The Public Option in Education

In Episode 153 of The Remnant podcast, Jonah Goldberg raises the question of school choice and public school to guest Andy Smarick at around 29:55. He suggests that the problem isn't public versus private school because he knows from personal experience that school choice, presumably he means publicly funded charter schools, doesn't resolve the issue that conservative activists complain about, namely the prevalence of leftist propaganda in schools. School choice options, including private school, often end up preaching the same stuff. The problem, Goldberg says, is not really the organizational structure of the schools but rather the ideology. 

Well...

First of all, public schools educate around 90% of American children. That is a monopoly. Monopolies are well known to generate this exact sort of dynamic, where the smaller market players are forced to conform to the practices of the large market player. The classic example of this is Microsoft. Any programmer who wants to develop and sell a program of any kind for a desktop PC must program it to work on Microsoft Windows or immediately lose 90% of his potential customers. Only after making sure he can make it work on Windows will he then develop it for other OS's. If he can't make it work for Windows, he likely won't have a viable business model at all and will never enter the market. This also means Apple customers often only have programs available that were primarily developed to work on the Windows OS. 

There is also a clear example of this dynamic in education. Textbook and curriculum publishers must conform their material to the state education standards of Texas and California or immediately lose a large percentage of their potential customers. The state education standards in Texas and California are decided on by state government level education boards populated by politicians who must be elected by a popular vote. This board then decides on curriculum standards for the entire state, which then dictates what kinds of curriculum get published in the first place. This is a far cry from the local control of schools that Andy and Jonah insist dominate public education, to say nothing of what it means for smaller states.

In addition to all of this, teacher training programs in college inevitably must prepare their students to teach in public schools because that is where 90% of the jobs are. Naturally, if those teachers end up in the other 10%, charters and private schools, they are still trained to teach in public school and their teaching will tend to reflect that. It is simply not true that the mere existence of school choice means the market is free to do as it pleases under monopoly conditions. This is why free market conservatives have worked to prevent monopolies as corrosive to the normal operations of the free market, all the more so when it is a publicly funded, state-run monopoly. 

Secondly, what ideology is Jonah talking about, and what is the ideology he would prefer? Doesn't he prefer privately run enterprise to socialist, publicly funded and run programs? Is he really okay with government run schools because of some outward semblance of local control? Does Jonah oppose socialism? If so, why the apologetics for a clearly socialist program? The arguments against socialized education are exactly the same as the arguments against socialized medicine. What is called the "public option" in healthcare is clearly the same as the already existing "public option" in education. If Jonah really has a free market ideology, why doesn't he criticize one as much as the other? 

Thirdly, given that public schools are socialist and educate 90% of American kids growing up, that means, tautologically, that 90% of Americans grow up in a socialist system. When they hit adulthood and enter the marketplace, they are blindsided by a market economy that is totally unfamiliar to them. It is entirely understandable that they would react against it. It seems "wrong" to them because they grew up in a system where everything is "free", paid for by the government through taxes, where they have no customers whose needs must be respected. Rather they must respect only government standards decided upon by politicians they have never met, and as long as they follow the government's rules they expect, and are told, that everything will work out great for them. They are taught that when they graduate they will have all the skills they need for getting a job, that they will be rewarded for doing virtually nothing at all useful to a real life customer, and that their work ethic is primarily to be directed towards gaining the approval of their superior which is, ultimately, the government. It's no wonder so many young people are just fine with socialism. It's the system they grew up under. If Jonah worries about the ideology of the country, maybe he should be worried about how people learn their ideology. Do they learn by listening to the Remnant podcast or are they more likely to learn it by their own personal experience during their formative years?

Now that's whack. 

Our Long March

I have wondered for quite some time now if someone today read through all my posts on this blog prior to the candidacy of Donald J. Trump and none of them since, they might reasonably come to the conclusion that I am obviously a Trump supporter. I've written at some length on the idea that sometimes "we", meaning evangelicals, social conservatives, conservatives of other stripes, are often too "nice" and accommodating. I've argued against the business wing of the GOP, whom Reagan called "fraternal order" Republicans, whose main concern appears to be power rather than principle.  But they would be quite wrong. I could not bring myself to vote for Trump even in the general election. My objection to Trump wasn't his character or his methods, his obnoxious tweeting or his public image. My objection to Trump was very simple: he wasn't, and still isn't a conservative. Everybody seems to know this but it doesn't appear to make much difference vis a vis the battle lines on the right.

