Correlation is NOT causation, dammit

Whoever wrote this article from the Economist's Democracy in America column (for "democracy" read the Democratic party) is just another standard product of Anglo-American "progressive" education, which eschews the teaching of history and logic because it would demolish the entire edifice of totalitarian thought the lefties have created. Such people simply lack the intellectual equipment to even see, let alone acknowledge, the gaping holes in their argument. 

First of all, as the article and the link on which it is based grudgingly admit, the relationship between the unionisation of teachers and performance in standarized testing proves nothing at all, not simply because - contrary to the indoctrination in those schools about global warming and other leftist pieties - correlation is not causation. However, another obvious objection is that the ACT and SAT tests are set by the teachers themselves in an institutional act of begging the question.

Yet another point ignored by the article is that the reason Republican are hostile to state employee trades unions is that the unions are the mainstay of the Democrats, recycling tax money back to the party that, unsurprisingly, has increased their pay and benefits beyond the ability of the productive sector to sustain them. So the following conclusion, so "wet" and so obviously written with an eye back across the Atlantic that it must have been by a Brit, is farcical.

There are clearly some serious problems facing American governance [1], and public-sector unions are going to have to make adjustments [2] to solve those problems, whether it means pension restructuring or allowing the firing of incompetent teachers. But those kinds of reforms will be unachievable if unions correctly [3] understand that their opponents, including Scott Walker and the modern Republican Party, are not in fact interested in collaborating with them on solutions [4], and are instead trying to destroy their existence as institutions [5].

1. No shit. Do you suppose a bloated parasitic sector might be one of them?
2. Adjustments, eh? Not "savage cuts", evidently. 
3. There can be no "if" in that statement. The unions' understanding is "correct", therefore their opponents are wrong, therefore:
4. Collaborative reforms are unachievable by Republicans [UK Conservatives] and we must all vote Democrat [UK Labour].
5. As to the Republicans attacking the unions, as the French aphorism puts it: Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l'attaque, il se défend [This beast is very wicked: It will fight back, when it’s attacked].

Laconic post from Biased BBC

David Preiser (USA) contributes a new Open Thread on B-BBC with this excellent montage (love the deliberate inversion [sic] in the middle) and comments:

Due to swingeing boodget coots, the local council has had to close a library, a swimming pool, and a community garden, as well as put several adorable puppies to sleep in order to afford to put up this new open thread.

Maybe that's the best we can do - just laugh at the pathetic bastards clinging to the increasingly withered tits of Crone Britannia.

Quote of the day - Simon Heffer

I´m not much of a fan of Simon Heffer, but he sometimes has a nice turn of phrase:

If this Government did not maintain its doctrinaire, bigoted and ignorant prejudice against selective schools, the state system would produce many more students capable of thriving in the best universities. If such universities are forced to take a quota of pupils who are not academically up to it then those universities will decline. Standards would need to drop to avert a rash of failures. The best teachers, frustrated, would be driven abroad. So would gifted ex-private sector students, sent overseas by discrimination. Higher education would be added to the list of things we once did so well, but have through stupidity destroyed. 

Just as it has already done in the USA, from which the British slavishly copied their "comprehensive" schools. It's not just stupidity, it's also the cultural cringe that has infected British "progressives" since the early years of the last century, leading them to imitate every academic fad to emerge across the Atlantic.  

Hilariously, the US Progressivism that the British Fabians copied was itself the ideology brought back from German universities by the first wave of American social "scientists" in the last decades of the 19th century. Not terribly surprising that "progressives" so easily default into totalitarian social engineering.