Military history may not be something that one finds on a standardized test, but it has made us what we are, culturally, and learning causes and effects can teach a lot of other items, be it meteorology, geology, astronomy, logistics, or math (it takes both accounting as well as more advanced forms of math to get food and booze to all troops on a battlefield.)
Trivia: Something like this is actually a plot point for one of the characters (Randy Waterhouse) in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. His first major big program is one that calculates calories supplied by various foodstuffs versus the time taken and calories burned acquiring them, to be used for running RPGs.
Everyone has a passion even kids ! How bout we foster their passions and let them grow with their passion !
That matches my personal experience, actually. For example, I learned most of my core trigonometry well before I ran into it in school, because I wanted to write space combat games, and trig is how you answer questions like "my ship is at this position facing this direction, the target is at that position, what angle is it at relative to straight ahead?" Learned most of my Newtonian physics the same way. I learned a fair amount of biology, geology, meteorology, and other things when doing research GM'ing tabletop RPGs. And I know several people who learned things like HTML5 and CSS because they wanted to make nicer websites.
Granted, the basics like spelling and arithmetic probably need to be taught for their own sake. But past a certain point, I find that people learn something more effectively when they're learning it it accomplish a goal they care about. Certainly they're better motivated in those cases.
"Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more."
This is purest drivel. A culture is a set of shared behaviors, interests, and values that cause people to cluster together, or derive from them being so. Geekdom, hackerdom, tech, or whatever you want to call it is its own culture. It may be predominantly white male, but it is not the same thing as white male culture at large. If it was, we'd be more interested in football and reality TV and less interested in roleplaying games and Star Trek. Not to say that no geeks like the former and that all like the latter, but the percentages are very very different from mainstream. We have our own slang, places we tend to hang out (especially if you consider online "places"), entertainment interests, people we admire, people we hate, things we like to talk about, and so forth.
In fact, the very idea that someone's ethnicity defines their culture is itself racist. When I hang out with my black, Chinese, and Indian coworkers, we all have common ground due to us sharing the tech culture, rather than being pigeonholed into the cultures we were born in, staying there, and having to overcome barriers when we want to interact.
While the analogy does apply sometimes, when technology is being used to do evil, the software/hardware engineer usually isn't in a role equivalent to a doctor torturing a patient. The engineer isn't the one acting upon the person being done evil to. More typically, since most tech has a wide variety of uses, the engineer's role is much more akin to a developer of medical devices. A syringe can just as easily be used to inject antibiotics or cyanide, and it would be silly to claim that the person designing the syringes is morally responsible for how the things get used. Consider the case of Saeed Malekpour, who wrote some code for uploading images, and is in jail in Iran (and was almost executed) because that code got used on a porn site. (No, not claiming that porn sites are evil or anything like that, it was just the first "syringe maker will never know what gets injected" example that I thought of).
Personally, I would rather current research focus more on solar, wind, tidal, geothermal -- rather than to continue to rely nuclear power.
The problem with all of those is that there are a limited number of locales where they can work well, and all of them except for geothermal are transient. That means power storage, which means batteries, which means toxic chemical waste. It may or may not be as dangerous on a per-volume basis as nuclear waste (someone more knowledgeable than me would have to answer that), but there would certainly be a hell of a lot more of it.
Jessica focused her mind on lasguns, wondering. The white-hot beams of disruptive light could cut through any known substance, provided that substance was not shielded. The fact that feedback from a shield would explode both lasgun and shield did not bother the Harkonnens. Why? A lasgun-shield explosion was a dangerous variable, could be more powerful than atomics, could kill only the gunner and his shielded target.
