as long as I am not allowed to use certain terms for people because it's "politically incorrect" or "offensive" to them, etc - for example, "black" or "gay" or perhaps saying that some act or sexual orientation is a "sin" - then I don't see why you should be allowed to swear and cuss under to offend someone under the guise of free speech.
You are allowed to say that sort of stuff. For instance, it's perfectly legal for the Westboro Baptist Church to show up at a soldier's funeral carrying signs that say "God Hates Fags". They can do that without fear of being arrested by the police. (Especially now that biker groups now will show up to the same funerals blocking the view of those signs with American flags.) Is it rude, uncouth, etc? Heck yes, but it's also legal.
Well, Jews are. In 2005-6, there were 11 Jewish senators and 26 Jewish representatives, for a total of about 7% of all seats in Congress, a much higher proportion than the ~2% of the US population that is Jewish.
Muslims, on the other hand, have a much tougher time of it. There have been only 2 Muslims in Congress (both currently in office), for a total of 0.4% of all seats in Congress, and a much lower proportion than the ~1% of the US population that is Muslim. In both the campaigns of Muslim candidates, their religious faith was used against them. You can also judge whether being Muslim helps when you consider the people who were in hysterics because they thought (contrary to all evidence) that Barack Obama was Muslim.
The funny thing is that that statement isn't actually true. A lot of the founders, most notably Thomas Jefferson, were Deists who denied the divinity of Jesus, the central belief of Christianity going back to the Council of Nicea (and for precisely this reason, Thomas Jefferson is being downplayed by the Texas School Board). Several presidents weren't religious at all, a bunch were Unitarians, and if anything the trend is towards more of an emphasis on candidate's faith or lack thereof now than in most other periods of US history.
That's why when I hear someone say "we want our country back" I want to ask "back to what?"
That's because the answer to that question is (generally speaking) a mythical past in which I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, etc are the normal American society, conveniently leaving out the parts of the 1950s that involved the Korean War, the beginnings of Vietnam, the existence of black people and the associated racial violence, the strong unions that allowed single-worker households to make ends meet, the beatniks, and of course the constant threat of being blown to smithereens by the Soviet Union.
Should we replace bridge inspections with votes about whether or not they are going to fall down, as well?
Oh, there's no need to worry about that. The free market will solve that problem - as the risk of driving over the bridge increases, fewer people will use it, because they want to be able to get to work by actually getting to work. Of course, a few poor suckers who didn't know about the risk will possibly be on the bridge when it collapses, but closing the bridge would have interfered with the sophisticated drivers who are knowingly taking the risk that the bridge will collapse. And of course efforts to regulate bridge building have a severe dampening effect on the bridge-building market, so we should in fact be deregulating bridges as much as possible.
It is not the Free Market that allowed people to make billions by doing 'money manipulation', it is the policy of the Government, which has adopted the Keynes ideas that the normal Economy should be controlled because normal Free Market economy is cyclical, it has a Boom (expansion) and a Bust (contraction) and before the Fed, when there was Free Market, the US standard of living was constantly rising and prices would not go up all the time but would come down due to actual competition.
Counterpoint: J P Morgan. He made huge sums of money engaging in money manipulation and banking, and his relationship to the US government was not totally different from Goldman Sach's government dealings today. And this definitely wasn't due to Keynesian economics, because he was dead in 1913, long before the Keynesians had anything close to real political power.
Or if you prefer, you can read about all the various railroad tycoons who bought off politicians to get monopolies to access certain areas of the country. The idea that government corruption is anything remotely new needs to go away - presidential corruption, for instance, goes back to at least Andrew Jackson, who came up with the idea of rewarding supporters with cushy government jobs.
I'm not suggesting that 3-year-olds should learn vector calculus. I'm suggesting that wealthier parents (which whether you know it or not, you are one) got to their first day of school knowing how to read, write a bit, count to 10 or 20, and possibly do some basic arithmetic. A lot of wealthier kids get that at preschool, but they could also get it from an attentive adult in other settings. In your case, your advantage was that you could afford to have your wife stay home and/or work with the neighborhood to start giving kids those basic skills.
