Interesting. I've always felt the story to be a bit of a straw man. Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc?

There have been school districts lately that have been getting rid of advanced math classes in the name of equality.

Story from a local school:

Parents of the more advanced math students in the grade requested some sort of more advanced math opportunities for their kids. School didn't provide any. When several of the kids used a more advanced math concept they had learned outside of school to solve a problem, the teacher told them to not do it that way because they hadn't learned it yet.

The school does provide extra classes for kids who they think are behind in one area or another. And if a kid has a lot of issues, a class will even get an extra teacher that just focuses on that kid.

Children who perform below grade level or have issues are getting extra attention from the school (great), but children who already know what's being taught are expected to just sit there quietly and waste their time (not so great).

Note the contrast between that and the athletic department, where schools are absolutely delighted to get a kid with an aptitude for sport, and push him hard to achieve.

Art classes seem the same, art and music teachers always seem eager to give special attention to kids who do much better than their peers.

Of course.

Very few teachers take any interest in the students who do well in math. In fact, they'll often find them annoying.

Yes, there are some teachers who do take an interest and do their best for those students. They just aren't the norm, and they don't get much support from the administration.

Only in America, but that's because the math teachers are nitwits.

Art and music programs are being cut to free up funding to ensure all the kids pass the standardized tests so the school doesn't lose NCLB funding.

American public schools are generously funded.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/238733/expenditure-on-ed...

I think the big difference here is that it doesn't really matter if someone isn't athletic. A school can have 10 kids for an amazing basketball team and 990 that are terrible at basketball and it doesn't affect anything, but if you have 10 geniuses and 990 kids that can't read then it's a huge negative for society

> it doesn't really matter if someone isn't athletic

Tell that to people who faked athletic credentials to get into the college of their choice. Or who get in with full academic scholarships because they're good at football.

I'm not advocating ignoring 990 kids that can't read, not at all. What I am suggesting is ignoring the 10 geniuses and not taking advantage of them is both unfair and bad for society.

Consider that WW1 and WW2 were won in large part by smart people making more effective weapons. You see the same thing in the Ukraine war today.

Failing to nurture the 10 geniuses is a very bad idea.

Most of those people would not be considered geniuses to Caltech educated elites like you.

I personally think ignoring the top 10 students is perfectly fine because they can clearly already manage. The rest of us can’t, but are still considered subhuman by your Bell Curve reading ilk.

In most larger universities, you can get an elite education by carefully selecting which courses to take.

1. take the honors track

2. 90% of the classes should be STEM

3. the STEM classes should be heavy on the math

4. avoid classes the stoners and cheaters take

5. classes should entail 2-3 hours of work for every hour of lecture

6. work towards getting As, not just passing

7. don't cheat, you'll be sorry if you do

8. be prepared to work your ass off

I literally did all of that at my state school, and yet despite this my degree name still makes people like you think I’m subhuman because I didn’t get into any top schools (because I don’t have “merit”). I have nothing because CalTech and MIT and Stanford elites have everything.

You don’t need to make that trade off.

I also don’t think a world where 10 geniuses go untapped in any context is a positive. The reason so many people can read in the first place is that a small number of geniuses created the prerequisite understanding to shape the modern world. Everyone put in massive amounts of work to achieve all we have achieved, but the key ingredients were a small number of people spearheading foundational ideas. People underestimate the impact of a very small number of people on the massive quality of life benefits we enjoy.

You can’t create genius. The most you can do is create the optimal conditions for the geniuses to take advantage of/manifest and push themselves to that level. Highly intelligent and creative people that make breakthroughs often come from unpredictable backgrounds. In order for them to thrive, you need to provide as many open doors where competency and demonstrable ability is the only prerequisite for entry.

This idea that spending on students correlates with performance is I think entirely wrong and a consequence of the limited metrics we have and attempts to raise money for education.

Education could be WAY cheaper and WAY more effective if we had the proper cultural understanding of what it should provide, and were wise enough to differentiate the needs of different areas. Many areas where reading comprehension is garbage are really in need of like a secondary non-dysfunctional family and job opportunities that are relatively high status/relatively high paying even if you aren’t that smart and just work hard/learn basic skills. If people were sorted into groups based on what their needs were, you could create and advertise doors the smart kids would walk through, and keep it open to anyone who puts in the work regardless of where they’re at, while also serving the needs of people who don’t care about school and are cheaper to bring to baseline if you do it right and don’t force people struggling for basic reading comprehension to be educated by people with a masters degree.

