Re: You (all) lie!
 

is it true that Texas school books are going to force schools everywhere to use those fucked up books? supposedly Texas is so large that a text book that can't be sold there can't make it- true?

Re: You (all) lie!
 

I'm not sure that many pre-med types, who typically are in science majors, are spending the marginal year of undergrad on course that make them well rounded. But I guess they at least have that chance.

Re: You (all) lie!
 

you can can't you RT? I'm pretty sure I knew guys that went to med school after 3 years.

Re: You (all) lie!
 

You're not? Well, I'm glad you speak with absolute authority on this topic, then.

I went to a small liberal arts school from which a few of my former roomates went on to professions that don't necessarily require a liberal arts degree. One became a phd in chemistry, another became a doctor. Each of them took the required courses in English, history, language, etc., as did everyone else in my school who went on to be doctors.

I'm not saying every doctor should be forced to undergo a liberal arts education. But I think GGG has a point when he says there is value there. And if we change the system so that you can skip the liberal arts experience altogether, no matter what school you're in, almost everyone who wants to be a doctor will. And I don't know if that's a good thing.

Take Hank for example. Surely he'd have been better served had he taken a few more English courses, no?

TM

Re: You (all) lie!
 

I get that people who want to make money gravitate towards finance. From a societal perspective, though, it seems to me that financial sector's power and sense of entitlement has far outstripped its usefulness. It increasingly appears parasitic, instead of a force for growth.

Re: You (all) lie!
 

I didn't say that. That's your characterization of my more nuanced point. Secondarily, your criticism of my inability to understand the article as a whole is undone by my previous post in which I said I liked the article, but had an issue with two finite points within it.

Perhaps you are unable to appreciate something in whole while retaining criticisms of certain of its pieces. If that's the case, I'm sorry. But as a favor, please refrain from assuming my powers of comprehension are similarly limited.

Might I also suggest finance as a career. That rote, linear thinking can mint one buckets of dough on Wall Street.

Re: You (all) lie!
 

I agree with you, although my experience is different. The folks who went on to med school, for the most part, were hard science majors who spent most of their time IT course at my large state-run public college. And as a business major, I didn't have to take many liberal arts classes either.

Re: You (all) lie!
 

No argument there. I think it's undoubtedly parasitic and bloated far beyond what's needed.

And on your first repackaging of my point, I don't think it was intentional, but your paraphrasing removes an important aspect of what I was saying. My criticism of the article was with the suggestion acting "simply" - taking the obvious course to achieve one's goal - rendered one mediocre. I don't agree. If you just want money, and you realize that you can get it by heading toward an industry awash in it, you're hardly a revolutionary thinker, but you are quite effective, and there is a certain elegance in the way you've avoided complexity to reach the goal. The best analogy I could offer would be drinks I had with an institutional sales guy years ago. We talked law school for a bit and he said, simply, "I left after a year because I realized, I don't need this." I didn't have to ask "what" he was referring to. The point was clear: Why take the long path to a goal? Head straight for it.

I can feel superior to him all day, and maybe I am. He was buying the drinks.

Re: You (all) lie!
 

This is not true. There is a robust market for textbooks and 50 different curriculum standards. The major textbook publishers make money by crafting curriculum that can be approved by a particular state board of education. The idea that "as goes Texas, so goes all the states that buy from its publisher" was a lie told to energize the left on what is largely a local issue. If even the smallest state said "Fuck you, we don't want a textbook that says Phyllis Schlafly wrote the Constitution by taking dictation from Jesus," the textbook publishers would just crank out another book.

Of course, I live in an 800 lb gorilla state. Maybe there are states with piggybacked bids on Texas's book orders to save money, but I doubt it. Curriculum content standards are the reason people run for the state school board, and they're unlikely to delegate their most important authority, or the reason to be wined and dined by Messrs. Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich.

Re: You (all) lie!
 

Same framework you use for determining Palin to be "intelligent"*, so shouldn't be surprising.

*not meant to re-hash that.

Re: things in moderation
 

I think the Democrats do have a response, but (a) they've worried too much about the inside game, as I've said before, (b) the media loves conflict and paints every story as having two legitimate sides, even when that's not true, and (c) the Republicans have this noise machine, including Drudge/Breitbart/Beck/Rush/FOX, which gives oxygen to stories and gets them into the more mainstream media as controversies to be covered (and for an example of this, consider the respective coverage of the affairs of Sen. Ensign and former Sen. Edwards).

Re: You (all) lie!
 

(a) I think the issue is more that any text book which sells in Texas is much more likely to succeed in the market more generally, so publishers cater to Texas, and

(b) Some publishers say that technological innovations will increasingly make it easy to modify textbooks for different markets, reducing Texas's clout, though there are reasons to be skeptical of this.

Re: things in moderation
 

I meant public response. Of course there is a response, and of course some of the smart folks in the party know it, but it's useless if they only talk privately about what they'd do if it weren't for [problem X].

Re: You (all) lie!
 

What makes you think I didn't realize that? Is there anything in my post inconsistent with what would commonly be included in response to such a point? Did I need to quote both RT and GGG in a cumbersome fashion, saying something like, "Well, GGG, I think your concerns about having well rounded students and RT's belief we can create docs straight out of high school can be reconciled" to satisfy your apparent need for excessive documentation and hyper-clarity on this point?

You're taking what I'm saying, causing it to say what you want it to say, or what you think I mean based on previous conversations on this topic, setting up an alleged lack of understanding of the issue presented on my part as a strawman, and then knocking it down.

Re: You (all) lie!
 

In my experience, the people who went to medical school seemed to have been selected as those whom I would least want as doctors from a personality perspective.