Still, I doubt that the sites visited by the 160 million people had a persistent skew in content changes.
You can't really know that without analyzing it, and if you don't do that -- and why would you take the time? -- you can't know it isn't skewing the data. Which means you can't trust the data.
When you play the odds, you are admitting your sampling methodolgy is flawed.
This is similar to the Neilsen ratings. Sure, it might work for many people, but there will be significant demographics that will be left out, making the data not just generally worthless, but damaging.
Such metrics are almost always worthless. And such is the case here. Their methodology is fundamentally flawed, and you can't fix flawed methodology by just getting more of it.
Ars Technica notes, 'The company tracks OS and browser use among "member sites" that use Net Applications' tracking services, which the company says encompasses data from some 160 million users per month. This means that the only OS and browser numbers being tracked are those from users who specifically visit those member sites, which include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and InformationWeek. If specific demographics of users—like, say, Linux users—don't tend to read those types of sites, they are going to be underrepresented, and similarly, other demographics may be overrepresented.
It obviously could be the case that Chrome is used by people more likely to use those "member sites" than people who use Safari.
Unfortunately, Ars Technica then writes, 'That being said, browser metrics such as these aren't worthless. Even though they may be an inaccurate way to make comparisons between operating systems, they provide a good picture when it comes to trends within a specific OS. For example, Net Applications tracked the Mac OS at 7.3 percent at the end of 2007 and 9.63 percent at the end of 2008, showing more than a 2.6 percentage point jump in only a year for the Mac. In this sense, it doesn't matter if Mac users tend to visit the Wall Street Journal's website more than Linux users. The trend is clearly showing that Mac users, with all their unique browsing habits, are growing steadily.'
That's obviously false, because it doesn't take into account the fact that demographics can trend from year to year (perhaps the WSJ introduced a new, and popular, Mac-specific section on their web site).
While the CBC has a mandate to promote Canadian unity, which I feel compromises its reporting on Quebec nationalism, I think nobody in Canada would say the government controls what the CBC reports.
So apart from where it controls what the CBC reports, it doesn't control what the CBC reports.
OK.:-)
I am not saying that the press can't act independently most of the time. I am saying that -- unless you have full transparency, which of course (ironically) doesn't exist in journalism -- you never know if there's something they are hiding or misrepresenting. Maybe 99 percent of the time they are independent, but you never where that one percent is lurking. And this strikes directly at the issue of trust, without which most mainstream media cannot survive.
As the MSM audience bleeds away, the danger to quality journalism at the CBC comes from market forces, not government forces.
For now. As far as you know. And as the MSM audience bleeds away, there's less opportunity to KNOW whether the government has undue influence, because there's fewer other people from other media checking up on the stories.
Whether or not the CBC is independent now or in the past is not the point. It's about trust for the next story, and the next, and the next after that. And trust requires not just a track record but also a reliable foundation, and being paid by the people you're covering is simply not such a foundation.
Do you really, honestly, expect the BBC to report objectively on itself?
It has in the past
That is irrelevant to my question. The question is whether you TRUST them to. If you do, you are a fool. Again: they are the government. Freedom of the press exists, to a large degree, to watch government.
False. And this is an example of how foolish you are being: FAIR is an explicitly leftwing organization! Why would you trust them to say there's no leftwing bias?
Only an ignorant would pit the relatively spotless reputations of NPR/PBS/BBC...
Only "an ignorant" would expect anyone to believe those organizations have spotless records.
The BBC has had many scandals. NPR doesn't have many scandals because a. they don't do nearly much "hard news" reporting, and b. most people don't care. Seriously. And PBS doesn't do its own news, for the most part (NewsHour is an indepedent organization, though funded by PBS and CPB, which get federal funds... in fact, NewsHour gets more of its money from corporations -- many of them controversial -- than it does from government sources).
That what it means to hold your own purse strings. The BBC doesn't beg the government for money, but raises their own taxes.
Yes, which is WORSE. How do you not get this? The press is supposed to watch the government, but in this case, the press IS A GOVERNMENT AGENCY. Do you really, honestly, expect the BBC to report objectively on itself?
Nonsense. For example, both of them ask a form the question, "Has the U.S. found evidence of Iraqi WMD?" The factual answer is, of course, Yes. Absoutely. If you don't know that fact, then you're the uneducarted one. It is a fact. Now, it is also true that the WMD we found was probably unsuable due to age, being from before the Gulf War. But that's not what the question asked.
