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Over the summer, Arizona lawmakers passed a universal educational voucher program, to my understanding the first in the nation. It attaches state education dollars to students rather than to specific schools, allowing parents to choose where to send the money the state spends on educating their children.
This was immediately challenged by, well, the whole education establishment. Kathy Hoffman, Arizona's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, was officially tasked with overseeing the program; instead, she doxxed parents who signed up for it. Arizona's teacher's union was immediately mobilized to work with the far-left non-profit "Save Our Schools" organization, which sought to gather signatures to put a repeal of the scholarship law on the next election ballot.
Arizona's Secretary of State excitedly tweeted her receipt of the supposedly over 140,000 signatures (almost 120,000 were required). Her statement that
is a bit confusing to me, I don't know how Arizona referendum law works but the idea that a petition to add an issue to the ballot could function to suspend the operation of a signed law raises several questions in my mind. However, as the Secretary of State maybe this was her call to make? Anyway she was too glib by half. The libertarianish Goldwater Institute, which had posted watchdogs on the filing process, immediately noted that fewer than 90,000 signatures had actually been filed. "Save Our Schools" Facebook page calls this "questionable" and notes that only the Secretary of State can make the final determination, but apparently the Secretary of State's office only received 8,175 petition sheets with a maximum of 15 signatures per sheet. Off their Facebook page, SOS concedes that they have likely fallen short. Their explanation of the miscount? "Well we were just estimating." Apparently Arizona's schoolteachers aren't so great with math!
SOS receives preferred treatment in the news reporting, but poking around some parent sites it looks like they have been predictably underhanded pretty much the whole way. Despite the support of both the Secretary of State and the Superintendent of Schools, both of whose offices are supposed to be effecting the law rather than repealing it, the voucher program is likely to proceed (which may only attract even more anti-choice money to the state's lobbies, I guess). With almost 11,000 applicants pending, it's likely to generate some very happy parents--along with at least some frustrated ones. I doubt we've heard the end of this.
But the victory here may encourage other states to follow suit. I feel like this is one more symptom of the present educational paradigm unraveling. COVID showed parents both how much, and how little, public schools do for them, personally. I know many parents who were relieved to send their children back to school. But I know many others who have simply decided to not. It's a bit of a homeschooling renaissance, it seems, and now in Arizona there are public education dollars attached to that. A family with three children could get something like $21,000 per year to help educate them.
The substance of the opposition is that this deprives neighborhood schools of much-needed funding, "skims the cream," hasn't got enough oversight, and empowers uncredentialed teachers to teach. These are basically all the same criticisms teacher's unions offer against charter schools, which are booming business in Arizona--Arizona's BASIS charter schools are regularly ranked among the best in the country (I count four of their Arizona campuses in the US News top 30). Basically, it looks like public education simply can't compete, and is desperately scrambling to protect its monopoly and union largess.
Parents, apparently, are not buying these arguments, at least in Arizona. And indeed I have never seen any evidence that these arguments have any merit; to the contrary, I am persuaded by The Case Against Education that our existing K-12 system cannot be upended fast enough. So I have been, and will be, watching Arizona's voucher experiment with great interest!
But in case I have not sounded appropriately unhinged thus far--I do have to ask. What would have been the outcome, if the Goldwater Institute had not posted watchdogs on the counting process? The Arizona news media seems to want to cast SOS as the watchdogs, here, but SOS appeared to be quite happy to smear their numbers in their own favor, and they have at least two powerful allies within the government who swallowed their claims whole, declaring the law "on hold" even when the math obviously didn't add up. This kind of narrative-crafting is really disturbing to me, and the fact that the Secretary of State seemed happy to take SOS at their word, to the point of tweeting about it, even as the Goldwater Institute knew instantly from the math that this wasn't going to fly... well, the whole thing seems awfully shady.
(This is where I deleted a paragraph borrowing a jack about "finding" a thousand more pages in a box somewhere...)
I keep wanting to write something about this kind of blatant procedural outcome manipulation (but I'd be better off searching for someone who already has).
Utopians constantly say things like "we shall have a System to ensure X and prevent Y", and then spend zero time designing a system that isn't trivially exploitable by baseline sociopaths who, shockingly, are agents with goals that don't necessarily align with The System. See the current "communism with magic robots has never been tried" thread for a typical example.
