Listen all! This is the truth of it. Fighting leads to killing, and killing gets to warring. And that was damn near the death of us all. Look at us now! Busted up, and everyone talking about hard rain! But we've learned, by the dust of them all... Bartertown learned. Now, when men get to fighting, it happens here! And it finishes here! Two men enter; one man leaves.
And, of course, Aunty said it better: Do you know who I was? Nobody. Except on the day after, I was still alive. This nobody had a chance to be somebody.
During one gaming night, whilst raiding the fridge, I walked through the room where my friend's wife was watching The Running Man. She had never seen it before (!). It happened to be the Buzzsaw scene.
I snarled "I LOVE THIS SAW. THIS SAW IS A PART OF ME. I'M GONNA MAKE IT PART OF YOU!"
Then, seconds later, Buzzsaw said something similar.
I digress. It was about corporations? Or something? Huh.
The best part about it is that it's a remake of Anabasis. I saw the movie before I knew about that... but, even so, it plays like a very, very old story even as it's set in "modern" America. Can you dig it?
(Also, The Furies terrified me when I was a little kid...)
If you allow the BoE to get into the schools’ business, the YEC people are going to take over the BoE (like what’s currently underway in Texas), because duh, when you aggregate power you aggregate the ability for that power to be take over and used by a different agenda.
If you have decentralized checks and balances, it’s very hard for a problem to become pervasive. That’s what we’re trying to achieve, here. Not stop all possibility of YEC loonies taking over anything to do with education. That’s an impossible goal, kind of like the war on drugs.
I agree with this so much that it seems excessive and it kinda creeps me out.
Isn't the problem *NOT* the "closet creationists" that might be hiding in the system but the "out and proud creationists" that are the ones with The Children that they are sending to the schools and demanding that their world views be treated respectfully?
If the price for getting buy-in from an additional 20% of parents out there is to allow an "ID" disclaimer taking up all of 3 minutes on the first day of Biology class, are we willing to pay that?
Would the ID disclaimer poison all of the children in the class and thus prevent us from having a new generation of doctors?
On the other end of the spectrum, I've got a friend who teaches math in Pennsylvania (the not-Philly, not-Pittsburgh part) and he told me that he has a lot of rules for his word problems that he has to give the students. He can't assume a rural setting, he can't assume an urban setting... and so this means he can't have "Billy" walk a certain number of blocks in an hour. He has some students that are low income and, as such, he can't give "Billy" a bike to ride. Lots of little rules dictating what he can and can't have "Billy" do in a word problem before we even get to the math part.
What price are we willing to pay to teach the things we want taught?
Are we willing to deal with the indignities of sure, maybe evolution is God's design?
Are we willing to inflict the indignities of "Billy" riding a bike and going 16 blocks in 8 minutes upon poor rural students?
I don't have kids and, as such, don't really have a dog in this fight outside of wanting the best education for the kids of my loved ones... but it seems to me that there are a lot of things we ask the schools to do that do not involve stuff like "teaching math or science" and it sometimes feels like those things are given a higher priority than "teaching math or science"... and, as such, we oughtn't be surprised when our children are slipping when it comes to math or science.
It has been established that Batman, and by extension, DC Comics in general is far, far superior to Marvel.
To be honest, I have to question whether someone who argues pro-Marvel sentiments is on the payroll, or is related to someone who is, or is merely stupid, or just enjoys being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian without having any real opinion of his or her own like some soulless golem who was programed by his or her rabbi to spout nonsense in the face of studied research.
It's libertarians like that that give the other 5% of us a bad name.
I would have gone down the "what other groups do you think ought to have their First Amendment rights restricted?" road, myself. Depending on whether I had been drinking, maybe I would have worked book burning into the question... sigh. Woulda coulda shoulda.
In any case: Don't trust the 95% of Libertarians who respond to every issue as if you were on Team Blue... whether or not you happen to be.
Team Gold is not Team Red and ought not argue as if they were.