I don't exactly smile when paying my property tax, but it's probably the one I dislike the least, especially when it comes to the funding of law-enforcement agencies. How well I view a given such agency is more or less inversely-proportional to how many people are within their jurisdiction. For instance, when I lived in California, my encounters (both when being stopped myself, and when I was a passenger in someone else's car who was being stopped) with the local suburb's PD or the county sheriffs were quite reasonable and understanding, while those with the California Highway Patrol were very negative. After moving to Vegas, the local vs. state quality difference has held true, though it's much less striking, and the Nevada Highway Patrol seem much nicer guys than the CHP -- but then, Nevada is a much smaller state than California, so that fits the "bigger = worse" pattern. As to the federal-level agencies like the DEA and the BATF, I'd disband almost all of them in an instant, and limit the FBI to providing support (fx. forensics) and coordination to more-local agencies.
Famous but probably-apocryphal conversation between a visiting German general and his Swiss counterpart, prior to WW2:
German: How many men are under your command?
Swiss: I can mobilize one million men in less than twenty-four hours.
German: What would happen if I marched five million men through that pass tomorrow?
Swiss: I would call up my men. Each man would fire five shots. Then I would send them home.
The U.S. military (Navy and Air Force, especially) has been repurposing obsolete aircraft as radio controlled target drones since not long after WWII.
They were doing similar things even during WWII. JFK's older brother Joe Jr. was killed along with another crewman in a mishap with an explosives-loaded B-24 Liberator. They were supposed to get the plane airborne, arm it, then bail out, but the explosives (equivalent to about 14kt) went off prematurely.
It kind of puts the environmentalists in a bit of a clamor. They wont know which way to go with this
Except given that fracking is polluting ground water and wells, any scheme oil companies come up with to try this is likely to pollute just as badly.
Trusting the oil companies is generally a bad idea.
Trusting government is generally a worse idea. Remind me again, was it Exxon or BP that was setting off above-ground nuclear explosions, a while back? Heck, mushroom clouds from the Nevada desert tests were such a common sight in Las Vegas that one of the casinos (the Stardust) had a sign partly inspired by them.
Would rather die from cardio-vascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer then?
Yes, I would rather live longer and die from those things than to die earlier from malnutrition or related problems.
We tinkered around with our food system and 2/3 of the population is over-weight and 1/3 is obese.
I'm sure having readily-available food has caused average weight to rise, but I'm skeptical about how much of a factor that is compared to reduction in exercise. Until quite recently (in the evolutionary and historical scheme of things), humans have had to burn a lot of calories just to stay alive -- food, shelter, and protection all required heavy exercise to acquire, produce, and/or maintain. Even after the advent of agriculture, the vast majority of the population spent their time doing manual labor to grow food, and the rest of the population tended to do manual labor that was just as intensive. Staying alive required you to plow a field, or chop wood, or haul stones, etc. Today, most of us here on Slashdot (and a lot of other people around us) gain our food, shelter, and protection by making little motions with our fingers, talking, and every so often moving a short distance within a building. We don't have to exercise to survive (in the day-to-day sense). Exercise is something we have to deliberately seek out.
Shorter version: I think the problem is more our lack of caloric output than our excessive caloric input.
We suffer from heart disease, diabetes and related problems in epidemic proportions.
Until human beings cease to be mortal, by definition something will be killing us in vast numbers. And unless those causes of death are evenly spread out, some things will always be glaring problems compared to everything else. All we can do is change what those things are, and hopefully make them happen later in life.
Or not. That's a pretty tiring way to go about debate. I've expressed disinterest in the points for a specific reason, that's only a back-door for exhausting, lame meta-discussion
Or an inability on your part to back up your views with facts and logic. As close as I can tell, what you consider "tangential and irrelevant" is the questioning of your underlying assumptions. "Everyone knows X is true, therefore Y is true." "Err, X isn't true, for these reasons." "That's irrelevant, we're talking about Y."
Enjoy straining definitions to the point where they can cover anything you don't like, and enjoy begging the question. Also, enjoy apparently being unable to address any of my criticism of your views.
Supporting feminism has nothing to do with your gender or sexual preference.
