Cindy Sheehan gives up

Please edit this diary ASAP. Quoting a whole story is considered plagarism. Generally a few paragraphs is considered acceptable if you link. You don't link and you quoted way too much. Please edit or we will have to.

That is not the implication at all. People who attend public schools are real, regular folks but they aren't getting their needs met by the system they are participating in. The SYSTEM is broken, for all the real, regular people and no matter how individuals try to cope, it will continue to deal mainly with the needs of those employed in it, not those paying for it supposedly as "self-governance."

This morning my expert public policy eye spots a right answer in the New York Times business news, real analysis and insight for all those of us who puzzle over public schools and party politics, religious wars, et cetera and just can't understand why we keep doing all the wrong things wronger, regressing rather than progressing.

"Overbooking, Bumped Fliers and No Plan B"
by Jeff Bailey

The whole story is about aggressive and insulated data analysts crunching endless numbers to create operational models that are statistically attractive to their own part of the "enterprise" but unfit for human consumption, thereby infuriating regular, responsible people just trying to participate in the system in good faith, in their own private, statistically insignificant roles.

Necessity being the mother of invention, savvy front line folks experiencing the fallout have to cope somehow. They create practical workarounds at their own lowly level that seem to compensate the consumer reasonably well and thus protect the system from its own longterm self-inflicted wounds. But that in turn makes the analysts redouble insistence on THEIR strategies, further infuriating users and further hurting the systems's credibility, requiring even more creative counterprogramming and loss of respect from the people caught up in it all. More and more regular people wise up to the system's escalating adversarial shortcomings, thus making it all even worse. Finally the system becomes neither workable nor fixable at any level . . Dörner's Logic of Failure.
"Stuck in a quagmire . . ."
"Scant credbility. . ."
"People view [it] as not on the up-and-up"

. . .what psychologist Dietrich Dörner shows, is that the problem lies not in the world, but in our own world-view . . .most of us are too simpleminded, especially when it comes to anticipating future trends or interactive processes. We don't think about the implications and consequences of what we want, or want to do, with results that come back to haunt us.

Nevertheless, and contrary to many current claims, Dörner also argues that there is no secret formula or mental trick . . . to overcome complacency or over-confidence. The world always has been very complex, but as the ambition and scale of our intentions has increased in modern times, the malevolent implications and consequences of our simple-mindedness becomes more and more frequent and compelling. . .
This is a book that public policymakers, politicians, planners, and the general public desperately need to read. We are squandering our environmental capital and undermining our social capital because we are trying to do things, or avoid doing things, that cannot be sustained for very much longer. . .

Remember that Kansas town that got wiped off the map by a giant tornado? Its mayor just quit, said he would not lead the rebuilding effort, wasn’t temperamentally suited to that kind of system work with competing ideas about what to do and how to do it. The town council said oh, don’t quit, we’ll just consider that you’re on sabbatical to get your own family squared away and then maybe you’ll come back and lead us. We’ll just wait.

HUH? But he is leading you, by example!
He’s doing a couple of smart, real, practical things. He has his priorities in order (family first) and he knows that not everyone is equally good at every task, “entitled” to it by system formula or not. And he knows that politics and government do not constitute leadership; it’s service.

None of which is to say that individuals against the big bad system are always right, or even a better alternative for the public than government. Individuals can be our best hope when they are critical-thinking individuals, and public policy can be progressive and productive. Both are possible and desirable. I'm not anti-government or anti-system or anti-institutional. I'm certainly not anti-peace or anti-mom!

But I am anti-Logic of Failure.

I know we have huge problems in the world, tornadic activity is tearing us apart all over the place. I am working toward finding solutions with the same fervor that drives most progressives. But the random, flailing, emotional-casuality, self-destructive, bathos-wallowing Logic of Cindy Sheehan is no less acceptable as The Right Answer than most of the rest of what passes for political discourse and analysis.

As an editor I am TELLING you our policy. It is also the pretty STANDARD POLICY on most blogs. If you don't change it damned soon I will personally delete the quoted text.

Furthermore, I said it is commonly accepted practice to link to the people you quote. That smooths over many problems and is considered polite. Again if you don't do it, I will delete the quoted text.

I am not asking. I am telling you our policy.

Maybe we have already discussed it with lawyers BEFORE having a problem.

This is all a huge gray area. There are no hard and fast rules. But there are lawsuits and potential lawsuits. People get sued for improper use of other people's material. We have no intention of having this happen to us. We want to set of an example of how to do things properly without having to be a legal test case.

