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Re:If you were President of the United States...
Part 3 of 4
5 foreign policy Foreign policy: The United States of America needs to change it’s international role. It is not our obligation nor our right to be an international police officer. It is neither our right nor our obligation to tell the world how to be good democracies and good free-enterprise economies. We need to enter into a much more egalitarian relationship with international organizations that recognize and honor the sovereignty of other free nations just as much as we expect other nations to honor the sovereignty of the U.S. Just as individual states of our nation surrender certain powers to the federal government in order to provide greater freedom and opportunity to each individual state, so will it be necessary for the united states, among other nations of the free world, to cede certain powers to an international administrative body, in order to exalt and enhance the sovereignty of all free nations. This is not a surrender of sovereignty, but an expansion of it. Americans will have to understand this, and we will see its power when it comes to pass, just as will member states of the new EU, once they are able to establish the terms of their own union.
6 Environment reverse damage Bush has done to the environment
7 capital punishment I would begin a nation-wide campaign to educate voters about the facts regarding capital punishment. I cannot end this crime without the consent of the population, but I can be a leader and show the country how unfair, how ineffective, how dangerous, and how immoral capital punishment is.
8 gay marriage Gay marriage: It is not up to the government, at the state or federal level, to tell individual Americans whom they can or cannot marry. Naturally, there are certain reasonable concerns of agency and consent that the government can and must establish. Beyond this, however, the government must not go. We cannot discriminate among couples based on sexual orientation, denying same-sex couples rights of inheritance, kinship status for medical purposes. It is not possible for heterosexual individuals to judge whether a homosexual lives the way she does because she was born that way or chooses to be so. We can only respect that that is the way she is, and give her all of the same rights and privileges we demand for ourselves. If calling the domestic union of two consenting adults of the same sex “domestic partnership” will make the process of its establishment move more smoothly, then we can certainly call it that. But eventually, we will have to recognize that a marriage is a marriage, regardless of whether the partners are of opposite or of like genders.
See part 4 of 4
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Mark S.
August 10, 2005
# Msgs: 8
Latest: August 24, 2005
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Re:If you were President of the United States...
Here is my first guess. What I have written, the sequence can be misleading. For example, I consider gay marriage and capital punishment to be much more important than their positions on my list may suggest. But since I cannot put all ten items in positions 1, 2, and 3, something’s got to sit down at the bottom. If I were really a president (not that I would ever in a googol years want to be president), I would in reality be working many of these projects in parallel, over-lapping, and so forth, so that there actually would be several items sharing priority 1, 2, and 3.
Also, I rush to point out that there are a jillion critical issues not appearing on this list: abortion, gun control, election reform, energy policy, fiscal policy, equal opportunity, physician-assisted suicide—the list would go for miles. I just wrote down the first ten things I thought of, rather than trying to figure out which would be the first ten things I’d act on.
I look forward to seeing other people’s answers.
1 education Establish a commission to fund research into national education programs in order to determine the most effective, most feasible changes we can make to our educational system in order to reestablish the level of excellence we once enjoyed. We need to find ways to ensure that money in the educational system is getting the best possible mileage in terms of student educational results per dollar spent. We need to examine how we will have to re-model our expectations of student achievement in the context of our culturally complex, post-modern society. We need to establish means of bridging the gaps between schools in wealthy communities and those in poor ones. We need to find ways to ensure that when we say “no child left behind”, that we can actually accomplish that, rather than simply hiding the children who are not getting what they need under the established system of education. We need to develop new models of education that will address, not only mainstream students, but those of the vast spectrum of special needs represented in our communities, whether they be those of students learning English as s second language, having some sort of cultural, religious, or ethnic differences, differences of gender, sexual orientation, physical/intellectual/emotional capacity, social, geographic, or class status, etc. Education must be freely available AND ACESSIBLE to all.
See part 2 of 4
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Mark S.
August 10, 2005
# Msgs: 8
Latest: August 24, 2005
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You tell 'em, Dwyn! Re:We would be just like them... ( My Opinion)
Wow!
That’s so scary. It sounds like your father has lived with his family name too long.
You are so right, Dwyn. If we don’t stick to the principles we stand for, we are no better than the terrorists we are fighting against. The ends do not justify the means. What makes America a great country is our constitution. It is our guaranteed rights and freedoms. It is our national commitment (admittedly, a commitment that has been severely undermined by the Bush administration) to the principle that protecting the rights of free citizens is more important than vengeance, more important than being certain to always catch the bad guy. As long as we maintain a higher standard of justice than the “bad guys”, our country will continue to be worth fighting for.