Things are currently falling apart because we’re not willing to admit that people have different needs and abilities and have created extravagantly expensive metrics and interventions to pretend we can equalize all outcome with enough resources. We can’t.

I think we can in fact create better outcomes for everyone, but we have to admit that everyone is different. You can’t have a one size fits all pipeline. Especially if you don’t want to demoralize like 90% of the people in the country that can’t get to the top of that particular giant leaderboard. The internet exacerbates this, and has destroyed borders in which someone who might have otherwise had relatively high status in a particular easily achievable niche accessible to them is now seeing all the people miles beyond them.

The way in which the upper classes currently pity people who don’t have high academic achievement and want to equalize experience in the same pipeline they benefitted from sounds good superficially, but it’s really toxic when you think about it. It assumes people need to have the kind of success that those who’ve done well in that academic pipeline have had in order to be treated with respect.

I think all of this could be fixed with one relatively simple guiding principle: keep metrics in a voluntary, competitive school system for those who have the aptitude and desire to pursue advanced study. Remove most metrics and bureaucracy from a base, mandatory public education much more about civics, basic skills, and introducing people to career paths relevant to their particular local area. I think that principle would ultimately lead to MORE people getting benefits from a traditional pipeline than do currently, free teachers to let the needs of the students actually direct how class time gets spent, and require way less administrative overhead.

EDIT: I rambled way too much here. The current state of education in the US drives me crazy.

Given the test-driven nature of modern education in the US, having 1000 kids that can just read at grade level is better than having 985 kids at grade level, 5 below, and 10 above. Any resources spent on the latter would be better spent on the 5 that are below grade level.

We need to empower geniuses if we have any hope of progressing our knowledge as a species. This means a chief priority should be to find and pay special attention to geniuses regardless of social class.

That doesn't mean there is a false dichotomy where we can't also achieve baseline literacy for all; that's a complex sociological problem which might take a genius to solve.

I think this argument presupposes that denying resourcing for the 10 will definitely improve the success of the 5.

Personal side note; I’ve tended to find that exceptional people are more productive with the resources given. So I find it hard to believe the inverse would also be true.

I think I misstated my argument. :-)

The way schools are currently measured, the 5 are very, very important and the 10 are completely irrelevant. The only judgement is how many of the students are below the appropriate skill level. I don't believe anyone even measures how much in advance of the skill level students at or above the minimum are.

How can you determine if the students learned anything without testing?

How do you know a prospective employee is worth hiring without testing?

Indeed. That's why they get tested.

Would you hire them based only on a competency test?

This is how schools are judged: what proportion of their students pass a minimum competency test.

Unless of course you have a school with a math department and a math team that competes.

Across American I'm sure it's the exception, and not the rule, to have a math department and a math team.

But in California, especially the Bay Area, they're not uncommon. All the public high schools, and many of the middle schools, in my city have them. Private schools will vary based on their priorities.

> When several of the kids used a more advanced math concept they had learned outside of school to solve a problem, the teacher told them to not do it that way because they hadn't learned it yet.

This is nothing new. Most teachers are more concerned with being able to manage their classes than they are with outcomes for individual students.

This also seems to be for the sake of the teachers. There's a bunch of different methods to do math problems, and they're supposed to grade both the method and the result. It's way easier if everyone is using the same method than to allow everyone to make their own.

As a straw-man example - you could come up with a more advanced way to format your essay and maybe write it in a new language you learned, but if the teacher can't understand it then it doesn't really fulfill the requirements of the assignment.

The "new math" thing also isn't anything new, there's a song about it from 1965 and another from 2009

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math_(song)

Like the sibling poster said this is probably a cost cutting measure. However, I really hate the dichotomy of “special ed” vs “gifted/advanced” that permeates education. Every student has special educational needs, and by that I mean not just academics. I excelled in school with no real effort and never got the support I needed in other areas because, clearly, I was doing great. I now have a 2e kid that goes to a Waldorf type school and gets like zero academic assistance (not really needed) but a ton of social/emotional support he needs. Eventually he’ll be in some more mainstream school where he can take advanced courses. I have a girl with ADHD and an 88 IQ - she just squirrels out as soon as she sees a problem that she cannot answer without some thought. She is sharp as a tack and does well in school because she has had to learn good study habits, but her support comes in the form of special ed to help give her a distraction-free environment in which to study.

