As most readers already know, John McCain opposed establishing a federal holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in 1983. Most Republicans (including Cheney and Gingrich) supported it at the time, but Arizona seemed dead-set against it. The holiday became official in 1986, but only 27 states and D.C. recognized it initially. The governor of Arizona at the time (a Democrat) declared the holiday through executive order, but it was later repealed by a Republican governor.
Around that time, in 1990, McCain was given a chance to change his mind, and eventually did. Though he initially supported the Republican governor’s controversial action to repeal the holiday, he later changed his stance and supported the recognition of the holiday. The governor continued to oppose the holiday, saying “I guess King did a lot for the colored people, but I don’t think he deserves a national holiday.” In 1992, the citizens of Arizona voted to recognize the holiday.
I wasn’t around at the time, so I don’t really know first-hand how important Martin Luther King Jr.’s contributions to civil rights, to our country, and to humanity as a whole were. I have, however, studied many of his speeches in school, and though I’ve only scratched the surface of his work I feel comfortable in saying that he was one of the most influential and important people of the twentieth century. To oppose naming a national holiday in his honor is absurd.
McCain also voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990 (specifically, he voted to uphold President Bush’s veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act), which lost by only one vote. To this day, he refuses to apologize for his vote. When asked earlier this year, he defended his action and claimed that the bill would have set up racial “quotas,” but that simply isn’t true. The bill had nothing to do with quotas, and everything to do with restoring laws regarding employment discrimination that had been put in place nearly two decades prior, and had only been recently overturned by supreme court cases that made it harder for minorities and women to win discrimination suits:
The act was a response to a series of controversial Supreme Court decisions made the year before. In those decisions, the court overturned a 1971 ruling that required employers to prove a “business necessity” for screening out minorities and women in its hiring practices. That burden of proof, the 1989 court said, should instead be placed on the plaintiff who alleged that his or her client had been unlawfully screened.
Both the House of Representatives and the Senate, deeming this unjust, passed bills that would restore the old law. But the Bush administration objected, insisting that a reversion to the old way would amount to forcing employers to have hiring quotas. It was a controversial and somewhat dubious claim, one that the New York Times editorial page called “an unjustified charge.”
McCain continues to justify his vote by claiming somehow the bill would have required “quotas,” and refuses to apologize for it. He has, on the other hand, apologized for his votes regarding the MLK holiday — while the fact that he initially opposed it remains, I like it that he was at least willing to change his mind. In this case, hoewver — when combined with his opposition to civil rights legislation — saying “I changed my mind” just isn’t enough.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-21 | Filed under: Opinion | 6 responses
For a while, everyone was asking each other “where were you when you heard about 9/11″ “or what were you doing,” etc. While I was alive (11 at the time), I was too young to really appreciate what had happened, so the memory never really stuck with me. From what those older than me have said, I gather that 9/11 is one of those moments that not only define history, but literally make you think “this is important, this is an important moment in history.” You realize the importance immediately upon hearing about it.
Today, I think I witnessed a moment like that.
Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. The bloggers, cable news reporters, everyone has been and will continue to talk about the historical and cultural importance of a black Presidential candidate, but it really never hit me until today. Hell, Obama has practically been the nominee days now, but today it’s different. It’s official. The Democratic party is nominating a black man for President.
It isn’t every day I get emotional about politics. Generally I tend to look down on it while simultaneously enjoying watching it fall apart, in the same way that someone might watch a car race just to see crashes. Even the civil rights movement always seemed so far away: decades ago, photos and dates in heavy history textbooks. Now, to me, it seems more real.
Of course, in the back of my mind, I know this moment will eventually be trumped by one of the greatest achievements in our country’s history: electing a black man. I believe Obama will be that man. Sure, it’ll be a tough road ahead, but we’re all in this together.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-06-07 | Filed under: Current events, Noteworthy, Opinion | 7 responses
USA Today reports:
In most math problems, zero would never be confused with 50, but a handful of schools nationwide have set off an emotional academic debate by giving minimum scores of 50 for students who fail.
(…)
Their argument: Other letter grades — A, B, C and D — are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.
(…)
“It’s a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F,” says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic
Basically, this continues with the increasingly common practice of artificially inflating the grades of students so that everything looks better on paper. There isn’t much of this at my school (at least, not as far as I know), but I’ve heard of it. My AP English teacher tells us of other schools where they just make every senior English class an AP class, without adding the additional depth and rigor that is supposed to go along with it, simply because it makes their school look better than it really is.