A "bad" teacher is not only a teacher that you would choose to not teach your children, but the children of a dear friend of yours who has moved to another state entirely and who you will most likely not see again excepting various holiday-related reasons.
given the huge societal disparities between 2006 Gaza and 2011 West Bank
I'm a fan of a three-state solution, myself... but there have been no shortage of plans for the last 6,017 years. One thing that has been shown by Iraq (and Egypt and Libya and other places acrost the Middle East) is that culture is very, very, very, very important when it comes to establishing a State.
No plan survives first contact with culture.
But I would also respond with a question: is your (admittedly impossible) thought experiment meaningful in the context of reaching a realistic, viable Palestinian state? If not, why does it interest you?
Only insofar as if every single Jewish inhabitant of Israel leaving at noon on Ash Wednesday would not result in a realistic, viable Palestinian state (or, hell, even providing the foundation for such), I don't think that someone waving a piece of paper in the air would do it.
But, hey, maybe I'm wrong. As I said, they seem to be on a good vector. I hope they stay on it.
I suspect that a "meaningful" (whatever that means) Palestinian State requires, among other things, "meaningful" attempts at a Palestinian State's creation.
Dig, if you will, the idea of Israel disappearing entirely. Whoops! Where'd they go? They were all raptured? Now... that doesn't make any sense at all... but here we are and every Jewish inhabitant of Israel is now gone. Vanished.
Is it more likely that:
A) The Palestinians move into Israel and ask a handful of other countries to give help with engineers who can train the Palestinian people to run the electric plants and maintain the electric grid, run the water plants, and run the sewage processing plants?
B) The Palestinians burn down the (now empty) Synagogues and any other buildings that offend their sensibilities?
It seems to me that B is more likely (though I base that pretty much on what happened after the Gaza withdrawal and, as we all know, anecdotes are not data!)
As B strikes me as more likely, I have come to the conclusion that a "meaningful" Palestinian State is not possible. If A were more likely, I suspect that there isn't much that most folks could do to *PREVENT* the Palestinians from establishing a meaningful state, like, 20 minutes from now. (They're in a much, much better place than they were in the 90's and, for that matter, the early oughts and, as such, I see them on a good vector and maintain hope that A will be more likely at some point... I don't know that they're necessarily there, though.)
Thinking about this some more, this also applies to most forms of prohibition.
Severe gun control (in America, anyway) means that we get all of the downsides of gun ownership (bad guys having guns) and none of the upsides (good guys having guns).
Prohibition of alcohol meant that we got all of the downsides of alcohol consumption (drunken Irish people urinating publically) as well as a handful of new downsides (Al Capone) and none of the upsides of alcohol consumption.
The War on Drugs means that we get all of the downsides of drug use and none of the upsides of drug use (Medicinal MJ, for example... but, in Colorado Springs anyway, we've got 8 pages of ads in the local weekly rag for medicinal weed so *THAT* is finally falling away too).
Making X illegal tends to mean that you only get the downsides of X... which, of course, makes it easier to double down and make the downsides even more stark, which, of course makes it easier to double down...
And that means politics and policy changes, and maybe even pretty serious revisions of some basic institutional structures.
I agree in theory. Sure.
What will it mean in practice?
Here's my suspicion: in any argument over who needs to change, the emphasis will be on the need for the needy to change and not on the need for the decent enough Samaritans who walk around saving the drowning at little to no cost to them.
I defended the idea, in theory, of long (but certainly not indefinite) detentions without the pressing of charges in the cases of really, really bad terrorism cases such as, in theory, the dirty bomb.
Hey, look at it this way, I said. Imagine if Jose had succeeded in building a dirty bomb and having it go off in, oh, the Sears Tower. Dozens, maybe hundreds, would die in the panic and ensuing fallout, radiation sickness, so on and so forth. Additionally, there would be that backlash against Muslims that everybody has been waiting to have happen.
You put both of these things on the scale, it's obvious that the long (but surely not indefinite) detention of Jose Padilla without charges is the lesser evil!
And then the day came that they charged him and it was chewing bubble gum on Sunday type charges.
