I don't think the people who come up with these schemes have ever sat a child in front of a computer, and watched while they tried to learn something from it.
The kind of information children can get that way is not much different than what you can get from reading a book. (Yes, I know the computer has sound and animation.) And for younger children, it's less than they can get by reading a book with their parents.
I would like to see published controlled studies that demonstrate that online classrooms can do as well as classrooms with a teacher.
Or that classrooms with a teacher plus Internet connections are better than classrooms with a teacher alone.
And they should be judged by the standard skills that good teachers are teaching students, not by their skills at answering computerized multiple-choice questions.
One good skill is learning how to tell whether a new innovation will work.
Since I don't know much more about IT than the average human resources guy, maybe my experience can be useful.
I taught myself how to write spreadsheets, and wrote a lot of them for my own personal use.
Then I talked to a guy who had been an engineer and programmer, and came into corporations to teach other people how to use spreadsheets.
He made the point that, when he wrote a spreadsheet, he included error-checking routines, such as calculating things in different ways, that would catch obvious mistakes in the spreadsheet.
For example, in a checkbook program, he would calculate the balance on each line by adding the debits or subtracting the credits from the previous line, as I did, and get a running balance.
Then he would separately total the columns and get the balance by taking the difference between the totals.
They should be the same. But if you made a mistake, they might not be.
People have made a lot of expensive mistakes by calculating the total of a bid but getting the range wrong.
This is a deliberately stupid example, but it's stupid enough that it was news to me (because I was self-taught), and it's stupid enough for an HR guy to understand.
I would suggest that you think up a few examples of how your general engineering and EE skills gave you insights that helped you write a better program, examples with obvious utility, examples that are simple enough for an HR guy to understand.
Since the HR guy may not even understand programming, you can give him a quick course in programming, which will demonstrate your educational skills as well.
"But after seeing that they only have 6 qualified CS teachers"
Its very hard to find CS teachers who believe the Bible is literal and the earth is only 6,000 years old and still want to claim to be in a scientific field.
There isn't any brainwashing going on, anyone with kids knows that little boys look for ways to make weapons and take things apart on their own very early. Evolution didn't produce genders that are identical mentally, and that is fine. The problem is people looking to make everything 50/50 in every profession.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males with Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth William G. Reiner, M.D., and John P. Gearhart, M.D. N Engl J Med 2004; 350:333-341 January 22, 2004 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa022236
I think this is the best evidence on socialization and gender. Boys were surgically converted to girls at birth, and raised as girls. They nonetheless identified as boys, and engaged in stereotypical male behavior, such as preferring war toys and rough-housing over domestic games and marriage fantasies.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males with Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth William G. Reiner, M.D., and John P. Gearhart, M.D. N Engl J Med 2004; 350:333-341 January 22, 2004 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa022236 [FREE TEXT]
Background
Cloacal exstrophy is a rare, complex defect of the entire pelvis and its contents that occurs during embryogenesis and is associated with severe phallic inadequacy or phallic absence in genetic males. For about 25 years, neonatal assignment to female sex has been advocated for affected males to overcome the issue of phallic inadequacy, but data on outcome remain sparse.
Methods
We assessed all 16 genetic males in our cloacal-exstrophy clinic at the ages of 5 to 16 years. Fourteen underwent neonatal assignment to female sex socially, legally, and surgically; the parents of the remaining two refused to do so. Detailed questionnaires extensively evaluated the development of sexual role and identity, as defined by the subjects' persistent declarations of their sex.
Results
Eight of the 14 subjects assigned to female sex declared themselves male during the course of this study, whereas the 2 raised as males remained male. Subjects could be grouped according to their stated sexual identity. Five subjects were living as females; three were living with unclear sexual identity, although two of the three had declared themselves male; and eight were living as males, six of whom had reassigned themselves to male sex. All 16 subjects had moderate-to-marked interests and attitudes that were considered typical of males. Follow-up ranged from 34 to 98 months.
Conclusions
Routine neonatal assignment of genetic males to female sex because of severe phallic inadequacy can result in unpredictable sexual identification. Clinical interventions in such children should be reexamined in the light of these findings.
How anyone could think that it was smart to have private industry run prisons is just beyond me. And I'm not talking about some contractors brought in to provide food service, but that the entire prison would be a for-profit industry is just insane.
