Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Watcher Behind”

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January 29, 2008

Watcher Behind

Hatched by Dafydd

Can't stop, running behind again, gotta go --

Council

It'sanhonorjusttobenominatedthankyouverymuch.

None of our votes won this week; we did much better next week.

Ed. Schools: They're Awful (for the most part), by The Colossus of Rhodey.

Hube states his thesis right up front. He quotes George Leef:

The public overwhelmingly believes that the function of schools should be mainly academic – that is, to make sure that children learn very well the skills and knowledge that it takes to succeed in life....

On the other hand, the dominant view among those who run and teach in our education schools is that the key role of schooling is to achieve various social objectives. In their opinion, it's more important for teachers to properly adjust students' outlook on life and society than to instruct them in "mere" knowledge and facts.

Leef is right, and Hube expounds upon this profundity throughout the post.

Instead, we voted for a pair of lesser issues, evidently:

Identity Politics Then and Now, by Bookworm Room;

500,000 Iraqis Did Not Die, by Cheat Seeking Missiles.

Bookworm writes about the politics of identification: "Vote for me because I look like you!" She contrasts this (largely Democratic) tendency with the (more often Republican) propensity to vote for the person whose philosophy and experience most closely matches what we see as ideal.

Is that an important topic? Nah. Tied for fifth.

Our second-place vote went to a post that notes the astonishing discrepency between the numbers of dead Iraqi civilians as estimated by the Lancet study and the World Health Organization... a gulf of greater than half a million souls!

Nouncil

Jeez, this is taking longer than I thought. All right, fifth gear! The winner was a nice piece by that Canadian guy who's under the gun for republishing the Mohammed cartoons:

Kangaroo Court, by Ezra Levant.

Levant makes a great case that his purpose in publishing them was simply to exercise his freedom to publish them in the putative Western democracy of Canada. (We voted this one in first place, and I remarked to myself, "Self, this Nouncil post is going to win by a landslide."

It tallied 5 1/3 points, which means either eight first-place votes -- or else seven firsts and two seconds -- or six firsts and four seconds -- well, you get the picture. The silver medal was a three-way tie... and one of those three was yet another post about Ezra Levant's battles with the Canadian Human Rights Commission!

Another of the silver medalists was our second-place vote:

The Media Does It Again, by Winds of Change.

Armed Liberal tears into the risible New York Times piece purporting to show a trail of death and destruction, or however they phrased it, following after Iraq-war veterans when they returned to the United States. (This was the piece we nominated.)