All of my "surely, in theory, we agree that you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" rhetoric was used in defense of throwing a guy in jail for distributing pamphlets. Proverbially.
Since then I've been a lot more humorless about this stuff.
(Ironically, I've noticed a lot of Democrats gaining a sense of humor about this stuff in the wake of Obama's election. "Well, to be sure, you have to understand...")
Now you’re telling me that the disproportionate number of poor people (is that right?) in jail is the result of mutual obligations.
Not quite.
The disproportionate number of poor people in jail is the result of "society" not seeing poor people as holding up their end of the mutual obligations.
I'm not talking about murder, or property crime, or assault. I'm talking about the mind-bogglingly huge number of folks in prison for reasons related to the drug trade (and that's without getting into the sheer number of murders, property crimes, and assaults related to the drug trade).
Stillwater: do you agree that society in general contains the attitude that Food Stamps ought to be used for Healthy Food?
This premise to my argument seems fairly evident to me in looking at society. If you do not see that this premise has any foundation, I suppose I can find articles or something.
Do you agree that society in general has different attitudes toward drunkenness and/or drug use in the powerful/productive and those who are on the wrong side of the tracks?
Again, this premise to my argument seems fairly evident to me in looking at society. If you do not see that this premise has any foundation, I suppose I can find articles or something.
Do you see these as mere assertions, unfounded as likely as not?
On “Cultural artifacts from the age of fear”
By the *BEST* movie, you mean.
Listen all! This is the truth of it. Fighting leads to killing, and killing gets to warring. And that was damn near the death of us all. Look at us now! Busted up, and everyone talking about hard rain! But we've learned, by the dust of them all... Bartertown learned. Now, when men get to fighting, it happens here! And it finishes here! Two men enter; one man leaves.
And, of course, Aunty said it better: Do you know who I was? Nobody. Except on the day after, I was still alive. This nobody had a chance to be somebody.
"
During one gaming night, whilst raiding the fridge, I walked through the room where my friend's wife was watching The Running Man. She had never seen it before (!). It happened to be the Buzzsaw scene.
I snarled "I LOVE THIS SAW. THIS SAW IS A PART OF ME. I'M GONNA MAKE IT PART OF YOU!"
Then, seconds later, Buzzsaw said something similar.
I digress. It was about corporations? Or something? Huh.
"
"Is that a vintage coat?"
"No. It's a right now coat."
"
The best part about it is that it's a remake of Anabasis. I saw the movie before I knew about that... but, even so, it plays like a very, very old story even as it's set in "modern" America. Can you dig it?
(Also, The Furies terrified me when I was a little kid...)
On “Why does the Finnish public school system work?”
If you allow the BoE to get into the schools’ business, the YEC people are going to take over the BoE (like what’s currently underway in Texas), because duh, when you aggregate power you aggregate the ability for that power to be take over and used by a different agenda.
If you have decentralized checks and balances, it’s very hard for a problem to become pervasive. That’s what we’re trying to achieve, here. Not stop all possibility of YEC loonies taking over anything to do with education. That’s an impossible goal, kind of like the war on drugs.
I agree with this so much that it seems excessive and it kinda creeps me out.
"
"We're Present! Evolution is not pleasant! To it we do not assent! Get used to it!"
"
Isn't the problem *NOT* the "closet creationists" that might be hiding in the system but the "out and proud creationists" that are the ones with The Children that they are sending to the schools and demanding that their world views be treated respectfully?
"
What price are we willing to pay?
If the price for getting buy-in from an additional 20% of parents out there is to allow an "ID" disclaimer taking up all of 3 minutes on the first day of Biology class, are we willing to pay that?
Would the ID disclaimer poison all of the children in the class and thus prevent us from having a new generation of doctors?
On the other end of the spectrum, I've got a friend who teaches math in Pennsylvania (the not-Philly, not-Pittsburgh part) and he told me that he has a lot of rules for his word problems that he has to give the students. He can't assume a rural setting, he can't assume an urban setting... and so this means he can't have "Billy" walk a certain number of blocks in an hour. He has some students that are low income and, as such, he can't give "Billy" a bike to ride. Lots of little rules dictating what he can and can't have "Billy" do in a word problem before we even get to the math part.
