the National Academy of Sciences and other organizations reviewed the current tests and found out that they don't do what they're supposed to do: They don't tell you whether a teacher is good or bad.
That's not what they're supposed to do. They measure the students, not the teacher. We measure the teachers based on how well the students perform and other factors.
The New York City department of education was using a test to determine whether new teachers would continue on the job.... The test told one middle school teacher that she was in the bottom 6%, and had to be fired. Her principal didn't believe it, and didn't want her to be fired, because she was a good teacher, her students got into the competitive high schools, etc.
That doesn't make sense. How does as new teacher have a history of her students getting into competitive high schools?
But that 6% had a confidence interval -- from 0% to 51%. So actually, she was either among the worst teachers (0%), or among the best half. If you don't know what a confidence interval is, there's no point in my talking to you, but that means the test results are statistically invalid. You might as well fire teachers by throwing dice.
You didn't even specify what the confidence level was, your statement is pretty much meaningless.
But even at a 95% confidence level with a tight range, applying that to thousands of teachers will lead to hundreds of incorrect results. So what? Who is suggesting that a teacher be fired after one bad test result? You're taking an extreme example and using it as a strawman. The equivalent for pro-testing people would be to find a story of a teacher who was really terrible but kept their job for years and years and using that as an example of all teachers.
Maybe the school really does use that fee money to pay for disciplinary activities like detention like they claim. These particular schools could give away the money because they are backed by billionaires, but that doesn't scale. It's easy to have success stories when you have deep pockets or an extremely dedicated staff. This school seems to have found a system that doesn't require continuous external funding or specialized staff, and still produces results. I'm really impressed.
The teachers were basically being asked to agree that they could be instantly fired if their kids didn't do well on a standardized test that they had no part in creating.
The school administrators also have no part in creating the standardized tests. It's a neutral test made by a third party.
I agree that parental involvement is the most important factor, but teachers are fighting the wrong battle by pitting themselves against standardized tests. They will not win because their position defies common sense. Everybody understands the need to measure outcomes and the need to compare those measurements.
The fight should be about who bears responsibility for low scores. If parents are the biggest factor, then parents should suffer for their underperforming children. If you extended this school's idea of fines for breaking rules to fines for getting bad grades, would teachers still have the same loathing of standardized tests?
That's odd. Doctors are given a lot of privilege in our society and I would expect they have some pretty stringent responsibilities in return. For instance they are legally protected from a lot of competition (license requirements plus controlled rate of new doctors coming into the system) and people can't self medicate (odd, I can wire my own ceiling fan at risk of death from electric shock, but I can't order a simple antibiotic without that lovely $150, 10 minute consultation...), etc. So they don't have to "put up" with unpleasant patients? That's asinine. They should have to put up with whatever people can throw at them for the amount of money they are raking from the system.
That holds true of pretty much every patient in a waiting room.
Having a patient with AIDS increases the risk of everybody else in the waiting room getting AIDS -- and people with AIDS have it all the time, people who are unvaccinated are only a danger if they have the disease in question. If they're in with a broken arm, the fact that they don't have their measles vaccination is completely irrelevant.
Having a person with the flu in the waiting room is dangerous for anybody with a weakened immune system. Do you think doctors should "fire" patients who come down with any communicable disease?
The only difference is that we're talking about vaccines which are a matter of choice for people. The article is talking punishing people for a lifestyle. At that point you've left science and medicine far behind and are talking about enforcing your morality. Might as well say doctors should be able to "fire" gay patients because they have an increased risk of having undetected HIV or AIDS, and thus other patients in the waiting room are put at further risk.. it's exactly the same.
On the other hand, parents are making decisions which are very likely not in their childs best interest, which isn't fair to the kid (and arguably, not fair to other kids/people/society in general in this case).
First problem is, it is in the child's best interest not to be immunized if most others already are. Looking at it selfishly, that has pretty much the best outcome for your child. No risk from the vaccine, no cost to you, and the benefits of herd immunity.