You could reasonably argue that the respondents to the polls didn't think of things that way, that they likely understood the question to refer to current, usable weapons. But that doesn't help the poll at all; it merely shows the question to be invalid.
So please don't believe you can trust the data from these "studies," as they are obviously, severely, flawed.
I think it's telling that you believe PBS/NPR is pushing a pro-big government statist regime, when really they have no such agenda.
NPR certainly does, and NewsHour leans that way. As for the rest of PBS, eh, it depends on the local station, but most of them seem to.
Exactly what is good about corporate media, when it's more costly, and sings to the tune of its corporate and political interests??
Apart from the fact that it is the only reasonable alternative to state-funded media which violates fundamental principles of liberty and free press?
The BBC is a government institution that holds its own purse strings -- effectively having the right to raise its own taxes.
Yes. And the BBC also is controlled by the government, which regulates content and can fine news organizations for not doing what the government thinks they should do.
In western countries, public news organisations offer by far the highest quality of reporting.
False.
Furthermore, we get that without advertising, and for less total cost.
Also false. There IS advertising -- in the U.S. anyway -- and the total cost is only less depending on how you're looking at it.
Now keep in mind, my favorite news program is NewsHour -- I watch it every day -- which is funded in part from government sources. So it's not like I am saying they do poor reporting.
But my argument is that quality isn't the point -- as there is also outstanding reporting from "corporate media" -- rather, the point is liberty, freedom, trust, rights, responsibility.
They hasten to add, "Did we just call for state-run media? Quite the opposite."
No, that is precisely what they called for.
Whoever holds the purse strings is in control.
The government might GRANT control, day to day, to the private people, but they can exert control whenever they wish to.
And you're exactly right cheddarlump... the press cannot be beholden to the government. It's a travesty. Just like "shield laws," where the press are beholden to the government to offer them special privileges, which, being legislative and particular to the people who have them, can be revoked.
The way to an actual free press is to for government to give every citizen the same rights, and to stay completely out of the system.
The real story here is that they want to save their own jobs, because they cannot figure out how to save them any other way. This isn't about The Press. If it were, they'd not have been doing such a terrible job (even before the Web came around).
I mean come on... look at the fricking New York Times. In the wake of Jayson Blair, they promised to rein in anonymous sources. They didn't. As a result, no one trusts the Times anymore, and no one should.
No one trusts the "blogs" either, but at least you don't pay for those.
In Washington, a woman registered her dog to vote. They kept sending the pup ballots, and they only "caught" her when she told them what she did. And they used this as evidence that "the system works."
Re:Stargate + Voyager + Battlestar Galactica + Pet
on
Stargate Universe
·
· Score: 1
Oh yeah, you're right. I just picked the first image I found. That's the one.
Looks like a guitar to me.
Stargate + Voyager + Battlestar Galactica + Petra
on
Stargate Universe
·
· Score: 1
I can find no evidence that anyone is denied coverage for preexisting conditions based on the fact of being a victim of domestic violence. I welcome it, if it exists.
I followed the links from here to here to here and finally to here. No evidence is given.
What seems to be the actual case is not that anyone is excluded for being abused, but that some people are being excluded for actual health problems that were CAUSED BY domestic violence.
So according to what these people are pushing for, if you are in a car accident (through someone else's fault), you can be excluded for preexisting conditions based on those injuries; but if you are beat up by your spouse, you can't be. I disagree with this approach. If you are going to get rid of preexisting condition exclusions, just do it. Don't try to treat some preexisting conditions as somehow special, moreso than others.
I think the main problem with the idea of "unschooling" is that you can only get so far without some sort of regimented learning.
Well, sort of. It depends on the subject. Some kids can get very far with this method in many subjects (most obviously, reading, of course, but also -- depending on the kid -- math and history and even science). But it is the rare kid who can get very far in all subjects this way.
Think of it this way, there's a lot of "unnatural" ideas out there that are very valuable to know and they have only come about because they have been built up over hundreds or even thousands of years of thinking and experimentation. Sure you can teach some of these concepts as part of the normal, "How does this work, daddy?" but a lot of ideas pretty much require you to have regular, involved, formal training over the years before you can have the framework to understand the more complex concepts.
I can't think of a single idea in public K-12 school that someone needs such "regular, involved, formal training" for understanding, except for maybe calculus and other advanced maths. So that's just wrong.