I met a member of the Goldstone commission after Goldstone published that article. He said that Goldstone may have changed his mind, but Goldstone was speaking for himself, not the commission. And Goldstone never disclosed the evidence that changed his mind.
The Israeli government refused to cooperate with the Goldstone commission. Goldstone said in that article that if the Israeli government had cooperated, his conclusions would have been different.
The main difference would have been the conclusion that the Israelis were deliberately targeting civilians as a matter of government policy. Goldstone said that he was now convinced that, while individual soldiers were deliberately targeting civilians, they were not doing so as a result of government policy.
To give you an idea of what they're talking about, here's one of the best-documented cases:
773. At about 12.50 p.m., Khalid Abd Rabbo, his wife Kawthar, their three daughters, Souad (aged 9), Samar (aged 5) and Amal (aged 3), and his mother, Hajja Souad Abd Rabbo, stepped out of the house, all of them carrying white flags. Less than 10 metres from the door was a tank, turned towards their house. Two soldiers were sitting on top of it having a snack (one was eating chips, the other chocolate, according to one of the witnesses). The family stood still, waiting for orders from the soldiers as to what they should do, but none was given. Without warning, a third soldier emerged from inside the tank and started shooting at the three girls and then also at their grandmother. Several bullets hit Souad in the chest, Amal in the stomach and Samar in the back. Hajja Souad was hit in the lower back and in the left arm.
The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life. As far as any human rights organization or journalist could find out, the Israeli government never investigated this event or prosecuted the soldier responsible. For example, nobody from the Israeli government talked to the Palestinian eyewitnesses, so they can't know first-hand what happened.
Goldstone was writing in 2011 that he was confident that the Israeli government would investigate these charges. As of 2015, they have not done so, so it seems his confidence was misplaced. What are they waiting for -- the messiah?
The UN chose Goldstone to head the commission because he had unimpeachable Zionist credentials, in Israel and South Africa. He was Jewish and had family in Israel. The UN wanted to head off in advance any criticism that the commission would be anti-Israel.
In contrast, the human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, staff their investigating commissions with people who are not living in the country they are investigating, out of fear that they would be subject to pressure.
That fear was justified in Goldstone's case. He was subject to immense abuse from the Israel-first community. They attempted to prevent him from attending his grandson's Bar Mitzvah.
Alan Dershowitz said that it was acceptable under Jewish law for any Jew to kill Goldstone. Dershowitz said that Goldstone was a moser, which means someone who informs on his fellow Jews, like the informers who turned other Jews in to the Nazis. Under Jewish law, it's acceptable to kill a moser. Coming from Dershowitz, one could reasonably worry, since several of his clients were murderers, including the member of the Jewish Defense League who firebombed Sol Hurok'
You may know its end better by the term holocaust.
The people I grew up with, many of whom had actually escaped from Germany, or fought in Germany, some of whom knocked out a few Nazi tanks or troop trains, usually referred to it as "The concentration camps" or just "World War II."
The term "holocaust" didn't become popular until around 1980, when some of the Israel-firsters started using it to justify doing everything they wanted to do, like blowing up Sol Hurok's office and killing his Jewish secretary. Because -- Holocaust!
The term "holocaust" was also a good draw for fundraising and for shaking down European governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It offends me because it's a religious term, whose literal meaning is that Jews were killed as a sacrifice to God. That's an insult to every Jewish atheist who died (or survived) fighting the Nazis.
Maybe you live an ideal world where nobody would try to kill somebody for financially based motives, but I've seen that happen far too many times in the news. And I don't trust insurance companies to not bully people if they're allowed to. Those bastards are cold hearted.
You mean an ideal world, with a single-payer health care system?
You forgot to mention the Palestinians sweetening the pot by blowing up buses (unless that's inconvenient because of walls or border guards), shooting at kids at a 12 year old's party, blowing up a holiday dinner for widowers, shooting rockets or artillery toward towns during morning commute (at a rate of one or two a week during "cease fires").
I could go on for days, actually. People who think the Israelis are ugly should turn their heads and look around 360 degrees and get to know all of Israel's neighbors.
I used to raise money for Israel in the 1980s. I was in the middle of the Jewish establishment. I used to write press releases that ran in the New York Times.
I kept reading stories in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal about Israelis killing Palestinians. The ones that really got to me were the Israelis killing Palestinian children. I remember a story in the NYT about an Israeli chasing a 12-year-old girl named Aasma, who ran away screaming, until he shot her in the head and killed her.
