uboat53

[uboat53]

You know, work doesn't often make me feel angry and frustrated. I mean, I work as a software engineer and a college professor, so one would hope not. But lately, by which I mean the last few years, there's been one thing in one of my jobs that has me really banging my head on the wall. Time for a bit of a SHORT RANT (TM).

For those who don't know, I teach a weekly Astronomy lab at my local community college. Nothing too complicated, we learn how to look at things in the night sky and we learn a bit of the physics behind it; nothing more advanced than a bit of algebra and geometry. The thing is, I'm hitting a consistent thing that's making me crazy.

In each term I have usually between 6 and 10 students and, without fail, I have at least one student who meets the following description. They are wildly incapable of doing even the most basic of math and, when I attempt to guide them through the problem, they freeze up and can't even do the simplest of steps. I mean that literally, to the point where I've started with an equation they wrote, pointed at a number, asked "where did this number come from?", and been met with blank stares. They do not know how to get the numbers they need to even set up an equation and are just typing in random things!

(And before I get the comment of "of course they froze up, the teacher just came up to them and demanded an answer, that's scary!", that's not what this is. This happens even after sitting down, casual conversation, gentle teaching, and calmly working through the problem. I've tried this over and over again in multiple ways with multiple students, I've taught scared toddlers before and know how to work through anxiety issues, this is really what's happening.)

The first time I encountered this I didn't think much of it, but I've been teaching for six years now and I have at least one EVERY SINGLE CLASS. This isn't a one-off problem. Since I've realized that, I've put a bit of effort into figuring it out because I really would like to help these students get past the issue, but, in order to work past the issue, I first have to find out what the issue is. So I sit with them while they're still working after everyone else has left and we talk, trying to get to the bottom of what's actually going on, and each time I've done this I get to the same place; each one is the same story, and the story is this:

In primary school (Kindergarten through second grade), they didn't immediately grasp the math concepts they were taught. When this happened, their primary teacher basically told them that it was okay, some people just aren't good at math, and that it was okay to be bad at math. This means they never got the basics, arithmetic, multiplication tables, and number sense, so when they got to secondary school (4th and 5th grade) where they had a dedicated math teacher who was good at math and didn't think it was okay to be bad at math, they were already so far behind that that teacher couldn't catch them back up. That teacher had a full class to teach and a curriculum to get across; kids need to be learning fractions in 4th grade! So this student fell into a pattern of just writing things down and faking the math or finding someone to just tell them the answer to get by until they didn't have to take math anymore. Only when they get to my class and I notice that the math they're doing is wrong and actually sit down with them and dig a bit does anyone notice that this kid doesn't even have the foundation that we need in order to teach all the rest of math.

As I said, I have had one of these kids every single class, 10% to 20%. And this isn't just the random population, this is the 35% or so of kids who are actually going to college; I have to imagine it's worse in the general population!

And that's what makes me feel frustrated. We have a primary education system that is absolutely failing kids at math. Sure, the ones who grasp math easily will be fine, but they'd probably be fine anyways. If we can't teach math to the kids who struggle with it, then we can't actually teach math, and that sets these kids up for a lifetime of frustration and shame. More to the point, it denies them basic tools that they need to live independent lives. A person who can't do math is a person who can't balance a checkbook, a person who can't do their own taxes, and a person who can't run a business on their own. More importantly, they're a person who can easily be taken advantage of by people who can do math. They're limited in every facet of what they can do in their lives, basic math is as foundational a skill as reading and, while reading is definitely something we're not teaching well enough, we're doing even worse with math.

I'll admit, I'm not sure who to blame here. The parents are certainly an option, as are the teachers - if I had a nickel for every time my mom (a retired secondary teacher) complained about primary teachers who babied kids instead of actually teaching them I could probably afford a car - but a problem this widespread has to be beyond just individuals.

There is a systemic rot at at the core of how we educate kids in math and I really think it has to do with a societal belief that math is for "smart people". This both creates a system where people feel free to check out of an entire aspect of human experience and also a system which breeds shame and resentment against the "elites"; those people who do understand math and, thus, have power over things that those who don't understand math can't access.

What can you do about all of that as just a regular person? Well, you start with what you have control of. If you have kids or interact with them regularly, encourage them. It's not okay to be bad at math, but it is okay if things are hard to do at first. Teach them how to ask for help and that it can often take multiple tries to find a way that works for them. If you've got older people in your life who have this issue, honestly, the same approach might work with them as well. As to the broader societal issue? Again, I don't have a hard-and-fast "this will fix it" recommendation, but at least please don't add to the problem. Don't treat "I'm bad at math" as something to be laughed along with; you don't have to shame people, but no one would joke about not being able to read. Treat math, especially basic math, as something that everyone should know.