You're right, of course, that we have built up our knowledge over thousands of years, and we can't figure out things entirely on our own, but we have this thing called "the Internet" and "libraries." Unschooling is not "try to figure it out without any help," it is about having undirected learning. You don't eschew a book to help you learn how photosynthesis works, you just don't set out to learn about photosynthesis until the kid is interested in learning how plants grow, and you let his questions direct the learning.
The other thing to note is that just because you can be a parent that doesn't mean you are a good teacher.
If you are a good parent, you are a good teacher. It's that simple. Parenting IS teaching, and there's no significant difference between teaching good manners and teaching the alphabet.
Most teachers go through a ton of training on learning styles, how to present information, and how to guide students from simple ideas to more complex ones.
And if you are a good parent, you usually intuitively know how your child learns; if you have trouble figuring it out, you can always ask for help.
They also are trained in the subject matter whereas a parent might not know, or be able to comprehend, the concepts that a child needs to learn about a subject.
For K-12, mostly -- and K-8 entirely -- this is not a big deal, at all. There's nothing going on in eighth grade an average adult can't understand with a little bit of work. Further, there's a wealth of resources for homeschoolers out there, including joint instruction: for example, near me there's a homeschool co-op where the parents teach groups of homeschooled children, and the parents often actually are experts in the various fields of instruction.
Yes, there are parents who are good at teaching and teachers who shouldn't be educating students but overall most students are better off learning some things from professionals.
There is absolutely no data backing up your claim, either. In fact, the data we do have shows the opposite: across the board, kids taught at home do better than kids taught by professional teachers.
I have experience with unschooling. We looked into it for awhile. It's perfectly normal and natural, and EVERYONE does it. You learn doing everything you do, especially as a kid.
The problem is that some things -- as a parent -- you think your kids should learn, they won't want to learn on their own, probably. Whether it's fractions or Spanish or botany, you're going to run into things they won't learn unless you sit them down and teach it to them.
When you can teach via unschooling, it's great. But it's, for most people, not going to be a very effective way to teach kids all that parents want their kids to learn.
As I said, go ahead with whatever story makes you feel good.
Looking at actual facts does make me feel good, thanks.
I have no further interest in arguing with you.
You never did. You made a claim you didn't support and refused to provide any backing for it.
Btw, nice strawman here
You obviously don't know what a "strawman" is. You refused to an offer an argument, and I guessed at what your imagined argument might be. As I explicitly did not attribute it to you, it cannot possibly have been a strawman.
However, when you said I ignored any documents, you WERE committing the straw man fallacy.
Nope. In fact, I know what I am talking about far better than you do, and I offered nothing remotely similar to a lie.
You, however, have been duped by revisionists.
I don't know why you think the Bard memorandum has relevance. Perhaps you think that because we did not give warning, this proves something? You're wrong, of course, although you're welcome to try to argue it.
I'll even get you started: the argument usually goes something like, "if we wanted them to surrender we would have warned them." The problem is that we did give them many opportunities for a real surrender, and Japan absolutely refused, in all of its public and diplomatic statements. They said they were willing to "surrender" but they made clear they were unwilling for a real surrender, an unconditional one. And after the vicious war of aggression they had waged against us, we could not take the risk of anything less than unconditional surrender.
There was no reason to think at the time that a warning would have made any difference, and indeed, it might have lessened the effectiveness of the deterrent.
Our main goal was, and morally must have been, the security of our people. And so no explicit warning was given.
Throughout human history conquerors have taken land not through mass or centralized acquiescence but through just enough force to maintain their power.
Yes, exactly. And bringing them to their knees like that made the force necessary much less than it otherwise would likely have been.
But it's only a hypothesis, one with two possible outcomes.
Same with your counter-hypothesis, of course.
A civilized people ought to try the less murderous approach first.
First, there were no murders. People keep making this odd error.
Second, no. You make your best judgment about what will have the fewest casualties in the long term. That is the judgment the U.S. made.
motivation is irrelevant, outcomes are what matter in ethical decisions.
That's not true at all. Intent is what matters most.
The reason the Japanese surrender proposal included the Emperor as a puppet was for saving face
Right. And it is why it was rejected.
Roosevelt dismissed that out of hand because his motivation was total victory/humiliation, not practical victory.
No. Practical victory for the long term required total victory. I think that's the part you're missing.
