Geeks get things done, but they're still geeks

Senior Wired editor Daniel Roth quotes Larry Rosenstock, founding principal of High Tech High, in his essay Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education:

"Geeks get things done. They're possessed. They can't help themselves," says Larry Rosenstock, founding principal of eight charter schools in San Diego County collectively called High Tech High. He has come up with a curriculum that forces kids to embrace their inner geek by pushing them to create. The walls, desks, and ceilings of his classrooms teem with projects, from field guides on local wildlife to human-powered submarines. (A High Tech High art project called Calculicious, based entirely on math principles, now hangs in the San Diego airport.) The students all work in small groups as a way to foster shared enthusiasm: Get two kids excited about something and it's harder for a third to poke fun at them.

Well, true, sort of. I do believe that geeks have an inherit drive to be artists and create. What this school seems to be doing is inspiring focus and direction in geeks, who have a tendency towards ferret-like ADD. That's admirable. But the overall point of the essay is that if you foster an environment where academic achievement and creativity is positively reinforced by peers, it somehow becomes "cool" or socially acceptable.

Well, again, true, sort of. While it may be true reform in academics to make learning socially acceptable, it's artificial geekiness, less "education reform" and probably only cool in the bubble of the education system itself. Out in the real world it's still socially awkward to be brainy and creative, no matter how cool you make it seem. Geeks are still different from people in general who don't care as much about less life-practical things, say, like, the fibonacci sequence, quantum computing, or the human genome. Creating an environment where these guys can get together and socially reinforce each other is great, but I'm not convinced it's really the "education reform" we need. Education prepares students for the real world, including the world outside of academics. Out there, true Geekdom will always be a sliver of the population, no matter whether individual schools themselves are completely geeked-out.

I think a true reform would be to foster an environment that celebrates and integrates diversity, rather than an environment that just replaces one homogeneous population (wedgy givers) with another (wedgy recievers). The real problem, especially at a high school level, is the obsession students have with fitting in, being cool. Simply encouraging them to fit in with a different group, changing the definition of "cool", doesn't address the underlying issue, doesn't teach them that there's nothing wrong with being different. Different is fine. Encouraging this principle would be true reform, with life-long benefits that carry over into the real world.

Nazi analogies have no place in political discourse

In 1990, veteran information technology attorney Mike Godwin made the observation that "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." This adage has become known as Godwin's Law, and it holds true. Follow any heated discussion on the web long enough and you'll find, sure enough, someone ends up calling someone a Nazi.

The Internet is generally understood to be a broadly diverse spectrum of the entirety of humankind. Unfortunately this includes on the lower end, which is sadly more populous it seems, darker elements of the human presence who clearly have no desire to be decent people. The anonymity of web, and the statistical improbability of being punched in the face by some guy you pissed off hundreds of miles away, likely contributed to this condition. It's well understood that if you're not encountering assholes on the web on a regular basis, you probably forgot to pay your DSL bill.

Outside the web it used to be different. Television and radio talk show hosts seemed to have higher standards. Sure, every now and then a fringie might have blurted out a Nazi comparison in an interview, but the host would quickly cut them off and, rightly, label them as a loon. They certainly never encouraged that sort of thing, nor promoted it as they seem to be doing now.

As Leonard Pitts Jr. writes in an editorial published in the Detroit Free Press: "it seems obvious the Nazis have invaded American political rhetoric in a big way. As in Rush Limbaugh declaring health-care reform 'a Hitler-like policy,' swastikas popping up at protest rallies, a poster depicting Obama with Hitler's moustache and a pamphlet that says: 'Act Now to Stop Obama's Nazi Health Plan!'"

Dutifully listeners are repeating in step, Nazis, Nazis, Nazis.

So what's the big deal? It's just political rhetoric after all, a little slanting of the historical facts, a little colorization to give a speech more impact. Just words. Obama's evil anyway, right?

The big deal is that it's absurd. It's absurd and it profanes real human tragedy, the nearly 6 million people who died at the hands of real Nazis, real human ugliness.

Pitts reminds us of the real Nazis: "It was Nazis who shoved sand down a boy's throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window and competed to see how many of those 'little Jews' could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women's uteruses to see what would happen, who stomped a pregnant woman to death, who once snatched a woman's baby from her arms and, in the words of a witness, 'tore him as one would tear a rag.'"

Nazi analogies have no place in political discourse because nothing in modern America compares to the above.

There are real places in the real world where human atrocities continue, where genocide is policy, where the ideology of Nazism may possibly apply, but it's not here. We don't suffer nearly enough.