I will guarantee you that every person without a serious learning disability can learn math (and those with such disabilities should get diagnosed, there are other things we can do to help too!). Give me a whiteboard and a willing student and I can get them through algebra and geometry no matter what their innate skill at math is.

So, yeah, a little aimless, but that's where I'm at. Any thoughts?

[uboat53]

The problem is that it's a no-win. If Sarah McBride makes this An Issue and fights, then she's giving the GOP another opportunity to campaign on "Democratic wokeness gone amok - and in the Halls of Congress!!!!!!!" and also really double-down and ramp up the offense and harassment. And also not make any impact and spend more time on this than on legislating.

If she goes the route she's going, she gets criticized for weakness and also has to put up with an incredibly and horribly toxic and hostile (possibly violent) environment politically and personally, and still empowers the haters and bigots.

My hope/inclination is to think that the Dem Caucus can come up with a way to help resolve this or deal with this and that they don't back away from her or only offer perfunctory support.

[uboat53]

Wait, you were actually born in the 1900's? Thats so cool

i am going to eat my own entire skin

[uboat53]

All right, the votes are now almost entirely in, so let's take a look at the most recent election, shall we? LONG RANT (TM) time.

THE MANDATE

As you may have already heard, Donald Trump won the election and is already claiming that it was an overwhelming victory which gives him a powerful mandate to govern as he wills.

As with most things he says, you should take all of that with a heaping spoonful of salt. Now that almost every vote is in (CA and WA still have about 3% of their votes left to count, but the rest is pretty much final) we can clearly see that, though he did get more of the popular vote than Kamala Harris, he still fell short of 50% for the third election in a row and he only led Harris by about 1.5%. Not only that, but with the full results we can see that more than 4.5 million fewer people voted in 2024 than voted in 2020, meaning that a good amount of the increase he saw from 2020 wasn't a result of more people favoring him.

(Fun fact, Kamala Harris may have gotten as many votes in 2024 as Donald Trump did in 2020 depending on the last few votes left to count.)

More to the point, Trump's electoral college victory, 312 to 226, is also far more fragile than he would have you believe. As in 2016, his margin of victory rested on the so-called "Blue Wall" states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In those states, a total shift of 232,580 votes, or less than 1.5% of the total votes cast in those states, OR just over 0.15% of the total votes cast nation-wide, would have produced a Harris presidency instead of a Trump one.

(I would note that Biden's margin of victory in 2020 was similarly slim, 1.65% of the votes cast it the blue wall states and just over 0.16% of the nation-wide total. His popular vote victory, though, was significantly larger, he won 51.3% of the popular vote, just about 4.5% more than Trump. I'd say there's a fair case to be made that he didn't have a powerful mandate either, but he had a better claim to one that Trump does now.)

In other words, Trump won, but it's a razor thin victory by any standard. That seems to be par for the course for the last few elections, the last significant victory, one with a margin of greater than 5% in the key states AND where the winner won the national popular vote by more than 2% (admittedly somewhat arbitrary markers, but ones that put the outside the margins of error for recounts or other likelihoods), was when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and the last one before that was Clinton's victory in 1996 or even Bush Sr.'s victory in 1988 if you are looking for one that wasn't confused by the presence of a significant third-party candidate.

THE CAUSES

So why did Trump win/Harris lose? Knowing the answer will allow us to determine both what the winner can/should do once in office and also what the losing candidate/party should adjust in order to do better next time.

One thing you have to know is that there's still not definitive answers on this from the last several dozen elections, so it's unlikely we'll get a quick answer this time around. There's good academic research to show that people respond to the specific messages of the candidates, but there's also good research showing that vote share can shift based on things as unrelated to the candidates as the number of shark attacks in a region in a given year.

A big caution I would give to anyone who is looking to argue that a specific issue, candidate statement, candidate quality, or policy proposal is responsible for the current result is that we've actually seen a very odd thing in elections around the world this year. For the first time in the last 120 years, every single incumbent party that faced election in the developed world lost vote share. In fact, of those incumbent parties facing election, the US Democrats actually had among the lowest decline. As to why, there are a few commonalities; every single developed country that held elections this year saw significant increases in both immigration and inflation in the past two years, for example, but it's hard to make conclusive statements without quite a bit more study.