Second, looking at a person's whole life, there are sooo many things in life that have a bigger impact than whether you get vaccine X or not. Some kids get all their vaccines, but their parents don't give a crap about their schoolwork so they fail everything and never graduate high school. Would you rather be that kid, or the one who skipped a few vaccines (with no ill effect to you) but received a great education?
There's nothing special about vaccines that override every other aspect of life, so looking at a child's best interests means it's only fair to look at their best interests in all the important areas of life, not just vaccines. In the spirit of this article, relating it to education (which to me is more important to a typical child's ultimate well being than vaccination), the equivalent would be "if a parent doesn't make every effort to help his child in school, the child isn't allowed to go to school anymore" -- which is hopefully obviously not in the best interest of the child or society. Same thing with doctors "firing" patients because they have a disagreement over vaccination.
Why can't they go to a special clinic that has higher safety standards, rather than trying to guilt everybody into doing something that not everybody is comfortable doing?
I guess the most obvious analogy is with the peanut allergy. Some kids will die this year because they come into contact with peanuts. Well why don't we just ban all peanut products?
Because people like peanuts more than they care about those childrens' lives.
So why do anti-vaccine people catch so much flack, but this other seriously deadly issue is ignored? It's BS. Just something for people to feel good about crusading against -- because the anti-vaccine group usually has other traits like they're overly religious. It's vogue to hate on them.
That means "first do no harm" -- it doesn't mean "my way or the highway." Doctors have to work with the limitations of their patients and that includes the patient's wishes. As an example, if a patient is just like "Sorry, my family can't afford to waste money doing all these tests" the doctor has a choice -- either kick the patient out forever for refusing to let the doctor "do his best" or work with that limitation. It's pretty obvious that the latter option is in the best interest of the patient.
What really makes this argument fail is that we're talking about withholding treatment for completely unrelated issues. Patient refuses a vaccine -- well, sorry, I'm not going to do your annual physical, help you with your heart condition, or help you look into hair loss treatments. That's bullshit. It's pure punishment, there's no possible defense of that action using the Hippocratic oath.
I agree, but it certainly wouldn't be "a large portion of our house of cards" -- we're talking a tiny proportion of the population who legitimately can't get vaccines.
And the children who can't get vaccines should be treated exactly the same as the children whose parents choose not to vaccinate them with respect to things like whether they're allowed in public school or whether a doctor "fires" them. Anything else is legislating morality rather than looking at objective results.
Since when is it to the benefit of the sick to withhold treatment because of some political issue that they disagree with?
Because that's all it is when the treatment in question is completely unrelated to the vaccine. Some dude has a broken arm, it's not because he didn't get his measles vaccine. The lack of will to separate the issues is purely political.
Fuck that shit. Everybody is a selfish dick, and that's a good thing. It prevents us from collapsing into a self-destructive mass of empathetic losers. I wonder if you remember that commercial about saving the starving children of Africa for less than the price of a cup of coffee. It's the same bullshit. Why aren't you giving a dollar a day to that charity? (Oh, are you? Well one dollar is nothing, why aren't you giving two?) And there's this other charity that should get at least five. And so on.
We're talking about certain death for millions of children a year, compared to a chance of illness and a smaller chance of death for a tiny number of children who can't get vaccines themselves. So which one makes you more of a selfish dick?
It's an invalid argument. If all you've got is "you're selfish" then you lose, because yeah, people are selfish, including you.
He uses quotes for non-"liberated" as well. To me that means he is making fun of the term "liberated" in general. I think he's trying to say something about one culture not being superior to another so terms like "liberated" are biased. To me it's BS, just like to you, even though we're coming at it from different directions. Funny how that works sometimes.
No, your argument is absolutely retarded. Here's the deal: No matter what lame argument you come up with, your words don't hold the force of reality. Just saying something doesn't make it so. You go spamming this comment about "go without" throughout the threads here, but it's just BS. You can't engage in any kind of debate. If you can't see how there are limits on copyright, and so it's a perfectly legitimate question to ask "where should those limits" end that's your problem.
