Tutor this!

Enbrethiliel (who is settling in at her new home, Shredded Cheddar) needs to be star of her own movie about the tough-yet-wise tutor:

Will anyone argue with me when I say the time had come to find the right bar of soap to stuff into Doctor Nemesis' foul little mouth?

As with most of my best teaching ideas, insight into what that right bar could be came to me on the spur of the moment, springing from my head fully formed, like Athena from the mind of Zeus.

The first thing I did was change where he and I usually sit. After the first few times he bolted up from his seat and made me chase him, I elected to sit next to him, all the better to throw a leg over him or spring at him. Today, I resumed sitting across from him . . . all the better for him to see the new tabs I was keeping on his language.

"Every time you say a new bad word," I told him, slapping a blank sheet of paper between us on the table, "I will write it down. I will keep a tally of everything you say so that I have a record for the next faculty meeting."

His eyes nearly bugged out of his head. "Why? WHY??? It's not fair! You know I have Tourette!"

"Yes, I know you have Tourette . . . I also know that you take advantage of it. I'll bet that if you really tried, you could control it."

"F*** you! Why don't you believe . . . Hey!"

I had written "F*** you" on the paper and made a note that he had said it once.

Read the rest.

More Than Intentions

Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek makes a good point which is too often glossed over in political debate:

Writing about health-care, Paul Krugman asserts that “conservatives … don’t want Americans to have universal coverage” (”The Defining Moment,” Oct. 30).

Among the earliest lessons that I teach my freshman economics students are (1) intentions are not results, and (2) to oppose a government program is not necessarily to object to the intentions stated by that program’s advocates.

Paul Krugman obviously teaches his students differently, for he clearly believes that (1) if government intends for Americans to have universal health coverage, then the result will be that Americans actually get universal health coverage, and (2) anyone who opposes a government program promising universal health coverage is a person who objects to Americans actually getting universal health coverage.

This is perhaps the most common fallacy of all in political argument for people to follow the form: I support bill/candidate X because I think it will have good result Y. You don't support X. Therefore you don't care about Y.

Generally speaking, Y is a very general positive sentiment while X is a very specific prescription. Examples:

"You don't support abolishing NAFTA, because you don't care whether ordinary Joes can make a decent wage in America."

"You don't support school vouchers, because you don't care whether poor kids can get a good education."

"You don't support the current health care reform legislation, because you don't care whether poor people can see a doctor when they're sick."

What this approach ignores is that the topic of dispute in politics is often not whether some general good should be achieved, but whether a particular proposal will actually contribute to the general good -- and if so whether its effects will be more positive than negative. This type of intention-based argumentation is an attempt to shut down any discussion on whether a proposal will have the desired effect (and whether its negative side effects will outweigh its intended benefits), and as such it strikes at the very root of reasonable political discussion.