Be a Good Human: End Marriage, Resist Educational Totalitarianism, and... VOTE!!

Today was the inaugural meeting of the Philosophy Club, headed and founded by Ian and myself. In order to pique the interest of as many people as possible, we started out with a bang: the long awaited debate between the Republican Club, Students for Social Justice, and a few members (I think) of the Democrats Club. It was actually more of an open forum for discussion, but was billed as a debate. It went relatively well, although when Ari Stone started talking about how all marriage was derived from the Bible, all of the civility in world could not have stopped the collective chuckle, from Republicans and others alike, as well as from Ari himself. Although everyone was testy about making sure that things were unbiased, we succeeded very well on that front. The worst complain that we had was when someone pointed out that the question "... is the Iraq war still beneficial, considering the current situation?" implied that the Iraq war was once beneficial. We omitted the "still" and appeased both sides.

There was a short discussion on homosexual marriage, at which point Ted voiced an opinion with which I wholeheartedly agree. He stated that the government should stop regulating marriage all together because it is a form of tax discrimination, and because the alleged "sanctity" of marriage is religious in nature anyway. This elicited general applause from most people, even some Republicans. While unfortunately unfeasible, I am a strong proponent of at least making the government only issue "civil unions" which can be between anyone--incest not excluded (we let people with AIDS, and many other life threatening transmittable diseases reproduce when the probability of defects and inheretance to offspring are much higher than with incest. Furthermore, incest is rare and naturally selected against because of the unfavorable genetic repercussions.) While marriage certainly doesn't come from the Bible, it's historically a religious institution, and it's importance is religious. So the government merely issue contracts between two people that allow them certain tax benefits with no basis of discrimination, or not issue any sort of contracts whatsoever. I had an interesting conversation along those lines with Ari Feuer, who had some compelling thoughts on Measure 36, the proposed state constitutional amendment to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

After a mere 18% of high school sophomores state-wide passed the state open-ended math assessment, the test has been official dropped for the next several years. Approximately 50% of students passed the multiple choice version, statewide. One the 2003 open-ended assessment, the pass rate was about 50% also. One the problem which I performed (and answered "correctly", according to their definition of "correct," I might add), there were actually an infinite number of possibilities for the correct answer: on the maximum speed of a car was given, not the speed that it actually traveled in the scenario. Other problems have asked for profit without actually specifying the cost of production or distribution. Jonathan Kadish received a score of 3 on his method of verification (4 is passing). To verify the problem, not only did he get the correct answer but he used calculus to do so (something like using integrals to derive some obvious area formula). It was overkill, but a certainly valid way of doing it. Other people who have used calculus to solve the problems have seen failing scores. Lucky for me, my last work sample score for this test may have been lost. I talked to Ms. Culpepper and she agreed to see if she could find a problem for the test that allowed me to use calculus as an experiment to see what my scores end up being. While I'm not fond of Culpepper's teaching "style," she a nice enough person. The class passes nicely when I ace the tests and do nothing in class but talk to Leeor, Jon, and her.

In other news, the recent polls suggest that Bush may be nearing the 20% mark in Multnomah county. The Oregonian reported today that in the county, Kerry leads Bush 65% to 21% with a 4% (if I remember correctly) margin of error. It is unlikely that Bush will be able to carry the state unless he gets at least 30% of the vote in Multnomah county. Bush's 21% is concentrated mostly in the area east of 82nd Av. on the eastside, including far east Portland and its neighboring suburbs.