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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

This one is a live grenade from a source that... likes to stir the pot and has some political leanings.

Im pretty liberal.

This is just dumb.

We are, as a country at a point where we cant have a conversation about this. About what is really going on, and actually fixing things. It's moments like these where I feel like I'm living in a copy of 1984.

How about you keep the dam gifted program and pour as much money into some schools where the kids have worse socioeconomic circumstances and give them the same leg up? That would be a SANE and RATIONAL policy...

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I'd like to say I'm liberal, but I don't think this is liberalism at all. It's racism under the guise of "its the right and ethical thing" so people who challenge it as labeled as isms or ist, it seeks to divide and create invisible barriers where there shouldn't be any.

The liberal thing to do would be to push for a meritocracy

>> The liberal thing to do would be to push for a meritocracy

Nothing of the sort would work

1. Pay teachers a living wage... Make it a 150k a year starting salary job. Make it competitive. Make it year round 8 hours a day full time.

2. Kids get NO home work. Half of HN cries that a 40 hour work week is too much... kids spend 30 hours a week in school and have more work at home. School is a job, you do your job at your job.

3. No more sports at school. Keep PE but no more football, baseball circle jerks.

4. More Shop, tech, Art and Music. You know gen z knows less about computing on the whole. It's not cell phones, they closed all the computer labs and stoped having those classes cause "digital natives". Bullshit. Also, no one knows how to weld, cut wood, fix a pipe, cook, balance a check register, budget (home economics)...

Totally agree.

GenZ can't use the command line. I am with you on shop, art, music, cooking, etc. All of those things make more capable people. Project based learning should start from a young age. The kids need to learn with their whole selves.

A problem is there is this idea that societal problems are the schools to fix.

> The liberal thing to do would be to push for a meritocracy

These are progressives, not liberals. They don't want a meritocracy; they want equal outcomes for everyone. And realistically the only way you get that is by lowering outcomes for gifted achievers.

In some people's eyes, there's a certain fairness to lowering outcomes for everyone. Racism IS bullying. You can have an individual racist who bullies you, or you can have society be the racist who bullies you. Unfortunately, you can also, and often do, have both. It's also unfortunate, but just a fact, that some people, usually privileged people, won't understand getting the short end of the stick until it happens to them.

While I might take issue with shutting down a program to make a point, I grew up as a Jewish guy in the 1980s and faced racism and bullying on the regular. It truly made my life a living hell sometimes. As an adult, I've had to deal with things like openly racist co-workers. Now of course there's all the recent suggestions that I'm enabling genocide somewhere just by _being_ Jewish and/or for supporting Israel. Whenever someone says something like "The Jews...", it's probably racism. It feels like it.

In my opinion, the root of all these problems is a small bunch of bad actors who think it's okay to engage in antisocial behavior. They then convince others that it's okay to do the same thing, whether actively or by example. Society would be so much better off if people with antisocial tendencies could somehow be convinced to be pro-social.

> I'm enabling genocide somewhere just by _being_ Jewish and/or for supporting Israel.

Hoping to not get over political, but the western media is failing to separate the Israeli government from the Israeli people, the latter of whom have a sizeable portion that don't agree with the governments actions in Gaza.

It's sad and as you suggested, just fuels racism in the form of anti semitism. All it takes is one extreme to destroy an entire point of view.

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