My point is simply this: before trumpeting this thing or that thing as the definitive answer for why Trump won/Harris lost, be sure that you're not actually just looking at something that's larger than our country or statistical noise. I know we like to ascribe outcomes to definitive and controllable circumstances, but complex events tend to have multiple interrelated causes that can interact in unpredictable ways and one of the lessons of history is that sometimes we're subject to powerful forces that are beyond the ability of one country or its leadership to dictate.

THE PUNDITRY

Of course, by now you're probably seeing dozens of articles and tons of episodes of news programs on TV and radio that are saying a lot more than I am. Just in the last few days I've seen dozens of them ranging from arguing that the election was decided by young men of Gen Z who have been radicalized by right-wing manfluencers, that Democrats didn't do enough to reach out to Latinos in Spanish, that RFK Jr. turned out key demographics for Trump, or that Republican laws and policies in key states depressed voter turnout.

I cannot say loudly enough that we do not have enough data to actually make any of these kinds of arguments. If we're fortunate, we'll start getting the first real results of voter intent studies sometime around next summer, but even then a binary choice like a presidential election based on thousands of shifting variables is far too complex to ever allow us to do anything than note large-scale trends. Detail may eventually be impossible to find an, in an election as close as the one we just had (see above), it's possible to say that just about any small factor may have been the critical one.

My advice is simple, if you don't know what to do or think now, take some time and consider it. Don't overreact and don't be swayed by whoever speaks the most passionately. If you do know what you want to do, start doing it. Don't wait for results that may never come; do your best to make what you want come about. The methods of activism should be shaped by data, but the goals must be set by your own conscience and, if you're already an activist, hopefully you've already figured that part out. Finally, if all of this is affecting your mental health, step away from it. The election is over and there is nothing more that you, as a voter, can do to change anything. There will be time for more voting and activism later.

As for the pundits on TV, radio, and in print; I'm planning to ignore them for the next few months. Yes, even me, who consumes way more political media than is probably good for a person, is going to step away. Over the last few months in particular I've become more and more convinced that quality political coverage has largely disappeared (or been removed) from the American media landscape. I'm going to take some time and figure out where I can still find it.

CONCLUSION

Look, I know the election was a wild ride for everyone and it likely settled nothing as far as the major issues that continue to roil American politics, but if you're looking for a reason why things turned out the way they did, I don't have anything definitive to provide. It was close, about as close as it's possible to get, and there's a hundred possible reasons why. Take care of yourself, figure out where you stand, what you believe, and what you want to/are willing to do and start planning for that.

This is the world now, probably for the foreseeable future. Your job isn't to fix every problem, your job is to do what you can for as long as you can and pass it down to the next generation in as good a shape as you can manage. That's the same job every generation has had, let's do our part.

[uboat53]

As someone who has a Bachelor's degree in political science I have to pause and ask for clarification when someone asks me "there's nothing political about this, right?" Mainly because define "political".

Like if you define it as "the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power" then everything is political.

Your roads are political.

The cost of corn and avocados is political.

The fire department and post office is political.

Charlotte's Web is political.

The cost of your kid's school lunch is political.

How much it cost to go to the hospital is political.

How much it cost you to go to college is political.

Whether you have to wear a uniform or not is political.

Everything is political.

[uboat53]

Well that's got to be one of the most disingenuous "man in the street" pieces I've ever read. Glamour claims that they're representing the opinions of young men across the country and yet, if you read just a bit further, nearly every one of the young men that they quote are conservative activists. Take a few hefty cubes of salt with this one.

[uboat53]

[uboat53]

Simple explanation in this case, ExxonMobil is a global corporation with operations all over the world. If the US puts in place a regulation or law that is completely at odds with a requirement in, say, Europe, ExxonMobil will have no choice but to comply with only one of them and is guaranteed to lose at least one major market.

They want lower regulations, certainly, but they don't want the kind of aggressively anti-ESG regulations that would require them to violate other country's laws. Losing either the US or European markets would absolutely tank their earnings, so they want to keep a lid on some of the truly crazy ideas that the far-right keeps babbling about.