I do think there is a push not to equalize everyone but to actually address individual needs, and those may draw resources from areas like advanced courses. Boredom in school for bright kids can definitely be a problem but I’m not sure it’s the end of the world. The kids who want to excel generally will, and can often just be advanced a grade or two. The rigid structure of class groupings by age is anachronistic and maybe like 50% appropriate. There are better ways to structure education.

Here in California, the people setting the next generation math curriculum explicitly reject the idea that some children are better in some subjects than others (0% of the people responsible for creating the math standards studied math).

Their original proposal would ban all but remedial coursework, so your kids would get the same treatment as everyone else (by intentionally lowering everyone's achievement; especially the special needs and gifted kids).

I can only assume the people pushing this are trying to sabotage the school system, but they claim to have good intentions, and hide behind all sorts of woke double speak.

In other news, the schools no longer fund science or art classes. Instead, the parents pay the public school $1000's per year per student (tax deductible) so we can have those programs.

Also, the facilities are crumbling and have all sorts of obvious health and saftey issues. This is in an extremely affluent part of the state and a top ranked school.

My kids will be fine (the parents at the school happily throw money at the problems -- it's cheaper than private school, after all), but I don't see how kids in poorer districts will be able to pretend to have a middle school education, regardless of whether they earn a California high school diploma, or not.

> Like the sibling poster said this is probably a cost cutting measure.

In the Seattle school district, this is certainly not a cost cutting measure. It's an equity measure.

> The kids who want to excel generally will

That's true. Even though there's a complete lack of interest in them by the public schools, at least those schools don't make an effort to block them.

Seattle-area parent here. I grew up in near a small city in the midwest, but even there we had 3 levels of classes for nearly every subject, and a gifted program. It was awesome. My classmates were all smart and hard-working, and I entered college already having tested out of nearly 2 years of general education requirements. Public schools are the way to go, or so I thought.

Having seen what the Seattle public school system has become, I'm planning to send my kids to private school. Most of my (largely Asian) friends here will do the same. As usual, people with the means to do so will pay to avoid these problems, but the lower/middle class suffers the consequences.

I had a similar experience in school and definitely agree

> I do think there is a push not to equalize everyone but to actually address individual needs, and those may draw resources from areas like advanced courses

This is a great point and reminds me of the quote "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". I definitely got a lot of privileges in school my friends didn't because I got good grades - better choice of classes, counselors will listen to you more, and maybe most of all, teachers seem to care much more about teaching and engaging and not just getting a group of kids they don't think want to learn to pass so they can leave the class.

For teachers is more fun to teach interested kids rather rather than people who clearly and blatantly aren't paying any attention.

You try talking for an hour to someone on the train, and keep going when they put their earphones on and start scrolling on the phone… it's not that easy.

> Boredom in school for bright kids can definitely be a problem but I’m not sure it’s the end of the world.

Until they completely lose the habit of learning. Which might come handy later on when the extra stuff they knew is no longer advanced.

In my highschool there were honors courses, but no AP courses. The school district wanted to replace honor courses with AP courses so that students might earn course credits for college. However the school district was in a working class town were most adults did not have college educations. The introduction of AP courses was fiercely opposed by many of these people, ostensibly because they didn't think it would be fair that taxpayers would have to pay for college credits, when they themselves never went to college.

Crab bucket mentality. It's real.

Brazilian guy here. In Brazil, state of Sao Paulo, some years ago the government wanted to implement a gifted students program, and it was DEFINITELY shut down for "politically correct" reasons, no "cutting costs" involved. But anyways, Brazil is not known worldwide as a smart celebrating country. Carnaval celebrates asses, not brains.

There's a difference between not providing extra resources to educate "gifted" students, and spending effort actively inhibiting their development. I feel what you describe falls in the first category, while the situation in the story falls in the second.

There was no extra costs involved per se. To "educate" the gifted children, you will incur some costs, be it on a regular public school or on a school dedicated to nurture this kids special abilities. What the political groups wanted, and in the end got, was a policy of not acknowledging that there are innate differences between children, and some are "better" than others. It doesn't matter that these kids, that frequent public schools in Brazil, are 100% poor. There is no rich kids in public schools in Brazil, I guarantee you that. The result is, this poor kids could have had a real jump start to their lives, but no. 10 years later they never had a chance, just stayed rotting in the garbage dumpsters the governments call public schools down here. It's the dangers of tabula rasa arguments, if you do not see reality in realities terms you end up hurting people.

