nationwide as of May 16, with 129 fatalities and 468 injured. Three of these were at a school at one was at a church. For comparison, it shows three mass shootings in Alabama with a total of five dead; New York only had one with one fatality, California had twelve with eleven fatalities, Texas had twelve with 21 fatalities, but the city of Chicago alone had four deaths across five mass shootings. All these include bar fights and domestic incidents with multiple casualties, not just schools. I'm not going to quote low-fatality statistics at you, but this should be enough for you to practice on when someone says you're not comparing apples to demographic apples.
What about next to last place? 40th instead of 50th? Second place? First? At what point will you allow us to say, O arbiter and czar of decency and liberty, “our children might not score as high as some states’, but stop shaming us for this perfectly respectable ranking, because it is not the only metric?” Education is important, even for people who may not be college material, but in a day and age where there’s a lot of training to blame capitalism (or “the heads of capitalism,” who I take to be not George Soros or Bill Gates and formerly not the Donald) for every human failure in history and conditioning to divorce personal responsibility from lifestyle outcomes, I’d be chary of making comprehensive moral judgments on the basis of a testing statistic.
I mean, really:it’s not fair to prioritize one issue, even life, and refuse to acknowledge the value of others, but you’re literally saying “the children we don’t kill do better on standardized tests than yours.” Wow, way to set the bar, there. It’s not like any true Scotsman would criticize the rope he was getting hanged with for being new, after all.
As for the mass shootings thing...the New York Times as of May 9 reports eight school shootings in the US, one being in Alabama. These have resulted in four deaths and seventeen injuries. Wikipedia has some more interesting statistics: 124 events total nationwide as of May 16, with 129 fatalities and 468 injured. Three of these were at a school at one was at a church. For comparison, it shows three mass shootings in Alabama with a total of five dead; New York only had one with one fatality, California had twelve with eleven fatalities, Texas had twelve with 21 fatalities, but the city of Chicago alone had four deaths across five mass shootings. All these include bar fights and domestic incidents with multiple casualties, not just schools. I'm not going to quote low-fatality statistics at you, but this should be enough for you to practice on when someone says you're not comparing apples to demographic apples.
No comments:
Post a Comment