By comparison, most poor kids (who didn't have access to Head Start and similar programs) start learning to read when they're 5 or 6. For instance, I was bored senseless in first grade because most of the time was spent trying to get my classmates capable of handling reading "See Spot run." Most of them couldn't do it the first day.
Oh, and what poorer parents are doing with their time at home - mostly mentally and physically resting from their jobs. If you really want to understand the life of a poor person, ideally talk to some of them and get to know them, or at the very least read about or watch smart capable and educated people try to live under the pressures that poor people do.
For instance, if you think that your expository writing class in the English department didn't actually help you on the job, then you must have never written software documentation in your life. And if you think your history course wasn't useful, remember that when you're called upon to judge the accuracy of various whitepapers and other marketing schlock. And if you think your language courses weren't useful, try working with someone from another country and understanding their idioms.
In the US, that same selection process happens all right, but instead of being tied to the child's ability to pass exams it's tied to the child's parent's ability to pay for the child's education.
It also starts much younger than you think, because the child of wealthy parents will be in a top-notch pre-school that provides that child with a good grounding in basic language and mathematical skills, whereas the child of poor parents will most likely be in a low-quality day care that does little more than keep the kids from dying while the parent(s) work. Even of those children end up going to exactly the same public school system (unlikely - wealthier kids live in wealthier school districts and thus get better school systems), the rich kid will be starting about 1-2 years ahead of the poor kid. His academic ability will be recognized quickly, and as a result they will be tracked into gifted-and-talented programs as quickly as possible, so that by the time he's in 6th grade he's about 3-4 years head of his typical poorer counterpart.
By the time you get into high school, poorer kids who have demonstrated real academic talent are consistently tracked lower than rich kids who are good students but not particularly outstanding. And for the other poor kids, they are either encouraged to go to vocational schools, or (much more likely) ignored until they drop out of school.
I have no idea where that's coming from either. Anybody want to explain how they think anything starting with "Your momma's so fat..." can be "insightful"?
Since you were being snarky, we're pals. If you'd seriously been suggesting that Thomas was the smartest guy on the court, I'd have asked you who your connection was so I could get hold of whatever you were smoking.
And the scary thing is, these days I wouldn't have been surprised to find out that you had in fact been serious.
That section was a dig at Justice Thomas, but I'm fair about applying that principle: if Obama nominates and confirms someone who's just as mute, I'll condemn that.
And I sincerely hope that you were going for a Funny mod, because I'm definitely not hoping that Kagan will behave like Thomas.
Mr Lamarr: Chewing gum on line, eh? I hope you brought enough for everybody! Student: I didn't know there were going to be so man- BANG! Other student: Boy, is he strict!
Yeah, but that unsustainable spending is so profitable for Lockheed, Halliburton, and other major contracting companies who give such nice big campaign donations.
In other words, good ideas, but I expect somewhere around 0 chance of getting through Congress.
For the job of "top 9 judges in the United States", yes, that's not enough experience.
For comparison's sake, consider that Sonia Sotomayor had been spent about 20 years on the bench before she was nominated. Diane Wood, frequently put forward as a good alternative to Kagan, has been on an appellate court for 15 years. Being a competent lawyer and being a competent judge are different skills, and I'd much rather have a pick that has demonstrated they're capable of being a judge.
In addition, there's good reason to call her competence as an attorney into question. For instance, in Citizen's United v FEC, her first oral argument of any kind, she (by her own admission) panicked when Justice Kennedy asked her about other significant First Amendment cases. (the exchange can be found on page 41)
And I'm not suggesting this rule has always been followed, but when it isn't followed, we are taking a much bigger risk that we'll end up with a justice incapable of asking a single relevant question during an oral argument for years on end.
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Strange thing is I created my sig about a week ago. \/
as long as I am not allowed to use certain terms for people because it's "politically incorrect" or "offensive" to them, etc - for example, "black" or "gay" or perhaps saying that some act or sexual orientation is a "sin" - then I don't see why you should be allowed to swear and cuss under to offend someone under the guise of free speech.