I can imagine this is motivated largely by complaints from parents. They’re all so upset that their little genius can’t pass English 12 because he or she blew off all the work in the first semester of the class. Well, if they have below a 20% they’re fucked, since even a perfect score on everything from then on isn’t going to get them above a 60% average. But, if it were set at 50% instead, a 70% the second semester would average out to a passing grade. By avoiding the immediate problem of the annoying parents, these schools are lowering standards and giving kids a sub-par education.
Also, note the “six times greater chance of getting an F” part — this statement is based on the obviously flawed assumption that students’ grades are evenly spread between 0 and 100. The grading system isn’t designed like that. Strange that someone from an education think tank would make such an obvious error.
But opponents say the larger gap between D and F exists because passing requires a minimum competency of understanding at least 60% of the material. Handing out more credit than a student has earned is grade inflation, says Ed Fields, founder of HotChalk.com, a site for teachers and parents: “I certainly don’t want to teach my children that no effort is going to get them half the way there.”
As far as I’m concerned, if you refuse to do any homework, sleep during class, and spend test time trying to spell words on the scantron sheet, you don’t deserve a 50. A 50 may still be a failing grade, but you shouldn’t get a 50 for doing nothing. There is a difference between a high and a low F, and the article discusses it: a high F on a test means the chance of passing the class as a whole is higher.
It’s absurd to say that because it a student may be in a situation where it is difficult to raise his or her grade, that student’s grade should be arbitrarily raised to increase the chance of passing. We shouldn’t be trying to help kids pass classes by manipulating what their grade is on paper. It doesn’t get anyone anywhere. The focus of our education system should be to give out knowledge, not to give out diplomas and letter grades.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-05-23 | Filed under: Opinion | 2 responses
Newer versions of Pidgin have the text input area resize to fit the text typed in, similar to Google Talk. This made a bunch of people all pissy, and now they want to fork Pidgin. The new project, funpidgin, intends to be just like Pidgin, only with a development team that cares about the users and lives to satisfy their needs.
That didn’t come out as sarcastic as I wanted, so I’ll just say it: the people behind funpidgin and everyone else complaining about the UI change in Pidgin are a bunch of whiners.
First of all, if users are so upset about Pidgin not acting just the way they like it, they can download a plugin that reverts the text box behavior to be just like it was before. In my mind, this pretty much invalidates most of their complaints. Not to mention, most of their complaints are along the lines of: “I don’t like it, change it back,” which is not helpful and is rightly being ignored. For all those with legitimate complaints (some people apparently like to edit large blocks of text inside Pidgin, which IMO seems stupid but at least they gave a valid reason for why they dislike the change), they can just install the plugin and the problem goes away.
It seems now that the bigger problem is about how “insensitive” the devs have been. Frankly, I sympathize with them. The users upset at the change want an option added in the preferences menu to toggle on and off the new functionality, but in terms of maintaining the software, UI options like that makes everything harder to debug, and add unneeded clutter to the interface. One of the devs explained it better than I could. That aside, it’s still the developer’s choice what happens in Pidgin. People seem to forget this. Just because the community wants something doesn’t mean it has to be added — the users aren’t the boss of the developers.
I predict the following will happen: most people won’t notice a thing, the offended users will get used to the change, the fork will dry up, and in a few months everyone will forget about this whole thing. Pidgin is an active project; it’s being updated and improved constantly, and that means some things are going to change. We can either bitch about it, or we can get used to it. Personally, I prefer the new interface, but even if I didn’t I’d still use Pidgin — it’s the best IM program out there, and a little UI tweak isn’t going to change that.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-30 | Filed under: Opinion, Tech and games | no responses
It’s no secret that I’m an Obama supporter. I’ll support Clinton if she’s the candidate, but I dearly hope she isn’t. I’m not a big fan of Hilary Clinton for several reasons:
That isn’t to say I dislike Clinton. She’d certainly do a better job than Bush, and she has lots of good ideas about health care (an issue I care very much about). I just think Obama should be the candidate, and that this long and bitter primary is doing damage to the Democratic party.
Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-25 | Filed under: Current events, Opinion | 6 responses
Despite the fact that I’m taking AP Environmental Science, I’m really not qualified to discuss the details of the greenhouse effect and global warming. I do know that they are issues with legitimate scientific uncertainty, but also that the general scientific consensus is that they are both happening. So, I chose to analyze the issue on a more general level: motives.
- First possibility: There is a huge conspiracy perpetrated not only by all the major scientific organizations but by a majority of all the world governments for the purpose of crushing the oil industry and raising taxes.
- Second possibility: The oil companies and co. are lying to us in order to cover their own asses, and are willing to buy fake research and corrupt politicians as long as it gets them short-term profit.
I’m more inclined to believe the second one.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-07 | Filed under: Current events, Opinion | one response
I recently watched a Frontline episode with my parents that discussed the danger of young people’s increased use of the Internet, and they were amused that I spent much of the time yelling back at the television. While overall the episode was excellent and did a commendable job showing multiple sides to a complicated issue, some of the interviewees espoused the popular yet flawed view that the Internet is a dark and dangerous place that gobbles up innocent children. Sexual predators and serial killers lurk everywhere in the shadows, waiting until the one time your children mentions his full name and age on MySpace. Otherwise moral and polite children attack and threaten each-other with broken English. Kids replace “real” friends with “MySpace friends.” Etcetera, etcetera. I have quite a bit of experience dealing with this fearful perspective, considering it is the view my parents used to hold.
My argument is that these people’s problems with the Internet all stem from a single misconception: they see the Internet as something foreign and unknown, and therefore they see everything on it as a product of the Internet itself, rather than a product of the people who uploaded it.
A perfect example from the Frontline episode is how the concept of “cyber-bullying” was portrayed. Commentators talked about it as if it were separate from regular bullying, when basically the main difference is that it involves IM, social networking sites, and such, which can reach a larger audience more quickly than traditional gossip. In my mind, that doesn’t make it a completely separate issue. The producers of the show were absolutely right that cyber-bullying is a serious problem, but that’s because regular bullying is a serious problem; the former is just an extension of the latter.
The “cyber-bullying” portrayed in the episode involved a student’s classmates bullying him both in school and out of school via the Internet. Some of the commentators pointed out that much of what was said online might not have been said in a real-life conversation, because in an IM chat you don’t “talk face-to-face.” From this, they implied that the Internet itself is partially to blame for the bullying, and that the fact that it enables non “face-to-face” conversation makes it bad. Quite simply, the Internet didn’t turn that student’s classmates into bullies. The problem hasn’t changed because modern technology was involved. All that’s really changed is that there’s a new platform of communication that is open to the free exchange of thoughts and ideas, and this platform can be used for whatever anyone wants; from blogging to bullying. Blaming the Internet because it allows assholes to communicate is a little bit silly.
One thing that the episode captured wonderfully is the generation gap. Parents really don’t understand what their children do on the computer all day. And, IMO, that’s exactly how it should be. Parents never understand what their children are in to. Before it was rock music and long hair, now it’s computers and technology. It’s all to be expected. Children need an opportunity to distance themselves from their parents and develop their own individuality, and in this day and age there’s no better way to do that than using the Internet.
One story in the Frontline episode that supports my theory is a story of a high schooler who became a famous goth idol on MySpace. Her parents, seeing this, were outraged. They forced her to delete all her photos. After a while, however, they came around — they realized how important it was to the self-confidence of their otherwise-introverted daughter, and when she re-opened her MySpace profile she had the support of her parents.
Now, I don’t mean to say that there’s no legitimate fear of children accessing the Internet. According to recent statistics, 36% of teenagers had met in real life with someone they had met online. Though the danger is greatly exaggerated, there is a danger of children being abducted due to giving out large amounts of personal information online. Like I said above, however, it is silly to blame the Internet for this.
The Internet is an extension of reality, and it should be treated as such. Giving out personal information to strangers is a bad idea all around — rather than warning us no to do it online, it would be better to tell us never to do it. Children are in just as much danger of abduction when they go to the park as they are when they go online. The only thing the Internet really changes is the size and reach of the community. The pseudo-anonymity and impersonal nature of conversations online with strangers should be taken with a grain of salt, just as a conversation with a stranger on the street should be. A random drunk guy on the sidewalk that calls you a fag is really no different than a /b/tard. Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-02-04 | Filed under: Noteworthy, Opinion, Tech and games | 10 responses