The outcome of the Roosevelt/Truman strategy was the same as if the Japanese surrender were accepted at Yalta
No, it wasn't, because the impact on the Japanese psyche was different. Allowing the Emperor to continue as a puppet, versus agreeing to it as terms of surrender, are two very different things.
No emotional end can justify mass murder of non-combatants.
It may have been phrased a tiny little inflammatory, but that was the stimulation to spark a discussion of the matter.
Just don't complain when I respond in kind. Shrug.
I'm entirely open to the possibility that there was some justification but I still believe that that number of civilian casualties has far too high
Look, it sucked. But at the time people thought not doing it would lead to FAR MORE casualties.
It could probably have been kept much lower (e.g. nuking the snow cap off Mount Fujy would have probably a devastating psychological effect as well).
Easy to say that, but obviously the psychological effect of bombing people is FAR greater, and we had only two bombs. We couldn't hut Fuji first and then maybe a port and then come back and hit people if those didn't work as we wanted to. This is war, and we have to do up front what we think will have the maximum effectiveness to END that war.
Then your entire post was just an attempt at insulting me?
Shrug. No moreso than yours was just an attempt to call Americans mass murderers.
It educates you...
No, it really doesn't.
1) Stay polite
Except, you weren't.
2) Have an open mind
Except, you weren't.
3) Back up your claims with arguments
Except, you didn't, and I didn't need to, because others already did.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, I doubt that the sites visited by the 160 million people had a persistent skew in content changes.
You can't really know that without analyzing it, and if you don't do that -- and why would you take the time? -- you can't know it isn't skewing the data. Which means you can't trust the data.
the odds seem very good that you will be counted.
When you play the odds, you are admitting your sampling methodolgy is flawed.
This is similar to the Neilsen ratings. Sure, it might work for many people, but there will be significant demographics that will be left out, making the data not just generally worthless, but damaging.
Eh, maybe the stats are "worthless" to sad OS/Browser fanboys who are arguing over every last 0.1%.
Also, to people who understand statistics.
But the general trend of the web browser is useful
False.
... and interesting.
To people who do not understand statistics.
These kinds of browser stats are how we tracked the rise-and-fall of Netscape, the rise and stagnation of IE, and the rise of Firefox.
Just because it turns out to be correct doesn't mean the methodolgy is reasonable.
People do use this sort of information for development and testing priority, flawed methodology and all.
To their discredit.
And you will never have a non-"flawed" methodology for capturing this information, even for the users on your own site.
False, of course. It has a degree of error, but it is not flawed methodolgy. There's a difference: we have a good sample, they do not.
Such metrics are almost always worthless. And such is the case here. Their methodology is fundamentally flawed, and you can't fix flawed methodology by just getting more of it.
Ars Technica notes, 'The company tracks OS and browser use among "member sites" that use Net Applications' tracking services, which the company says encompasses data from some 160 million users per month. This means that the only OS and browser numbers being tracked are those from users who specifically visit those member sites, which include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and InformationWeek. If specific demographics of users—like, say, Linux users—don't tend to read those types of sites, they are going to be underrepresented, and similarly, other demographics may be overrepresented.
It obviously could be the case that Chrome is used by people more likely to use those "member sites" than people who use Safari.
Unfortunately, Ars Technica then writes, 'That being said, browser metrics such as these aren't worthless. Even though they may be an inaccurate way to make comparisons between operating systems, they provide a good picture when it comes to trends within a specific OS. For example, Net Applications tracked the Mac OS at 7.3 percent at the end of 2007 and 9.63 percent at the end of 2008, showing more than a 2.6 percentage point jump in only a year for the Mac. In this sense, it doesn't matter if Mac users tend to visit the Wall Street Journal's website more than Linux users. The trend is clearly showing that Mac users, with all their unique browsing habits, are growing steadily.'
That's obviously false, because it doesn't take into account the fact that demographics can trend from year to year (perhaps the WSJ introduced a new, and popular, Mac-specific section on their web site).
While the CBC has a mandate to promote Canadian unity, which I feel compromises its reporting on Quebec nationalism, I think nobody in Canada would say the government controls what the CBC reports.
So apart from where it controls what the CBC reports, it doesn't control what the CBC reports.
OK. :-)
I am not saying that the press can't act independently most of the time. I am saying that -- unless you have full transparency, which of course (ironically) doesn't exist in journalism -- you never know if there's something they are hiding or misrepresenting. Maybe 99 percent of the time they are independent, but you never where that one percent is lurking. And this strikes directly at the issue of trust, without which most mainstream media cannot survive.