You are allowed to say that sort of stuff. For instance, it's perfectly legal for the Westboro Baptist Church to show up at a soldier's funeral carrying signs that say "God Hates Fags". They can do that without fear of being arrested by the police. (Especially now that biker groups now will show up to the same funerals blocking the view of those signs with American flags.) Is it rude, uncouth, etc? Heck yes, but it's also legal.
Jews and Muslims are easily elected.
Well, Jews are. In 2005-6, there were 11 Jewish senators and 26 Jewish representatives, for a total of about 7% of all seats in Congress, a much higher proportion than the ~2% of the US population that is Jewish.
Muslims, on the other hand, have a much tougher time of it. There have been only 2 Muslims in Congress (both currently in office), for a total of 0.4% of all seats in Congress, and a much lower proportion than the ~1% of the US population that is Muslim. In both the campaigns of Muslim candidates, their religious faith was used against them. You can also judge whether being Muslim helps when you consider the people who were in hysterics because they thought (contrary to all evidence) that Barack Obama was Muslim.
All of our presidents have been Christians
The funny thing is that that statement isn't actually true. A lot of the founders, most notably Thomas Jefferson, were Deists who denied the divinity of Jesus, the central belief of Christianity going back to the Council of Nicea (and for precisely this reason, Thomas Jefferson is being downplayed by the Texas School Board). Several presidents weren't religious at all, a bunch were Unitarians, and if anything the trend is towards more of an emphasis on candidate's faith or lack thereof now than in most other periods of US history.
That's why when I hear someone say "we want our country back" I want to ask "back to what?"
That's because the answer to that question is (generally speaking) a mythical past in which I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, etc are the normal American society, conveniently leaving out the parts of the 1950s that involved the Korean War, the beginnings of Vietnam, the existence of black people and the associated racial violence, the strong unions that allowed single-worker households to make ends meet, the beatniks, and of course the constant threat of being blown to smithereens by the Soviet Union.
Should we replace bridge inspections with votes about whether or not they are going to fall down, as well?
Oh, there's no need to worry about that. The free market will solve that problem - as the risk of driving over the bridge increases, fewer people will use it, because they want to be able to get to work by actually getting to work. Of course, a few poor suckers who didn't know about the risk will possibly be on the bridge when it collapses, but closing the bridge would have interfered with the sophisticated drivers who are knowingly taking the risk that the bridge will collapse. And of course efforts to regulate bridge building have a severe dampening effect on the bridge-building market, so we should in fact be deregulating bridges as much as possible.
It is not the Free Market that allowed people to make billions by doing 'money manipulation', it is the policy of the Government, which has adopted the Keynes ideas that the normal Economy should be controlled because normal Free Market economy is cyclical, it has a Boom (expansion) and a Bust (contraction) and before the Fed, when there was Free Market, the US standard of living was constantly rising and prices would not go up all the time but would come down due to actual competition.
Counterpoint: J P Morgan. He made huge sums of money engaging in money manipulation and banking, and his relationship to the US government was not totally different from Goldman Sach's government dealings today. And this definitely wasn't due to Keynesian economics, because he was dead in 1913, long before the Keynesians had anything close to real political power.
Or if you prefer, you can read about all the various railroad tycoons who bought off politicians to get monopolies to access certain areas of the country. The idea that government corruption is anything remotely new needs to go away - presidential corruption, for instance, goes back to at least Andrew Jackson, who came up with the idea of rewarding supporters with cushy government jobs.
I'm not suggesting that 3-year-olds should learn vector calculus. I'm suggesting that wealthier parents (which whether you know it or not, you are one) got to their first day of school knowing how to read, write a bit, count to 10 or 20, and possibly do some basic arithmetic. A lot of wealthier kids get that at preschool, but they could also get it from an attentive adult in other settings. In your case, your advantage was that you could afford to have your wife stay home and/or work with the neighborhood to start giving kids those basic skills.
By comparison, most poor kids (who didn't have access to Head Start and similar programs) start learning to read when they're 5 or 6. For instance, I was bored senseless in first grade because most of the time was spent trying to get my classmates capable of handling reading "See Spot run." Most of them couldn't do it the first day.