Sohrab Ahmari recently wrote an article outlining a position he calls "David French-ism", which he is against. David French, the man, the myth, the legend, wrote a response, and for some reason the whole dust-up ballooned into something rather larger than it ought to have been for all the same reasons that public discourse in the age of social media, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Donald J. Trump is often ridiculous. A complete fucking moron says something moronic that happens to align with one side but has patently obvious and egregious flaws. The other side jumps on those flaws immediately and en masse, not because it is hard but because it is easy, and the first side then defends the patently obvious, often absurd flaws as not really being flaws at all simply because they think they must defend their own. Finally, the whole debate becomes ridiculous and everybody misses the point that actually matters. Obviously, "David French-ism" is not very similar to the positions, ideas, and actual life lived by one David French. Neither does "Sohrab Ahmari-ism" bear much resemblance to the life and times of one Donald J. Trump. In that respect, David French's response to the attack on his person is accurate.

In other respects, I found French's response almost equally as frustrating as Ahmari's original article. David French appears to believe that everything is going quite swimmingly in the culture wars, i.e., we are winning. French's idea of this references the situation in the early 80s compared to today and claims progress on a number of fronts. I can't help but recall Jerry Falwell's belief that the Moral Majority had won the issue of gay marriage. He probably died believing it. Less than a decade later gay marriage became legal in the entire country. Why did someone like Jerry Falwell, who had fought this battle for years up close and personal, believe so wrongly that he had won? Is David French making the same mistake? Can people like David French and Jerry Falwell ever wrap their heads around the idea that maybe, just maybe, Ellen DeGeneres coming out was far more important than the passage of DOMA? Could they ever be impressed upon to understand that it doesn't matter how many laws you pass or cases you win protecting the free speech of college students when all their professors are leftist radicals? Jessie Owens, Joe Louis, and the Tuskegee Airmen made a much larger impact in the fight against racism than the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Why is this so hard for people on the right to understand?

IT DOES NOT MATTER what the law is today, tomorrow or any other day. It matters what people believe. People make the law. The left owns every institution in our society that informs belief: education, media, arts and entertainment, everything. They even took over the mainline Protestant denominations and have a disturbingly large foothold in the Catholic Church. It's a minor miracle Protestant conservatism survived at all. Our entire K-12 public education system was built by progressives openly advocating character formation of young children taken away from their parents as a means to societal revolution. Hollywood has always been a blatantly liberal propaganda machine. Conservatives disappeared completely from higher education in the 1920s, and the last gasp of theologically conservative academics became a byword and a derogatory term for us ever since. Progressives of one stripe or another have owned all of these things since roughly the 1920s. That means that no matter how hard the David French's of the world work, in the end leftists will be making the law, because everyone is a leftist except those exceptional few who have managed to escape the long arm of leftism either by some miracle or plain old contrarian obstinance. Leftists can, and will, get anything they want in a generation or two not because they have the best arguments, not because they win court cases or align with the Constitution, but because they have POWER, and they are experts at wielding it to do the only thing that matters: molding the minds of ordinary unaligned people.

Since progressives took over the culture conservatives have operated as a subculture with essentially no voice anywhere in the culture where it really matters. Where does it really matter? It matters where one can speak with authority to an audience that hasn't yet made up its mind. That's primarily in educational institutions and tangentially in the arts and entertainment. Nobody reads the court opinions that David French and others have worked so hard to procure, and nobody cares. They care whether Elsa is gay or not. They care that they were taught evolution in the third grade by a teacher who believed it, and not only is the Bible just wrong, it's so irrelevant that it's never even discussed. People do NOT generally form their beliefs in their 20s and 30s based on argument, evidence and reason. Most people, and by "most" I mean the vast, vast majority, form their opinions in only hazy, vague, barely understood snippets of random feelings when they are very, very young. Once they reach their late teens it's far too late to do anything about it. Life takes over, and virtually all of these people will be far too busy just getting by to think much about their basic beliefs.

So I don't take much comfort in the existence of the Federalist Society or David French's faith in the ability of classical liberalism to appeal to those people. There is only one way we win back the culture, and that is the same avenue by which the left won it in the first place: the long march through the institutions. That doesn't mean passing laws or winning elections. It means getting OUR PEOPLE in positions of POWER within the institutions that matter to the formation of common and public belief in this society. And I shudder to think that none of our supposed thought leaders, be it French or Ahmari, appear to understand that.

Now that's whack.

How Avengers: Endgame Tries and Fails to Avoid the Grandfather Paradox

The Grandfather Paradox is my biggest pet peeve about sci-fi. The Grandfather Paradox is so named because of the logical problem that if one goes back in time and kills their grandfather, than they never would have been born, and thus never would have killed their grandfather. Yet it doesn't seem possible that there is some kind of physical world that would allow time travel yet not allow a time traveler to kill their grandfather. The problem with time travel in science fiction has always been that the main reason why you'd want to travel to the past is to change something, but if you actually succeeded, then why would you have gone back in time to change something that never happened because you prevented it? It's a lazy plot device that doesn't make sense.

