Filed under: Uncategorized
I’m fasting from blogs for the rest of the week. Next week I’m away in Muskoka with the family and girlfriend. Posting will be non-existent for two weeks.
Filed under: Arthur Laffer, Economics, Matthew Yglesias, Politics, Reaganomics, Supply side economics, Uncategorized
Matt Yglesias points to the “worst editorial ever” at the Wall Street Journal on the Laffer Curve. In the comments section ‘Jalmari’ writes the following:
Supply-side economic theory really IS as laughably ridiculous as this graph makes it look.
Now don’t be dissin’ on Arthur Laffer Jalmari. You don’t want to go there. Ok. You just did. I’m going to have to go a little Robert Mundell on you. How’s about some 1970s style Wall Street Journal Jude Waninski? (more…)
Filed under: Andrew Sullivan, Conservatism, Gay rights, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Politics
The gay rights movement has won numerous victories in Canada culminating in the recent right to marry. Not so much in the States. With a stacked conservative Supreme Court, I can’t see many future judicial victories. Maybe 10-15 years from now? We’ll see. Legislative victories? Meh.
It’s understandable that there is much anger in the gay community. Many feel that they have been demonized for their way of life. Perhaps they have. But, after all this is a fundamental clash in worldviews. It ain’t going to be pretty. Worldviews are fundamental. They are the air we breathe; the glasses we look through.
With this in mind, it would be understandable to see gay rights advocates want the anvil of the government to come crashing down on their opponents when the power swings in their direction. But, Andrew Sullivan is different.
A moment of sanity:
I argued specifically against the liberal recipes for gay equality: against hate crime laws and even against employment discrimination laws. I argued that a conservative position on gay rights would leave private discrimination and prejudice alone and change only the government’s stance so that all citizens are treated equally by the state, even if they are subject to discrimination by private entities. Virtually Normal did contribute, I think, to a deeper understand that marriage rights and military service were central to the gay rights movement. In that, it helped revolutionize the gay rights movement – against the wishes of many of its leftist leaders. But I had no luck trying to shift the liberal nannying and tolerance-mongering of the gay establishment.
Still, we’re not all liberals. For the record. But it’s a quixotic position, I will sadly concede. Freedom is not as popular as it once was. And liberals have helped whittle it away.
I hope and pray that when the gay rights movement picks up more steam there will be Andrew Sullivan’s at the helm. Unfortunately, true conservatives are hard to find these days.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Will be back sometime late Friday night.
I hate camping. Don’t we buy houses for a reason?
Filed under: Eucharist, Henri de Lubac, Lord's Supper, Peter Leithart, Sacraments, Theology
In The Baptized Body, Peter Leithart cites the important work of Henri de Lubac on the Eucharist. I am glad that Leithart has done this because like most authors Leithart reads, I would not be able to read them without his assistance.
De Lubac notes that medievals, drawing on patristic traditions, developed a triple body of Christ theory. There was the personal body of Christ (now resurrected and ascended), the Eucharistic body, and the corporate body of the church (the community that shares in the Eucharistic body). For medievals, all three bodies were linked together.
Early medieval theologians saw a close association with the Eucharistic body and the corporate body. Energies were spent developing this connection. “For these theologians, it was axiomatic that ‘the Eucharist makes the church.’ Participation in the one loaf of the Eucharistic body forms the one corporate body of the church (1 Cor. 10:16-17).”
It was not until the high middle ages that the way of understanding the triple body moved from a close link with the Eucharistic body and the corporate body to a close link with the Eucharistic body and the personal body of Christ. It was only then that medieval theologians started to speculate on how the Eucharistic body could be turned into the personal body of Christ. No wonder masses started to operate without the participation of the corporate body. They didn’t need to anymore.
George Will:
Two decades ago, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote about “the cultural contradictions of capitalism” to express this worry: Capitalism flourishes because of virtues that its flourishing undermines. Its success requires thrift, industriousness and deferral of gratifications, but that success produces abundance, expanding leisure and the emancipation of appetites, all of which weaken capitalism’s moral prerequisites. (more…)
Over at Andrew Sullivan’s “Dissent of the Day,” a teacher turned lawyer has taken him to task for his writings on teacher merit pay. When this teacher worked at a for profit charter school that endorsed the merit pay system, all the more experienced teachers would fight for the advanced classes leaving the low proficiency classes to the new and unexperienced. The effect? Many young teachers gave up. Enfleshed, the system also created incentives for teachers to leave poor performing schools where they were really needed.
The ex-teacher believes that a more realistic plan would have the merit pay based on measurable improvement. This seems reasonable.
Filed under: Links
The Archbishop of Uganda on What is Anglicanism?
Ross Douthat defends Russell Kirk from Alan Wolfe
The Internet Monk shows how Acts 15 does not line up with Romish claims to the primacy of Peter
Andrew Sullivan on why scientists should shut up when it comes to policy positions. Disagreeing with them is not an “attack on science”
The changing social frontier of young people
I’m not quite sure what to think about healthcare anymore. My Canadianness has biased me towards free universal health care. However, I’ve been very influenced by old school National Review style conservatism (not the Goldberg stuff) and paleoconservatism. I also like Andrew Sullivan’s libertarian leanings. I’m experiencing some cognitive dissonance.
No doubt influenced by Michael Moore’s Sicko, Matt Yglesias has jumped into the fray by responding to comments made by the libertarian Cato Institute. Michael Tanner of Cato has warned Americans that Democratic health care proposals would lead to, amongst other things, slow economic growth and worse health care for millions of Americans.
Yglesias responds to the slow economic growth line with an interesting counter argument:
There seems to me to be decent evidence that labor market flexibility leads to employment growth. It also seems clear that America’s health care system generates substantial labor market rigidities as people with medical histories need to maintain a seamless web of insured-ness in order to remain insurable. There economic costs here seem potentially quite large, but obviously you’d need some really smart people to take a look at it.
Something to ponder. Expanding on Yglesias’ point, I wonder if this could be used as evidence for strong social safety nets.
Filed under: Education, Gerald Bracey, James Popham, MDI, Merit pay, Standardized tests
To understand why I’m posting this, see the last post. I wrote this as a reflection paper for a class on Measurement & Evaluation. It’s a debate from Phi Delta Kappan between Gerald Bracey and James Popham on whether Measurement Driven Instruction (MDI) is a good thing or a bad thing. Gerald Bracey argues against MDI, Popham the opposite. Although Popham has since changed his beliefs to being against MDI, I am still persuaded by his original arguments.
James Popham and Gerald Bracey on Measurement-Driven Instruction
Measurement-driven instruction is an educational idea which has sparked intense debate. The debate is so polarized that people can’t even agree on an adequate definition for what measurement-driven instruction (MDI) means. This can be seen with the two articles selected for this essay. James Popham says that MDI occurs when a high stakes standardized test influences a teacher’s instructional program in order to prepare students for the test (Popham, 1987, p. 680). Gerald Bracey sees the definitions provided by MDI proponents as being so vague as to cause confusion. Bracey cannot even provide a conclusive definition, only “general considerations,” (Bracey, 1987, p. 684). Given how important MDI has become in the United States since the No Child Left Behind legislation, this paper will summarize and examine what James Popham and Gerald Bracey have written on MDI in order to see whether it is a blessing or a curse. (more…)