As the MSM audience bleeds away, the danger to quality journalism at the CBC comes from market forces, not government forces.
For now. As far as you know. And as the MSM audience bleeds away, there's less opportunity to KNOW whether the government has undue influence, because there's fewer other people from other media checking up on the stories.
Whether or not the CBC is independent now or in the past is not the point. It's about trust for the next story, and the next, and the next after that. And trust requires not just a track record but also a reliable foundation, and being paid by the people you're covering is simply not such a foundation.
False on both counts. And you have not actually responded to ANY of my points.
Do you really, honestly, expect the BBC to report objectively on itself?
It has in the past
That is irrelevant to my question. The question is whether you TRUST them to. If you do, you are a fool. Again: they are the government. Freedom of the press exists, to a large degree, to watch government.
How can you not see the problem here?
As for NPR/PBS, evidence shows that liberal bias is a myth.
False. And this is an example of how foolish you are being: FAIR is an explicitly leftwing organization! Why would you trust them to say there's no leftwing bias?
Only an ignorant would pit the relatively spotless reputations of NPR/PBS/BBC ...
Only "an ignorant" would expect anyone to believe those organizations have spotless records.
The BBC has had many scandals. NPR doesn't have many scandals because a. they don't do nearly much "hard news" reporting, and b. most people don't care. Seriously. And PBS doesn't do its own news, for the most part (NewsHour is an indepedent organization, though funded by PBS and CPB, which get federal funds ... in fact, NewsHour gets more of its money from corporations -- many of them controversial -- than it does from government sources).
That what it means to hold your own purse strings. The BBC doesn't beg the government for money, but raises their own taxes.
Yes, which is WORSE. How do you not get this? The press is supposed to watch the government, but in this case, the press IS A GOVERNMENT AGENCY. Do you really, honestly, expect the BBC to report objectively on itself?
Scientific analysis disagrees.
Nonsense. For example, both of them ask a form the question, "Has the U.S. found evidence of Iraqi WMD?" The factual answer is, of course, Yes. Absoutely. If you don't know that fact, then you're the uneducarted one. It is a fact. Now, it is also true that the WMD we found was probably unsuable due to age, being from before the Gulf War. But that's not what the question asked.
You could reasonably argue that the respondents to the polls didn't think of things that way, that they likely understood the question to refer to current, usable weapons. But that doesn't help the poll at all; it merely shows the question to be invalid.
So please don't believe you can trust the data from these "studies," as they are obviously, severely, flawed.
I think it's telling that you believe PBS/NPR is pushing a pro-big government statist regime, when really they have no such agenda.
NPR certainly does, and NewsHour leans that way. As for the rest of PBS, eh, it depends on the local station, but most of them seem to.
Exactly what is good about corporate media, when it's more costly, and sings to the tune of its corporate and political interests??
Apart from the fact that it is the only reasonable alternative to state-funded media which violates fundamental principles of liberty and free press?
The BBC is a government institution that holds its own purse strings -- effectively having the right to raise its own taxes.
Yes. And the BBC also is controlled by the government, which regulates content and can fine news organizations for not doing what the government thinks they should do.
In western countries, public news organisations offer by far the highest quality of reporting.
False.
Furthermore, we get that without advertising, and for less total cost.
Also false. There IS advertising -- in the U.S. anyway -- and the total cost is only less depending on how you're looking at it.
Now keep in mind, my favorite news program is NewsHour -- I watch it every day -- which is funded in part from government sources. So it's not like I am saying they do poor reporting.
But my argument is that quality isn't the point -- as there is also outstanding reporting from "corporate media" -- rather, the point is liberty, freedom, trust, rights, responsibility.
They hasten to add, "Did we just call for state-run media? Quite the opposite."
No, that is precisely what they called for.
Whoever holds the purse strings is in control.
The government might GRANT control, day to day, to the private people, but they can exert control whenever they wish to.
And you're exactly right cheddarlump ... the press cannot be beholden to the government. It's a travesty. Just like "shield laws," where the press are beholden to the government to offer them special privileges, which, being legislative and particular to the people who have them, can be revoked.
The way to an actual free press is to for government to give every citizen the same rights, and to stay completely out of the system.
The real story here is that they want to save their own jobs, because they cannot figure out how to save them any other way. This isn't about The Press. If it were, they'd not have been doing such a terrible job (even before the Web came around).