It is very tempting to stoop to the level of vengeance and vigilantism. It is easy. It is expedient. It promises to ease our pain and make us feel better (a promise that it will never fulfill, because violence can never cure our pain, but only make it worse and cause more violence). There may be times when retaliation is appropriate as a deterrent to further violence, but we’re clearly not dealing with an enemy with whom that’s an effective answer. Since they’re lining up in droves to kill themselves in their cause, there is clearly nothing deterrent for them in our military response. Rather, it seems to encourage their violent nature. If insanity is defined as continually repeating the same failed strategy in hopes of finally getting a different result, this tells us something important about our presidential administration.
It sounds like your family are very angry, and I certainly don’t blame them. All of these coffins coming back from Iraq are very disturbing, and there are clearly a lot of individuals in Iraq who need to be captured and tried and brought to justice. The problem with nuking the country, as you rightly observe, is that there are a large number of innocent and kind people whom we would be murdering by such an act. I was just listening to stories of the aftermath of our bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and I learned something I never knew. We killed and injured huge numbers of Korean people in these bombings, Koreans who had come to Japan to earn a living, but who were denied by Japan, and refused any kind of medical support until now, sixty years after the event.
See part 2 of 2
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Mark S.
August 7, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: August 7, 2005
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You tell 'em, Dwyn! Re:We would be just like them... ( My Opinion)
Part 2 of 2
Nuking is a very powerful answer to terrorism. But it is not a very precise one. Not only do we harm innocents, but we set a precedent in the world which I’m sure we don’t want to live with. We create a world where nuking is an acceptable answer to our problems. So the next terrorist attack on New York may then wipe the city off the map. I can’t imagine wanting to go there.
All of this is not to mention, of course, something the Bush administration loves to see us forget: Osama Bin Laden is in Afghanistan. Iraq has been a handy scapegoat in Bush’s “war on terror”, but Sadam Hussein was the wrong bad guy. He had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and there has never been any evidence that he was developing nuclear weapons. In other words, however nasty a guy Hussein is, in this war, it is WE who are the bad guys. It is we who invaded a foreign nation on false charges and started killing people without any just foundation for our actions. We haven’t sunk to Hitler’s level yet, but we are certainly on our way.
Anyway, I’m glad that nobody in your family is president of the United States. Granted, they couldn’t do much worse, but anyway, I would never vote for them. On the other hand, if YOU are ever interested in finding a campaign manager, be sure to let me know…
# Posted By Message
57978 Dwyn
Hart
August 6, 2005
Reply
We would be just like them... ( My Opinion)
I just got back from two weeks in Chicogo, and my cousin came with me. We were driving and a news broadcast came on, anouncing that 8 more american soilders had been killed. She goes, I hope they shoot Bin Laden when they find him. Then I said, no, they shouldn't. She said he killed so many americans he should be killed. I said yes, but if we kill him we're no better than him, we're americans, and we should give everyone fair trials, even it they're terrorists. Because if we just shoot them, we are just like them. Then she said we should neuc Iraq. I almost hit her. I said, what? She said they killed americans, and I said we killed them too, she said who cares just neuc them. I said, If we were to wipe out an entire country, we'd be as bad as Hitler. We would be brought up on war crimes, our millitary leaders would be executed and america would suffer greatly.
Then today my cousin and my dad took the same side, against me. They said we should neuc every country that is anti-american. I said every country has some anti-american people in it even america. Then I said, Dad, I intend on living in Germany for awhile, would you neuc Germany if I was there? Without hesitation, he said yes.
What this world needs is good role models, and if knowone steps up, I will, what do I have to loose? My dad already said I'm dead.
Language pair: English; German
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Mark S.
August 7, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: August 7, 2005
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Re:We would be just like them... ( My Opinion)
> Then I said, Dad, I intend on living in Germany for awhile, would you neuc Germany if I was there? Without hesitation, he said yes.
> What this world needs is good role models, and if knowone steps up, I will, what do I have to loose? My dad already said I'm dead.
You are an excellent role model already. I just hope you can find a forum which lets the right people to hear your message.
Puti
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Juha-Petri T.
August 7, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: August 7, 2005
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No Child Left, Pt 1 of 2
Hi Dwyn, Travis, everyone:
I think you've made a thoughtful analysis here, pointing out that the government doesn't seem to offer any meaningful solution. If you're familiar with the "carrot and stick" approach to management, where those responsible for some accomplishment are offered some reward for successful efforts (the carrot) and some punishment for failure to perform satisfactorily (a beating with a stick), it seems here that the government is trying to put together something like that, but forgot about the carrot part. I'm not terribly encouraged by what you've found.