In general, a clear attempt to give full credit (which you did), providing a link (hence sending the people whose material you are using some traffic) and making a clear effort to just use brief excerpts and urging readers to get more info from the original site all usually placate anyone who might be protective of their material. Quoting material from another site in its entirety WITHOUT FULL PERMISSION and without any link is generally frowned upon on any site I tend to blog on. On the other hand, material from organizations that are trying to get their word out as widely as possible can be quoted more extensively, though I always still provide a link if I can.

Also, I will remind you once more, on any site you post the publisher and editors have final word. Arguing is poor form at best.

Correct, there are no hard and fast rules; rule of thumb is two or three paragraphs.

I'd also suggest that Wallner does not belong either on the front page, and that in a case like this, you do what I do, which is simply edit as necessary. Wallner doesn't understand that his ability to release unrestrained blather on other people's sites in exactly the manner he sees fit is not some sacrosanct constitutional right.

Ugh, Wallnerisms; how distasteful.

How did he GET on the front page? I sure didn't do it. I am willing to have him posting here, but he is not front page material.

Not saying any of that, or antyhing LIKE that, nor does Dr. Dörner. (He's a internationally known cognitive psychologist, you know, not some mechanic or accountant.) Have you actually read his book? Or did you at least get the chance to read the blog essay you inspired me to flesh out for the front page, in which I hope I've given more nuanced meanings than this?

And btw, thinking and feeling have been integrated -- no more Spinozan-Cartesian dichotomy to debate! -- or so the NYT reported a few years back, let me know if I need to dig out that article.

This was already handy though:

Ever thought much about the relationship between thought and language? Lewis Carroll, logician and fairy tale writer, apparently did. He wrote in Through the Looking Glass:

"When I say a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

So if I were to comment that Sheehan's public persona to date puts the psycho- in psycho-logical, it would indeed be insulting and too glib by half, and while I might honestly mean it in one way (she is pretty "out there" to my way of thinking) it wouldn't capture much else that I find more important to say, and it certainly wouldn't mean I wanted her to go to the other extreme, become a machine instead.

I construct my arguments and choose my language to match all my thoughts and meanings, and when what I mean isn't simple --is it ever? ;-)-- then I choose nuanced words to mean several things at once, or to different audiences, and in the proportions I find satisfying. I expect the same thing from those I bother to read and argue with, or else I don't (bother.)

I wish all political commentators and activists would read Diane F. Halpern's Rules for Clear Communication and then follow them! There are six, and they are spot-on.

Read the book online.

She discusses words and their meaning, how we use analogies, context and contrast, and includes two sections that may particularly interest politically active homeschooling parents: "Definitions and Control of Thought" followed by "The Power of Labels and Categories."

And her treatment of Emotional Language and Name Calling may benefit any adult living in today's world, as could the subsection on " leading questions and marked words." For example, she shows how an identical program description may be accepted or rejected depending on whether the argument presented focuses on gains or losses.

"It is clear," she writes, "that a loss is more negative than a comparable gain is positive."

And connections between the logical and the psychological are introduced with this: "The trick of course is to reason well. It isn't easy, and it isn't automatic."

And like the joke about psychologists trying to change a light bulb, it can be done only if the object of all their hard work and attention really WANTS to change.

Critical thinking is why public schools universally require algebra, you know. It's supposed to fashion a whole society of logical thinkers, to run all our systems successfully. It's failing at that purpose, of course, but it has a certain simplistic gut-level appeal and it's well-intended -- just like Cindy Sheehan.

from a midwestern homeschool mom called "Corn and Oil"??

"And" instead of corn VERSUS oil to buy and sell government decisions. Wonder how good that blog is at critical evaluation and synthesis of such complex connections?

Hmmm, here it is -- not very Dorner-like, too literalist and simplistic about what it takes to cultivate liberty as a sustainable crop in today's culture. But it does have a great "corn and oil" quote from Mark Twain in the masthead that imo goes in a third direction, in a pattern that fits this topic perfectly: corn AND oil as prime tools for public bribery!

"The teacher reminded us that Rome’s liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sell— exactly our own history over again."

(not Dorner's, though I think they dovetail well) --

Gardner was writing for education policy thinkers in this piece, what School could be concentrating on for the next generation. But say you are right and we have all those kinds of minds now already well-represented in society. How well represented are they among political candidates, and how well are they served by our political processes?

In other words, do we attract possessors of such minds into the electoral arena or do we drive them away while attracting hordes of a different kind, ruthless or glib, competitive to a fault, adversarial or even megalomaniacal minds instead? Soundbite simplistic and shameless about other people's money look like the main kinds of minds that succeed in our decaying system to me --