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w1ndex (Member Profile)

siftbot says...

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w1ndex (Member Profile)

16 seconds: The Killing of Anita Kurmann

Buttle says...

I reviewed the policy before posting, and concluded that this video does not qualify as snuff. Death is not presented as entertainment. Although the entire video is essentially about a single death and its causes and effects, the actual moment of Dr. Kurmann's demise is just one short but disturbing part.

newtboy said:

True, but that's not all it says....
The presence of human fatality is acceptable and not considered "snuff" if presented as a limited, incidental portion of a lengthy educational, informative news report or documentary that encompasses a much broader narrative. Our definition of "snuff" does include but is not exclusive to any short clip in which a human fatality occurs whether or not any victims are actually visible on camera.

As the fatal accident was the central point of the video and not incidental, and the video may or may not be considered lengthy and or news, I thought it a reasonable question to pose to the community.
To clarify, it was intended as a question not an accusation.

This is what a coward looks like

bareboards2 says...

Why doesn't he just call a lawyer?

Over four minutes long, and the answer is easy peasy.

And I agree with Dag. He is a human being.

He is also a human being with zero self-reflection skills. He feels empowered and powerful when he can scare others, but is terrified when the guns might be trained on him.

Zero self reflection. Zero understanding of cause and effect.

And a textbook example of Toxic Masculinity.

There are other ways of engaging the world. Get some therapy, dude.

Here's why the average millionaire's college GPA is 2.9

noims says...

Interesting stuff until the last line where I think he's mixing up cause and effect. He says that "not playing by the rules is advantageous once you get out of a closed system like education" using high earners as evidence. Instead he should be looking at people who exhibit those trails and seeing how successful they are relative to the high GPA crowd.

Liberal Redneck - Muslim Ban

enoch says...

radical islamic terrorism is the usage of a rigid fundamentalist interpretation as a justification predicated on abysmal politics.

ill-thought and short sighted politics is the tinder.
hyper-extremist fundamentalism is the match.

ISIS would never even have existed without al qeada,who themselves would not have existed without US interventionism into:iran,egypt and saudi arabia.

and this is going back almost 70 years.

so lets cut the shit with apologetics towards americas horrific blunders in regards to foreign policy.actions have consequences,there is a cause and effect,and when even in the 50's the CIA KNEW,and have stated as much,that there would be "blowback" from americas persistent interventionism in those regions.which stated goals (in more honest times) was to destabilize,dethrone (remove leaders not friendly to american business) and install leaders more pliant and easily manipulated (often times deposing democratically elected leaders to install despots.the shah and sadam come to mind).

see:chalmers johnson-blowback
see: Zbigniew Brzezinski-the grand chessboard.

or read this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/america-created-al-qaeda-and-the-isis-terror-group/5402881

so to act like islamic radicals just fell from the fucking sky,and popped out from thin air,due to something that has been boiling for almost 70 years is fucking ludicrous.

radicalization of certain groups in populations have long been understood,and well documented.

and religion,though the most popular,and easiest tool to motivate and justify heinous acts of violence for a political goal,is not the SOLE tool.

nationalism is another tool used to radicalize a population.
see:the nazi party.

but it always comes down to:tribalism of one kind or another.

@transmorpher

so when you use this "ISIS themselves, in their own magazine (Dabiq) go out of their way to explain that they are not motivated by the xenophobia or the US fighting wars in their countries. They make specifically state that their motivation is simply because you aren't muslim. You can go an read it for yourself. They are self confessed fanatics that need to kill you to go to heaven. "

to solidify your argument,all i see is someone ignoring the history and pertinent reasons why that group even exists.

you may recall that ISIS was once Al qeada,and they were SO radical,SO fanatical and SO violent in their execution of religious zeal..that even al qeada had to distance themselves.

because,again...
religion is used as the justification to enact terrorism due to bad politics.
but the GOAL is always political.

you may remember that in the early 90's the twin towers were attacked and it was the first time americans heard of al qeada,and osama bil laden.

who made a statement back in 1993 and then reiterated in 2001 after 9/11 that the stated goal (one of them at least) was for the removal of ALL american military presence in saudi arabia (there was more,but it mostly dealt with american military presence in the middle east).

but where did this osama dude come from?
why was he so pissed at america?
just what was this dudes deal?

turns out he was already on the road to radicalization during the 80's.coming from an extremely wealthy saudi arabian family but had become extremely religious,and he saw western interventionism as a plague,and western culture as a disease.

he left the comforts of his extremely wealthy family to fight against this western incursion into his religious homeland.he traveled to afghanistan to join the mujahideen to combat the russians,who were actually fighting the americans in a proxy war.and WE trained osama.WE armed him and trained him in the tactics of warfare to,behind the scenes,slowly drain russia of resources in our 50 year long cold war.

