The Republicans don't like any talk outside the party lines. Have you noticed that pretty much every bill consists of 100% of Republicans voting the exact same way?
In defense of the Republicans, the Communists did the same thing.
Thanks for that link. Dubner and Levin are not the guys I was thinking of. They make an interesting argument. However, they merely reinforce my belief that Dubner and Levin are charlatans, a conclusion I came to when I looked up some of their data once before (on automobile safety) and found out they got it all wrong.
Dubner and Levin say that there was a natural experiment during the Vietnam war. Young men got a lottery number, men with low numbers were drafted, and men with high numbers were not. The students who were not drafted, and went to college, earned more money afterwards than those who were drafted. QED college makes you earn more money.
The problem with that argument is that students who got a low number could also get deferred by going to college. The poster boy is Dick Cheney, who spent the Vietnam war days in years of undergraduate college and graduate school like Cheney. Wealthy people could go to college more easily, especially years of graduate school. So the college graduates were wealthier even before they went to college.
So Dubner and Levin's sample is biased.
In fact, one of the ways working-class men have traditionally improved their career prospects and lifetime income is by going into the military. With the right training, the military can be as valuable as college. I've met people who learned electronics in the Air Force and the Navy. It's the perfect vocational school, because they train people in skills that are in demand. (They also pay for college.) Wouldn't it be nice if we could have the same vocational education, without the unnecessary expense of going to war?
Here's a story I remember reading about Bill Gates, and I wonder whether it's true.
His father was a millionaire lawyer (that much is true). His mother was on a lot of "charity" boards, and on one of those boards, she met an executive of IBM. At that moment in history, IBM was developing the PC as a skonk works project, and needed a simple operating system. His mother hooked the executive, and IBM, up with her son, and he sold them his operating system, which was a derivative of UNIX that he bought from somebody else. IBM foolishly or generously bought non-exclusive rights to the operating system, so that he could sell it to other companies.
How much of that is true? How did Bill Gates make the connection to IBM? I haven't read all the biographies.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
on
Just Say No To College
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
At one time, getting a college degree in any field would guarantee middle-class success. There was a sociologist (I forget his name) who wrote a couple of books about that, based on studies of lifetime career progressions of large numbers of people, and that's what he said.
Unfortunately, you have to follow people 50 or 60 years to find out what childhood experiences made them successful, and by the time you get your data, the world has changed. After World War II, a college degree was a ticket to success for a middle-class and especially a working-class kid. It was class mobility. There were businesses that needed a kid who had basic math and physics, and they were willing to train them.
Today we've eliminated a lot of labor, and outsourced a lot more. There's no more class mobility, the lower-class kids are getting stuck, and competition (with China) is driving wages down.
sounds like the thousands of inner-city kids who all think that their ticket out of the ghetto is to become an NBA star. Sure, it works for a couple of dozen of lucky people per year, but for the rest, it's an abysmal failure.
That's known as the "Doctor J syndrome". There was a black sociologist at I think Berkeley who did some good studies about this. Does anybody know his name?
I'm making more money than all of my 4-year degree friends because I decided long ago to educate myself in a field that's likely to GROW (and not things like art history, where you go to school just to teach other kids, so they can teach other kids, and so on)
Whatever you may have accomplished, don't put down art history. I've taken a few art history courses.
First, art history is a subset of history. Most history books about a period will have a chapter on the art of the period, because that usually gives a pretty good insight into the period. Many of the best scientists and innovators today (Nobel laureates for example) started out as history majors.
Second, I've learned more about engineering from art history books than I learned from my engineering courses. That includes one book in particular, Siegfried Gideon's Mechanization takes command, which describes how mechanization changed our daily and working environment through history particularly from the 19th century. Do a Google Images search for the Bauhaus, which created the look of the modern world that we take for granted today. They could design your ass.
How do you make things easy to use and manufacture? Those problems have been solved decades ago. If you don't know industrial history, you're going to waste time (maybe all your time) solving problems that have been solved before, and you might not solve them as well. One of the best ways to find out how they did it before is through art history.