Oh, and what poorer parents are doing with their time at home - mostly mentally and physically resting from their jobs. If you really want to understand the life of a poor person, ideally talk to some of them and get to know them, or at the very least read about or watch smart capable and educated people try to live under the pressures that poor people do.
For instance, if you think that your expository writing class in the English department didn't actually help you on the job, then you must have never written software documentation in your life. And if you think your history course wasn't useful, remember that when you're called upon to judge the accuracy of various whitepapers and other marketing schlock. And if you think your language courses weren't useful, try working with someone from another country and understanding their idioms.
they don't aspire to be a lumberjack
I do ... leaping from tree to tree, as I float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia, ...
In the US, that same selection process happens all right, but instead of being tied to the child's ability to pass exams it's tied to the child's parent's ability to pay for the child's education.
It also starts much younger than you think, because the child of wealthy parents will be in a top-notch pre-school that provides that child with a good grounding in basic language and mathematical skills, whereas the child of poor parents will most likely be in a low-quality day care that does little more than keep the kids from dying while the parent(s) work. Even of those children end up going to exactly the same public school system (unlikely - wealthier kids live in wealthier school districts and thus get better school systems), the rich kid will be starting about 1-2 years ahead of the poor kid. His academic ability will be recognized quickly, and as a result they will be tracked into gifted-and-talented programs as quickly as possible, so that by the time he's in 6th grade he's about 3-4 years head of his typical poorer counterpart.
By the time you get into high school, poorer kids who have demonstrated real academic talent are consistently tracked lower than rich kids who are good students but not particularly outstanding. And for the other poor kids, they are either encouraged to go to vocational schools, or (much more likely) ignored until they drop out of school.
Because it makes this scenario much more likely?
I have no idea where that's coming from either. Anybody want to explain how they think anything starting with "Your momma's so fat ..." can be "insightful"?
Yeah, if we got hit with this thing we'd be only worth about 15 points.
Oh yeah? Your momma's so fat that when she slept with Jupiter, Jupiter had to be on top so she wouldn't crush it!
Actually, the real answer is that Jupiter is just so fat that you can't see the belt.
And if people are completely unable to take care of their children, Jonathan Swift pointed out a quite reasonable solution.
Hey, if Pravda says it, it must be completely true!
Her midi-chlorians are right off the scale.
And of course there's always 2: the master (Obama) and the apprentice (Kagan).
Actually, I think a better phrase for this is "Bill, I think you misunderstood all that talk about cloud computing."
Since you were being snarky, we're pals. If you'd seriously been suggesting that Thomas was the smartest guy on the court, I'd have asked you who your connection was so I could get hold of whatever you were smoking.
And the scary thing is, these days I wouldn't have been surprised to find out that you had in fact been serious.
That section was a dig at Justice Thomas, but I'm fair about applying that principle: if Obama nominates and confirms someone who's just as mute, I'll condemn that.
And I sincerely hope that you were going for a Funny mod, because I'm definitely not hoping that Kagan will behave like Thomas.
Mr Lamarr: Chewing gum on line, eh? I hope you brought enough for everybody!
Student: I didn't know there were going to be so man-
BANG!
Other student: Boy, is he strict!
Yeah, but that unsustainable spending is so profitable for Lockheed, Halliburton, and other major contracting companies who give such nice big campaign donations.
In other words, good ideas, but I expect somewhere around 0 chance of getting through Congress.
For the job of "top 9 judges in the United States", yes, that's not enough experience.
For comparison's sake, consider that Sonia Sotomayor had been spent about 20 years on the bench before she was nominated. Diane Wood, frequently put forward as a good alternative to Kagan, has been on an appellate court for 15 years. Being a competent lawyer and being a competent judge are different skills, and I'd much rather have a pick that has demonstrated they're capable of being a judge.
In addition, there's good reason to call her competence as an attorney into question. For instance, in Citizen's United v FEC, her first oral argument of any kind, she (by her own admission) panicked when Justice Kennedy asked her about other significant First Amendment cases. (the exchange can be found on page 41)
And I'm not suggesting this rule has always been followed, but when it isn't followed, we are taking a much bigger risk that we'll end up with a justice incapable of asking a single relevant question during an oral argument for years on end.