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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.
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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.
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.
There were many, many opportunities during the 20th Century to deliver sorely needed aid to Afghanistan, and put some money into helping the country modernize and industrialize. Under Western Cold War Political Doctrine, however, that simply wasn't seen as being "necessary" or a "priority". So after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan by the Western-armed Afghan Mujahedeen, Afghanistan was left to its own devices (= the country was left to rot in abject poverty). With the bone-crunching poverty, and political-abandonment by the Developed World came support for the Taliban. With the Taliban came a particularly hateful, denigrating view of women (women should cover at all times, girls should not go to school, girls should be married to older men by arranged-marriage). ----- Here we are many decades later, wondering why Afghanistan is an underdeveloped s__thole of place, where someone can so pissed at girls being educated, that he poisons their drinking water. Afghanistan should have been helped decades ago. The West, at the time, was too cheap to commit money to such a project. And now we have a genuinely "failed state" to deal with. "You reap what you sow", as they say.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
...able to go home almost immediately aka insta-antidote is kind of odd/unusual.
Perhaps the contaminant was a strong emetic or diuretic causing extreme dehydration, which explains the headache.
In the cases where they could go simply home after "treatment in the hospital", perhaps those girls didn't drink as much of the tainted water (duh).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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 agree, I heard that in India, a man set his wife on fire for THINKING she was having an affair, and he got off with a slap on the wrist, even though she may or may not have been cheating, as he had no real proof.
I hate any cheater, but come on....that is just sick!
Who said that Slashdot was only about technology news? "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." This matters.
...they're afraid to accuse people whom they think poisoned over a hundred schoolgirls, for fear that they'll tick the criminals off (and have trouble as a result). Sure, angering terrorists (or whatever they're calling these scoundrels--if anything) is likely to provoke them to try other acts of terrorism. What are you going to do, though, let them get away with it? I can't see how that won't encourage further acts of terror just as thoroughly (if not necessarily as quickly).
Side note: yes, Afghanistan is strongly Muslim, and yes there are some extremists who utterly pervert and abuse that faith; but unless there's some mention in TFA about religious motivations, let's please not jump to inflammatory conclusions about this being faith-motivated. In point of fact, this sort of thing has happened here in the USA, as recently as in the 20th century, so let's not throw stones based on our dominant religions (including atheism and agnosticism--which are, of course beliefs about God, if only by denial and uncertainty) being somehow superior to theirs. Horrible people exist in all countries, and infest all religions, as you should all well know.
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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It's just the "teaching girls" part. Free-thinking women are harder to control.
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.
Republican's don't want to outlaw birth control. They just don't think the government should pay for it.
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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
They got zero from India, and the Babylonians had a placeholder for it back before 1000 B.C.
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.
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.
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? Cutting school budgets to get the latest F-35 bombers that the military doesn't even want?
Yes, it is cultural, yes religion is used as an excuse. Same as Taliban extremists - they have their views, including outlawing education for women for a few years, and they use religion to back it up.
Many Christian groups treat women as second class citizens because they are to remain silent in church, and obey their husbands. Most Christians understand that contextually, but a few take it literally and frequently out of context. Every culture, every religion has people who do this, and it is not tied to the religion. It is an interpretation used as a convenient excuse to impose what some people believe on others.
Well, the middle east is going through it's own version of the Dark Ages, nothing more nothing less.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Let these girls and their families (and other females who are attacked for wanting an education) have asylum in the USA or other country where girls don't get killed for wanting an education.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
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.
"Not even religious fanatics are stupid enough to think this helps their cause."
Who are you to speak for them?
Also, they are winning.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Republicans just don't want to have to pay for someone else's birth control, you troll
They do, however, want someone else to pay for their hardons.
Also, if you honestly believe a group referred to as the "Religious Right" does not use religion as their motivation, well, I've got this bridge in NY state you may be interested in purchasing...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You're either uninformed or plain old lying.
Here's the bill in virginia that makes the pill illegal: http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?121+ful+HB1
passed the republican controlled house and senate with ease.