We should make science like that too. If you reference a paper, you should pay the author.
You should be paying every teacher you've had in your life. Every time you speak English you should pay your first grade English teacher. If you use proper grammar, bump that to 6th grade English teacher. It'll be tough to keep track of, but you don't want those teachers to be forced to work for free.
Where does it end? Seriously, you're using this really simplistic moral argument, but the fact is society rejects it. You can't copyright facts, for instance -- why not? Someone had to find them! That's work! If you don't want to pay for facts, you shouldn't use them, right?
When you make your yard look nice, it's helping the property value of yourself and your neighbors as well. If they sell their house at a slightly higher price because your own house is so awesome, do you demand a cut? No. You worked for free.
Producing a cool painting or photograph is not much different than producing a cool yard or cool Christmas lights. You're doing something that others want to see, and that you want others to see, and you're proud of it. It's just that there's no precedent for charging for certain activities.
Everybody who contributes to society does this to some extent.
The point of copyright is we decided that there will be more cool stuff if some people are allowed to really dedicate themselves to producing it and still make a living. But keep in mind that it's the societal benefit that we want -- we didn't just say "you have a moral right to making money in this fashion."
The "concept of a variable" has been known since forever. In the earliest texts on mathematics, like the Babylonian sources we have, they talk about a "heap" meaning an unknown quantity which you have to solve for. Example from 2000 BC: http://www.math.uconn.edu/~leibowitz/math2720f08/RhindPapyrus.html
Consider the solution of Problem 24, which is to find heap if heap and its one-seventh added together become 19. Ahmes states a linearity or proportionality principle: "As many times as 8 must be multiplied to give 19, just as many times must 7 be multiplied to give the correct answer."
You're right that the Greeks are known more for geometry than algebra, but you are incorrect in that their type of geometry was so elevated that it is actually called algebraic geometry. They weren't just drawing shapes, they were solving abstract equations with geometric methods. The Pythagorean Theorem is a great example, actually. He didn't "prove" it with a table of examples, he proved it in generality.
What you probably meant was symbolic notation for variables, not just the "concept of a variable".. Well, hate to break it to you, but Diophantus, a Greek guy known as the father of algebra, is one of the earliest persons to extensively use symbols in mathematical statements.
Geometry (Euclidean) was developed in Greece, and had they had algebra, they would been able to develop De Cartes' "Cartesian" geometry.
That makes no sense. Someone could have invented it 1 year before Descartes, or 2 years, or any n years. But they didn't. It was such a leap of mathematical insight... man you probably have no idea. It's a new way of thinking about the world. One of the greatest mathematical advances of all time.
In the US, what harm would it be if someone opposed the Holocaust? Speech is no problem if it causes no real harm.
Did you know that the US had (and continues to have) a number of laws specifically to combat the KKK? The President even suspended habeas corpus to help break the power of the KKK.
Every culture makes limits to free speech as needed when it's creating a significant enough problem.
The word algebra may come from Arabic but the mathematics of algebra owe much more to the Greeks and Babylonians. In any case the foundations of algebra predate Islam by centuries. What you're doing is like reading a math book written in English and assuming that the English must have come up with everything in it.
There's no evidence available to you either way so where do you get off labeling it as persecution?
If it's just persecution why aren't there literally 1000+ of these events every single day? If "the man" is trying to wage a war against Muslims, they are doing a piss poor job of it. At this rate it'll be, oh, never until they're all deported.
So you admit there is a lack of information on the details of the incident, how do you feel this confident in calling the police idiots?
He's probably being monitored, as you deduced. But there doesn't seem to be any explanation for that other than his origin? Where did you come up with that? Because his lawyer said so in the article? That's ridiculous.
In reality terrorism is a highly successful tactic and the people with brains realize that and exploit it. You think Obama would be negotiating with the Taliban if they weren't involved in terrorism against us?
Look at Pakistan. If they didn't have their fingers in all the terrorist groups with funding, information, and hands on training, they wouldn't have half the influence they have. They openly play their puppets against us, warning that their nuclear weapons "may" fall into the wrong hands if they don't get their annual payoff, erm aid money.
