ISTM that the core problem here - ignored by most of the outraged posters - is that the Orthodox Jews in this area are apparently paying most of the taxes and getting only a small percentage of the benefits. If you read the comments you would get the impression that the opposite is the case, but apparently it’s not so.
In any situation like this, it’s only natural that the group being short-changed - in this case the Orthodox Jewish population - will do what they can to lessen the disparity, while the beneficiaries will seek to maintain the status quo.
That seems to sum up the big picture, best as I can tell.
Oh sure. They are getting short changed because they choose private religious schools over public. They should also get a tax break because they don’t drive on Saturdays.
First of all, cite that the Orthodox Jews in the area are paying most of the taxes. Not saying it’s not true, but I haven’t seen those numbers. And they aren’t being short changed any more than rich white people who send their kids to boarding schools, or Christian fundamentalists who home school are being short changed; there is a public school system that is available, but they choose not to use it.
All adults without children in the schools should therefore takeover the school board and make sure those children get as cheap and terrible an education as they can in hopes that the families with kids all move away. In this case, senior citizens are paying taxes and have no benefits whatsoever, other than an educated populace (which, come to think of it, has innumerable benefits). And if senior citizens took over the local school board, intentionally ran it into the ground and then set up fraudulent appraisals to sell the physical schools that were no longer in use to senior’s centers at a markedly reduced prices, using lawyers that have done this before in previous towns, I would be just as outraged.
Neither have I. I’m assuming absent evidence to the contrary that if they make up the majority of voting age population then they are probably the majority of homeowners and pay the majority of the taxes. But even if they don’t pay most, it’s a pretty safe assumption that they pay out of proportion to what they’re getting back in school services if they send none of their kids to the public school system.
That depends on how you define the term short-changed. The education and legal systems is set up such that it reflects the values and morals of the majority of the country, and not those of some guys who are a majority in some small area. But in any event, bottom line is that they’re putting in a lot more than they’re getting out, and it’s natural for them to want to even things out a bit.
Several points:
[ul]
[li]I don’t know that anyone is doing anything “in hopes that the families with kids all move away”, or how anyone knows that this is the case, and at any rate it doesn’t relate to my point.[/li][li]Seniors are different in that they typically have used the public school system at some point.[/li][li]Senior centers are different in that they are not part of the education system at all.[/li][li]I think you need to distinguish between illegal acts and the main subject of the OP, which was “defund[ing]” the school system.[/li][/ul]
The bottom line for you is that you’re part of the majority on this issue, and the system is set up to work for you and people like you, so it’s natural that you’re strongly in favor of it. But for people who are not part of the majority, the system does not work, and it’s natural that they try to push things a bit in their direction to the extent possible when they have political power. ISTM that that’s all this is about. And in addition, it’s misleading to portray it as people trying to extort other people’s money in their direction, when if anything the exact opposite is true and they’re only trying to even the score a bit.
I’ve seen unqualified hostile comments about Muslims draw negative reaction here. I don’t recall ever seeing a thread titled something like “Muslims Do X Bad Thing in U.S. neighborhood”, but I highly doubt it would pass without the OP being called out for (at least) careless language.
Why not start a thread on that subject (with relevant examples) instead of trying to negate the reactions of posters in this thread to offensive phraseology?
A thread on knee-jerk tu quoquery would also be fun and educational.
I don’t see why anyone would need “the premise of needing funding for special ed to get elected to the school boards”. Whatever happened to good old “No Taxation Without Representation”.
I would think as long as you’re subject to taxes set by the school board, you should be entitled to get elected to it, special ed or no special ed.
Oh, they certainly do. I’m not saying that anything goes wrt Muslims with dopers. But the threshold for people calling a cat a cat is much higher. It takes much more than a mere “Muslims do bad thing X” or “Arabs do bad thing Y” for a couple moderators to chime in. Some dopers have been telling us for years how Muslims are destroying us from within and from without without ever getting as much as a warning, while they would be famous for their antisemitism and/or racism if they had said one tenth of that about Jews or Blacks. And probably banned long ago, in fact.
Because I’m a lazy man who doesn’t bookmark the thread each time read something which irritates me. I know I should.
But I wish that dopers (and moderators alike) would sometimes replace the word “Muslim” by “Jew” or “Black” in their mind when hey read it here and see how they would feel and react (and what they would think of the poster) if the exact same thing was said about one of the latter groups.
And for someone like me coming from a country like mine where “Arabs” (who often aren’t) are the most obvious minority, this kind of speech is all too failiar. I can’t count how often themes that are in Europe the province of the racist extreme right are rehashed here (how they will outbreed us and bring the collapse of our civilization, for instance). Dopers might have the excuse of being Americans for the most part, hence to not recognize at first glance these kind of “opinions” for what they are, but still… (once again, that’s where replacing the word by “Blacks” would come in handy).
Because I also disagree with the reaction of these posters. Jews did take over the East Ramapo School District. Nothing in the actual event as reported in the news, or in the OP is antisemite. The OP isn’t even suspected of being antisemite. People react because a sentence beginning in the same way, used in a different context, by different people about a different issue could be antisemite. Which is a vast overreaction. People plainly want the word “Jews” to never be used in association with a negative statement (at least not without extra cautious qualifiers).
I don’t want people and mods to have the same level of sensitivity wrt to Muslims. I’d like them to be a bit less oversensitive to vague hints of possible antisemitism, and a bit more reactive to blatant displays of racism (against Muslims. They dance around quite a bit when it’s about Blacks. Again because they’re mostly Americans, who are exra-sensitive about this, and quite a lot of posters are in fact Black themselves. Although offensive generalities against “Africans” also generally get a pass unless you go as far as saying they have an average IQ of 50, and even then it’s apparently still worth a debate).