Decent health care -- 5 weeks vacation? You think that's bad?
Sounds like what every other developed western country gives all its citizens. I want every American to get that too (as we used to).
You sound like you have too much money. I don't think you're paying enough taxes. I think your taxes should be raised.
Taxes in the US are the lowest they've been in modern times, and lower than any other developed country. The rich are moochers and freeloaders like Romney who pay a lower proportion than the rest of us (thanks to handouts like the Bush tax cuts). That tax money should come from the rich.
Therefore by your logic you're not a party to a social contract with Al Qaeda, so Al Qaeda has no obligation to you.
If Al Qaeda wants to blow up a building with you in it and kill 3,000 people, you have no right to prevent it, and Al Qaeda has no responsibility to you, according to your logic, right?
And if Al Qaeda captures a journalist, like Daniel Pearl, and decides to behead him, he has no rights because he's a foreigner in their land, according to your logic, right?
You sound like you failed Biology 101. As the evolutionary biologist Peter Kropotkin said, the "fittest" is not the one with sharpest claws and teeth, or even the strongest or cleverest. Kropotkin observed that the fittest animals are those who cooperate with each other for mutual benefit.
As applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, evolutionary biologists (in Science 18 May 2012 for example) have found in human societies at all times and all places are capable not only of first, destroying their enemies with war, but second, reconciling themselves with their enemies. The Israels have excelled at the first but not the second.
Interesting exercise: How would we feel if our enemies applied the same kind of law to people who support us?
So if the Cubans jailed people who were giving material support (distributing propaganda) on behalf of a country (i.e., the US) that was trying to overthrow their government (by bombing their airliners and tourist hotels), our Secretary of State would agree that that isn't a violation of human rights.
Or if the governments in Haiti, Venezuela, Gaza, or all those other governments that we're trying to overthrow, put people in jail for giving material support to the US, our Secretary of State would agree that under US law, we do the same thing.
"the system is deeply flawed, and the emergence of DNA evidence just exposed some of those flaws." For most criminal cases DNA evidence plays no role, and there is no reason to believe those people are less likely to be innocent.
You are correct.
I heard a panel where Barry C. Scheck and some others from the Innocence Project spoke.
Scheck said that the important lesson of DNA testing was not that a few specific people were innocent, but that it demonstrates the error rate of the criminal justice system. The DNA cases are a sampling.
People were falsely convicted, most often by eyewitness testimony and confessions, and the Innocence Project could prove that they were innocent because they were fortunate enough to be involved in crimes that involved DNA evidence.
This demonstrates how unreliable eyewitness testimony and confessions are.
It also demonstrates that other people must have been convicted falsely by eyewitness testimony and confessions, but have no DNA evidence to exonerate them.
(This was actually demonstrated before DNA testing. Psychologists tested the accuracy of eyewitness testimony decades ago. People have been convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony in circumstances where the eyewitness couldn't possibly have recognized their face -- like being on the other side of the street, watching a crime being committed in dim light. Defense lawyers aren't allowed to have experts testify on the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony.)
Significantly, it also demonstrates how flawed the criminal justice system is.
Some of these people were on death row. The advocates of the death penalty will often claim that we're so thorough and careful to protect the rights of defendants that it's impossible for an innocent person to be convicted. (Supreme Court Justice Scalia seems to have made that argument.) The sampling of cases that can be confirmed with DNA evidence demonstrates that they're wrong.
One good story about eyewitness testimony -- a young man was on trial for rape in New England. His defense lawyer was sitting in court, with a young man in a plaid shirt sitting next to him. He cross-examined the victim, asked her to describe the man who raped her, and then pulled the prosecutor's favorite line -- "Do you see that man in this court?" She pointed to the young man who had been sitting next to him. The lawyer asked the young man to identify himself. It wasn't the defendant. The lawyer had brought a decoy. The case collapsed, and his defendant was acquitted. But the judge sanctioned the lawyer. Apparently, they don't sanction the prosecution for bringing an witness who's so unreliable that she will testify that the wrong person did it. But they do sanction a defense lawyer who demonstrates how unreliable the witness is.