If by "feminism" you mean "women should have the same legal rights as men", then I wouldn't call that feminism, I'd just call it not being misogynist. We don't call someone who opposes discrimination against blacks an "Africanamericanist." But if by "feminist" you mean the beliefs like "the Patriarchy deliberately oppresses women" and "all men are rapists" of the Andrea Dworkin crowd, forget it. There are many women whom I admire, but academic feminists are not among them. I'd give a thousand Naomi Wolfs or Susan Faludis for one Margaret Thatcher or Anousheh Ansari.
If you support the rights and reproductive freedoms of your sisters, daughters, female friends, girlfriends, wife, and mother...
I absolutely do, but there are two things I've noticed over the years. First, women who oppose abortion tend to be far, far more vehement about it than men who oppose it, and second, the women who shout "objectification! sexist! demeaning!" the most loudly also tend to be nasty and hateful towards women who receive such attention and don't object. One instance from a previous job sticks in my mind. Our front-desk receptionist (call her Alice) had a boyfriend (call him Bob) who worked in tech support. The tech receptionist (call her Candace) tended to wear short skirts and such, to the obvious approval of the (all male at the time) techs. Alice, angry that Bob's eyes might be wandering, complained to our HR director whom she was friends with (call her Debbie), who immediately instituted a more-restrictive dress code. Candace, presumably finding the atmosphere around the place rather uncomfortable, left shortly afterwards. Most ideological feminists would have complained that Bob and the other techs were "generating a hostile work environment", but to me that much better describes Alice and Debbie's actions.
Objectification is conventionally considered sexism even when it doesn't contain explicit stereotypes
Among people in the Grievance Studies majors and similar folks prone to using terms like "objectification" and "<something>-justice", yes. In the real world, not so much.
because it's implicitly dehumanizing.
Perhaps they're implying it, and perhaps you're merely inferring it. There is a difference, and people of the above-mentioned mindset tend both to ignore or to not realize the difference, and to be downright eager to detect it if they aren't already to the point where they see it in everything 24/7 already.
You don't consider it sexism.
It's not sexism, because an -ism is a belief system. What belief system were the two Australian guys espousing, beyond the perfectly-normal "I like boobs"? Unless you're a telepath (in which case, contact James Randi and collect your million dollars), the evil beliefs you might attribute to the speakers are going to be conjured from your brain and from others who also carry the "men who openly express attraction to women they find attractive, are bad" meme.
And yes, I mean normal. Most of the things men and women find attractive about members of the opposite sex are cues about how good of a job that person will do in enabling you to produce healthy offspring that will survive to adulthood. Your viewpoint is the sexual equivalent of veganism -- an attempt to impose a behavior pattern completely contrary to human nature.
Gee I wonder how those psychopaths got into power. It's not like the CIA overthrew their democratically elected leader and installed their own lap dog leading to revolution a decade later instilling anti american feelings in the region or anything.
A few problems in this oft-quoted assumption:
1. The mullahs who later supported overthrowing the Shah also hated Mossadegh. It wasn't until after the Shah pissed off the mullahs (see item 2) that Mossadegh's overthrow became a talking point with them. They (as did the US) saw Mossadegh as having Marxist sympathies -- a very bad thing given Marxism's hostility towards religion. Grand Ayatollah Broujerdi (who Khomeini was a clerk for at the time) strongly supported the coup. This attitude continued despite a temporary alliance during the 1978-79 revolution, and a lot of Marxists were executed after Khomeini's rise to power. Even after the revolution, Khomeini continued to condemn Mossadegh, refusing to allow his birthday to be celebrated, stating that "if the US imperialists had not slapped Mossadegh in the face, then Mossadegh would have slapped Islam."
2. What really pissed off the mullahs (and their followers) was the Shah's attempts as liberalizing and secularizing Iran, in particular the elimination of official government privileges and funding for the clergy, removing religious influence from the schools (fx. by teaching evolution), and extending voting rights to women. You need to distinguish with what was grievances against the Shah were emphasized by the people in Iran, and what grievances were emphasized for external consumption to undermine support for him internationally.