And the fact that they are using this representation to maneuver to purchase the physical schools from the taxpayers at a fraudulent discount to use as private schools for themselves gives you no pause at all?
Oh dear me, don’t conflate the issues. The fact that they are running the schools into the ground, were extorting the old school board into misappropriating funds and illegally selling off schools are all totally different issues.
Eta: see tomndeb? Of course some people came in to defend this stuff.
I addressed this in the fourth bullet point of my earlier response (#125) to your prior post.
In addition, I would also caution that you need to distinguish between the different specific actors here. One aspect of the use of the term “the Jews” which has not been commented on is the attribution of the acts of any specific Jews to a sort of cabal of Jews acting in unison. In reality there might be good Jews and bad Jews, just like any other ethnicity.
While it makes more sense to talk of “the Jews” when referring to broader forces and trends, which tend to involve support (in aggregate) by communities, specific acts tend to involve specific actors.
I am not familiar with the details of this maneuver. But if the people involved in an attempted fraudulent transfer are the same people running the board today, then they can obviously be criticized. And indicted, for that matter. (Has anyone been indicted?)
But if it’s not the same people, but just people who happen to share the same religion, then I don’t think it’s appropriate to say “they” do something when it’s specific people doing it.
They are the very same board members. One of the school sales that they were able to get through hastily at a lowball number was reversed when the appraiser that they hired plead guilty to accepting a bribe to generate a low appraisal. Ordinarily this would be grounds for voting them out of office, except that the voting bloc agrees with this fraud.
Oddly, after being caught in fraud, the school board made the decision to sell the school to the very same buyer (the Yeshiva) who attempted to defraud them the first time, albeit at a higher number as forced by the bribery admission. You would think that a school board trying to get top dollar for one of their assets would likely not deal with a group that attempted to defraud them.
And the “threshold” is arguably quite different for Catholics, or Christians in general.
If your knowledge of history is so poor as to not comprehend why negative generalizations about “Jews” are less tolerated than those about other religious groups, then your ignorance is too profound to be remedied here.
Your first paragraph seems to suggest that the board was in on the attempted fraud and the second seems to suggest that they may not have been. (Which leads back to my earlier question about whether any school board members were indicted in connection with this attempted deal.)
If the second is correct, I would imagine that - considering that the fraud was apparently an attempt to help the private schools and not enrich any individual - that these people regarded it as something of a legal issue and not as a full-scale fraud, especially if there were no active higher bids for the property anyway.
I would be curious to see an example of similar posts that were treated differently.
Even this thread does not appear to exemplify what you are concerned about. Martin Hyde has not been punished or even reprimanded for his choice of language. I agreed that his usage was inflammatory, but that had nothing to do with moving the thread which, as I noted, was moved because it was not posted as a debate. It had much more in common with Recreational Outrage associated with The BBQ Pit than with any other form of post and it lacked an actual thesis to debate. Therefore it was moved. There have been any number of threads in Great Debates hostile to Islam and Muslims that were never moved to The BBQ Pit as long as they actually provided a point to debate and arguments to support their position. Conversely, several rants against Islam or Muslims have been moved from Great Debates to The BBQ Pit when the OP was nothing more than a rant.
The public school board is not supposed to be trying to help the private schools. If the public school board is selling a public school asset, then the public school board is supposed to be trying to get as much money as possible for that asset.
And there were higher bids. The Yeshiva sale that the board approved at 3 million, and was based on a fraudulent appraisal was after other higher offers. Also, the Yeshiva eventually had to pay 5 million, so obviously this first offer was not intended to be a best offer.
After that sale was unwound, the Commissioner of Education for New York State stated, “I am constrained to find that the board abused its discretion by hastily approving the sale of Hillcrest to the Congregation and that such sale must be set aside. Further, prior to selling Hillcrest in the future, the board must take reasonable steps, consistent with this decision, to secure the best price obtainable for Hillcrest.”
The board done wrong by trying to get less money because they didn’t care how much money the school district that they are in charge of overseeing brought in for this asset.
I didn’t grow up as a Muslim or Jew. I grew up in a family that had a Catholic upbringing and even then we knew that there were some families that were Catholic and some that you’d roll your eyes and say “Oh-my-fucking-god-what-did-they-do-now” Catholic. And that was in ONE church. If you visited relatives or went on vacation and went to a church even supposedly of the same (denomination?) , you never knew if you were getting “Vat-2” or “Children of The Corn”.
Going to school, I had lots of friends of lots of different religions and guess what? Some of them had [del]“Total Psycho Assholes”[/del] “Religious Extremists” to deal with too.
Honestly, it was a moment of religious breakthrough: "OMG! You have to deal with Assholes Too!?Gimme-Five!
Personally, over time, I started to worry about me possibly cutting more slack to my churches assholes than to Other churches assholes. Hey, I knew I had a WHOLE LOTTA doubts about there being any God, but ethically, playing favorites is just seemed Wrong.
Ultimately, it helped lead me to call Shenanigans on the whole religion thing and to find my own truth (YMMV):
ALL religions are Bullshit, but some of the people stuck in them are kinda cool and slack-worthy.
Claire, I’m not asking to be let off of the hook or off of your shit-list. I’m sure that I deserve to be on it for 100 better reasons. That said, I say this so you can get a better idea as to why I said “Religious Extremists”,
if only in the hope that someday that HighFive! moment might happen here too.
Because we ALL have to deal with assholes. Why make it harder?
You keep inserting the word “public” in there, to make it “public school board”. I understand that it helps your case. But AFAIK, it’s the “school board”.