I didn't just believe the NYT. I read the Amnesty International reports. And I didn't just believe the AI reports. I asked Israeli government officials. Their answer? They denied it happened. They said the Palestinians made it all up. The Palestinians lied.
I checked them out. It was the Israelis who were lying.
That was long before any Palestinian suicide bombings or bus bombings. The Palestinians were mostly meek and passive. I kept thinking to myself, "Why don't they get guns and fight back? The Jews would."
There were lots of Palestinians who wanted peace with the Israelis. The Israelis actually made it illegal for the Palestinians to talk about having a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel side-by-side. They arrested Palestinians for talking about peace. I know because I read the AI reports, and called the Israeli government about it.
Finally after the Israelis demonstrated that the peaceful Palestinians would get nowhere, the Palestinians did fight back, though not in the way I expected. They started blowing up buses with suicide bombs. Of course, it's terrible when innocent people get killed, Palestinian or Jew. But the Israelis were provoking, beating, arresting and killing the Palestinians for years before the Palestinians finally decided to fight back.
Of course I could give you facts and supporting evidence, but I've done that many times before and I know what the Israeli-firsters say. They just brush it off and say that it's not true, the Palestinians are lying, Amnesty International is lying, B'Tselem is lying, Haaretz is lying, the UN is lying, the NYT is lying, the BBC is lying, everybody else in the world is lying except Israel and MEMRI, because everybody else in the world is anti-Semitic and hates Israel. And I expect that's what you're going to say.
But maybe I'm wrong. Go read the Goldstone report. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/... If you don't believe that, I won't waste any more time with you.
My impression is that the net result of the child porn laws is that you have 50-year-old cops sitting on their fat asses in front of a monitor eating donuts, pretending to be 12-year-old girls, instead of going out and stopping actual child sex abuse (which is a lot more difficult).
In fact, if you wanted to stop child sex abuse, there are probably people who are better able to stop it than cops. Shift the money from police to schools, and bring back the guidance counselors who were laid off.
The difference is this isn't a slipper slope fallacy because these kinds of block lists have already been shown to be used for political purposes wherever they show up.
I heard a Palestinian describing what it's like to negotiate with Israel.
He said, it's like dividing a pizza. First, you divide it in half. Then the other guy says, "I want half of your half too." So he takes that half. Then he says, "I want half of what you've got left...."
Why is everything a slippery slope for you people? Is it not possible that we find a middle way?
Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate economist, wrote an article in Science in which he said that the middle way is not always the best. Sometimes a compromise is worse than either alternative.
You want America to be free. I want America to be slave. Let's compromise: Make America half free and half slave.
If you want something more recent, there's for example the torture of Dilawar by the U.S. Army. Dilawar was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists for 4 days, while the Americans used him as a kicking target until he died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Barbaric? They could give the KKK some lessons on cruelty. (Or maybe they were in the KKK.)
You know that if they got caught killing Dilawar, there must have been a lot more that they didn't get caught on. How many? Hundreds? Thousands?
Overall, somewhere between 150,000 and 600,000 Iraqi people died in Bush's Iraq war, most of them innocent civilians and most of them children. You know they didn't all die humanely.
From reading the medical reports, it seems that a large number of them died from having their houses destroyed. Crush injuries, which are one major cause of death in those situations and take two or three days, are a fairly painful way to die.
A lot of the deaths are burn injuries, over several days, which are one of the most painful ways to die in medicine, especially if you don't have morphine. In fact, burning someone to death in a few seconds like ISIS did it is humane compared to the way we did it.
Tell me again why it's barbaric to kill someone by burning him to death with gasoline in a cage in a few seconds, while it's not barbaric to kill someone by bombing his house, burning him to death, and having it take three days.
If the Iraqis did that to your wife or child, how would you respond? Maybe you'd want to kill every Iraqi you could get your hands on? Say -- do you think they feel the same way? Do you think that could be part of the reason Muslims want to kill us? Do you think that if we killed 600,000 Iraqis, some of their relatives might want to kill us in return?
Do you think it would have been a better idea not to have attacked Iraq in the first place -- not because Iraqi lives matter, but just for selfish reasons, to avoid having them attack us in return?
If you want to know what my position is (for those of you who are so dense that you haven't figured it out), I think it's wrong to kill people just for some geopolitical reason, when it doesn't protect your country or anyone else.