I would like to question your conclusion that the government expects schools to somehow perpetually improve grades, and that when the entire student body is pulling down a 4.2 average, the schools are all going to have to find a way to produce students who are earning 4.3's. I'm not saying that this isn't a reasonable interpretation of the materials you've read, or even that it's unlikely that the government would have such an expectation (from an administration that thinks it can improve its success in Afghanistan by starting a new war in Iraq? By now, I'm ready to believe ANYTHING!) After all, our whole economic system is based on the assumption that markets, products, and services will consistently grow indefinitely. From Adam Smith to now, two hundred and thirty years later, nobody in the economics discipline has figured out that there is a problem with this model on a planet with a finite population and finite resources.
On the other hand, it's important to recognize the context within which education emerges as a critical social issue: The United States has gone from being one of the foremost educational systems in the world to being among the worst. Many would argue that we have been, for a couple of decades now, in the midst of an education crisis. A characteristic response to this from a conservative viewpoint (please correct me if I'm wrong, you conservatives out there), is to do what it takes to restore the educational successes we had before. Make the schools go back to the old paradigms that were working, and get us back on track that way. So the idea, then, is not to create an infinite path of educational growth, but to restore our educational system to a very specific standard that it used to meet, and no longer does.
That being the case, one valid reading of the facts we've seen here might be, "There's the bar, and we expect your students to clear it. If they don't we're going to step in and restructure your system, and if they do, we'll leave you alone and move on to the next school on our list.
See NoChildLeft Pt 2 of 2
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Mark S.
June 9, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: June 9, 2005
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No Child Left, Pt 2 of 2
NoChildLeft Pt 2 of 2
Of course, I don't know, I'm just conjecturing, challenging the report you've offered, bounding my thinking off of what you've said. If you read something (or even if you said something I missed) that makes it clear that my reading is wrong and yours is right, it woud be helpful for me to see that; I hope you'll let me know. Otherwise, maybe you'll consider my alternative reading and see what you think of that.
In any case, even if the government is smart enough to choose some reasonable standard of education and say, this is our goal, that's what we need to accomplish, it is still pretty self-evident that their solution of stepping in in a punitive (using punishment) way to deal with the problem is ignorant and ineffective. That's like beating a dog for peeing on the carpet without bothering to check if anyone bothered to put any newspaper down. You have to look at causes of a problem and take appropriate steps to address those causes. All the intervention in the world will do nothing if we haven't taken the time to figure out where the problem came from and what it will take to correct it.
Travis, you put your finger on a huge part of the problem. There's something really wrong with the way we pay people outrageous sums of money to do work they love and enjoy, and then teachers, who work hard, are underappreciated, and often face hostility and violence from students, are rarely paid enough money to put them above the poverty line. That's the priority our great nation has placed on education.
You want to know where the problem with our education lies? There's a great place to start looking. If our country doesn't value education enough to provide schools with the funds and resources they need to do their job effectively, How can we expect to achieve results any better than we have? I have yet to see a meaningful answer to that question from this presidential administration (I have yet to see a meaningful answer from them on anything, but anyway…)
I'm afraid I'm pretty unhappy with our president. I am soooo happy he can't run for another term after this.
Anyway, thanks for the great topic. Keep the faith!
Cheers,
Mark/ Sacramento
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Mark S.
June 9, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: June 9, 2005
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Re:Re:Re:A friend of dwyns
:-)
# 53220
Re:Re:A friend of dwyns dwyn hart
Thanks for welcoming travis! I knew you would!
This is a reply to message # 53148
Language pair: English; English
Category: Opinions
Post date: June 3, 2005
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Mark S.
June 4, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: June 12, 2007
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Re:What is your oppinion of
When you've had a chance to do some research, would you like to tell us what it is about? I've been hearing about it for years, and I have no idea what it is, except for odd references here and there. I have to admit that I have been judging it in ignorance. George Bush seems to have the Midas Touch in reverse: everything he touches turns to crap. The war on terrorism, his abuse of the Alaskan Wilderness, his outragous ideas for "saving" (read, "destroying") social security. As a teacher, I have been, quite frankly, terrified to examine it too closely. I have enough misery in my life the past five years. But I really should know.
Mark
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Mark S.
June 4, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: June 9, 2005
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Re:Right to the intimacy
> Usually I travel to NYC . I understand
> that due to terrorist attacks the airports
> be under surveillance and control . But ,
> I think that the new regulations for the
> airports security , especially in
> american airports , are very stringent .
>
> Waht do you think about it ???
Very stringent, indeed, and yet not
stringent enough. No surveillance device
(or person) is almighty, and diligent
criminals are good at playing cat-and-mouse
games with the advancing surveillance
technology.
Puti
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Language pair: English; Spanish
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Juha-Petri T.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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