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Sounds like an exercising in rearranging the furniture on the Titanic to me.

In a world where discrimination and separatism is qualitatively and quantitatively on the rise, people in charge must be ecstatic that they can appease people without having to do anything meaningful that might piss off the extremists on the right, or "shareholders". And people are so used to being told that change is only possible through incremental adjustments that they'll eat it up like candy and think this is progress.

"People people people, if you're going to call someone a filthy tranny and throw fast food at xem on public transport, at least use the proper pronoun when you verbally abuse xem."

When there's a hole in the boat and you're taking on water, the least of your concerns should be about what language you use to describe the in-rushing water or shape of the hole, nor arguing over the colour of the material you use to repair it.

I'm sure some people will see this as a victory. Until next time they apply for a job and not get hired due to transphobia. And the manager of the company, with a gleam in their eye, begins the rejection letter with 'Dear bun/bunself', then sniggers to themselves and says "fucking trannies."

What I'm trying to say was summed nicely in a tweet i saw the other day:
ALTRIGHT/NEO NAZI: your all going to the gas chambers!!!
NEOLIBERAL: you're*

If this is the extent of what activism is able to achieve, i should say that the establishment/elite have won by pacifying and declawing the protesters. It's no longer about breaking the shackles of oppression. We can't go around breaking shackles everywhere - think of the effect on the economy? And what about people getting hit by shrapnel? No, instead the LGBTQ community will be given multi coloured chains, the black community will be given slightly longer chains, and we'll pad the shackles with silk so that everyone is much more comfortable. Don't complain about the concept of being chained, instead complain that your chain is not as nice as the next guy's chain.

It's as though the great struggle of protest and civil disobedience has been taken over by the liberal intelligentsia, and the worst kind of discrimination faced by a 20 year old middle-class university student with rainbow coloured dreadlocks and a nose piercing is the letter they receive about their student loan that begins "dear sir/madam". So they go out and march about it and think they've made progress when they get their own pronoun. In their life, in their experiences, they are treated equally in other respects, so they think they ARE fighting inequality.

But for the working class male or female transsexual who gets filthy looks and a seat isolated by themselves on public transport, to travel to their entry level job where they've been skipped over for promotion for not looking the part, or getting the right level of respect from the trans-phobic staff, getting snide whispered comments from customers about the size of their hands, getting abuse yelled at them as they travel to have a night out at the ONLY trans-friendly bar within a 20 mile radius....... I get the feeling that receiving a letter with the correct pronoun isn't exactly going to change their fucking lives.

To remove a weed, you go for the roots. Some wanker calling you him/her when you prefer bun/bunself is not the root of this problem. The problem is that they are trans-phobic, not the language - which is just the tool they use to discriminate against you. To change the language and think that you've won is a bit like redefining room temperature and claiming you've warmed everybody by a few degrees.

If you march for equal rights, fair pay, fair treatment then people are going to see that and join your protest because they also want those things. Those things will solve the problems faced by the trans community, feminists, masculinists, minorities alike! And through common goals and by supporting each other en masse for simple, unified goals like EQUALITY, progress will be made, change will happen. It is a concept called solidarity and seems to be going out of fashion, but our grandparents knew.

The objective for the establishment is to drive a wedge between groups of people so that their demands are more manageable, and they can be turned on each other. Feminists, masculinists, LGBT, everyone... can't you see how better off you'd be marching together for common values that lie at the core of what every human wants?

Wall of text, sorry... and I know it looks like i'm being insensitive. So congratulations, genuinely, for getting someone to use your preferred pronoun if that makes you feel better. But whilst people have been fighting tooth and nail to get their own pronoun (in civilised settings only), we've suffered huge leaps backwards in freedom and tolerance behind their backs whilst they were bent over intently concentrating on the finer detail of what their ideal equality looks like.

billpayer.
Respectfully, go fuck yourself.

longde, its not a matter of beating anyone at the admissions game, its not an open competition. The govt. has set aside 25% of ALL placements to go to foreign students. Imagine how you would feel if you got a rejection letter because there weren't enough placements in your course.....

Neither of which matters. Condemning an entire nation because of the acts of a few, and you think you have moral superiority here ?
Again, go fuck yourself.

Tabloid media up in arms the instant a foreign national gets harmed. Blame it on the racist aussies!!
Actually no, blame it on the criminals who mug people. Crime rate is fairly low, pack the country full of foreign nationals and sooner or later one of them will fall victim to crime. That does not give cause to shout the motive was due to race.

You've just made the case for the libertarian platform of limited government. Libertarians defend that the government should be shrunk down to the bare essentials because politicians are completely incapable of making competent technical decisions.

I'm well aware. Ron Paul is not the voice of libertarians everywhere, nor are his conceptions of libertarian education reform what I support. I didn't say I believe the federal government should stay completely out of education, I said that it should stay out of deciding educational topics. When I said I didn't like the idea of handing things off to states, I think of Paul because he supports moving from federal to states' rights, and under states' rights as he would like to have them, decisions are handed off from local politics to local regionally-based politico-educational power-brokers (district school administrators and, as you mention yourself, school boards). I disagree, because those guys happen to be even dumber than presidents and mayors. I want to go lower than that, I want teachers and school administrators to make decisions on what's taught in our schools. Also, federal funding is a different issue than curricula decisions.