My school had a lot of different levels of math in particular, I took a lot of the highest courses and loved my teachers, but with the stories I've heard from other students it seems like the school would give the best teachers to the best students, so people already doing bad would only do worse. So I do see some value in removing that because it incentivizes the school to not care about the lower level courses as much.

I think a better overall solution would be something like what Khan academy was going for - you can have a bunch of kids at different levels in the same class, and then you can also rely on them to help teach each other more. I think this was the main way schoolhouses were run before the industrial revolution. Then you're not limiting anyone, and you're also not encouraging the weird social effects that come from trying to section off people into discrete buckets

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040373

Equity, not equality. Big difference in modern parlance.

It's remarkable how Equity was just smuggled into "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion", without people realising that it doesn't mean the sort of equality that the majority supports.

It was on purpose. It started as "Diversity and Inclusion", and anyone who questioned it was shouted down as racist. Once any opposition was squashed, they slip in the "Equity", which was really the point the whole time. Marxism using racial politics as a smoke screen.

It's all double-speak for Marxism, or equal outcomes for everyone.

AFAIK Marxism isn't about equal outcomes, but it is opposed to enforced classes. So a Marxist would likely argue you shouldn't have lower and advanced courses separate, but you'd still have one course with a distribution of grades. The teacher would just focus more on the kids that need more help to improve the mean of the distribution, where our current method would create unnatural multi-modal distributions

If you're opposed to Marxism you should also know "double-speak" comes from a book written in support of socialism[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...

>"double-speak comes form a book written in support of socialism"

LOL - whut? Did you read a different 1984?

Orwell's thoughts on governance was complicated, and changed over time, but in no way was 1984 some kind of endorsement of socialism.

Also, Marxism is not socialism.

https://www.thecoldwire.com/socialist-vs-marxist/#:~:text=Th....

I know they're not equal, but typically people lump them together and oppose both without knowing the differences, so I figured OP would like to know they're quoting a socialist to oppose Marxism, because they might actually really support socialism even if they oppose marxism. I guess I shouldn't have said "in support of socialism" and instead "by an author who hugely supported socialism", but I think it's fair to say his works were influenced and driven by his political beliefs since that's so much of the focus. It's not a book talking about how great socialism is, but it's also not at all a critique of socialism. It's just about totalitarianism, and people often use it to oppose socialism or marxism so wanted to throw this out for clarification

A classic example was Orwell in the Spanish civil war saying he was super against Stalinism specifically and also seemed to know that it was not at all communism, but overall he seemed to primarily like democratic socialism.

Maybe this is because I'm from the US but here most people think Stalinism==Communism==Socialism==Maoism, so I think it's important to point out differences

---

Also from your link

> This is different from Marxism which relies on a violent revolution

This is definitely not true so I wouldn't trust that source much. Some people think it's the only way but others don't

This is probably a vain attempt by management to put a shine on a cost cutting exercise.

There is a poisonous ideology at work in the background but ultimately defunding schools comes from a desire for more inequality, not less.

"A desire for more inequality"?

That smacks of "good people support Policy X, even if it achieves the opposite of its goals in the long run. To acknowledge that and oppose Policy X, even on its own merits, makes you evil in intent."

Few people actually have desires like "I want more inequality", even if they oppose a policy which intends to decrease it.

A lot of the modern American progressive argument presupposes the validity of its own assumptions. It's entirely circular logic.

> oppose a policy which intends to decrease [inequality]

Of course, there is very little discussion on whether said policies do actually end up decreasing inequality; much like how the Great Society "War On Poverty" arguably increased poverty.

>Few people actually have desires like "I want more inequality

It's dressed up differently. They talk about cutting "bloated" public sector budgets or the necessity of austerity.

Nobody calls themselves anti choice or pro death or pro war either but lots of people are.

You can believe in those things for reasons other than "wanting more inequality".

Your political opponents believe what they say, not some nefarious strawman you think they're secretly thinking.

Who do you mean by management, here?

The superintendent, the school board, the city council or the voters?

The cynical among us might suspect the real reason to be budget.

It's not due to lack of budget. For example, in San Francisco, the school district spends $22k per student per year. That figure doesn't include capex.

Do you have a source for this claim? Sounds incredible.

