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Anti-Education Attack Poisons 150 Afghan Schoolgirls
An anonymous reader writes "The water at a high school in Afghanistan was contaminated today, poisoning roughly 150 girls in attendance. Afghan officials say this was a deliberate attack: 'We are 100 percent sure that the water they drunk inside their classes was poisoned. This is either the work of those who are against girls' education or irresponsible armed individuals.' From the article: 'Some of the 150 girls, who suffered from headaches and vomiting, were in critical condition, while others were able to go home after treatment in hospital, the officials said. They said they knew the water had been poisoned because a larger tank used to fill the affected water jugs was not contaminated. ... None of the officials blamed any particular group for the attack, fearing retribution from anyone named.'"
is what happens when you coddle and religious groups extreme behavior and the myth that they have a right to tell governments what to do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And occasionally blowing up a building full of innocent people, but that is the absolute limit.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The comment is absolutely on the mark.
The story makes me absolutely sick and reinforces my easy evaluation system for world religions: How they treat their women is in direct proportion to the value the religion brings to all societies of the world. That said, I fail to see how this relates to technology.
None of the officials blamed any particular group for the attack, fearing retribution from anyone named.'"
Bad guys do bad things and people are afraid to even name them for doing the said bad things... I think the bad guys might be winning.
Religion of Peace. We should be tolerant of their views.
Show me in the Koran where it prohibits educating girls?
It's a cultural thing. Traditional (read patriarcal) societies that treat women as second class citiczens or as property all do horrible things like this.
And it's not right at all. Any culture that values males more than females is a backwards culture. In varying degrees, India, China, Japan, the Arab nations, Persians, most of the African countries, you names them - all backwards cultures. And most of them are paying a very heavy price for it. And in just about all cases, religion is used as an excuse for their deplorable behavior - it's not the cause.
Remember that crap like this is carried out by a fundamentalist extremists. Don't start a witch-hunt on religion just because the wack-jobs killing people claim to be religious.
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Ah, so Republicans' desire to outlaw birth control is cultural, not religious. Poor backward Republicans.
Unless abortion is birth control, you're just making shit up. Move along.
Aside from that, its an excellent example of why multiculturalism should not exist. My daughter gains nothing by the existence of that culture. Let american consumerism steamroll it out of existence, no substantial loss.
Right, because the American culture is the One True Culture. Your ridiculous statement implies a false choice: American culture vs. poisoning girls who want to go to school. This is, in fact, a great argument for multiculturalism. If Afghanistan were more of an educated multi-cultural society, these nutjobs would have a harder time getting a following. As it is, when everyone only sees one culture (their own), treating women like this is the only "normal" they know.
I was just watching a talk by NDT on "Intelligent Design". In that, he made an excellent observation about how, for a 300 year period, the Arab world was the center of intellectual progress in the world. 2/3 of all stars with names have Arabic names. They discovered 0, they gave us algebra.
Then... a new religious philosophy arose that taught that mathematics was the work of the Devil. This wasn't Mohamed.... it wasn't there in the beginings of Islam. For many years, these problems didn't exist.
The sobering thought there is... as he points out.... this period of advancement ended with the rise of this anti-scientific ideology. Just think, there are a Billion Muslims, and only a handful of Muslim/Arab nobel prize winners. If they hadn't ended their period of advancement hundreds of years before Europe became the new center of intellectual progress... where would we be today? How much raw talent just went totally unused because of these ideologies.
Honestly.... I have little doubt that there would be people posting comments from Lunar or martian colonies by now if not for this terrible ideology.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I hate any cheater, but come on....that is just sick!
Why would you hate someone for doing something that doesn't affect you, for reasons you have no idea of?
It's a conservative thing. Conservatives everywhere attack education. Whether it's literacy for women in Afghanistan, or sex ed and evolution in the United States, conservatives are anti-education.
Why are conservatives anti-education? Because their beliefs cannot be supported by facts, and so the more factual ideas you teach, the less conservative your people will be. There is a positive correlation between education and liberalism for a reason.
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Culture and Religion are very intertwined.
The Catholic Church while a Unified church, operate rather differently cross different cultures. Even with them following the same rules, the importance of the rules they follow are prioritized differently.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why? Its a fucking health service. Why should birth control be special from antibiotics when it comes to healthcare. Its a religious objection, flat out.
Good-bye
The problem is that we have a religious culture that encourages extremely high levels of obedience, faithfulness and passion. And this is not necessarily going to cause problems, but....
But it's unstable, like a dictatorship. Your first dictator might be a fine Wise Benevolent Leader, and everybody's happy. But then his son takes over, and he's maybe something more on the Cackling Lunatic Leader side of thing. You're trapped in a system that doesn't regulate itself. As long as you're shackled to the ideologies attached to a name, rather than the rationale behind the ideologies themselves, something horrible can go wrong.
And it has.
Would you like a slice of toast?
By this line of reasoning, we need 2 more bills before Congress:
1 - Doctors and hospitals are absolved of blame in refusing to tread non-paying patients, and are permitted to eject them.
2 - We need a public health organization to collect and cremate uncollected bodies found on public property, or upon request uncollected bodies found on private property. This is of course subject to finding that the death was natural and not the result of foul play. This is necessary to safeguard the water supply, and because trained personnel are required to safely handle such bodies.
EITHER !!!
You are going to be compassionate about medical care, in which case you'd better be as efficient about it as possible. In which case paying for birth control is a heck of a lot cheaper than paying for emergency childbirth care.
OR !!!