3. A large segment in Iran were pissed off about it, but it certainly didn't instill anti-American feelings "in the region" as you put it. The peninsular Arabs did not want to wind up staring across the Gulf at a Soviet sympathizer, as they feared Mossadegh of being or at least becoming.
Also, while it's not a part of the cause/effect discussion, I have yet to see any of the folks who condemn Operation Ajax whenever the topic of US/Iranian relations comes up similarly condemn Operation Countenance (the earlier Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran).
Doh. Sorry, new computer, didn't realize I wasn't logged in.
Having an educated society is not free, we all benefit from it.
Even if I agreed with you 100% on that, you're conflating "educated" with "schooled." You won't get anything out of college if you aren't already predisposed to value and seek knowledge. The individuals I know who conspicuously display those the traits that higher education is supposed to nurture -- the ability to think clearly, methodically, critically, and abstractly, a respect for the views of others combined with a willingness to challenge them and their own, valuing knowledge for its own sake -- acquired those traits from the people around them years before they went to college, if they ever went at all. For someone who possesses those traits, college can be a great way to exercise and hone those traits, but for someone who doesn't posses them, it's a pointless waste of resources and time -- like taking an anorexic to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Perhaps, but right now it's the best way of preventing a second Sino-Japanese War. China trusts the US military much more than they do a Japanese military, and US abandonment of the region would trigger an arms race (conventional and otherwise) that would make Indian-Pakistani relations look warm and fuzzy.
Not just with the Japanese, either -- basically, all the other countries in the region are going to have to decide whether they care more about the evil things Japan did to them prior to and during WW2, or about how powerful mainland China is today. Further, the less of a counterweight the US is to China, the more incentive there is for China's neighbors to go nuclear -- and Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have the technological/industrial base to do so very quickly.
Mind you, that might not necessarily be a bad thing. A while ago, one of the PRC's generals stated that Taiwan wasn't really protected by the US because the US wouldn't "trade Taiwan for Los Angeles or San Francisco." If the Taiwanese had their own nuclear arsenal, they can turn the question around and ask the PRC if they're willing to trade Taiwan for Shanghai and Beijing. Given that Taiwan's existence is at stake, they'd be taken much more seriously in the PRC's calculations. That might lead to a more stable situation -- or it might not. It depends on whether or not the bad blood between the smaller countries stays buried (a 1-to-n MAD situation, with the PRC being the 1) or if they don't (an n-to-n MAD situation).
None of the carriers china is building is anything close to the Nimitz class ships the United States has.
Depending on what position you take in the big carriers vs. small carriers and the "drones will make piloted combat aircraft obsolete/no they won't" debates, this may matter as much as how many battleships a country had in 1939. Not taking sides, myself (not knowledgeable enough), but there's a lot of discussion in naval warfare circles about where things will wind up 10-20 years down the line.
Maybe they'll start making... (gasp)... actual plots to accompany those stars/explosions/special effects?
General: Mr. Bay, can you think of any idea how to outwit these terrorists?
Michael Bay: I believe I can. We start... by making a big CG building and then we have a meteor go CROSSHH! and it, and it's all like CRAAWWW a-and motorcycles burst into flame while they jump over these helicopters, right?
General: No no! We need ideas how to stop the terrorists!
Michael Bay: An eighteen-wheeler spins out of control and it's all like BROSSHH! And then this huuuge tanker full of dyna-
General: Those aren't ideas, those are special effects!
Michael Bay: I... don't understand the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Military history may not be something that one finds on a standardized test, but it has made us what we are, culturally, and learning causes and effects can teach a lot of other items, be it meteorology, geology, astronomy, logistics, or math (it takes both accounting as well as more advanced forms of math to get food and booze to all troops on a battlefield.)