Unfortunately the Tea Part also showed its utter lack of understanding of government with the debt ceiling fiasco.
Don't confuse lack of understanding with disgust. Yes the tea party is disgusted with the state of government, especially fiscal policy. What on earth makes you think they don't understand it though?
Let me guess. You don't believe the national budget can be compared to a household budget, even for rhetorical purposes. That seems to be what most liberals latched onto at the time.
it's another thing to argue from a point of total ignorance of realpolitik and global economics and just simply HATE and act like a 2 year old in the middle of a temper tantrum.
The fact that a debt ceiling deal was reached shows that they put their ideological concerns aside. It's obvious they were just going for the best bargain they could get with the power they had. That IS realpolitik. What else did you have in mind? What do YOU think realpolitik is in this situation?
Also, if the tea party wants LESS government, why is it so interested in using government to shove their religious/moral beliefs down my throat?
Not sure what you're referring to, I've heard the tea party is very religious but from what I've seen it's fiscal policy that takes center stage. It's not called the cross party after all.. it's quite obviously focused on taxation.
The fragmentation in political agenda is the point here. The overlap between the Democratic subgroups you pointed out is enormous. How can you separate blacks and upscale liberals for instance? I've never met an upscale liberal who doesn't support increased spending on inner city schools, affirmative action programs, and race-sensitivity in the criminal system (for instance, horror at the different sentencing options for crack vs. cocaine or the racial stats of death row inmates).
On the other hand, in the Republican party, religious conservatives contradict libertarian small government supporters on many issues.
If you are selling organs you may need to kill someone to harvest those organs. Therefore killers can be economically productive. There are probably less extreme examples too.
Your argument sounds like it has some seriously biased assumptions about value. Instead of "a thing has value if people are willing to pay for it" (and people are certainly willing to pay for others to kill on their behalf) you're doing some kind of moral value. Can you explain what you mean?
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the National Academy of Sciences and other organizations reviewed the current tests and found out that they don't do what they're supposed to do: They don't tell you whether a teacher is good or bad.
That's not what they're supposed to do. They measure the students, not the teacher. We measure the teachers based on how well the students perform and other factors.
The New York City department of education was using a test to determine whether new teachers would continue on the job. ... The test told one middle school teacher that she was in the bottom 6%, and had to be fired. Her principal didn't believe it, and didn't want her to be fired, because she was a good teacher, her students got into the competitive high schools, etc.
That doesn't make sense. How does as new teacher have a history of her students getting into competitive high schools?
But that 6% had a confidence interval -- from 0% to 51%. So actually, she was either among the worst teachers (0%), or among the best half. If you don't know what a confidence interval is, there's no point in my talking to you, but that means the test results are statistically invalid. You might as well fire teachers by throwing dice.
You didn't even specify what the confidence level was, your statement is pretty much meaningless.
But even at a 95% confidence level with a tight range, applying that to thousands of teachers will lead to hundreds of incorrect results. So what? Who is suggesting that a teacher be fired after one bad test result? You're taking an extreme example and using it as a strawman. The equivalent for pro-testing people would be to find a story of a teacher who was really terrible but kept their job for years and years and using that as an example of all teachers.
Maybe the school really does use that fee money to pay for disciplinary activities like detention like they claim. These particular schools could give away the money because they are backed by billionaires, but that doesn't scale. It's easy to have success stories when you have deep pockets or an extremely dedicated staff. This school seems to have found a system that doesn't require continuous external funding or specialized staff, and still produces results. I'm really impressed.
The teachers were basically being asked to agree that they could be instantly fired if their kids didn't do well on a standardized test that they had no part in creating.
The school administrators also have no part in creating the standardized tests. It's a neutral test made by a third party.
I agree that parental involvement is the most important factor, but teachers are fighting the wrong battle by pitting themselves against standardized tests. They will not win because their position defies common sense. Everybody understands the need to measure outcomes and the need to compare those measurements.
