Texas' attempt to change their textbooks

Like, for example, about communism?

 

I'm just going to assume you're being obtuse on purpose instead of really asking. Because anyone who takes a serious look at our public school systems around the country knows they have countless issues.

 

Well, we know it's not the threat everyone said it was.

 

I'm sure the folks in North Korea feel that way...

And the folks shipped off the the gulags under Stalin & Co...

And the political prisoners in Cuba...

And the millions of folks who were locked behind the Iron Curtain...

It was just a regular fucking Utopia.

 

So you're OK with Jefferson Davis being put on par with Lincoln? Or you think that the civil rights movement created unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes among minorities? Whatever the hell that actually means.

 

Yeah, it was such a threat that conservative members of the U.S. Congress tried to have the party banned in the late 1940s/early 1950s. Nevermind the precedent that it would have set that if you didn't agree with a party's views, that they could be banned.

Communism is, in reality, a conservative idea in many ways, in that it reduces people's freedoms.

Looking throughout history, life as we know it has improved a lot more thanks to liberals. The Magna Carta was a liberal document that said the King didn't have absolute power. The idea that a group of colonies could question the divine right of a king and break away from his power was a liberal idea. Ending slavery, giving women the right to vote, labor laws that regulated working conditions and ended child labor, laws that forced businesses to adhere to regulations for safe food and water, all liberal ideas.

If it were up to conservatives, we'd still would be members of the British Empire, and women would be stuck in the kitchen, cooking food with rat parts in it.

 

The Dem-led War on Poverty has worked out great...

And who can forget Al Gore Sr. filibustering against the Civil Rights Act.

 

I know, I know, and Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee didn't ruin any lives that didn't deserve to be ruined.

 

Re Jeff Davis, the winners of wars get to write the history. Not our fault that Vietnam doesn't have many writers, and besides, like I said, classes rarely get that far anyway.

 

Are you seriously trying to compare Joseph McCarthy to mass-murdering dictators and other communist leaders who have brutalized, intimidated and impoverished their populations for decades?

 

No, just that McCarthy ruined a lot of people's lives unnecessarily.
And there are some people who seem to think Communism is still a threat to this country.

 

The internal threat of Communism and the threat to the rest of the world are two different issues. The internal threat certainly did not turn out to be nearly what McCarthy and many others tried to make it out to be.

Back on the actual topic, the real fun here is a few conservatives trying to twist the debate rather than deal with the fact it is people on their side of the fence trying to use their control over the writing of textbooks to abuse the educational system in this country.

I'm not saying there aren't issues on both sides. I have some serious issues with the ideas regarding education coming from the liberal side. For one thing, they try to put way too much of the blame for the educational issues in this country on teachers, who are only one part of the puzzle. They are also looking at ideas such as year-round schooling without giving proper thought to staffing schools those extra months of the year. There is a very real risk of good people being chased out of teaching if some of the ideas they are pushing ever come to fruition. Maybe the government should focus on fixing the execution of No Child Left Behind first.