Also, the market has ways of regulating quality and correcting bad decisions. One is criticism from outsiders. If that fails, low standardized test scores, rejection letters from colleges and job applications will make parents get the message and demand better quality.

I'm on board for the market comparison. Currently, using the free-market as a model for education system development falls through when one evaluates the current US public educational system through that lens, because it is specifically not even close to a free market (yet). And, since federal budgets are used to help finance schools, it is essential that the federal government get on board when it comes to distributing such tax money in order to force improvement in schools. Unless of course, you happen to believe that states will create improvement at the same pace when pressure is put on them. A free-market system can apply at both the federal and state levels.

1. Until college, students must attend regional public schools with very few exceptions. They are thus not free to take their education elsewhere without paying up the wazzoo or going to private school. This is why school vouchers are so important to me, allowing students to choose which school to attend and thus send their allocated money to is key to moving back towards a free-market model.
2. Parental demand is a poor way of regulating schools when my first point is true. Unintelligent and uneducated parents will often be unable to tell a good school from a bad one, which is why:
3. Regular, unbiased, quantitative and qualitative feedback on the success or lack thereof of students is essential. Free-market models also generally rely on informed decision-making, something that can't be attributed to American parents on the whole either. Where do they get feedback from? College acceptances are only applicable to high schools, and even then the path of blame can't be traced solely to them, poor pre-K to secondary school education also fall into the mix for screwing students over. Standardized test scores are ok, but then again, this creates a need for unbiased tests that are representative of the body of knowledge a student is expected to command at his or her particular age and education level. I studied and gamed my way (legally and on my own) into perfect scores on standardized tests repeatedly throughout my education. This is part of why the current No Child Left Behind act is failing: the tests don't represent the knowledge of the student, and so when schools teach to the test or when the student prepares for the test, the student misses out completely on certain sections of his or her education, and also results can't be counted on to judge the quality of the school's or student's performance. In addition to which:
4. Quantitative feedback is impossible without the creation of nationalized feedback systems. No matter what form, there needs to be standardized measurements. Thus, tests can't be limited by state, nor can they be limited to a county or to a district. In order to create such test, we need to have...well, national organizations to keep them regulated.

The US has a few success examples in education that I can think of offhand to demonstrate the principles I'm arguing for above:
The first is private high schools of a specific kind: Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville, etc.
The second is magnet public high schools: TJ in Virginia, Hunter College in NYC, Stuyvesant, etc.
The third is the higher-education system, both undergraduate and graduate: Harvard, MIT, U. Chicago, etc.

In the three examples I've given, free-market-based attendance and thus improvement is pretty demonstrable, yet federal funding is also used to support these schools based on their performance as indicated by the students' attendance and performance. In the private and magnet high school examples, students are comparable to the best students worldwide. At the higher-education system, students are on average better than those at the same level of education in other countries. Nationalized education reform plans can be improved a lot from those ideas and those examples.

>> ^jonny:

Really? So, you'd be ok with local school boards deciding that their basic science curriculum should include the alternate theory of the sun revolving around the earth?

Yes. Teachers and communities should be able to choose what they want to focus on. My experience is that if you hand a teacher a curriculum he doesn't believe in, he'll just do a half-assed job and skip to what he thinks is important.

Also, the market has ways of regulating quality and correcting bad decisions. One is criticism from outsiders. If that fails, low standardized test scores, rejection letters from colleges and job applications will make parents get the message and demand better quality.

>> ^rembar:
If you want to follow a strict constitutional viewpoint, carry it to its logical conclusion: NO state and NO government under the United States Constitution whatsoever has the right to use its power to deny teaching scientifically-accurate material to students in public schools. Decisions about teaching scientific curricula, or any other public school curricula for that matter, should be left up to the only people qualified to make such decisions, and we happen to have already hired those folks. Those people are teaching our children in public schools every day. Decisions over teaching evolution are not for the federal OR local governments to make, it's for the teachers and school officials, the people who are required to be educated on the topics they teach, to decide.

You've just made the case for the libertarian platform of limited government. Libertarians defend that the government should be shrunk down to the bare essentials because politicians are completely incapable of making competent technical decisions.

When Ron Paul says that the federal government should stay away of education, he's not implying that "states rights" will fix the problem. If you watch the New Hampshire Town Hall Q&A session (which aired along with that Fox debate RP wasn't invited to), you'll see him making the point that parents and teachers should be responsible for each child's education. Just like the federal government should delegate functions to the states, the states are expected to further delegate and keep regulation to a minimum.

I'm an engineer who took an interest in education, so after I got my pure mathmatics degree I also became a licensed math teacher. I'm completely opposed to government interference in education. To me, Brazil (my country) represents a textbook example of education central planning gone wrong. 9th grade public school kids read and write at 5th grade levels, consistently finish last in international benchmarks and each government decision actually makes things worse by providing cosmetic solutions and more regulation.

best "Mummys boy" comment.

weirdest video submitted in 2007.
most controversial video
best new channel
best *ban rejection letter received