The fight should be about who bears responsibility for low scores. If parents are the biggest factor, then parents should suffer for their underperforming children. If you extended this school's idea of fines for breaking rules to fines for getting bad grades, would teachers still have the same loathing of standardized tests?
If only we could agree on what "properly care for them" means.
You should have been taken away from your parents since they apparently didn't instill a healthy respect for personal freedom in you.
That's odd. Doctors are given a lot of privilege in our society and I would expect they have some pretty stringent responsibilities in return. For instance they are legally protected from a lot of competition (license requirements plus controlled rate of new doctors coming into the system) and people can't self medicate (odd, I can wire my own ceiling fan at risk of death from electric shock, but I can't order a simple antibiotic without that lovely $150, 10 minute consultation...), etc. So they don't have to "put up" with unpleasant patients? That's asinine. They should have to put up with whatever people can throw at them for the amount of money they are raking from the system.
That holds true of pretty much every patient in a waiting room.
Having a patient with AIDS increases the risk of everybody else in the waiting room getting AIDS -- and people with AIDS have it all the time, people who are unvaccinated are only a danger if they have the disease in question. If they're in with a broken arm, the fact that they don't have their measles vaccination is completely irrelevant.
Having a person with the flu in the waiting room is dangerous for anybody with a weakened immune system. Do you think doctors should "fire" patients who come down with any communicable disease?
The only difference is that we're talking about vaccines which are a matter of choice for people. The article is talking punishing people for a lifestyle. At that point you've left science and medicine far behind and are talking about enforcing your morality. Might as well say doctors should be able to "fire" gay patients because they have an increased risk of having undetected HIV or AIDS, and thus other patients in the waiting room are put at further risk.. it's exactly the same.
On the other hand, parents are making decisions which are very likely not in their childs best interest, which isn't fair to the kid (and arguably, not fair to other kids/people/society in general in this case).
First problem is, it is in the child's best interest not to be immunized if most others already are. Looking at it selfishly, that has pretty much the best outcome for your child. No risk from the vaccine, no cost to you, and the benefits of herd immunity.
Second, looking at a person's whole life, there are sooo many things in life that have a bigger impact than whether you get vaccine X or not. Some kids get all their vaccines, but their parents don't give a crap about their schoolwork so they fail everything and never graduate high school. Would you rather be that kid, or the one who skipped a few vaccines (with no ill effect to you) but received a great education?
There's nothing special about vaccines that override every other aspect of life, so looking at a child's best interests means it's only fair to look at their best interests in all the important areas of life, not just vaccines. In the spirit of this article, relating it to education (which to me is more important to a typical child's ultimate well being than vaccination), the equivalent would be "if a parent doesn't make every effort to help his child in school, the child isn't allowed to go to school anymore" -- which is hopefully obviously not in the best interest of the child or society. Same thing with doctors "firing" patients because they have a disagreement over vaccination.
Why can't they go to a special clinic that has higher safety standards, rather than trying to guilt everybody into doing something that not everybody is comfortable doing?
I guess the most obvious analogy is with the peanut allergy. Some kids will die this year because they come into contact with peanuts. Well why don't we just ban all peanut products?
Because people like peanuts more than they care about those childrens' lives.
So why do anti-vaccine people catch so much flack, but this other seriously deadly issue is ignored? It's BS. Just something for people to feel good about crusading against -- because the anti-vaccine group usually has other traits like they're overly religious. It's vogue to hate on them.
That means "first do no harm" -- it doesn't mean "my way or the highway." Doctors have to work with the limitations of their patients and that includes the patient's wishes. As an example, if a patient is just like "Sorry, my family can't afford to waste money doing all these tests" the doctor has a choice -- either kick the patient out forever for refusing to let the doctor "do his best" or work with that limitation. It's pretty obvious that the latter option is in the best interest of the patient.
What really makes this argument fail is that we're talking about withholding treatment for completely unrelated issues. Patient refuses a vaccine -- well, sorry, I'm not going to do your annual physical, help you with your heart condition, or help you look into hair loss treatments. That's bullshit. It's pure punishment, there's no possible defense of that action using the Hippocratic oath.