And all the current candidates bar Romney have gone on record agreeing with it explicitely for religious reasons: http://www.personhoodusa.com/blog/personhood-republican-presidential-candidate-pledge
Of course Romney flip-flops back and forth but here he is saing he "absolutely" agrees too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkrOt9Qposg#t=5m25s
Part if the mechanism of the pill is to prevent fertilized eggs from impanting - that's after conception has occured. It's not the only mechanism, but it's part of the package. So all those republicans are trying to outlaw the pill. Not just not pay for it.
Maybe they should have thought of that before targeting women with poison.
Idiots.
I'm not aware of any philosophy that claimed that. The most common philosophy that is blamed for wrecking the Muslim's worlds scientific progress was that espoused by Al-Ghazali in his highly influential book "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers. The most damaging thing in that philosophy was the idea that there were no actual laws of the universe, only things occurring the way Allah decided to. So for example if one lit a piece of cloth with a candle, the cloth catches fire not from any property of the cloth but because Allah has decided in this particular instance for the cloth to catch fire. And according to Al-Ghazali, asserting otherwise was essentially heresy. This sort of view of things is extremely inimical to discovering or codifying laws of the universe. There were other problems that happened about the same time such governments becoming more intertwined with religion in much of the Muslim world. But I suspect that is the philosophy that Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about.
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.
Not all conservatives have religious or anti-educational ideas and motivations.
BUT... What they all DO have is a very strong preference for the status quo. THAT is why they can't accept new ideas, or find them threatening.
To them it's good as it is. Perfect in fact.
To fundamentalists among them, ANY change is a tantamount to an attack on their entire way of life.
Those girls weren't being taught to be atheists, feminists, witches or whatever the fundamentalists would find undermining to their religious beliefs.
In fact, they probably had religious studies at school as well.
They were simply girls, being taught.
That's the idea that breaks the status quo world of the(se) fundamentalists.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
he was a fucking hypocrite then, is he still flying around on his cart with flying horses? All religions are full of this shit, say one thing and then contradict it later and then forget about the contradiction.
its time all priests were outlawed and people allowed to "worship" in their own personal space and don't bother anyone else with their delusions. Priests and imams are the major problem as they think they have a line to their imaginary god
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
As long as nobody tries to take away their boner pills.
It seems they voted THEMSELVES a pretty nice health plan.
Quran-only Muslims are a small minority, and their rejection of Hadith is heavily criticized by mainstream Muslims. So saying "The Quran does not state" really has no weight for the vast majority of Muslims. If it's in Hadith, it's part of the religion.
So because the water in the tank wasn't contaminated, they know it was poison?
Afghanistan isn't especially well known for it's hygiene standards. The symptoms of headaches, Nausea and vomiting match up pretty well with salmonella or e-coli poisoning. It's obviously in a public official best interests to blame evil terrorists rather than lax health standards. Put your water jugs in a messy kitchen where meat it prepared, it could easily be contaminated.
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.
Then why didn't your benevolent "shit-fucking" work in Russia during the 1990s, or in Vietnam in the 1960s? Could it be because in the cases of Germany and Japan, the allies (eventually) offered an alternative way of life under democracy to their defeated opponents? That the US actually engaged in real nation rebuilding at that time and effectively created two of the most successful post war countries as a result? A pity no such long term planning has been applied or indeed even contemplated in either modern Afghanistan or Iraq.
Bombs and tanks wont he battles, but it was the Marshall Plan won the war, and the subsequent Cold war besides. The US and her allies in the present have created no such legacy, for all their costly foreign expeditions.
May the Maths Be with you!
I don't want to pay for nuclear weapons, but I don't really get a choice in that do I?
~S
Jesus on Taxes.
"For truly I say upon to you... Render on to Ceasar what is Caesar's...Render on to the father what is his."
Jesus on the rich.
A rich man approached Jesus. "Teacher how can I enter heaven."
Jesus: "Sell everything you own and give all the money to the poor and the needy. Then you can enter the kingdom of god"
Jesus re-affirms : "For truly I say upon to you. It is much easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle that it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god"
I think Jesus was very very adamant about helping the poor and about the ability for anyone to enter the "kingdom of god" without selling all their riches and giving the proceeds to the poor.
It's a cultural thing.
I've heard exactly this position from a local imam (a liberal Turkish Sunni and Sufi too). People associate "old time religion" with whatever their local cultural traditions are.
Same thing happened with Christianity in the Middle Ages.
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