how's that for irony.

osama was not,as american media like to paint the picture "anti-democratic or anti-freedom".he saw the culture of consumerism,greed and sexual liberation as an affront to his religious understandings.

this attitude can be directly linked to sayyid qtib from egypt.who visited the united states as an exchange student in 1954.now he wasnt radicalized yet,but when he returned to egypt he didnt recognize his own country.

he saw coco cola signs everywhere,and women wearing shorts skirts,and jukeboxs playing that devils music "rock and roll".

he feared for his country,his neighbors,his community.
just like a southern baptist fears for your soul,sayyid feared for the soul of his country and that this new "westernization" was a direct threat to the tenants laid down by islam.

so he began to speak out.
he began to hold rallies challenging the leadership to turn away from this evil,and people started to take notice,and some people agreed.

change does not come easy for some people,and this is especially true for those who hold strong religious ideologies.
(insert religion here) tends to be extremely traditional.

so sayyid started to gain popularity for his challenge if this new "westernization",and this did not go un-noticed by the egyptian leadership,who at that time WANTED western companies to invest in egypt.(that whole political landscape is totally different now,but back then egypt was fairly liberal,and moderately secular).

so instead of allowing sayyid to speak his mind.
they threw him in prison.
for 4 years.
in solitary.

well,he wasn't radicalized when he went IN to prison,but when he came OUT he sure was.

and to shorten this story,sayyid was the first founder of the muslim brotherhood,whose later incarnation broke off to form?

can you guess?
i bet you can!
al qeade

@Fairbs ,@newtboy and @Asmo have all laid out points why radicalization happens,and the conditions that can enflame and amplify that radicalization.

so i wont repeat what they have already said.

but let us take dearborn michigan as an example.
the largest muslim community in america.
how many terrorists come from dearborn?
how many radicals reside there?
how many mosque preach intolerance and "death to america"?
how many imams quietly sanction fatwas from the local IHOP against american imperialistic pigs?

none.

becuase if you live in stable community,with a functioning government,and you are able to find work and support your family,and your kids can get an education.

the chances of you become radicalized is pretty much:zippo.

the specific religion has NOTHING to do with terrorism.
religion is simply the means in which the justifications to enact violent atrocities is born.

it's the politics stupid.

you could do a thought experiment and flip the religions around,but keep the same political parameters and do you know WHAT we find?

that the terrorists would be CHRISTIAN terrorists.

or do i really need to go all the way back to the fucking dark ages to make my point?

it's
the
politics
stupid.

New Rule: America Rules, Trump Drools

coolhund says...

Oh, I already know how much you care about facts and just bend them the way you need them. But Ill bite. Once.

At least half of that is a lie, not based on actual facts, only on your interpretation, and has been proven wrong already. Yet you guys still believe it. And on the other side you dont believe the stuff about Hillary, that has been proven long ago, and every normal person would have been jailed for it long ago and lost all support from true ethic people. I mentioned the hypocrisy. And you have proven my points perfectly. Youre going off over words.

Its unmasking how you believe so much stuff that is based not once on facts, and yet you only mention the emails on Hillary. Only one thing.
Seriously? Do you think I will start a proper discussion with someone that biased? You guys make a joke of yourselves, and then wonder why people like Trump get more and more support. You dont even get how you only hurt yourself with sick thinking like that. You dont know cause and effect, and thats why you dont get whats going on in the world because of politically correct liars like Hillary. Your hypocrisy is choking me. Maybe thats your tactic though? You having no facts, and thus annoying the shit out of people with such bullshit and hypocrisy, that they wont even bother with you, so you can keep spewing that crap without intelligent people touching you, because they know its useless with you guys. Whatever, as I said, youre only hurting yourselves with jumping on lies, like the side you accuse of them, marking yourself with a big fat red bullseye for manipulators to target you even more.

newtboy said:

What little we know about Trump....he's a tax cheat, charity fraud, rapist (according to an ex wife), misogynist, racist, serial adulterer that tries to screw his 'friend's' wives, and a failed businessman probably deep in debt to our enemies and competetors that produced (didn't write, although he claimed he had) a book about how to get ahead by lying that's screwed over every person that's ever done business with him, and has never made money for others.
What we know about Clinton, she's a politician that acts like one, meaning lying and obfuscating, that made a bad move once with some emails.
Trying to compare the two is impossible, there isn't a scale that stretches that far.

RetroReport - Nuclear Winter

RedSky says...