What price are we willing to pay to teach the things we want taught?
Are we willing to deal with the indignities of sure, maybe evolution is God's design?
Are we willing to inflict the indignities of "Billy" riding a bike and going 16 blocks in 8 minutes upon poor rural students?
I don't have kids and, as such, don't really have a dog in this fight outside of wanting the best education for the kids of my loved ones... but it seems to me that there are a lot of things we ask the schools to do that do not involve stuff like "teaching math or science" and it sometimes feels like those things are given a higher priority than "teaching math or science"... and, as such, we oughtn't be surprised when our children are slipping when it comes to math or science.
"
"If you want Finland’s fruits, you must also accept its branches, trunk and roots."
Does that include the homogenous society thing?
On “Labor Roundtable: The Labor Movement, Redistributive Justice, and Procedural Fairness”
It has been established that Batman, and by extension, DC Comics in general is far, far superior to Marvel.
To be honest, I have to question whether someone who argues pro-Marvel sentiments is on the payroll, or is related to someone who is, or is merely stupid, or just enjoys being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian without having any real opinion of his or her own like some soulless golem who was programed by his or her rabbi to spout nonsense in the face of studied research.
Which of those are you?
"
It's libertarians like that that give the other 5% of us a bad name.
I would have gone down the "what other groups do you think ought to have their First Amendment rights restricted?" road, myself. Depending on whether I had been drinking, maybe I would have worked book burning into the question... sigh. Woulda coulda shoulda.
In any case: Don't trust the 95% of Libertarians who respond to every issue as if you were on Team Blue... whether or not you happen to be.
Team Gold is not Team Red and ought not argue as if they were.
"
A "bad" teacher is not only a teacher that you would choose to not teach your children, but the children of a dear friend of yours who has moved to another state entirely and who you will most likely not see again excepting various holiday-related reasons.
This seems a good enough measurement for me.
On “Live from the J Street National Conference”
given the huge societal disparities between 2006 Gaza and 2011 West Bank
I'm a fan of a three-state solution, myself... but there have been no shortage of plans for the last 6,017 years. One thing that has been shown by Iraq (and Egypt and Libya and other places acrost the Middle East) is that culture is very, very, very, very important when it comes to establishing a State.
No plan survives first contact with culture.
But I would also respond with a question: is your (admittedly impossible) thought experiment meaningful in the context of reaching a realistic, viable Palestinian state? If not, why does it interest you?
Only insofar as if every single Jewish inhabitant of Israel leaving at noon on Ash Wednesday would not result in a realistic, viable Palestinian state (or, hell, even providing the foundation for such), I don't think that someone waving a piece of paper in the air would do it.
But, hey, maybe I'm wrong. As I said, they seem to be on a good vector. I hope they stay on it.
"
I suspect that a "meaningful" (whatever that means) Palestinian State requires, among other things, "meaningful" attempts at a Palestinian State's creation.
Dig, if you will, the idea of Israel disappearing entirely. Whoops! Where'd they go? They were all raptured? Now... that doesn't make any sense at all... but here we are and every Jewish inhabitant of Israel is now gone. Vanished.
Is it more likely that:
A) The Palestinians move into Israel and ask a handful of other countries to give help with engineers who can train the Palestinian people to run the electric plants and maintain the electric grid, run the water plants, and run the sewage processing plants?
B) The Palestinians burn down the (now empty) Synagogues and any other buildings that offend their sensibilities?
It seems to me that B is more likely (though I base that pretty much on what happened after the Gaza withdrawal and, as we all know, anecdotes are not data!)
As B strikes me as more likely, I have come to the conclusion that a "meaningful" Palestinian State is not possible. If A were more likely, I suspect that there isn't much that most folks could do to *PREVENT* the Palestinians from establishing a meaningful state, like, 20 minutes from now. (They're in a much, much better place than they were in the 90's and, for that matter, the early oughts and, as such, I see them on a good vector and maintain hope that A will be more likely at some point... I don't know that they're necessarily there, though.)