However, there are some ways time travel can be implemented in a story without causing a grandfather paradox. One of them was famously done by the TV show Lost, and I'm told the show Continuum does something similar. In Lost, there's an entire character, a physicist, who's only purpose in the show appears to be to constantly remind everyone that time travel is possible but the past cannot be changed. Several of the main characters travel to the past and of course they try to prevent something the show calls "the incident", but end up causing the very thing they try to prevent, thus avoiding the paradox.

Another way to avoid the paradox is to travel back in time to obtain something that you need but cannot get in the present. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, one of my personal favorites, has the crew of the Enterprise traveling back in time to pick up a couple humpback whales and bring them BACK TO THE FUTURE where humpback whales are extinct and unfortunately there is an alien probe trying to communicate with them whose signal is destroying the world. Gee, I hope they didn't talk very long the first time the probe came huh? An excellent example of grown-up yet still unreformed hippies making films. The Grandfather Paradox is avoided because they don't really change anything in the past. Humpback whales still go extinct, so presumably even though they interacted with some people and stole a couple of whales that were released into the ocean, saving them from being killed by whalers, nothing they did in the past changed anything that would have eliminated their reason for traveling back in time in the first place, so the Grandfather Paradox is avoided. However, they couldn't just leave it at that. In one famous scene Scotty, the engineer, explains to a 1980s glass manufacturer how to make "transparent aluminum" because they need some help modifying their ship to transport the whales. At the end of the classic scene, Scotty, confronted with the fact that he just altered the timeline by doing this, says "How do we know he didn't invent the thing?" In fact, he did invent the thing, and he always invented it, because if this is in fact actually the past corresponding to the future, then this is the way it always happened and they didn't actually change anything. Ofc, Scotty meant that maybe he invented it even without their intervention, but the point is that anything which constitutes an actual change in the past doesn't make sense, because then it would no longer be the same past or the same future.

Some sci-fi gets around this by claiming every time something is changed in the past a new timeline is created, branching off from the old one, essentially creating another universe. This is the approach of the new Star Trek films, conveniently allowing a reboot of the original series where they can do anything they like, and of shows like the new Flash series, which ends up with multiple characters from multiple universes, including an evil scientist from their timeline replaced by a happy-go-lucky, nincompoop author from what they call Earth-2, and of course Supergirl from another show who hails from Earth-38. I used to like The Flash, but's it's just gotten so ridiculously embroiled in various versions of the multiverse solution to the GP that I just can't handle it any more. Once you use time travel to solve a problem there's no going back. Time travel is a deus ex machina that can solve any problem, so now in order to keep the story plausible you must keep the stakes low enough that time travel is either not necessary or not worth it (boring), or invent an explanation why you can only use it in rare instances. In the end, it always creates infinitely self-replicating plot holes. There's an older show called Quantum Leap where the main characters are constantly traveling back in time to change something but every time they go BACK TO THE FUTURE something else they didn't intend happens which results in their future world not being the same as they remembered it (how could they remember it if it never was?). So they just keep going back changing things trying to make everything the way it's supposed to be in the future. Ultimately this trope only makes sense if you posit multiple universes. Some even argue that the multiverse already exists where everything that could happen does happen, so traveling back in time to change the past only means that when you travel BACK TO THE FUTURE, you are simply going to a different branch of the already existing multiverse where...you traveled back in time from a different universe and changed history in the new one, the one you now inhabit...in the future. I won't go through all the logical problems here but essentially this explanation doesn't make logical sense either in the end.

In the end, the Lost approach is the only way to go. The past has already happened and cannot be changed by someone from the future. The main problem with this is that it limits time travel as a plot device. It only works in Lost because the time travelers are missing all sorts of key information about what actually happened in the past. They don't know they were the ones who caused the incident they tried to prevent. If they did know, then obviously they wouldn't have gone back, and the thing wouldn't have happened, and you have a sort of reverse Grandfather Paradox even though no time travel occurs. So for time travel to make sense as a plot device it has to work the same way a prophecy does. You don't actually know what it means until it happens. The solution is limited knowledge, and this only makes sense in certain story contexts like Lost where nobody knows what's going on, including the writers.