The district where my kids attend have suggested this on a few occasions. Frequently advanced math is the target. The district has hired a consultant that is charged with professional development for educators in the district. Among other things, the consultant makes claims that tracking is "... a racialized system of exclusion.” and compares it to Apartheid on multiple occasions. The rationale is explicit: "The biggest problem with tracking–by a million miles — is the equity issue." In my opinion combatting inequity in this way, by eliminating a resource that students need to succeed, is an example of “leveling down” or "Harrison Bergeroning" the situation if you will.

Here's one: https://stanforddaily.com/2022/04/07/stanford-and-cal-profes...

> the reformed framework attempted to remedy achievement gaps by urging public schools to remove certain accelerated math tracks from middle school education. Boaler’s guidelines have become a basis for a statewide push to move these classes, specifically Algebra I, out of middle school.

Basically they do that to kill force people who can to send their kids to private schools.

Strange indeed! Difficult to understand the motivation. How would removing advanced tracks from public schools (with disproportionately more minority students) help equality?

Not always.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

People are fickle in their adulation.

Oh. Hi! :-) 8minutes faster U!

>Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc?

It's a complex terrain to navigate, I think. The German term "schadenfreude" comes to mind, specifically, in direct contrast to that. For example, would you say the Kardashian family is celebrated or despised?

People certainly interpret it as a straw man, but if it was that, I'm really not sure why the author would have decided that Harrison would be declaring himself king, getting a beautiful queen, appointing an aristocracy, being weirdly and unnecessarily violent or literally flying.

Accusing a ‘science fiction’ story of strawmanning is pretty weird.

Moreover, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ can easily be paralleled to Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, which is a direct jab at the early Soviet Union. However, idk if Vonnegut was interested in that or read Bulgakov.

What constitutes "ability" and "beauty", and what is acceptable/permitted to idolize, is extremely culturally specific. And the story explores a world with a very different view of those.

No, as we learned when morphing started to work, beauty is average. If you average a large number of faces, you get one most humans think is beautiful.[1] Non-beauty seems to be a defect-sensing system.

[1] https://petapixel.com/2013/05/28/what-averaged-face-photogra...

Americans idolize athletic skill and beauty, but look down on intellectual achievement.

"nerds"

Media and popular culture teaches the nerd/jock dichotomy to children, who internalize it and let it become a self fulfilling prophesy. When the influence of this meme is diminished, athletic and intellectual ability have a positive correlation with each other. People with healthy strong bodies are more likely to have healthy and strong minds as well, and vice versa. The quality of a school and a community's attitude towards intellectualism can be judged by how much overlap there is between the sports teams and honors courses. The less overlap there is, the worse that school/community is.

One way that popular culture teaches this dichotomy is with role playing games, where you choose to spec into INT or STR, but if you split your skill points between both you'll be mediocre at both. Real life doesn't work like that.

Mens sana in corpore sano

That's an unnecessary large brush. There are 300 million of us. Are we all the same?

When I say "people like ice cream" and you say "not all people like ice cream" I reply "I didn't say all."

"All" is a modifier for a reason.

For example, people are demanding that the SATs should not be used to evaluate students academic ability, because it's unfair that some students do better on the test than others.

Have you ever seen anyone advocate this sort of thing for the school sports program? How about it being unfair and inequitable that top athletes have a leg up on college admissions?

Did any PE teacher shower attention on me or the other inept students to bring us up to speed? Nope. The attention was all on the top 2 or 3 athletic students. The rest of us were just an annoyance. (I'm not saying this to complain, as my interests were elsewhere, just illustrating an example.)

Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading. I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important.

> Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading

If I say "people have two legs" and you reply saying what about amputees, that's a debate tactic, not a misinterpretation. If I say "people are amputees" that would be a false statement.

> I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important.

The term "people" by itself means people in general. Not all people, and not one person in a billion.

English is neither a mathematics nor a programming language, and should not be treated as such.

Seems like you moved the goal posts a bit there. Your first comment indicates "people" could be any quantity, now it seems you mean that "people" means people in general, which indicates a majority of people? It's important to be precise in language if you want your thoughts understood.

> It's important to be precise in language if you want your thoughts understood.

I can't help but conclude you understood me perfectly, and are just being argumentative.

Consider the bloodsoaked frenzy that surrounds any celebrity who steps out of line.

Consider, in social media, our quaint tradition of "voting". Suppressing the smart and stupid alike. Enforcing conformity to the norm above all.