I mean come on ... look at the fricking New York Times. In the wake of Jayson Blair, they promised to rein in anonymous sources. They didn't. As a result, no one trusts the Times anymore, and no one should.
No one trusts the "blogs" either, but at least you don't pay for those.
In Washington, a woman registered her dog to vote. They kept sending the pup ballots, and they only "caught" her when she told them what she did. And they used this as evidence that "the system works."
Oh yeah, you're right. I just picked the first image I found. That's the one.
Looks like a guitar to me.
That about sums it up.
I'll keep watching for now.
In case you missed the final reference ... compare SG:U ship to Not of This World album cover.
Oh, also, with all the kids in SG:U, I keep wanting to call it "Stargate University."
I can find no evidence that anyone is denied coverage for preexisting conditions based on the fact of being a victim of domestic violence. I welcome it, if it exists.
I followed the links from here to here to here and finally to here. No evidence is given.
What seems to be the actual case is not that anyone is excluded for being abused, but that some people are being excluded for actual health problems that were CAUSED BY domestic violence.
So according to what these people are pushing for, if you are in a car accident (through someone else's fault), you can be excluded for preexisting conditions based on those injuries; but if you are beat up by your spouse, you can't be. I disagree with this approach. If you are going to get rid of preexisting condition exclusions, just do it. Don't try to treat some preexisting conditions as somehow special, moreso than others.
I think the main problem with the idea of "unschooling" is that you can only get so far without some sort of regimented learning.
Well, sort of. It depends on the subject. Some kids can get very far with this method in many subjects (most obviously, reading, of course, but also -- depending on the kid -- math and history and even science). But it is the rare kid who can get very far in all subjects this way.
Think of it this way, there's a lot of "unnatural" ideas out there that are very valuable to know and they have only come about because they have been built up over hundreds or even thousands of years of thinking and experimentation. Sure you can teach some of these concepts as part of the normal, "How does this work, daddy?" but a lot of ideas pretty much require you to have regular, involved, formal training over the years before you can have the framework to understand the more complex concepts.
I can't think of a single idea in public K-12 school that someone needs such "regular, involved, formal training" for understanding, except for maybe calculus and other advanced maths. So that's just wrong.
You're right, of course, that we have built up our knowledge over thousands of years, and we can't figure out things entirely on our own, but we have this thing called "the Internet" and "libraries." Unschooling is not "try to figure it out without any help," it is about having undirected learning. You don't eschew a book to help you learn how photosynthesis works, you just don't set out to learn about photosynthesis until the kid is interested in learning how plants grow, and you let his questions direct the learning.
The other thing to note is that just because you can be a parent that doesn't mean you are a good teacher.
If you are a good parent, you are a good teacher. It's that simple. Parenting IS teaching, and there's no significant difference between teaching good manners and teaching the alphabet.
Most teachers go through a ton of training on learning styles, how to present information, and how to guide students from simple ideas to more complex ones.
And if you are a good parent, you usually intuitively know how your child learns; if you have trouble figuring it out, you can always ask for help.
They also are trained in the subject matter whereas a parent might not know, or be able to comprehend, the concepts that a child needs to learn about a subject.
For K-12, mostly -- and K-8 entirely -- this is not a big deal, at all. There's nothing going on in eighth grade an average adult can't understand with a little bit of work. Further, there's a wealth of resources for homeschoolers out there, including joint instruction: for example, near me there's a homeschool co-op where the parents teach groups of homeschooled children, and the parents often actually are experts in the various fields of instruction.
Yes, there are parents who are good at teaching and teachers who shouldn't be educating students but overall most students are better off learning some things from professionals.
There is absolutely no data backing up your claim, either. In fact, the data we do have shows the opposite: across the board, kids taught at home do better than kids taught by professional teachers.
I have experience with unschooling. We looked into it for awhile. It's perfectly normal and natural, and EVERYONE does it. You learn doing everything you do, especially as a kid.
The problem is that some things -- as a parent -- you think your kids should learn, they won't want to learn on their own, probably. Whether it's fractions or Spanish or botany, you're going to run into things they won't learn unless you sit them down and teach it to them.
When you can teach via unschooling, it's great. But it's, for most people, not going to be a very effective way to teach kids all that parents want their kids to learn.
Yes, yes, yes you're emphatically right. You win all the Internet arguments through sheer persistence. Enjoy your win, I have other things to do.