It might be acceptable in a just war, but Iraq wasn't it. You may have missed the memo, but all the reasons for the Iraq war turned out to be lies. http://www.pbs.org/now/politic...
I buy my food in a supermarket. They assume all moral responsibility for me. It's like giving my junk to a recycling center. I don't have to know where it comes from or what happens to it.
At least ISIS burned him alive humanely, compared to the way the Christians did it.
So let's apply the same standards to Christians and Muslims.
BTW, what was that pilot doing when he was flying over the area? He was dropping bombs, which killed a lot of innocent people, a lot of whom were burned just as badly and suffered just as much.
Don't get me wrong. It was not OK. Clearly for ISIS to burn a prisoner to death was [insert the same condemnation you use when Christians and Americans do the same thing]. But be consistent. Whatever you say about the Muslims, you should say about the Christians who caused just as much or more painful suffering and death.
FWIW, I opposed the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq left a power vacuum for ISIS to move in. So the lesson is, "Don't do stupid things (like elect GWB president)."
In fact, we drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan. If the Soviets had still been running things, we wouldn't have this problem.
If you want to stop this brutality, then stop all wars. Get out in the street and demonstrate against it. And that's just a start.
What makes you think the Muslim nutjobs need any provocation from the West to attack the West? They need the West so they don't appear so radical as to declare war against Muslims. Now they get to hide behind "Defending Islam against the West, anything else is understandable collateral and Muslims should feel honored to be martyred." They are self-agitated regardless of what the West does or doesn't do.
When I studied game theory, I learned that one of the most basic strategies is tit for tat.
If you attack me, I attack you back.
If we attack the Muslims (or atheists, for that matter), they're going to attack us back.
Assuming for purposes of argument that you had a Muslim population minding its own business and fighting its own battles in the middle east, why would they travel all the way over to the U.S. to attack us, if we don't bother them?
OTOH if you had a Muslim population minding its own business, and we did attack them first, don't you think that would motivate some of the hotheads among them to attack us back?
You don't think the people in charge really believe that BS about God, do you? As the Greek philosopher Thrasymacus said, "With religion the clever manipulate the foolish." (An honest Republican could have told you that too, if you could find one.) The Arabs knew all about Greek philosophy. They were writing commentaries about Greek philosophy in Arabic, while the Christians were burning heretics on bonfires. (Hmm. Burning heretics on bonfires. That sounds pretty horrific.)
You know who's really crazy? Those Christians. Not only were they killing each other, but they had to go down to Jerusalem on their "crusades." They managed to convince the suckers that when they die following their master's orders, they're going to Heaven.
and how you literally set the pilot on fire, because you chip into a market which serves as a source of substantial funding for ISIS through your gas purchases. and they used that money to purchase equipment, fuel, to capture and kill the pilot.
you murderer you.
I live in an all-electric building, and take the subway, all powered by a friendly nuclear power plant. I don't even contribute to global warming. My conscience is clear.
We all know what happened. It was adequately described. Fox New just panders to the warmongers among us and is trying to rile them up.
I would advance the argument that the function of a news agency is to report the news. Not some of the news or the news you / I approve of. This is what's really happening in the world around us, without protecting us from things we may find objectionable or viewpoints differing from our own. How can we possibly make rational decisions or hold properly informed opinions based on only some of the information about a given situation?
That's true, but during the Afghanistan war Robert Fisk published hundreds of photos of Afghani civilians who were killed by American attacks, which the BBC, British press, and American press wouldn't print.
News media get much more news than they have room for, so they have to be selective.
I wonder if Fox News ran similar photos of the civilian victims of civilian victims of the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Gaza?
This is what Fox News' viewers want to see: the barbarity of Muslims.
While this may be the case, there also seems to be that pesky fact they seem to have put someone in a cage, lit them on fire, and burned them to death.
What's the big deal with burning somebody alive? Look what the US Army did to Dilawar in Afghanistan.
They suspended him from the ceiling by the wrists for 4 days until his hands were crippled, and kicked him on the knees until his feet were crippled too and he died of the complications.
The lead interrogator responsible, Glendale Walls, served 2 months in military prison.
In the same way that the Republicans are literally working for ISIS by starting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and torturing Muslim prisoners in Abu Grarib, the black sites, and Guantanamo.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the people who come up with these schemes have ever sat a child in front of a computer, and watched while they tried to learn something from it.