You have to adopt the, "Go away and die," model. There is very little in-between. Health care as practiced in the US today is one of the lease efficient ways to run it. There is effectively universal emergency care, but no universal preventive care. That pretty much guarantees that some portion of the population will require expensive medical care.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I think you simplify this too much. It wasn't the "west's" opportunity after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. Iran, Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan were the major players in Afghanistan in the post Peshawar Accords. If the British (or the US) would have just gone in there (even to "help"), how do you think things would have gone differently? Would the Afghanis have just completely forgotten the first 3 anglo-afgan wars? Not so sure that was the best course of action.
Perhaps, we should have perhaps been rooting for Ahmad Shah Massoud and the United Islamic Front. They weren't saints, but were still anti-Taliban. Instead, the west was lobbying for them to surrendar to the Taliban to stabilize the region as the west was more aligned with Pakistan at the time (and Pakistan was one of the big supporter of the Taliban).
How did history unfold? Well, Mr Massoud was eventually assasinated and then Sept 11th occured. I don't think it was about the west being too cheap, it was more about picking the wrong side.
Help doesn't always help.
If we tried to help, who is to say it would have turned out better or turned out like many African and Latin American countries that did receive help. Symptoms may get treated, but that can make the issues worse.
America is evil for trying to impose it's will on other countries.
America is evil for not trying to impose it's will on other countries.
In a no-win situation doing nothing is often the best course of action.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Quick question... Which do you think costs more in the long run? Government covering costs of birth control to help reduce unwanted pregnancies, the cost to government and society that result from unwanted parenthood? These unwanted children will incur additional costs in welfare, education, and (statistically speaking) increases in crime.
A party complaining about "welfare mothers" doesn't have a lot of room to complain about making birth control more accessible.
...despite obvious inconsistencies, such as Jesus helping the poor and budget cutting anything that helps poor people.
Jesus advocated helping the poor. He didn't say to help the poor with somebody else's money. Christians donate more and run more charities as a group than any other.
:wq
Maybe they should have thought of that before targeting women with poison.
Idiots.
Republican's don't want to outlaw birth control. They just don't think the government should pay for it.
... Republicans are trying to prevent people from getting birth control in the private market.
No, the person you're responding to is correct - while there are a few "objectors" that work in pharmacies, few people want to BAN birth control, and there's more than just religious grounds... I pay for insurance - why should I subsidize your birth control? It's not a "health" choice, it's a lifestyle choice. If you want to have sex, and you want to prevent unwanted pregnancies, go ahead and buy birth control - there's nothing stopping you.
I suggest using the "religious freedom" argument to suggest that employers have ever been the freedom to inflict their religious views on their employees against their will in a way that causes measurable harm.
Hyperbole, much? What measurable harm? That someone has to pay for their own birth control instead of having it subsidized by people who object to it? Heavens to Betsy!
I would argue if it's for health reasons (like the hormonal birth control used to treat other symptoms) you'd have a point. Otherwise... no.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Why should birth control be special from antibiotics when it comes to healthcare.
For that matter, the materials and services used to prevent death from other causes should also be provided by the minority of people who pay the majority of the taxes. It's only right. So, let's see ... death by freezing is bad, so a majority of the citizens should have housing and energy paid for by other people. Starving to death is definitely something health-related, so no question that most people should be getting someone else to pay for their food. Certainly nobody (except the minority who pay most of the taxes) should have to pay for things like the water piped to their house, since clean potable water is a necessity for being healthy, and that's health-related, just as much as condoms are, for sure. So, even though a lot of water will be used to wash things like the cars that are medically necessary in order to get you to your so-important-that-someone-else-should-pay-for-it visit to the podiatrist, it's still something other people should pay for.
Which aspects of housing and food and clothing and personal grooming and a mattress that makes you sleep super well and a really nice chair in your cubicle at work and nice hobbies that help you to live a low-stress and this healthier life aren't health services, really, when you get down to it? The government should pay for all of it - everything that will make you happy (and thus healthier - it's been shown in studies!) should be paid for by someone else, always, since it's a right to have everything you want and need in order to be as healthy as possible since that's government's job.
Give it a rest.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As long as nobody tries to take away their boner pills.
It seems they voted THEMSELVES a pretty nice health plan.
Sarcasm detected. Yes, Republicans are a cultural movement, not religious. They cater to both moral and fiscal conservatives despite obvious inconsistencies, such as Jesus helping the poor and budget cutting anything that helps poor people.
That's just wrong. Republicans... conservatives donate a higher percentage of their income to charities than liberals; they also donate more blood and time. Paying taxes and sinking this country into a fiscal debt crisis is not "charity." If you are not making the decision, it's not "charity" and it's not "magnanimous" on your part. If you believe in Jesus then you must believe did NOT support not giving people the choice... you have to be judged on your OWN actions, not what you were forced to do. (for the record, I'm not religious, and I use this very same argument against religious people who want to control my life, too)
Who Gives and Who Doesn't.. Yes, you can call it biased... yet no liberals have ever been able to disprove it, just attack the authors without substantive arguments.
They use religion to back up their opinions where it is supported, and any other useful tidbit when it doesn't. Do you think Jesus would have supported the NRA?
I don't think Jesus would care one way or another about the NRA.
Cutting school budgets to get the latest F-35 bombers that the military doesn't even want?
You're right about one thing, it's not based on religion that they do this... it's based on what's written in the constitution; based on the failure of our educational system despite the wanton amounts of money we throw at it (BTW, Bush increased educational spending more than anyone else in the previous four decades... what did he get for it? The disdain of the left, of course.). As far as military spending - you're right. I'm not a republican, I think they've been terrible leaders since Bush's election... but I also think democrats seem to have been inspired to one-up the terribleness.
Think what you want - I won't change your mind, I realize that the people asking the most for open mindedness are typically the most closed minded of all. But between the way liberals want to destroy this country and the way the republicans want to destroy this country, the republicans are much less "bad," even if they're not good.
Stupid sexy Flanders.