Is there any way to get this across to people who don't want to understand it? In my experience the same people who were just complaining about the nomenklatura betraying the last revolution will stubbornly refuse to entertain the idea that the same thing could happen to their revolution.
Anyway, I'm willing to bet this particular event will get officially recorded on wikipedia as "extremist MAGA election fraud conspiracy theory derails effort to save Queer and Brown school children." Because a coalition of Facebook boomers just found out that the secretary of state lied about ballot counting on a massive scale, and the media has spent two years enforcing the consensus that this can't happen:
I think the most predictable outcome here is a huge effort to make this kind of organization impossible in future; bank accounts shut down mysteriously, all online accounts banned, and the phones of every participant added to spam blocking lists. The censorship framework is already there and rapidly growing more sophisticated, but some groups can still slip through the gaps for now.
Can someone explain why I have seen this word maybe 10 times in the past week but never before in my life? Did some prominent person or blogger use it recently?
It's been extremely common in political speak since the Cold War.
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You might have drifted into a new circle? It and the New Class concept have been popular in the dissident right for a long time (was it Sam Francis who introduced it from the New Left clique?)
I've been totally offline for a few weeks now, so it's probably not a current trend.
These days many people use it as a synonym for PMC, sadly.
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Just Bader Meinhoff.
I keep conflating "Baader-Meinhoff" with "Dunning-Kruger." I suppose the composite that results is "you think this is just the frequency illusion, but you're mistaken."
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Yeah, or maybe synchronicity in the Jungian "meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved", with the 'something other' being memetic. People who are all thinking about the same topic are likely to be in a similar headspace. You want to decry nepotism, and you think some recent instance feels particularly soviet, and what was that cool word they had for them? Nomenklatura.
This is how memes are started though, and nomenklatura definitely fits the bill, so it is possible everyone saying it picked it up from the same source. They don't even have to do it consciously - if it fits well your brain might do it anyway.
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I feel like this is a fundamental difference between Communists and Capitalists.
Communists seem to think the vast majority of human beings are intrinsically good and only do evil when forced to by circumstance. By fixing the circumstance, you can remove the evil, hence prescribing increased bennies as a panacea to crime. In a utopia, nobody would do wrong because nobody would have a reason to. Everyone wants to hit co-operate and is only forced to hit defect by circumstance. Communism is supposedly about providing for everyone so nobody ever needs to defect against society. It is about diminishing the difference in rewards for co-operation vs defection to almost nothing and trusting in people's better nature to want to be good.
Capitalists recognise that the vast majority of people have at least the capability for evil, if not the constant inclination. People will commit crimes of opportunity and exploit systems and other people when they think they can get away with it. Most people will defect when they're reasonably sure they'll both profit and come out on top. Capitalism is supposed to channel people's greed and other evil instincts into a constructive direction by incentivising pro-social things with monetary rewards. It's putting a thumb on the scale of co-operate by increasing the rewards for co-operating. In theory.
To be clear, this is the platonic ideals of these ideologies and I think that almost nobody who supports them actually supports them in these forms or for these reasons. Most real life "communists" just want to upend society for a quick route to the top via new ruling party loyalty and are perfectly okay with guillotining criminals (and most of them think some people are inherently evil, mainly whites). Most real life "capitalists" don't care for much of capitalism at all honestly, they just don't want those aforementioned communists to win power, because they stand to lose personally, in terms of money, status or their life itself, and probably all three.
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This, and the continuing efforts to get a Texas independence referendum, are two key efforts to watch for ascertaining the effectiveness of said censorship.
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I'd take that bet, I don't think these people are going to face any consequences. School choice is well within the Overton window.
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There are lots of bogus or even downright fraudulent signatures on any signature-gathering mission. People will put bogus information on your petition to deliberately fuck with you and you cannot stop them.
See also: Verizon vs. Net Neutrality
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Well yeah, but in this case nobody had to do any of that for the official overseeing the process to celebrate tens of thousands of nonexistent sigs.
If they had written down "Mickey Mouse" an extra 50000 times, the process was for the SoS to verify the sigs to her satisfaction, then send a "randomly selected" 5% sample back to individual counties to do their own verification. Lots of opportunities to sneak things through there, kinda surprised it didn't happen; the last big one only failed after it went to the courts for review for fraudulent sigs the SoS "missed" (iou a source that isn't Salon)
That's the sort of thing I was talking about with people designing a System that on the surface looks secure, but in practice totally depends on one person playing by the rules.
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