The kind of information children can get that way is not much different than what you can get from reading a book. (Yes, I know the computer has sound and animation.) And for younger children, it's less than they can get by reading a book with their parents.
I would like to see published controlled studies that demonstrate that online classrooms can do as well as classrooms with a teacher.
Or that classrooms with a teacher plus Internet connections are better than classrooms with a teacher alone.
And they should be judged by the standard skills that good teachers are teaching students, not by their skills at answering computerized multiple-choice questions.
One good skill is learning how to tell whether a new innovation will work.
Since I don't know much more about IT than the average human resources guy, maybe my experience can be useful.
I taught myself how to write spreadsheets, and wrote a lot of them for my own personal use.
Then I talked to a guy who had been an engineer and programmer, and came into corporations to teach other people how to use spreadsheets.
He made the point that, when he wrote a spreadsheet, he included error-checking routines, such as calculating things in different ways, that would catch obvious mistakes in the spreadsheet.
For example, in a checkbook program, he would calculate the balance on each line by adding the debits or subtracting the credits from the previous line, as I did, and get a running balance.
Then he would separately total the columns and get the balance by taking the difference between the totals.
They should be the same. But if you made a mistake, they might not be.
People have made a lot of expensive mistakes by calculating the total of a bid but getting the range wrong.
This is a deliberately stupid example, but it's stupid enough that it was news to me (because I was self-taught), and it's stupid enough for an HR guy to understand.
I would suggest that you think up a few examples of how your general engineering and EE skills gave you insights that helped you write a better program, examples with obvious utility, examples that are simple enough for an HR guy to understand.
Since the HR guy may not even understand programming, you can give him a quick course in programming, which will demonstrate your educational skills as well.
"But after seeing that they only have 6 qualified CS teachers"
Its very hard to find CS teachers who believe the Bible is literal and the earth is only 6,000 years old and still want to claim to be in a scientific field.
Forrest Mims.
There isn't any brainwashing going on, anyone with kids knows that little boys look for ways to make weapons and take things apart on their own very early. Evolution didn't produce genders that are identical mentally, and that is fine. The problem is people looking to make everything 50/50 in every profession.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males with Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth
William G. Reiner, M.D., and John P. Gearhart, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2004; 350:333-341
January 22, 2004
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa022236
I think this is the best evidence on socialization and gender. Boys were surgically converted to girls at birth, and raised as girls. They nonetheless identified as boys, and engaged in stereotypical male behavior, such as preferring war toys and rough-housing over domestic games and marriage fantasies.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males with Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth
William G. Reiner, M.D., and John P. Gearhart, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2004; 350:333-341
January 22, 2004
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa022236
[FREE TEXT]
Background
Cloacal exstrophy is a rare, complex defect of the entire pelvis and its contents that occurs during embryogenesis and is associated with severe phallic inadequacy or phallic absence in genetic males. For about 25 years, neonatal assignment to female sex has been advocated for affected males to overcome the issue of phallic inadequacy, but data on outcome remain sparse.
Methods
We assessed all 16 genetic males in our cloacal-exstrophy clinic at the ages of 5 to 16 years. Fourteen underwent neonatal assignment to female sex socially, legally, and surgically; the parents of the remaining two refused to do so. Detailed questionnaires extensively evaluated the development of sexual role and identity, as defined by the subjects' persistent declarations of their sex.
Results
Eight of the 14 subjects assigned to female sex declared themselves male during the course of this study, whereas the 2 raised as males remained male. Subjects could be grouped according to their stated sexual identity. Five subjects were living as females; three were living with unclear sexual identity, although two of the three had declared themselves male; and eight were living as males, six of whom had reassigned themselves to male sex. All 16 subjects had moderate-to-marked interests and attitudes that were considered typical of males. Follow-up ranged from 34 to 98 months.
Conclusions
Routine neonatal assignment of genetic males to female sex because of severe phallic inadequacy can result in unpredictable sexual identification. Clinical interventions in such children should be reexamined in the light of these findings.
How anyone could think that it was smart to have private industry run prisons is just beyond me. And I'm not talking about some contractors brought in to provide food service, but that the entire prison would be a for-profit industry is just insane.
Well, it worked so well for health care.
Also Judge Richard Goldstone has apologized for the poor quality of that report, for how much he was fooled.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I met a member of the Goldstone commission after Goldstone published that article. He said that Goldstone may have changed his mind, but Goldstone was speaking for himself, not the commission. And Goldstone never disclosed the evidence that changed his mind.