So finally, to Avengers: Endgame! I'm not a huge fan of all these comic book movies, and I've never read comic books at all, but like everybody else I go see them. They are fun and make good movies, but I never take them too seriously because they just aren't worth it. After I saw Infinity War I figured, like pretty much everybody else, that all the characters who died from Thanos' snap were either not dead or weren't going to stay dead. I also figured that they would use time travel to fix it. I assumed they would somehow regain control of the time stone, in some way which Dr. Strange had anticipated or perhaps had even set up using the time stone before he gave it to Thanos. Then they would go back in time and change the events of Infinity War. They go back in time, fight Thanos again only this time they win because they have knowledge, or perhaps even help, from the future versions of themselves. It would have been appropriately epic, appropriately clever and a pretty satisfying ending. But it also would have been a Grandfather Paradox. Why go back in time to save the world if it never got blowed up in the first place?


SPOILER ALERT!

Instead, the Endgame writers tried to avoid the dreaded GP using the Star Trek IV method: they go back in time to obtain possession of the Infinity stones, travel BACK TO THE FUTURE with them, use them to magically make everyone who died not dead, they were just gone for five years, then go back to the past and put the Infinity stones back right where they found them.

Conceptually this could have worked, but the way it was implemented fails to avoid changing the past. I haven't done an extensive check of this, but it seems like they changed a dizzying number of scenes we've already seen in  previous films. They for sure interact with characters in the past in a way that could not fail to have affected the way those characters behave and act in the future, including for instance a scene where Captain America fights himself. They also gloss over the part where Captain America travels back in time by himself and puts all six Infinity stones back where they found them. Major, major plot holes abound here, simply because a large portion of the movie involves the Avengers' intricate plan to obtain the Infinity stones in the past. It requires no less than three separate teams working, in present terms, all at the same time. This is hastily justified by some technobabble preventing them from making as many trips as they want with as many people as they want. Of course the real reason is they wanted to showcase all the Avengers' various talents in a scenario where they are all actually needed and not on screen just because. This is especially true of Hawkeye and Black Widow, the two members who are just plain old humans who are just really good at archery and martial arts, respectively. Why send them if you could send the Hulk instead? Their fight scene makes this evident because...well...they end up just fighting each other over who gets sacrificed to obtain the soul stone. Really? You are going to send the two regular humans, without Iron Man style suits, on the same mission with no superpowers to help out? Com' on, even the Hulk got an Iron Man suit once. So how come they need to do this, and it's super difficult, and all sorts of things go wrong, but suddenly when it's time to put the Infinity stones back where they found them in the past Captain America can do it all by himself? In a single trip? To multiple different times? Pure nonsense.

What concerns us here though is the dreaded GP. Do they actually avoid it? Obviously not. In the first part of the movie Thanos destroys the Infinity stones and is then found and killed by the Avengers, who find out from him the stones have been destroyed and can't be used to undo the snap. Conceptually, they could have just gone back in time, figured out a way to steal all the stones and put them back without being seen or altering the timeline. But like Star Trek IV, the writers just couldn't help themselves. Even if you take away Cap's fight with himself, Nebula killing her past self, and all the other things that happen which make great movie scenes but not great logical sense, there's still the big baddie. They couldn't just leave Thanos alone. Thanos from the past figures out what the Avengers from the future are doing and tries to stop them, even following them BACK TO THE FUTURE resulting in a huge battle between Thanos and all his minions and all the resurrected heroes over the Infinity stones. They just could not resist doing this. Thanos is KILLED. The past Thanos is killed in the future. Obviously if past Thanos is killed in the future he never would have gotten the Infinity stones in the first place and the snap never would have happened.

So why did the Endgame writers take such pains to avoid a GP with the Infinity stones but totally disregard it with respect to Thanos? Why did Cap even bother returning the stones when killing past Thanos already created the same kind of GP he was trying to avoid? In fact, the Avengers at the beginning of the film even discussed traveling back in time and killing Thanos, but reject it on the grounds that it would create a GP. But then they end up killing adult Thanos before the snap? They killed what is supposed to be the same Thanos twice in the same movie. Ugh.

Stuff like this is why sci-fi writers should just avoid time travel altogether. There's just too many ways to use it as a clever plot device that inevitably results in a Grandfather Paradox. Time travel is to a sci-fi writer what the apple was to Eve. It's just too big of a temptation to do the wrong thing. And as Avengers: Endgame shows, actually avoiding a GP would probably make your movie kind of suck. Suppose their plan succeeded without any GPs. All that would have happened was they come BACK TO THE FUTURE with the stones, do the reverse snap, and then put them back in the past. Game over. No epic final battle with a past Thanos and all his minions. No Tony Stark heart-to-heart with his father. No Nebula killing her past self in a thinly veiled commentary on the way her character has changed. No future anti-establishment Captain America fighting his past self defending world order. Just we win, yay, game over. In order to make the kind of comic book movie they wanted, they needed the epicness factor, and to do that they fell into the GP trap and destroyed the justification for the entire plot of Endgame, avoiding one GP just to create a dozen more.

Now that's whack.