A leftie without rules is like a salt water ocean without the salt. Or the water.

Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still

Actually, 1984 levels of freedom would be quite welcome at the moment.

—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand;

Yes of course. Nobody protected our health, wealth or well being until the government got intimately involved in it. This man needs a government enema STAT.

The Left’s mistake was in assuming that “society” was a synonym for “the whole people.” While the institutions do set the tone for society, it is ultimately the society of those people who … happen to already share the values of the institutions.

The whole people, on the other hand, keep their own society, and impart their values upon it by doing the things privately that institutions do, poorly, in public.

As I am sure that you are already aware – being acquainted with homeschooling yourself – the studies that have been done on homeschooled children have shown that they were light years ahead of institutionally educated children. Further, it made very little difference in the outcome whether the parents had higher degrees or not. Also – economic factors made little difference in outcome.

This liberal jacktard – what is his name? – Mark Lilla has not a clue. Yet he will decree it thus because he believes it to be so.

I don’t have, and I don’t need, an ‘Ivy League MBA’ to know that public education sucks – and the fact that I can do a better job than any public school (and many private schools) shines right there in my kids.

Lilla was once regarded as a “neocon” (or neocon sympathizer). Then he suddenly left hick Chicago (and the “Straussian” Committee for Social Thought) to return to the cozy cocoon of Manhattan and started to wildly overcompensate for his wayward years.

In his recent articles a recurring theme is how the old-time (ie. 70s-80s) conservatives were substantive thinkers whereas now they are all stupid. Though he never points to contemporary progressive thinkers who are any better.

In some other articles he has seemed to be apologizing for conservatives, though this time he is particularly vitriolic. The term “libertarian mob” is particularly strange. He talks about trends like the anti-Vaxers (a phenom that I didn’t regard as connected to the tea parties and has more to do with the editors of the peer-reviewed Lancet). He attributes to them a xenophobia towards Obama – while ignoring the face that the movement didn’t get going until federal spending started skyrocketing.

1. Many people fear they can’t homeschool because they remember how difficult school was for them toward the end of their school careers — advanced algebra, physics, chemistry, etc. They forget they will be teaching 5-year olds.

2. Home schooling has the pleasant side effect of the teacher learning what they failed to learn in 13 or more years of failed public “education.” Thus after trudging through the failed institutions so famously conquered by the left’s “long march,” the adult slips the bonds of public education’s indoctrination and the pupil never gets exposed to the left’s virus at all.

3. It’s downright scary when students actually learn to read, write and understand American history.

I found Mr. Lilla’s use of the phrase “an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self” mildly amusing. I assume that he isn’t into self-reflection that much.

Heh…”I’m the king, but if you don’t do what I say, I can’t be king anymore.”

My wife is a public elementary school teacher in a district that is considered to be one of the better in the area, not to mention the state. Yet she and I sat down one day and figured out the amount of time over a typical month that her kids actually spend being taught and it’s somewhere on the order of 30-40% of the 7-hour school day. And if parents knew of half of the nonsense that goes on in that 40%, they’d be at the school doors with pitchforks and torches.

What these deep thinkers don’t realize is that the institutions they’ve commandeered no longer have the trust of the people they supposedly “serve.” We stump-toothed hicks have caught on, and realize that we’re the ones serving the institutions, and we’re not going along with it much longer.

I guess Underwriters Laboratories is doing an inadequate job of ensuring the safety of our electrical eqpt. And worse some Americans get their safety from the CSA (the Canadian counterpart of UL).

And who is UL beholden to? The insurance industry.

Now if only government was doing this job…

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BTW College is a waste. The smart kids don’t need it and the not so smart don’t benefit. What we need is an accrediting agency that can test people for adequate knowledge.

And let med add – public schools do not suck. If you get into the Advanced Placement track. The top 10% of teachers meet the top 10% of students. Except for the leftist indoctrination my kids got wonderful educations from the public schools.

My homeschooled kid will have grades from his second semester of college posted this week. Straight A’s', high A’s, all of them.

So fuck Lilla – I think I probably did a better job tailoring his education to him than any school system devoted to herd management would have.

As a homeschooling parent of a National Merit Finalist (now at an Ivy) and a 12th grader finishing Calculus 3 through dual-enrollment at our Commuity College, I can see how some would see us as a threat to public education.