Trivia: Something like this is actually a plot point for one of the characters (Randy Waterhouse) in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. His first major big program is one that calculates calories supplied by various foodstuffs versus the time taken and calories burned acquiring them, to be used for running RPGs.
Everyone has a passion even kids ! How bout we foster their passions and let them grow with their passion !
That matches my personal experience, actually. For example, I learned most of my core trigonometry well before I ran into it in school, because I wanted to write space combat games, and trig is how you answer questions like "my ship is at this position facing this direction, the target is at that position, what angle is it at relative to straight ahead?" Learned most of my Newtonian physics the same way. I learned a fair amount of biology, geology, meteorology, and other things when doing research GM'ing tabletop RPGs. And I know several people who learned things like HTML5 and CSS because they wanted to make nicer websites.
Granted, the basics like spelling and arithmetic probably need to be taught for their own sake. But past a certain point, I find that people learn something more effectively when they're learning it it accomplish a goal they care about. Certainly they're better motivated in those cases.
"Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more."
This is purest drivel. A culture is a set of shared behaviors, interests, and values that cause people to cluster together, or derive from them being so. Geekdom, hackerdom, tech, or whatever you want to call it is its own culture. It may be predominantly white male, but it is not the same thing as white male culture at large. If it was, we'd be more interested in football and reality TV and less interested in roleplaying games and Star Trek. Not to say that no geeks like the former and that all like the latter, but the percentages are very very different from mainstream. We have our own slang, places we tend to hang out (especially if you consider online "places"), entertainment interests, people we admire, people we hate, things we like to talk about, and so forth.
In fact, the very idea that someone's ethnicity defines their culture is itself racist. When I hang out with my black, Chinese, and Indian coworkers, we all have common ground due to us sharing the tech culture, rather than being pigeonholed into the cultures we were born in, staying there, and having to overcome barriers when we want to interact.
While the analogy does apply sometimes, when technology is being used to do evil, the software/hardware engineer usually isn't in a role equivalent to a doctor torturing a patient. The engineer isn't the one acting upon the person being done evil to. More typically, since most tech has a wide variety of uses, the engineer's role is much more akin to a developer of medical devices. A syringe can just as easily be used to inject antibiotics or cyanide, and it would be silly to claim that the person designing the syringes is morally responsible for how the things get used. Consider the case of Saeed Malekpour, who wrote some code for uploading images, and is in jail in Iran (and was almost executed) because that code got used on a porn site. (No, not claiming that porn sites are evil or anything like that, it was just the first "syringe maker will never know what gets injected" example that I thought of).
How will the troops live without lutefisk?
Personally, I would rather current research focus more on solar, wind, tidal, geothermal -- rather than to continue to rely nuclear power.
The problem with all of those is that there are a limited number of locales where they can work well, and all of them except for geothermal are transient. That means power storage, which means batteries, which means toxic chemical waste. It may or may not be as dangerous on a per-volume basis as nuclear waste (someone more knowledgeable than me would have to answer that), but there would certainly be a hell of a lot more of it.
Jessica focused her mind on lasguns, wondering. The white-hot beams of disruptive light could cut through any known substance, provided that substance was not shielded. The fact that feedback from a shield would explode both lasgun and shield did not bother the Harkonnens. Why? A lasgun-shield explosion was a dangerous variable, could be more powerful than atomics, could kill only the gunner and his shielded target.
"Learn about this one weird bug that Verizon doesn't want you to know!"
In a fundamental sense, aren't all weapons used against chemicals? Well, except weapons used against energy beings, I guess.