I agree, but it certainly wouldn't be "a large portion of our house of cards" -- we're talking a tiny proportion of the population who legitimately can't get vaccines.
And the children who can't get vaccines should be treated exactly the same as the children whose parents choose not to vaccinate them with respect to things like whether they're allowed in public school or whether a doctor "fires" them. Anything else is legislating morality rather than looking at objective results.
Since when is it to the benefit of the sick to withhold treatment because of some political issue that they disagree with?
Because that's all it is when the treatment in question is completely unrelated to the vaccine. Some dude has a broken arm, it's not because he didn't get his measles vaccine. The lack of will to separate the issues is purely political.
Fuck that shit. Everybody is a selfish dick, and that's a good thing. It prevents us from collapsing into a self-destructive mass of empathetic losers. I wonder if you remember that commercial about saving the starving children of Africa for less than the price of a cup of coffee. It's the same bullshit. Why aren't you giving a dollar a day to that charity? (Oh, are you? Well one dollar is nothing, why aren't you giving two?) And there's this other charity that should get at least five. And so on.
We're talking about certain death for millions of children a year, compared to a chance of illness and a smaller chance of death for a tiny number of children who can't get vaccines themselves. So which one makes you more of a selfish dick?
It's an invalid argument. If all you've got is "you're selfish" then you lose, because yeah, people are selfish, including you.
He uses quotes for non-"liberated" as well. To me that means he is making fun of the term "liberated" in general. I think he's trying to say something about one culture not being superior to another so terms like "liberated" are biased. To me it's BS, just like to you, even though we're coming at it from different directions. Funny how that works sometimes.
No, your argument is absolutely retarded. Here's the deal: No matter what lame argument you come up with, your words don't hold the force of reality. Just saying something doesn't make it so. You go spamming this comment about "go without" throughout the threads here, but it's just BS. You can't engage in any kind of debate. If you can't see how there are limits on copyright, and so it's a perfectly legitimate question to ask "where should those limits" end that's your problem.
We should make science like that too. If you reference a paper, you should pay the author.
You should be paying every teacher you've had in your life. Every time you speak English you should pay your first grade English teacher. If you use proper grammar, bump that to 6th grade English teacher. It'll be tough to keep track of, but you don't want those teachers to be forced to work for free.
Where does it end? Seriously, you're using this really simplistic moral argument, but the fact is society rejects it. You can't copyright facts, for instance -- why not? Someone had to find them! That's work! If you don't want to pay for facts, you shouldn't use them, right?
When you make your yard look nice, it's helping the property value of yourself and your neighbors as well. If they sell their house at a slightly higher price because your own house is so awesome, do you demand a cut? No. You worked for free.
Producing a cool painting or photograph is not much different than producing a cool yard or cool Christmas lights. You're doing something that others want to see, and that you want others to see, and you're proud of it. It's just that there's no precedent for charging for certain activities.
Everybody who contributes to society does this to some extent.
The point of copyright is we decided that there will be more cool stuff if some people are allowed to really dedicate themselves to producing it and still make a living. But keep in mind that it's the societal benefit that we want -- we didn't just say "you have a moral right to making money in this fashion."
The "concept of a variable" has been known since forever. In the earliest texts on mathematics, like the Babylonian sources we have, they talk about a "heap" meaning an unknown quantity which you have to solve for. Example from 2000 BC: http://www.math.uconn.edu/~leibowitz/math2720f08/RhindPapyrus.html
Consider the solution of Problem 24, which is to find heap if heap and its one-seventh added together become 19. Ahmes states a linearity or proportionality principle: "As many times as 8 must be multiplied to give 19, just as many times must 7 be multiplied to give the correct answer."
You're right that the Greeks are known more for geometry than algebra, but you are incorrect in that their type of geometry was so elevated that it is actually called algebraic geometry. They weren't just drawing shapes, they were solving abstract equations with geometric methods. The Pythagorean Theorem is a great example, actually. He didn't "prove" it with a table of examples, he proved it in generality.