Professors like that are assholes. There was a series of articles in Science about the problems of science teaching in the US, and why good students don't go into a science career. That was one of the problems. A lot of physics profs take it upon themselves to "pull out the weeds." A scientist said, "They're not pulling out the weeds, they're tearing up the whole garden."
You can read the statements of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (organizations founded by Jews) which condemn violations of international law by Palestinians and Israelis alike. There are clear standards.
This is the kind of disproportionate response Israel has been committing. You can see many more cases like this in the Goldstone report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Fact_Finding_Mission_on_the_Gaza_Conflict I could accept an Israeli incursion into Gaza if at least they limited themselves to killing combatants and not deliberately killing non-threatening civilians, but they don't. If you're an American, your tax money is paying for this. Are you willing to accept this?
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 anbulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life.)
Second, what should they do? The Palestinians, including Hamas, have been making peace offers for years. One of the Hamas leaders, Ahmed Jabari, was prepared to sign a long-term peace agreement; he was one of the first assassinated by Israel. It really seems that Netanyahu doesn't want peace. This is a consistent pattern -- every time Hamas calls a ceasefire, the Israelis assassinate somebody.
Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.
Gershon Baskin is a co-chairman of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Shalit.
The vast vast vast majority of people on both sides favor a two state solution. the US wants this too, as does virtually everybody else. its the obvious answer. why dosen't it happen?
Because in order to have a 2-state solution, Israel would have to withdraw to the 1967 borders, and shut down its settlements.
Some of the settlers claim to believe in their nationalistic irredentist mission to populate the historical land of Israel, but some of them just want a nice cheap house with a swimming pool within driving distance from their job in Jerusalem.
I don't know if they really believe in this religion or if it's just an excuse that they use. As Rupert Murdoch said in a different context, "You don't really believe that rubbish, do you?"
I think it can be explained by evolutionary biology more easily than religion. Throughout evolution, one tribe has always exterminated their neighbors and taken their land, sometimes capturing their women, sometimes not. Biologists see that today with chimpanzees in their native habitat.
That's known in international law as a "disproportionate response."
The Israeli Defense Forces lawyers have warned generals who made those kind of swaggering remarks during the Gaza invasion to avoid traveling to countries with laws that allow them to prosecute war criminals.
There's a constant back and forth, and on both sides, there's always something or someone to avenge.
According to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as of November 13, Palestinian militants had fired 797 rockets into Israel in the course of 2012 , and according to the Israeli human rights organization Btselem, between January 2009 (the conclusion of the last all-out Gaza war) and September of this year, 25 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, and 314 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces, with six more being killed by Israeli civilians.
Wednesday November 14
Reports emerged that Israel has targeted Ahmed Jabari, head of Hamas's military wing; Israel confirmed the assassination, citing his "decade-long terrorist activity," and said that killing was the part of an operation in which the military struck 20 different targets across Gaza. HaAretz [Note: Later reports indicate that Jabari was considering a permanent truce agreement at the time of his assassination]
Slashdot Mirror
Before Reagan.
The Republicans don't like any talk outside the party lines. Have you noticed that pretty much every bill consists of 100% of Republicans voting the exact same way?
In defense of the Republicans, the Communists did the same thing.
You younger Slashdotters may not believe this, but at one time we had conservatives (and Republicans) with principles.
(Not that the Democrats are all that great.)
In the sciences, writers are expected to be truthful about the limitations of their conclusions.
This gives know-nothings the opportunity to quote them out of context and misinterpret those statements.
Thanks for that link. Dubner and Levin are not the guys I was thinking of. They make an interesting argument. However, they merely reinforce my belief that Dubner and Levin are charlatans, a conclusion I came to when I looked up some of their data once before (on automobile safety) and found out they got it all wrong.