I don't exactly smile when paying my property tax, but it's probably the one I dislike the least, especially when it comes to the funding of law-enforcement agencies. How well I view a given such agency is more or less inversely-proportional to how many people are within their jurisdiction. For instance, when I lived in California, my encounters (both when being stopped myself, and when I was a passenger in someone else's car who was being stopped) with the local suburb's PD or the county sheriffs were quite reasonable and understanding, while those with the California Highway Patrol were very negative. After moving to Vegas, the local vs. state quality difference has held true, though it's much less striking, and the Nevada Highway Patrol seem much nicer guys than the CHP -- but then, Nevada is a much smaller state than California, so that fits the "bigger = worse" pattern. As to the federal-level agencies like the DEA and the BATF, I'd disband almost all of them in an instant, and limit the FBI to providing support (fx. forensics) and coordination to more-local agencies.
Famous but probably-apocryphal conversation between a visiting German general and his Swiss counterpart, prior to WW2:
German: How many men are under your command?
Swiss: I can mobilize one million men in less than twenty-four hours.
German: What would happen if I marched five million men through that pass tomorrow?
Swiss: I would call up my men. Each man would fire five shots. Then I would send them home.
The U.S. military (Navy and Air Force, especially) has been repurposing obsolete aircraft as radio controlled target drones since not long after WWII.
They were doing similar things even during WWII. JFK's older brother Joe Jr. was killed along with another crewman in a mishap with an explosives-loaded B-24 Liberator. They were supposed to get the plane airborne, arm it, then bail out, but the explosives (equivalent to about 14kt) went off prematurely.
Except given that fracking is polluting ground water and wells, any scheme oil companies come up with to try this is likely to pollute just as badly.
Trusting the oil companies is generally a bad idea.
Trusting government is generally a worse idea. Remind me again, was it Exxon or BP that was setting off above-ground nuclear explosions, a while back? Heck, mushroom clouds from the Nevada desert tests were such a common sight in Las Vegas that one of the casinos (the Stardust) had a sign partly inspired by them.
Would rather die from cardio-vascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer then?
Yes, I would rather live longer and die from those things than to die earlier from malnutrition or related problems.
We tinkered around with our food system and 2/3 of the population is over-weight and 1/3 is obese.
I'm sure having readily-available food has caused average weight to rise, but I'm skeptical about how much of a factor that is compared to reduction in exercise. Until quite recently (in the evolutionary and historical scheme of things), humans have had to burn a lot of calories just to stay alive -- food, shelter, and protection all required heavy exercise to acquire, produce, and/or maintain. Even after the advent of agriculture, the vast majority of the population spent their time doing manual labor to grow food, and the rest of the population tended to do manual labor that was just as intensive. Staying alive required you to plow a field, or chop wood, or haul stones, etc. Today, most of us here on Slashdot (and a lot of other people around us) gain our food, shelter, and protection by making little motions with our fingers, talking, and every so often moving a short distance within a building. We don't have to exercise to survive (in the day-to-day sense). Exercise is something we have to deliberately seek out.
Shorter version: I think the problem is more our lack of caloric output than our excessive caloric input.
We suffer from heart disease, diabetes and related problems in epidemic proportions.
Until human beings cease to be mortal, by definition something will be killing us in vast numbers. And unless those causes of death are evenly spread out, some things will always be glaring problems compared to everything else. All we can do is change what those things are, and hopefully make them happen later in life.
Or not. That's a pretty tiring way to go about debate. I've expressed disinterest in the points for a specific reason, that's only a back-door for exhausting, lame meta-discussion
Or an inability on your part to back up your views with facts and logic. As close as I can tell, what you consider "tangential and irrelevant" is the questioning of your underlying assumptions. "Everyone knows X is true, therefore Y is true." "Err, X isn't true, for these reasons." "That's irrelevant, we're talking about Y."
That's because the claims were tangential and irrelevant.
That is itself a claim. Back it up, please.
Enjoy your sexism you don't call sexism.
Enjoy straining definitions to the point where they can cover anything you don't like, and enjoy begging the question. Also, enjoy apparently being unable to address any of my criticism of your views.
Supporting feminism has nothing to do with your gender or sexual preference.