TL;DR ExxonMobil doesn't want climate regulations that limit or tax emissions, but they're even more scared of the US having laws that are incompatible with international business.

what's giving me a dim spark of joy is that even the most destructive and horrible mechanisms need a modicum of expertise, competence, and common sense to run, and trump and his ass kissers have none of those things

I will not despair over climate policy while there is a chance that the new administration fucks up everything so bad it lowers carbon emissions on accident via causing industries to collapse into chaos

[uboat53]

[uboat53]

"I'm sorry my evil empire killed your friends but I'm going to keep working to make sure myself and all the other imperials get clean sidewalks and fluffy socks and sandwiches :)"

Let's be honest the only good ending here is the collapse of the USA. I hope for your sake it's relatively quick and bloodless but I hope more that it happens.

What can I say? I am sorry that the evil empire I live in killed your friends. I don't think it should do that. I've been protesting wars since 2003 because I don't think it should do that.

I'm sorry you have it worse than me, and I'm sorry if the things that I'm doing to help people in an area where I can help people don't make your life better. That's rough buddy, but I'm not sure why you're talking to me about it because the things you're doing aren't going to make much of an impact on my day either.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with how US anarchists work, but generally when we talk about handing out hygiene kits and food, it is to unhoused people. If you think that unhoused Americans deserve to be hungry, or don't deserve clean socks or wipes to help prevent debilitating infections because they live in an imperialist nation that bombs people and installs dictators, well, you kind of sound like a piece of shit and it doesn't make me particularly sympathetic to your position.

[uboat53]

Trump administration chose to antagonize coffee-drinkers and chocolate-eaters.

Big mistake.

[uboat53]

The Shirley Exception

[uboat53]

I suddenly thought of an interesting question. What is the purpose of democracy? Is it democracy for democracy's sake? democracy exists to protect human rights. Voting is one of the most typical expressions of democracy, but if, due to the tyranny of the majority—the so-called ‘will of the people’—the human rights of the country’s citizens are actually severely harmed (as in the case of this U.S. election), what then? Does democracy, at this stage, still have any meaning to uphold?I mean, suppose, at this moment, one party were to take power through undemocratic means, such as election manipulation, a coup, or assassination, but this party’s policies were, comparatively, more protective of human rights than the opposing party’s. From an objective standpoint of justice, should it be supported at this stage?🤔

I think this is indeed an interesting question and I'll try to answer it in two parts.

First, the idea that "democracy exists to protect human rights" is a considerably recent idea, and doesn't actually figure much into classical expressions/conceptions of democracy. As it was originally practiced in Athens, it had nothing to do with safeguarding the rights of marginalized groups (indeed, if anything, the opposite). It was just a system where groups of people, i.e. property-owning citizen men, were allowed to make decisions collectively, but it was still able to be adjourned at any time for a despot (in the classical sense) to resume autocratic authority. It just means a system in which the people (demos) have authority (kratia). That means, therefore, who constitutes as a "person" under the law is one of the longest-running questions (and struggles) in the entire history of the concept.

As it was then thought about in the Enlightenment and the 18th-century context in which the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, "democracy" was very much the same idea of a small group of "worthy" but ordinary men making decisions in a quasi-elected framework, rather than as a single inherited monarchy. There was still no particular idea that "human rights" was a goal, and would have been foreign to most political theorists. There was an emerging idea of "natural rights" wherein man (and definitely man) was a specially rational creature who had a right to have a say in his government, but yet again, that depended on who was viewed as qualified to have that say. (The answer being, again, white property-owning Christian men.) There have been many constitutional law papers written on how much the founding fathers trusted the American electorate (not very) and how the American government was deliberately designed to work inefficiently in order to slow down the implementation of possibly-stupid decisions (but therefore also potentially-helpful ones). The Electoral College, aside from being an attempt to finesse the slavery question (did slaves count as people for purposes of allotting House representatives? James Madison famously decided they counted as three-fifths of a person), was a further system of indirect republicanism. Likewise, US Senators were not popularly elected on a secret ballot, the same as the president, until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.

Of course at the same time in the 19th-early 20th century, the Civil War, Reconstruction and its end, Jim Crow, women's suffrage movements, were all ongoing, and represented further challenge and revision of what "democracy" meant in the American context, and who counted as a legally recognized person who was thus entitled to have their say in government. It was not until Black people and women began insisting that they did in fact count as people that there was any universal idea of "human rights" as expressed in popular democratic systems. This further developed in the 20th century in the world war context, and then in the decolonization waves in the 1950s and 1960s that dismantled European imperialism and gave rise to a flood of new nation-states. Etc. etc., the Civil Rights movement in America, the gay rights movement starting with Stonewall, and further expansion of who was seen as a person not just in the physical but the legal and actionable sense.