I had a teacher that loved to use Harrison Bergeron as a useful discussion point on the complex difference between "Equality" and "Equity", and my understanding is that is also what Vonnegut intended. (The nihilistic modern Libertarian interpretation of "it's not even worth trying to accommodate differently abled people because Harrison Bergeron said so" seems quite contrary to a lot of Vonnegut's other works.)

I appreciate that today we have less likely to be confused with nihilism memes on "equality" versus "equity" such as this now classic: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/94/b9/cf/94b9cff6e57f8bff9db127a21...

I think it is a shame that we've almost lost some access to good humor/satire/farce such as Vonnegut's in what increasingly feels like a Post-Poe's Law Singularity world where the internet makes it painfully obvious how much "most" people associate any given satire with its most facile arguments and miss the forest for the trees, miss the punchline, or miss the general point.

> The nihilistic modern Libertarian interpretation of "it's not even worth trying to accommodate differently abled people because Harrison Bergeron said so"

That isn't what Libertarians think.

Anyone I've ever heard it from was a Libertarian, so it seems fair to use that as a label. I don't know or care if it is a "party plank" shared by "all Libertarians" or "true Libertarians" or "true Scotsmen", it's not relevant to my point.

You're not hearing it from this libertarian.

Libertarianism is not code for rude, thoughtless, meanness, uncharitable, stealing, defrauding, enslaving, etc.

It's code for people doing what they want to, as long as they don't hurt others.

For example, I follow recommendations for making my web sites more usable for people using screen readers. Not because anyone makes me do it - I'm happy to do it.

Great. You want a pat on the back for doing the easy things?

A lot of accommodations cost money and are supported by taxes. Are you one of the rare Libertarians who doesn't also believe "taxation is theft"? Other accommodations require regulation because incentives (money) alone don't work (and have been repeatedly proven not to). Have you squared your Libertarianism with the need for useful regulations of accommodations?

The extreme nihilistic version has deep roots in modern American Libertarianism, I'm glad you anecdotally don't think you subscribe to it. I don't have any cookies to hand out for someone feeling happy to do the low hanging fruit when part of the point is about doing the hard things for equity (not equality) and compassion.

"taxation is theft" is compatible with a desire to help the less fortunate. We don't all have to subscribe to your ideology of forcing "conpassionate" behavior to actually help people.

There's plenty of reasons that a voluntary approach can (and does) work. Not perfectly, of course, but nothing is perfect. But it arguably works better than the more authoritarian approach you prescribe.

> "taxation is theft" is compatible with a desire to help the less fortunate. We don't all have to subscribe to your ideology of forcing "conpassionate" behavior (sic) to actually help people.

So you mean saying "oh poor you!" giving a sad look and moving on with your day?

I'm sure the less fortunate are really happy about that.

Or can you detail what's the plan to help the less fortunate without taxation on the more fortunate?

> So you mean saying "oh poor you!" giving a sad look and moving on with your day?

Oh what a zinger! You got me there! /s

Honestly, why should I waste time arguing with you?

> Honestly, why should I waste time arguing with you?

To show good faith… you succeeded at showing you didn't have that.

If you want good faith then don't open with an insult.

Can you point me exactly where I insulted you? I don't see any insult.

(I'm not him.)

> So you mean saying "oh poor you!" giving a sad look and moving on with your day?

This was insulting.

It's way worse if you're the person on the receiving side of that.

You put words in his mouth, which is rude. He was on the receiving end of it, not me, but I can still see that what you did was insulting.

He did say he didn't want to pay taxes to help the less fortunate. So I offered my view of what that looks like… he didn't care to state his view, but preferred to pull the "i'm offended" card to not reply. Which makes me think he actually had no answer to the question, and just doesn't like taxes, but doesn't like to be told he's a bad person for the inevitable consequences that has.

> He did say he didn't want to pay taxes to help the less fortunate.

Of course, I literally didn't say that. I think it's probably obvious to most people how what I said differs from your interpretation.

> So I offered my view of what that looks like… he didn't care to state his view, but preferred to pull the "i'm offended" card to not reply.

I did not play the "I'm offended" card. You chose to be a dick. If you want people to engage with you in substantive dialogue, don't be a dick.

Calling me a dick while saying I'm offensive -_-'

You never had any worthwhile opinion to share.

The hard things, like making comments calling people out on the internet for not doing exactly what you think they should do?

You can read my other posts. I've extensively written about Libertarianism. None of it matches what you describe.

I'm not asking for cookies. I'm pointing out that you have a misinformed view of Libertarianism, and gave an example.