Dubner and Levin say that there was a natural experiment during the Vietnam war. Young men got a lottery number, men with low numbers were drafted, and men with high numbers were not. The students who were not drafted, and went to college, earned more money afterwards than those who were drafted. QED college makes you earn more money.
The problem with that argument is that students who got a low number could also get deferred by going to college. The poster boy is Dick Cheney, who spent the Vietnam war days in years of undergraduate college and graduate school like Cheney. Wealthy people could go to college more easily, especially years of graduate school. So the college graduates were wealthier even before they went to college.
So Dubner and Levin's sample is biased.
In fact, one of the ways working-class men have traditionally improved their career prospects and lifetime income is by going into the military. With the right training, the military can be as valuable as college. I've met people who learned electronics in the Air Force and the Navy. It's the perfect vocational school, because they train people in skills that are in demand. (They also pay for college.) Wouldn't it be nice if we could have the same vocational education, without the unnecessary expense of going to war?
You don't seem to know that Gerard Piel, the founding editor and publisher of Scientific American, was a history major, do you?
Here's a story I remember reading about Bill Gates, and I wonder whether it's true.
His father was a millionaire lawyer (that much is true). His mother was on a lot of "charity" boards, and on one of those boards, she met an executive of IBM. At that moment in history, IBM was developing the PC as a skonk works project, and needed a simple operating system. His mother hooked the executive, and IBM, up with her son, and he sold them his operating system, which was a derivative of UNIX that he bought from somebody else. IBM foolishly or generously bought non-exclusive rights to the operating system, so that he could sell it to other companies.
How much of that is true? How did Bill Gates make the connection to IBM? I haven't read all the biographies.
At one time, getting a college degree in any field would guarantee middle-class success. There was a sociologist (I forget his name) who wrote a couple of books about that, based on studies of lifetime career progressions of large numbers of people, and that's what he said.
Unfortunately, you have to follow people 50 or 60 years to find out what childhood experiences made them successful, and by the time you get your data, the world has changed. After World War II, a college degree was a ticket to success for a middle-class and especially a working-class kid. It was class mobility. There were businesses that needed a kid who had basic math and physics, and they were willing to train them.
Today we've eliminated a lot of labor, and outsourced a lot more. There's no more class mobility, the lower-class kids are getting stuck, and competition (with China) is driving wages down.
sounds like the thousands of inner-city kids who all think that their ticket out of the ghetto is to become an NBA star. Sure, it works for a couple of dozen of lucky people per year, but for the rest, it's an abysmal failure.
That's known as the "Doctor J syndrome". There was a black sociologist at I think Berkeley who did some good studies about this. Does anybody know his name?
I'm making more money than all of my 4-year degree friends because I decided long ago to educate myself in a field that's likely to GROW (and not things like art history, where you go to school just to teach other kids, so they can teach other kids, and so on)
Whatever you may have accomplished, don't put down art history. I've taken a few art history courses.
First, art history is a subset of history. Most history books about a period will have a chapter on the art of the period, because that usually gives a pretty good insight into the period. Many of the best scientists and innovators today (Nobel laureates for example) started out as history majors.
Second, I've learned more about engineering from art history books than I learned from my engineering courses. That includes one book in particular, Siegfried Gideon's Mechanization takes command, which describes how mechanization changed our daily and working environment through history particularly from the 19th century. Do a Google Images search for the Bauhaus, which created the look of the modern world that we take for granted today. They could design your ass.
How do you make things easy to use and manufacture? Those problems have been solved decades ago. If you don't know industrial history, you're going to waste time (maybe all your time) solving problems that have been solved before, and you might not solve them as well. One of the best ways to find out how they did it before is through art history.
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=446
Decent health care -- 5 weeks vacation? You think that's bad?
Sounds like what every other developed western country gives all its citizens. I want every American to get that too (as we used to).
You sound like you have too much money. I don't think you're paying enough taxes. I think your taxes should be raised.
Taxes in the US are the lowest they've been in modern times, and lower than any other developed country. The rich are moochers and freeloaders like Romney who pay a lower proportion than the rest of us (thanks to handouts like the Bush tax cuts). That tax money should come from the rich.