No, I won because I provided actual arguments, and you just kept attacking ME.
That's how it works. HTH.
As I said, go ahead with whatever story makes you feel good.
Looking at actual facts does make me feel good, thanks.
I have no further interest in arguing with you.
You never did. You made a claim you didn't support and refused to provide any backing for it.
Btw, nice strawman here
You obviously don't know what a "strawman" is. You refused to an offer an argument, and I guessed at what your imagined argument might be. As I explicitly did not attribute it to you, it cannot possibly have been a strawman.
However, when you said I ignored any documents, you WERE committing the straw man fallacy.
When you disregard the published documents of your own military planners ...
Please do not lie. I disregarded nothing. In fact, I explained how that document doesn't mean that surrender wasn't the point of dropping the bombs.
If you were intelligent, honest, and thoughtful, you would respond with an argument for how it DOES mean that.
Nope. In fact, I know what I am talking about far better than you do, and I offered nothing remotely similar to a lie.
You, however, have been duped by revisionists.
I don't know why you think the Bard memorandum has relevance. Perhaps you think that because we did not give warning, this proves something? You're wrong, of course, although you're welcome to try to argue it.
I'll even get you started: the argument usually goes something like, "if we wanted them to surrender we would have warned them." The problem is that we did give them many opportunities for a real surrender, and Japan absolutely refused, in all of its public and diplomatic statements. They said they were willing to "surrender" but they made clear they were unwilling for a real surrender, an unconditional one. And after the vicious war of aggression they had waged against us, we could not take the risk of anything less than unconditional surrender.
There was no reason to think at the time that a warning would have made any difference, and indeed, it might have lessened the effectiveness of the deterrent.
Our main goal was, and morally must have been, the security of our people. And so no explicit warning was given.
You're either lying, or ignorant.
Hey, that's my line!
Throughout human history conquerors have taken land not through mass or centralized acquiescence but through just enough force to maintain their power.
Yes, exactly. And bringing them to their knees like that made the force necessary much less than it otherwise would likely have been.
But it's only a hypothesis, one with two possible outcomes.
Same with your counter-hypothesis, of course.
A civilized people ought to try the less murderous approach first.
First, there were no murders. People keep making this odd error.
Second, no. You make your best judgment about what will have the fewest casualties in the long term. That is the judgment the U.S. made.
When some general or politician decides to kill a lot of people, it doesn't make any of his fellow countrymen a murderer as well.
Granted.
The rest I'll let stand for itself, because your claims are really just that. Your claims. Nothing more.
Which makes them no worse off than yours.
motivation is irrelevant, outcomes are what matter in ethical decisions.
That's not true at all. Intent is what matters most.
The reason the Japanese surrender proposal included the Emperor as a puppet was for saving face
Right. And it is why it was rejected.
Roosevelt dismissed that out of hand because his motivation was total victory/humiliation, not practical victory.
No. Practical victory for the long term required total victory. I think that's the part you're missing.
The outcome of the Roosevelt/Truman strategy was the same as if the Japanese surrender were accepted at Yalta
No, it wasn't, because the impact on the Japanese psyche was different. Allowing the Emperor to continue as a puppet, versus agreeing to it as terms of surrender, are two very different things.
No emotional end can justify mass murder of non-combatants.
There was no mass murder.
If the outcomes were significantly different
They were.
It may have been phrased a tiny little inflammatory, but that was the stimulation to spark a discussion of the matter.
Just don't complain when I respond in kind. Shrug.
I'm entirely open to the possibility that there was some justification but I still believe that that number of civilian casualties has far too high
Look, it sucked. But at the time people thought not doing it would lead to FAR MORE casualties.
It could probably have been kept much lower (e.g. nuking the snow cap off Mount Fujy would have probably a devastating psychological effect as well).
Easy to say that, but obviously the psychological effect of bombing people is FAR greater, and we had only two bombs. We couldn't hut Fuji first and then maybe a port and then come back and hit people if those didn't work as we wanted to. This is war, and we have to do up front what we think will have the maximum effectiveness to END that war.
Then your entire post was just an attempt at insulting me?
Shrug. No moreso than yours was just an attempt to call Americans mass murderers.
It educates you ...
No, it really doesn't.
1) Stay polite
Except, you weren't.
2) Have an open mind
Except, you weren't.
3) Back up your claims with arguments
Except, you didn't, and I didn't need to, because others already did.