My recent interaction with our local school system was to request that my son be allowed to take the PSAT (test required to qualify for Nat’l Merit). Although he had already taken the ACT at our local high school (34/36) on a Saturday, he was barred from taking the PSAT there on a school day. Thei excuses ranged from concerns for his safety, to concerns that he “might bring a weapon on campus”.

The elites buy into what I call the Fundamental Contradition of the Democratic Nanny State: How can individuals be incompetent to make personal decisions about how to live their own lives, but when they enter the voting booth somehow be supremely qualified to make decisions about how everyone must live their lives (either directly via the Athens/New England-style town meeting or referenda; or indirectly by electing legislators to make the laws)?

These people seem unfamiliar with Hayek’s “Knowledge Problem”. It simply isn’t possible for the administrators of these hallowed “institutions” to possess the knowledge that is mastered by the people at the tip of the spear.

I’m also struck by the fact that readers are supposed be shocked that a large percentage of Americans want to be “free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do”, as if any of this is a bad thing.

Particularly, “…free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; ”

What is the meaning of this? Perhaps this is a typo, but should we have policies too difficult to understand?

One of my best friends, who is expecting her first child, is considering home-schooling. This young woman was valedictorian of her high school class and then went on to graduate summa from Harvard. She’s also an outstanding teacher (which I know from years of having her help my sorry butt through foreign languages, which is just something that my brain does not do). Her husband has a master’s from one of the best schools in Europe.

But I guess that her desire to home-school indicates a totally unwarranted confidence in her and her husband’s intellectual abilities….

why should Lilla presume them incompetent to make that decision?

Stacy, most liberals think that conservatives are all uneducated hicks. (Now, if you ever want to see them start howling about how going to top schools and obtaining professional degrees does not a smart person make, put me into a room with them; it’s incredibly funny to watch their worlds fall apart.) In their worlds, only liberals are smart and go to Ivies; therefore, us conservatives who would homeschool children are creating the next generation of illiterates.

Liberals believe that most individuals are illiterate.

But those same individuals are infallible when hired by the school board or local/state/federal governments.

If you agree with Mr. Lilla’s ideas you might want to trace them back to their source in the seminal 18th Century Tory broadside about the original Tea Party, “What’s the Matter With Massachusetts? Or, Why These Rebellious Peasants Should Shut Up and Quietly Submit to Being Buggered By Their Betters,” by Lord Thomas Frank.

These aren’t your parent’s pinkos. Whine, Whine, Whine, Bitch, and Moan.

“and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.”

Let me translate: Lilla, They have an unhealthy sense of high self esteem. You can’t even shame them by calling them racist.

Really the criticism is, that American People want to live as free people? As free as possible…isn’t there a song about this supposed free condition pined for by the American People? This is a new discovery by Lilla?

I seem to recall some lyrics

Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave…..

So Lilla woke up in the land of milk and honey, and wants none of it?

It’s a liberal trick if you tell people over and over again that you are the superior intellect, than that makes it true. It’s all pretense, these fools don’t think they are anymore intelligent, they think everyone else is too timid to call them out on their claims. So no one challenges their pretend consensus.

Truth is no one really cares enough to call them out or correct them. They hate that, because almost all of their claims of intellectual superiority are only for one purpose – Hey look at me, look at me…attention whores.

I understand the knee-jerk reaction to any criticism of the Tea Parties, but surely Mr. McCain (if not his readers) is familiar with conservative critiques of individualism?

“What was the point of the Left’s “long march through the institutions” if, having captured those institutions, they can’t use them to tell everybody else what to do?”

Of course they can. They can tell you whether grandpa should have his hips replaced, whether to do away with grandma who hasn’t much quality of life, whether Trig should not be born for he would be a burden to the healtcare system, how much we should pay to insure ourselves and those unfortunate folks who don’t have healthcare insurance, what we can insure ourselves for… Yes, they can tell a lot of us, albeit not everybody, what to do.

I’m amazed at the number of people who think their kids are being properly educated in public school. They’re being warehoused, for the most part.

Uh-oh, S. L. Toddard, the notorious message-thread derailer. OK, I’ll riskl feeding the troll: Yes, I am, SLT. So what?