You will not reconcile yourself to enemies if you don't listen to what they are actually saying.
That's especially true if you only listen to what the propagandists are saying about them.
Therefore by your logic you're not a party to a social contract with Al Qaeda, so Al Qaeda has no obligation to you.
If Al Qaeda wants to blow up a building with you in it and kill 3,000 people, you have no right to prevent it, and Al Qaeda has no responsibility to you, according to your logic, right?
And if Al Qaeda captures a journalist, like Daniel Pearl, and decides to behead him, he has no rights because he's a foreigner in their land, according to your logic, right?
You sound like you failed Biology 101. As the evolutionary biologist Peter Kropotkin said, the "fittest" is not the one with sharpest claws and teeth, or even the strongest or cleverest. Kropotkin observed that the fittest animals are those who cooperate with each other for mutual benefit.
As applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, evolutionary biologists (in Science 18 May 2012 for example) have found in human societies at all times and all places are capable not only of first, destroying their enemies with war, but second, reconciling themselves with their enemies. The Israels have excelled at the first but not the second.
Interesting exercise: How would we feel if our enemies applied the same kind of law to people who support us?
So if the Cubans jailed people who were giving material support (distributing propaganda) on behalf of a country (i.e., the US) that was trying to overthrow their government (by bombing their airliners and tourist hotels), our Secretary of State would agree that that isn't a violation of human rights.
Or if the governments in Haiti, Venezuela, Gaza, or all those other governments that we're trying to overthrow, put people in jail for giving material support to the US, our Secretary of State would agree that under US law, we do the same thing.
"the system is deeply flawed, and the emergence of DNA evidence just exposed some of those flaws." For most criminal cases DNA evidence plays no role, and there is no reason to believe those people are less likely to be innocent.
You are correct.
I heard a panel where Barry C. Scheck and some others from the Innocence Project spoke.
Scheck said that the important lesson of DNA testing was not that a few specific people were innocent, but that it demonstrates the error rate of the criminal justice system. The DNA cases are a sampling.
People were falsely convicted, most often by eyewitness testimony and confessions, and the Innocence Project could prove that they were innocent because they were fortunate enough to be involved in crimes that involved DNA evidence.
This demonstrates how unreliable eyewitness testimony and confessions are.
It also demonstrates that other people must have been convicted falsely by eyewitness testimony and confessions, but have no DNA evidence to exonerate them.
(This was actually demonstrated before DNA testing. Psychologists tested the accuracy of eyewitness testimony decades ago. People have been convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony in circumstances where the eyewitness couldn't possibly have recognized their face -- like being on the other side of the street, watching a crime being committed in dim light. Defense lawyers aren't allowed to have experts testify on the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony.)
Significantly, it also demonstrates how flawed the criminal justice system is.
Some of these people were on death row. The advocates of the death penalty will often claim that we're so thorough and careful to protect the rights of defendants that it's impossible for an innocent person to be convicted. (Supreme Court Justice Scalia seems to have made that argument.) The sampling of cases that can be confirmed with DNA evidence demonstrates that they're wrong.
One good story about eyewitness testimony -- a young man was on trial for rape in New England. His defense lawyer was sitting in court, with a young man in a plaid shirt sitting next to him. He cross-examined the victim, asked her to describe the man who raped her, and then pulled the prosecutor's favorite line -- "Do you see that man in this court?" She pointed to the young man who had been sitting next to him. The lawyer asked the young man to identify himself. It wasn't the defendant. The lawyer had brought a decoy. The case collapsed, and his defendant was acquitted. But the judge sanctioned the lawyer. Apparently, they don't sanction the prosecution for bringing an witness who's so unreliable that she will testify that the wrong person did it. But they do sanction a defense lawyer who demonstrates how unreliable the witness is.
I had a prof who said 'I know what it takes to be a real physicist, and none of you have it' and failed the entire class.