"
_The Dark Ages_?
On “Delusional goat-herds with box-cutters and other threats to the Republic”
From what I understand, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a surprise to the TLAs in Warshington.
On “Incoherent Democracy, Again”
Thinking about this some more, this also applies to most forms of prohibition.
Severe gun control (in America, anyway) means that we get all of the downsides of gun ownership (bad guys having guns) and none of the upsides (good guys having guns).
Prohibition of alcohol meant that we got all of the downsides of alcohol consumption (drunken Irish people urinating publically) as well as a handful of new downsides (Al Capone) and none of the upsides of alcohol consumption.
The War on Drugs means that we get all of the downsides of drug use and none of the upsides of drug use (Medicinal MJ, for example... but, in Colorado Springs anyway, we've got 8 pages of ads in the local weekly rag for medicinal weed so *THAT* is finally falling away too).
Making X illegal tends to mean that you only get the downsides of X... which, of course, makes it easier to double down and make the downsides even more stark, which, of course makes it easier to double down...
On “Delusional goat-herds with box-cutters and other threats to the Republic”
A lot of people had no idea until, like, the 90's.
On “The Crime of Making the Government Look Foolish”
The problem is that he was tried in the court of public opinion for being a terrorist who was building a dirty bomb.
The stuff that they could make stick was stuff like "conspiracy".
"
That was Herbert's.
On “Incoherent Democracy, Again”
And that means politics and policy changes, and maybe even pretty serious revisions of some basic institutional structures.
I agree in theory. Sure.
What will it mean in practice?
Here's my suspicion: in any argument over who needs to change, the emphasis will be on the need for the needy to change and not on the need for the decent enough Samaritans who walk around saving the drowning at little to no cost to them.
On “The Crime of Making the Government Look Foolish”
The Italian Prime Minister's philandering being made public?
"
It was Jose Padilla that made me wake up.
I defended the idea, in theory, of long (but certainly not indefinite) detentions without the pressing of charges in the cases of really, really bad terrorism cases such as, in theory, the dirty bomb.
Hey, look at it this way, I said. Imagine if Jose had succeeded in building a dirty bomb and having it go off in, oh, the Sears Tower. Dozens, maybe hundreds, would die in the panic and ensuing fallout, radiation sickness, so on and so forth. Additionally, there would be that backlash against Muslims that everybody has been waiting to have happen.
You put both of these things on the scale, it's obvious that the long (but surely not indefinite) detention of Jose Padilla without charges is the lesser evil!
And then the day came that they charged him and it was chewing bubble gum on Sunday type charges.
All of my "surely, in theory, we agree that you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" rhetoric was used in defense of throwing a guy in jail for distributing pamphlets. Proverbially.
Since then I've been a lot more humorless about this stuff.
(Ironically, I've noticed a lot of Democrats gaining a sense of humor about this stuff in the wake of Obama's election. "Well, to be sure, you have to understand...")
On “Incoherent Democracy, Again”
Now you’re telling me that the disproportionate number of poor people (is that right?) in jail is the result of mutual obligations.
Not quite.
The disproportionate number of poor people in jail is the result of "society" not seeing poor people as holding up their end of the mutual obligations.
I'm not talking about murder, or property crime, or assault. I'm talking about the mind-bogglingly huge number of folks in prison for reasons related to the drug trade (and that's without getting into the sheer number of murders, property crimes, and assaults related to the drug trade).
"
Stillwater: do you agree that society in general contains the attitude that Food Stamps ought to be used for Healthy Food?
This premise to my argument seems fairly evident to me in looking at society. If you do not see that this premise has any foundation, I suppose I can find articles or something.
Do you agree that society in general has different attitudes toward drunkenness and/or drug use in the powerful/productive and those who are on the wrong side of the tracks?
Again, this premise to my argument seems fairly evident to me in looking at society. If you do not see that this premise has any foundation, I suppose I can find articles or something.
Do you see these as mere assertions, unfounded as likely as not?