If by "feminism" you mean "women should have the same legal rights as men", then I wouldn't call that feminism, I'd just call it not being misogynist. We don't call someone who opposes discrimination against blacks an "Africanamericanist." But if by "feminist" you mean the beliefs like "the Patriarchy deliberately oppresses women" and "all men are rapists" of the Andrea Dworkin crowd, forget it. There are many women whom I admire, but academic feminists are not among them. I'd give a thousand Naomi Wolfs or Susan Faludis for one Margaret Thatcher or Anousheh Ansari.
If you support the rights and reproductive freedoms of your sisters, daughters, female friends, girlfriends, wife, and mother...
I absolutely do, but there are two things I've noticed over the years. First, women who oppose abortion tend to be far, far more vehement about it than men who oppose it, and second, the women who shout "objectification! sexist! demeaning!" the most loudly also tend to be nasty and hateful towards women who receive such attention and don't object. One instance from a previous job sticks in my mind. Our front-desk receptionist (call her Alice) had a boyfriend (call him Bob) who worked in tech support. The tech receptionist (call her Candace) tended to wear short skirts and such, to the obvious approval of the (all male at the time) techs. Alice, angry that Bob's eyes might be wandering, complained to our HR director whom she was friends with (call her Debbie), who immediately instituted a more-restrictive dress code. Candace, presumably finding the atmosphere around the place rather uncomfortable, left shortly afterwards. Most ideological feminists would have complained that Bob and the other techs were "generating a hostile work environment", but to me that much better describes Alice and Debbie's actions.
Objectification is conventionally considered sexism even when it doesn't contain explicit stereotypes
Among people in the Grievance Studies majors and similar folks prone to using terms like "objectification" and "<something>-justice", yes. In the real world, not so much.
because it's implicitly dehumanizing.
Perhaps they're implying it, and perhaps you're merely inferring it. There is a difference, and people of the above-mentioned mindset tend both to ignore or to not realize the difference, and to be downright eager to detect it if they aren't already to the point where they see it in everything 24/7 already.
You don't consider it sexism.
It's not sexism, because an -ism is a belief system. What belief system were the two Australian guys espousing, beyond the perfectly-normal "I like boobs"? Unless you're a telepath (in which case, contact James Randi and collect your million dollars), the evil beliefs you might attribute to the speakers are going to be conjured from your brain and from others who also carry the "men who openly express attraction to women they find attractive, are bad" meme.
And yes, I mean normal. Most of the things men and women find attractive about members of the opposite sex are cues about how good of a job that person will do in enabling you to produce healthy offspring that will survive to adulthood. Your viewpoint is the sexual equivalent of veganism -- an attempt to impose a behavior pattern completely contrary to human nature.
Gee I wonder how those psychopaths got into power. It's not like the CIA overthrew their democratically elected leader and installed their own lap dog leading to revolution a decade later instilling anti american feelings in the region or anything.
A few problems in this oft-quoted assumption:
1. The mullahs who later supported overthrowing the Shah also hated Mossadegh. It wasn't until after the Shah pissed off the mullahs (see item 2) that Mossadegh's overthrow became a talking point with them. They (as did the US) saw Mossadegh as having Marxist sympathies -- a very bad thing given Marxism's hostility towards religion. Grand Ayatollah Broujerdi (who Khomeini was a clerk for at the time) strongly supported the coup. This attitude continued despite a temporary alliance during the 1978-79 revolution, and a lot of Marxists were executed after Khomeini's rise to power. Even after the revolution, Khomeini continued to condemn Mossadegh, refusing to allow his birthday to be celebrated, stating that "if the US imperialists had not slapped Mossadegh in the face, then Mossadegh would have slapped Islam."
2. What really pissed off the mullahs (and their followers) was the Shah's attempts as liberalizing and secularizing Iran, in particular the elimination of official government privileges and funding for the clergy, removing religious influence from the schools (fx. by teaching evolution), and extending voting rights to women. You need to distinguish with what was grievances against the Shah were emphasized by the people in Iran, and what grievances were emphasized for external consumption to undermine support for him internationally.
