28 January 2020

Ontario is in the lead up to a province-wide education strike

Mostly because the Conservative government are greedhead wreckers.  I got a "maybe write a letter to the editor? we have a distribution tool" email, and this is what I wrote:

Dear editor,

As we move into a time of climate collapse, we can be sure today's school children are going to have rougher lives than those of us now adult. We can be sure that if we make it through this, it'll because people who are children now had the knowledge and skills to apply to the problem.

A desire to make education cheap at such a time is beyond incompetence; it's not so much pouring gasoline on the fire as going and finding everything especially precious and valuable and throwing it on the fire.

Ontario should be investing more in education, not less. Of course Ontario should raise taxes to do that if that's what's required; every dam, ditch, drain, culvert, settling pond, pump, lock, sewer, causeway, and canal in the province is presently some mix of in the wrong place and the wrong size and it's only going to get worse. The only way to get low taxes for the next couple centuries is to give up on civilization entirely.

Let's pay for civilization; that means paying for education, for skilled teachers, for small class sizes, for additional educational opportunity, and for the increase of knowledge.

Let's recognize we're all in this together, and that we owe those kids the best education we can give them. Let the government of Ontario stop being blatantly, shamefully incompetent and fund good, broad, effective public education for all.

Sincerely,
Graydon Saunders

14 January 2020

Does right action arise from them, or you?

That's it.  That's the whole thing.

If right action arises from them, you need a taxonomy.  A taxonomy can't be correct.  So as soon as you need a taxonomy you need a mechanism of enforcement.  If you set limits on the mechanism of enforcement, you set limits on the security and the power of the folks who define the taxonomy.  They're competing with each other; limits of authority, limits on what the mechanism of authority does, are removed.

(You can sometimes get limits through conflict between mechanisms of legitimization for the exercise of force, but mostly you get what we have; an arbitrary prescriptive norm forcibly established as the basis of authoritarian social norms.  And it has a strong feedback mechanism to keep it going in as much as "too different" increases general insecurity more than most things, because most things don't get you beaten as a child and told you deserved it.)

If right action arises from you, well.  You have an idea of how you ought to behave; you don't need a taxonomy.  (You might have one, but you don't need one.)

The trick is to figure out how to do that so the (much larger) arises-from-them side doesn't kill you for it.