The Israeli government refused to cooperate with the Goldstone commission. Goldstone said in that article that if the Israeli government had cooperated, his conclusions would have been different.
The main difference would have been the conclusion that the Israelis were deliberately targeting civilians as a matter of government policy. Goldstone said that he was now convinced that, while individual soldiers were deliberately targeting civilians, they were not doing so as a result of government policy.
To give you an idea of what they're talking about, here's one of the best-documented cases:
The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life. As far as any human rights organization or journalist could find out, the Israeli government never investigated this event or prosecuted the soldier responsible. For example, nobody from the Israeli government talked to the Palestinian eyewitnesses, so they can't know first-hand what happened.
Goldstone was writing in 2011 that he was confident that the Israeli government would investigate these charges. As of 2015, they have not done so, so it seems his confidence was misplaced. What are they waiting for -- the messiah?
The UN chose Goldstone to head the commission because he had unimpeachable Zionist credentials, in Israel and South Africa. He was Jewish and had family in Israel. The UN wanted to head off in advance any criticism that the commission would be anti-Israel.
In contrast, the human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, staff their investigating commissions with people who are not living in the country they are investigating, out of fear that they would be subject to pressure.
That fear was justified in Goldstone's case. He was subject to immense abuse from the Israel-first community. They attempted to prevent him from attending his grandson's Bar Mitzvah.
Alan Dershowitz said that it was acceptable under Jewish law for any Jew to kill Goldstone. Dershowitz said that Goldstone was a moser, which means someone who informs on his fellow Jews, like the informers who turned other Jews in to the Nazis. Under Jewish law, it's acceptable to kill a moser. Coming from Dershowitz, one could reasonably worry, since several of his clients were murderers, including the member of the Jewish Defense League who firebombed Sol Hurok'
Jon Stewart has a thoughtful response to your comments http://www.addictinginfo.org/2...
You may know its end better by the term holocaust.
The people I grew up with, many of whom had actually escaped from Germany, or fought in Germany, some of whom knocked out a few Nazi tanks or troop trains, usually referred to it as "The concentration camps" or just "World War II."
The term "holocaust" didn't become popular until around 1980, when some of the Israel-firsters started using it to justify doing everything they wanted to do, like blowing up Sol Hurok's office and killing his Jewish secretary. Because -- Holocaust!
https://books.google.com/ngram...
The term "holocaust" was also a good draw for fundraising and for shaking down European governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It offends me because it's a religious term, whose literal meaning is that Jews were killed as a sacrifice to God. That's an insult to every Jewish atheist who died (or survived) fighting the Nazis.
Maybe you live an ideal world where nobody would try to kill somebody for financially based motives, but I've seen that happen far too many times in the news. And I don't trust insurance companies to not bully people if they're allowed to. Those bastards are cold hearted.
You mean an ideal world, with a single-payer health care system?
Couldn't happen.
Amnesty International isn't lying.
You forgot to mention the Palestinians sweetening the pot by blowing up buses (unless that's inconvenient because of walls or border guards), shooting at kids at a 12 year old's party, blowing up a holiday dinner for widowers, shooting rockets or artillery toward towns during morning commute (at a rate of one or two a week during "cease fires").
I could go on for days, actually. People who think the Israelis are ugly should turn their heads and look around 360 degrees and get to know all of Israel's neighbors.
I used to raise money for Israel in the 1980s. I was in the middle of the Jewish establishment. I used to write press releases that ran in the New York Times.
I kept reading stories in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal about Israelis killing Palestinians. The ones that really got to me were the Israelis killing Palestinian children. I remember a story in the NYT about an Israeli chasing a 12-year-old girl named Aasma, who ran away screaming, until he shot her in the head and killed her.
I didn't just believe the NYT. I read the Amnesty International reports. And I didn't just believe the AI reports. I asked Israeli government officials. Their answer? They denied it happened. They said the Palestinians made it all up. The Palestinians lied.
I checked them out. It was the Israelis who were lying.
That was long before any Palestinian suicide bombings or bus bombings. The Palestinians were mostly meek and passive. I kept thinking to myself, "Why don't they get guns and fight back? The Jews would."