That's why we have political philosophy concepts of "electoral" and "liberal" democracies, and why they're not quite the same. In an electoral democracy, people have the right to vote on and elect their leaders, but there may be less protection of associated "liberal" rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression and assembly, and other characteristics that we think of in terms of protected groups and individual rights. Liberal democracies make a further commitment to protect those rights in addition to the basic principle of voting on your leaders, but as noted, democracy does not inherently protect them and if you have a system where a simple majority vote of 49% can remove rights from the other 48%, you have a problem. Technically, it's still democracy -- the people have voted on it, and one side voted more than the other -- but it's not compatible with justice, which is a secondary question and a whole other debate.

In the modern world, autocrats have often been popularly elected, which is technically a democratic process, but the problem is that once they get there, they start dismantling all the civic processes and safeguards that make the country a democracy, and make it much harder for the opposition to win an election and for power to meaningfully change hands. See for example India (Narendra Modi/BJP), Turkey (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan/AKP), Poland (Jarosław Kaczyński/PiS), Hungary (Viktor Orbán/Fidesz), Russia (Vladimir Putin/United Russia) and America (Donald Trump/GOP). Some of these countries were more democratic than others to start with, but all of them have engaged in either significant democratic erosion or full authoritarian reversion. The US is not -- yet -- at the latter stage, as I have written about the features of the system that make it different from other countries on that list, but it's in the danger zone.

Lastly, the idea of "we're morally better and protect human rights but are willing to launch a coup/assassination/etc of the current government" has been claimed many, many times throughout history. It has never been the case. Not least since if a party in a democratic system, however flawed, is willing to throw aside the core feature of that system, they simply don't respect human rights in any meaningful sense. That's why we kept having "the people's revolutions," especially in the 20th century, that promised to uphold and liberate the working class and all ended up as repressive communist dictatorships functionally indistinguishable from the autocracies or even quasi-democracies they had replaced. In this day and age, does anyone want Online Leftists, who will cancel and viciously attack fellow leftists for tiny disagreements on the internet, deciding that they're going to overthrow the government and announce themselves the great protector of human rights? Aside from the fact that they couldn't do it even if they ever tried and stopped being insane keyboard warriors, I don't think anyone would believe them, and nor should they, because violent antidemocratic groups are bad. This is the sixth-grade level explanation, but it's true.

If you're so drastically committed to your ideology that you're willing to destroy everyone else for not agreeing (and even then, post-revolution, the revolutionaries always start eating each other), then you're not special or enlightened. You're the exact same kind of ideological zealot who has been responsible for most of the worst atrocities throughout history. When "I need to kill for my beliefs but I'll clearly only kill the right people" is your guiding philosophy, the "right people to be killed" quickly expand past any controls or laws. Why not, especially when you've just declared the law to be invalid? Pretty soon you're into death-squads and extrajudicial-assassinations territory, and no matter how soaringly noble your aims were to start with, you've become much worse than what you replaced.

This does not mean "we all have an obligation to obey oppressive governments because the alternative is worse," which has been likewise used by the oppressive governments who benefit from it. It just means that if a democracy is violently overthrown, what emerges from it -- no matter how nice their rhetoric might initially sound -- will invariably be much worse. Winston Churchill famously remarked that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the alternatives, and in this, I tend to agree with him. It sucks, but there's nothing that has yet been invented that can take its place or that has any interest in protecting human rights in the way that 21st-century liberal democracy has generally accepted it has an obligation to do, however partial, flawed, and regressive it can often be. Indeed right now, in this particular historical moment, the only feasible alternative is quite clearly far-right populist fascist theocratic authoritarianism, and that -- for you fortunate Americans who have never lived under anything like that -- is much, much worse. So yeah.

[uboat53]

are we feeling the schadenfreude today?

[uboat53]

White conservative America will vote for whiteness and patriarchy.

White conservative America would rather have Putin in the White House before Kamala Harris.

[uboat53]

The only way people who lack empathy change is when bad things happens to them.

Let bad things happen to them. We need change from MAGA. A lot of change.

[uboat53]

a big lesson for me was learning that most things are not as fragile as I’d believed. missing a class, or turning in a bad assignment, won’t instantly destroy your professor’s opinion of you. accidentally saying something harsh won’t make your friend want to end the friendship. it takes work to repair these things - it takes effort and research and sometimes a sincere apology - but you can do that because they’re not irreparably broken. what you’ve worked to build, in academia and in relationships and in life, is stronger and more enduring that your mind may teach you to believe. don’t let imagined fragility lead you to giving up