3. A large segment in Iran were pissed off about it, but it certainly didn't instill anti-American feelings "in the region" as you put it. The peninsular Arabs did not want to wind up staring across the Gulf at a Soviet sympathizer, as they feared Mossadegh of being or at least becoming.
Also, while it's not a part of the cause/effect discussion, I have yet to see any of the folks who condemn Operation Ajax whenever the topic of US/Iranian relations comes up similarly condemn Operation Countenance (the earlier Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran).
Doh. Sorry, new computer, didn't realize I wasn't logged in.
And the US is in a position to be talking about "fundamental freedoms"?
Sigh. Is there ever going to be a political discussion on Slashdot without someone using the tu quoque fallacy?
Having an educated society is not free, we all benefit from it.
Even if I agreed with you 100% on that, you're conflating "educated" with "schooled." You won't get anything out of college if you aren't already predisposed to value and seek knowledge. The individuals I know who conspicuously display those the traits that higher education is supposed to nurture -- the ability to think clearly, methodically, critically, and abstractly, a respect for the views of others combined with a willingness to challenge them and their own, valuing knowledge for its own sake -- acquired those traits from the people around them years before they went to college, if they ever went at all. For someone who possesses those traits, college can be a great way to exercise and hone those traits, but for someone who doesn't posses them, it's a pointless waste of resources and time -- like taking an anorexic to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Perhaps, but right now it's the best way of preventing a second Sino-Japanese War. China trusts the US military much more than they do a Japanese military, and US abandonment of the region would trigger an arms race (conventional and otherwise) that would make Indian-Pakistani relations look warm and fuzzy.
Not just with the Japanese, either -- basically, all the other countries in the region are going to have to decide whether they care more about the evil things Japan did to them prior to and during WW2, or about how powerful mainland China is today. Further, the less of a counterweight the US is to China, the more incentive there is for China's neighbors to go nuclear -- and Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have the technological/industrial base to do so very quickly.
Mind you, that might not necessarily be a bad thing. A while ago, one of the PRC's generals stated that Taiwan wasn't really protected by the US because the US wouldn't "trade Taiwan for Los Angeles or San Francisco." If the Taiwanese had their own nuclear arsenal, they can turn the question around and ask the PRC if they're willing to trade Taiwan for Shanghai and Beijing. Given that Taiwan's existence is at stake, they'd be taken much more seriously in the PRC's calculations. That might lead to a more stable situation -- or it might not. It depends on whether or not the bad blood between the smaller countries stays buried (a 1-to-n MAD situation, with the PRC being the 1) or if they don't (an n-to-n MAD situation).
None of the carriers china is building is anything close to the Nimitz class ships the United States has.
Depending on what position you take in the big carriers vs. small carriers and the "drones will make piloted combat aircraft obsolete/no they won't" debates, this may matter as much as how many battleships a country had in 1939. Not taking sides, myself (not knowledgeable enough), but there's a lot of discussion in naval warfare circles about where things will wind up 10-20 years down the line.
Maybe they'll start making... (gasp)... actual plots to accompany those stars/explosions/special effects?
General: Mr. Bay, can you think of any idea how to outwit these terrorists?
Michael Bay: I believe I can. We start... by making a big CG building and then we have a meteor go CROSSHH! and it, and it's all like CRAAWWW a-and motorcycles burst into flame while they jump over these helicopters, right?
General: No no! We need ideas how to stop the terrorists!
Michael Bay: An eighteen-wheeler spins out of control and it's all like BROSSHH! And then this huuuge tanker full of dyna-
General: Those aren't ideas, those are special effects!
Michael Bay: I... don't understand the difference.
General: I know you don't. Get him out of here!
(South Park, "Imaginationland")