What you probably meant was symbolic notation for variables, not just the "concept of a variable".. Well, hate to break it to you, but Diophantus, a Greek guy known as the father of algebra, is one of the earliest persons to extensively use symbols in mathematical statements.
Geometry (Euclidean) was developed in Greece, and had they had algebra, they would been able to develop De Cartes' "Cartesian" geometry.
That makes no sense. Someone could have invented it 1 year before Descartes, or 2 years, or any n years. But they didn't. It was such a leap of mathematical insight... man you probably have no idea. It's a new way of thinking about the world. One of the greatest mathematical advances of all time.
In the US, what harm would it be if someone opposed the Holocaust? Speech is no problem if it causes no real harm.
Did you know that the US had (and continues to have) a number of laws specifically to combat the KKK? The President even suspended habeas corpus to help break the power of the KKK.
Every culture makes limits to free speech as needed when it's creating a significant enough problem.
The word algebra may come from Arabic but the mathematics of algebra owe much more to the Greeks and Babylonians. In any case the foundations of algebra predate Islam by centuries. What you're doing is like reading a math book written in English and assuming that the English must have come up with everything in it.
There's no evidence available to you either way so where do you get off labeling it as persecution?
If it's just persecution why aren't there literally 1000+ of these events every single day? If "the man" is trying to wage a war against Muslims, they are doing a piss poor job of it. At this rate it'll be, oh, never until they're all deported.
So you admit there is a lack of information on the details of the incident, how do you feel this confident in calling the police idiots?
He's probably being monitored, as you deduced. But there doesn't seem to be any explanation for that other than his origin? Where did you come up with that? Because his lawyer said so in the article? That's ridiculous.
In reality terrorism is a highly successful tactic and the people with brains realize that and exploit it. You think Obama would be negotiating with the Taliban if they weren't involved in terrorism against us?
Look at Pakistan. If they didn't have their fingers in all the terrorist groups with funding, information, and hands on training, they wouldn't have half the influence they have. They openly play their puppets against us, warning that their nuclear weapons "may" fall into the wrong hands if they don't get their annual payoff, erm aid money.
Unfortunately the Tea Part also showed its utter lack of understanding of government with the debt ceiling fiasco.
Don't confuse lack of understanding with disgust. Yes the tea party is disgusted with the state of government, especially fiscal policy. What on earth makes you think they don't understand it though?
Let me guess. You don't believe the national budget can be compared to a household budget, even for rhetorical purposes. That seems to be what most liberals latched onto at the time.
it's another thing to argue from a point of total ignorance of realpolitik and global economics and just simply HATE and act like a 2 year old in the middle of a temper tantrum.
The fact that a debt ceiling deal was reached shows that they put their ideological concerns aside. It's obvious they were just going for the best bargain they could get with the power they had. That IS realpolitik. What else did you have in mind? What do YOU think realpolitik is in this situation?
Also, if the tea party wants LESS government, why is it so interested in using government to shove their religious/moral beliefs down my throat?
Not sure what you're referring to, I've heard the tea party is very religious but from what I've seen it's fiscal policy that takes center stage. It's not called the cross party after all.. it's quite obviously focused on taxation.
The fragmentation in political agenda is the point here. The overlap between the Democratic subgroups you pointed out is enormous. How can you separate blacks and upscale liberals for instance? I've never met an upscale liberal who doesn't support increased spending on inner city schools, affirmative action programs, and race-sensitivity in the criminal system (for instance, horror at the different sentencing options for crack vs. cocaine or the racial stats of death row inmates).
On the other hand, in the Republican party, religious conservatives contradict libertarian small government supporters on many issues.
If you are selling organs you may need to kill someone to harvest those organs. Therefore killers can be economically productive. There are probably less extreme examples too.
Your argument sounds like it has some seriously biased assumptions about value. Instead of "a thing has value if people are willing to pay for it" (and people are certainly willing to pay for others to kill on their behalf) you're doing some kind of moral value. Can you explain what you mean?