Same thing happened to Ted Rall, the cartoonist. He was an engineering student at Columbia, and a visiting professor from England pulled the same line. http://www.rall.com/uploaded_images/YOLD1-89-28-717289.JPG
Professors like that are assholes. There was a series of articles in Science about the problems of science teaching in the US, and why good students don't go into a science career. That was one of the problems. A lot of physics profs take it upon themselves to "pull out the weeds." A scientist said, "They're not pulling out the weeds, they're tearing up the whole garden."
Not so crazy. Google "Dance Your PhD".
You can read the statements of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (organizations founded by Jews) which condemn violations of international law by Palestinians and Israelis alike. There are clear standards.
This is the kind of disproportionate response Israel has been committing. You can see many more cases like this in the Goldstone report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Fact_Finding_Mission_on_the_Gaza_Conflict I could accept an Israeli incursion into Gaza if at least they limited themselves to killing combatants and not deliberately killing non-threatening civilians, but they don't. If you're an American, your tax money is paying for this. Are you willing to accept this?
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/12session/A-HRC-12-48.pdf
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 anbulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life.)
Second, what should they do? The Palestinians, including Hamas, have been making peace offers for years. One of the Hamas leaders, Ahmed Jabari, was prepared to sign a long-term peace agreement; he was one of the first assassinated by Israel. It really seems that Netanyahu doesn't want peace. This is a consistent pattern -- every time Hamas calls a ceasefire, the Israelis assassinate somebody.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/israels-shortsighted-assassination.html
Op-Ed Contributor
Israel’s Shortsighted Assassination
By GERSHON BASKIN
Published: November 16, 2012
Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.
Gershon Baskin is a co-chairman of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Shalit.
The greater, more brutal the response, the more brutal the retaliation by the Palestinians, and the more Jews they kill.
Do you like to see Jews getting killed?
Lemme ask you this: who would you rather have move into the neighborhood: an Arab or a Jew?
Would I rather have a secular, peace-loving arab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzeldin_Abuelaish or a violent settler Jew http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Goldstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yigal_Amir ? I'll take the Arab any day.
The vast vast vast majority of people on both sides favor a two state solution. the US wants this too, as does virtually everybody else. its the obvious answer. why dosen't it happen?
Because in order to have a 2-state solution, Israel would have to withdraw to the 1967 borders, and shut down its settlements.
Some of the settlers claim to believe in their nationalistic irredentist mission to populate the historical land of Israel, but some of them just want a nice cheap house with a swimming pool within driving distance from their job in Jerusalem.
I don't know if they really believe in this religion or if it's just an excuse that they use. As Rupert Murdoch said in a different context, "You don't really believe that rubbish, do you?"
I think it can be explained by evolutionary biology more easily than religion. Throughout evolution, one tribe has always exterminated their neighbors and taken their land, sometimes capturing their women, sometimes not. Biologists see that today with chimpanzees in their native habitat.
That's known in international law as a "disproportionate response."
The Israeli Defense Forces lawyers have warned generals who made those kind of swaggering remarks during the Gaza invasion to avoid traveling to countries with laws that allow them to prosecute war criminals.
Here's a chronology.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/11/who-started-the-israel-gaza-conflict/265374/
Who Started the Israel-Gaza Conflict?
By Robert Wright
Nov 16 2012,
A summary of events in the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, Nov 8 - Nov 15
By Emily Hauser
There's a constant back and forth, and on both sides, there's always something or someone to avenge.
According to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as of November 13, Palestinian militants had fired 797 rockets into Israel in the course of 2012 , and according to the Israeli human rights organization Btselem, between January 2009 (the conclusion of the last all-out Gaza war) and September of this year, 25 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, and 314 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces, with six more being killed by Israeli civilians.
Wednesday November 14
Reports emerged that Israel has targeted Ahmed Jabari, head of Hamas's military wing; Israel confirmed the assassination, citing his "decade-long terrorist activity," and said that killing was the part of an operation in which the military struck 20 different targets across Gaza. HaAretz [Note: Later reports indicate that Jabari was considering a permanent truce agreement at the time of his assassination]