There were lots of Palestinians who wanted peace with the Israelis. The Israelis actually made it illegal for the Palestinians to talk about having a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel side-by-side. They arrested Palestinians for talking about peace. I know because I read the AI reports, and called the Israeli government about it.
Finally after the Israelis demonstrated that the peaceful Palestinians would get nowhere, the Palestinians did fight back, though not in the way I expected. They started blowing up buses with suicide bombs. Of course, it's terrible when innocent people get killed, Palestinian or Jew. But the Israelis were provoking, beating, arresting and killing the Palestinians for years before the Palestinians finally decided to fight back.
Of course I could give you facts and supporting evidence, but I've done that many times before and I know what the Israeli-firsters say. They just brush it off and say that it's not true, the Palestinians are lying, Amnesty International is lying, B'Tselem is lying, Haaretz is lying, the UN is lying, the NYT is lying, the BBC is lying, everybody else in the world is lying except Israel and MEMRI, because everybody else in the world is anti-Semitic and hates Israel. And I expect that's what you're going to say.
But maybe I'm wrong. Go read the Goldstone report. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/... If you don't believe that, I won't waste any more time with you.
My impression is that the net result of the child porn laws is that you have 50-year-old cops sitting on their fat asses in front of a monitor eating donuts, pretending to be 12-year-old girls, instead of going out and stopping actual child sex abuse (which is a lot more difficult).
In fact, if you wanted to stop child sex abuse, there are probably people who are better able to stop it than cops. Shift the money from police to schools, and bring back the guidance counselors who were laid off.
America is in a police state today, the fact that people are not being shot in the street doe not change that fact.
The fact that too many people are not being shot in the street, anyway.
The difference is this isn't a slipper slope fallacy because these kinds of block lists have already been shown to be used for political purposes wherever they show up.
It's called "mission creep."
I heard a Palestinian describing what it's like to negotiate with Israel.
He said, it's like dividing a pizza. First, you divide it in half. Then the other guy says, "I want half of your half too." So he takes that half. Then he says, "I want half of what you've got left...."
Why is everything a slippery slope for you people? Is it not possible that we find a middle way?
Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate economist, wrote an article in Science in which he said that the middle way is not always the best. Sometimes a compromise is worse than either alternative.
You want America to be free. I want America to be slave. Let's compromise: Make America half free and half slave.
Let me make it clear that I'm just talking about the Christian extremists.
There were over 4,000 lychings in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and they were still going in in the 1960s.
If you want something more recent, there's for example the torture of Dilawar by the U.S. Army. Dilawar was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists for 4 days, while the Americans used him as a kicking target until he died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Barbaric? They could give the KKK some lessons on cruelty. (Or maybe they were in the KKK.)
You know that if they got caught killing Dilawar, there must have been a lot more that they didn't get caught on. How many? Hundreds? Thousands?
Overall, somewhere between 150,000 and 600,000 Iraqi people died in Bush's Iraq war, most of them innocent civilians and most of them children. You know they didn't all die humanely.
From reading the medical reports, it seems that a large number of them died from having their houses destroyed. Crush injuries, which are one major cause of death in those situations and take two or three days, are a fairly painful way to die.
A lot of the deaths are burn injuries, over several days, which are one of the most painful ways to die in medicine, especially if you don't have morphine. In fact, burning someone to death in a few seconds like ISIS did it is humane compared to the way we did it.
Tell me again why it's barbaric to kill someone by burning him to death with gasoline in a cage in a few seconds, while it's not barbaric to kill someone by bombing his house, burning him to death, and having it take three days.
If the Iraqis did that to your wife or child, how would you respond? Maybe you'd want to kill every Iraqi you could get your hands on? Say -- do you think they feel the same way? Do you think that could be part of the reason Muslims want to kill us? Do you think that if we killed 600,000 Iraqis, some of their relatives might want to kill us in return?
Do you think it would have been a better idea not to have attacked Iraq in the first place -- not because Iraqi lives matter, but just for selfish reasons, to avoid having them attack us in return?
If you want to know what my position is (for those of you who are so dense that you haven't figured it out), I think it's wrong to kill people just for some geopolitical reason, when it doesn't protect your country or anyone else.
It might be acceptable in a just war, but Iraq wasn't it. You may have missed the memo, but all the reasons for the Iraq war turned out to be lies. http://www.pbs.org/now/politic...
I buy my food in a supermarket. They assume all moral responsibility for me. It's like giving my junk to a recycling center. I don't have to know where it comes from or what happens to it.
It should make intelligent people stop and think before they jump on the bandwagon of denouncing Muslims for their "barbarity."
What is ISIS doing that isn't as barbaric as the things we do every day?
Burning somebody alive. Big fucking deal. The American Christians burned thousands of people alive.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/... Yes, ISIS Burned a Man Alive: White Americans Did the Same Thing to Black People by the Thousands
At least ISIS burned him alive humanely, compared to the way the Christians did it.
So let's apply the same standards to Christians and Muslims.
BTW, what was that pilot doing when he was flying over the area? He was dropping bombs, which killed a lot of innocent people, a lot of whom were burned just as badly and suffered just as much.
Don't get me wrong. It was not OK. Clearly for ISIS to burn a prisoner to death was [insert the same condemnation you use when Christians and Americans do the same thing]. But be consistent. Whatever you say about the Muslims, you should say about the Christians who caused just as much or more painful suffering and death.
FWIW, I opposed the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq left a power vacuum for ISIS to move in. So the lesson is, "Don't do stupid things (like elect GWB president)."
In fact, we drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan. If the Soviets had still been running things, we wouldn't have this problem.
If you want to stop this brutality, then stop all wars. Get out in the street and demonstrate against it. And that's just a start.
What makes you think the Muslim nutjobs need any provocation from the West to attack the West? They need the West so they don't appear so radical as to declare war against Muslims. Now they get to hide behind "Defending Islam against the West, anything else is understandable collateral and Muslims should feel honored to be martyred." They are self-agitated regardless of what the West does or doesn't do.
When I studied game theory, I learned that one of the most basic strategies is tit for tat.
If you attack me, I attack you back.
If we attack the Muslims (or atheists, for that matter), they're going to attack us back.
Assuming for purposes of argument that you had a Muslim population minding its own business and fighting its own battles in the middle east, why would they travel all the way over to the U.S. to attack us, if we don't bother them?
OTOH if you had a Muslim population minding its own business, and we did attack them first, don't you think that would motivate some of the hotheads among them to attack us back?
You don't think the people in charge really believe that BS about God, do you? As the Greek philosopher Thrasymacus said, "With religion the clever manipulate the foolish." (An honest Republican could have told you that too, if you could find one.) The Arabs knew all about Greek philosophy. They were writing commentaries about Greek philosophy in Arabic, while the Christians were burning heretics on bonfires. (Hmm. Burning heretics on bonfires. That sounds pretty horrific.)
You know who's really crazy? Those Christians. Not only were they killing each other, but they had to go down to Jerusalem on their "crusades." They managed to convince the suckers that when they die following their master's orders, they're going to Heaven.
and how you literally set the pilot on fire, because you chip into a market which serves as a source of substantial funding for ISIS through your gas purchases. and they used that money to purchase equipment, fuel, to capture and kill the pilot.
you murderer you.
I live in an all-electric building, and take the subway, all powered by a friendly nuclear power plant. I don't even contribute to global warming. My conscience is clear.
We all know what happened. It was adequately described. Fox New just panders to the warmongers among us and is trying to rile them up.
I would advance the argument that the function of a news agency is to report the news. Not some of the news or the news you / I approve of. This is what's really happening in the world around us, without protecting us from things we may find objectionable or viewpoints differing from our own. How can we possibly make rational decisions or hold properly informed opinions based on only some of the information about a given situation?
That's true, but during the Afghanistan war Robert Fisk published hundreds of photos of Afghani civilians who were killed by American attacks, which the BBC, British press, and American press wouldn't print.
News media get much more news than they have room for, so they have to be selective.
I wonder if Fox News ran similar photos of the civilian victims of civilian victims of the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Gaza?
This is what Fox News' viewers want to see: the barbarity of Muslims.
While this may be the case, there also seems to be that pesky fact they seem to have put someone in a cage, lit them on fire, and burned them to death.
What's the big deal with burning somebody alive? Look what the US Army did to Dilawar in Afghanistan.
They suspended him from the ceiling by the wrists for 4 days until his hands were crippled, and kicked him on the knees until his feet were crippled too and he died of the complications.
The lead interrogator responsible, Glendale Walls, served 2 months in military prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In the same way that the Republicans are literally working for ISIS by starting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and torturing Muslim prisoners in Abu Grarib, the black sites, and Guantanamo.