Correlation and causation is distinguished by controlling for variables directly where the list of possible covariates or confounders is known & limited, or when it is not, using say machine learning techniques to infer a model from the data and repeatedly cross validating it with different test and training samples to ensure that it is rigorous. Read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

There is nothing about repeatability.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_(statistics)

Repeatability has nothing to do with testing for correlation / causation. Okay, you repeat an experiment. It looks like X causes Y, like in the first test. But it turns out that Z (that you didn't consider or can't measure) is acting on X & Y at the same time, creating the appearance of a relationship between X & Y where none exists. Read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding

If anything the political hype is underblown. Politics deals with the immediate, tangible and the "what directly helps me now." With the financial crisis, politics in the US has decreed that any action on climate change that might marginally impact wages or living standards is out of bounds.

If we assume the risks are real - polluting has specific benefits (cost reduction to polluters) and incredibly dispersed costs which are almost imperceptible for decades while the damage is being done. It requires global coordination for a cost on carbon to be politically feasible. And the effects are seen at least 40 years into the future:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html

That's the problem, by the time the effects are obvious, it will be too late to react. In the meantime, you have massive amounts of money, interest groups, politics and delayed effect all acting against any action being taken.

vil said:

No I am not. Science totally relies on cause & effect.

Science has methods to distinguish correlation from causality. Causality means repeatable results, possibility of practical use and my hypocritical benefit. Correlation means randomness and no reason to invest.

Im not against the notion of global warming or nuclear winter.

As far as nuclear winter is concerned I dont think there is much difference between a frozen planet and one that is merely a "few" degrees colder than normal for a couple of years. In either case humans are done for. So while the hype was overdone, reality is just as frightening.

Global warming is a projection into the future, and the future is one of the hardest things to predict. I am happy to agree that we are f*cking up our planet and need to stop ASAP. There are measurable indicators that are clearly out of bounds, conclusively because of human activity.

The political hype (of climate change) is a big risk - if the climate straightens out because of external factors humans might be tempted to not stop f*cking up their environment.

Lets stick to facts and not overemphasize various projections.

If Meat Eaters Acted Like Vegans

transmorpher says...

Ok I'll try to divide up my wall text a bit better this time

I totally acknowledge that people in the past, and even in present day, some people have to live a certain way in order to survive, but for the vast majority of people that doesn't apply.


Taste:
Like most of the senses in the human body, the sense of taste is in a constant state re-calibration. It's highly subjective and easily influenced over mere seconds but also long periods of time. They say it takes 3 weeks to acclimatize from things you crave, from salt to heroin. That's why most healthy eating books tell you go to cold tofurkey (see what I did there ) for 3 weeks. It's all about the brain chemistry. After 3 straight weeks you aren't craving it. (The habit might still be there but, the chemically driven cravings are gone).
Try it yourself by eating an apple before and after some soft drink. First the apple will taste sweet, and after it will taste sour. Or try decreasing salt over a 3 week period, it'll taste bland at first, but if you go back after 3 weeks it'll be way too salty.



Food science:
One of the major things stopping me from not being vegan, was the health concerns, so I read a number of books about plant-based eating.
There is a new book "How Not To Die" by Dr. Michael Greger. If you want scientific proof of a plant based diet this the one stop shop. 500 pages explaining tens of thousands of studies, some going for decades and involving hundreds of thousands of people. I was blown away at the simple fact that so many studies get done. Most of them are interventional studies also, meaning they are able to show cause and effect (unlike observational or corrolational studies, as he explains in the book). 150 pages of this book alone are lists of references to studies. It's pure unbiased science. (It's not a vegan book either in case you are worried about him being biased).

At the risk of spoiling the book - whole foods like apples and broccoli doesn't give you cancer, in fact they go a long way to preventing it, some bean based foods are as effective as chemotherapy, and without the side effects. I thought it sounded it ridiculous, but the science is valid.
Of course you can visit his website he explains all new research almost daily at nutritionfacts.org in 1 or 2 minute videos.
He also has a checklist phone app called Dr.Greger's Daily Dozen.

There are other authors too, most of these ones have recipes too, such as Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Cadwell Esselstyn, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr Joel Furhman.
Health-wise it's the best thing you can do for yourself. And if like me you thought eating healthy meant salads, you'd be as wrong as I was I haven't had a salad for years. My blood results and vitamin levels are exactly what the books said they would be.

Try it for 3 weeks, but make sure you do it the right way as explained in the books, and you'll be shouting from roof tops about what a change it's made to your life. The other thing is, you get to eat more, and the more you eat it's healthier. What a weird concept in a world where we are constantly being told to calorie count (it doesn't work btw).

Environmental:
I've read a lot about ethics, reason and evidence based thinking, as well as nutrition and health (as a result of my own skepticism). So I could and I enjoy talking about these all day long. On the environmental side of things, I'm not as aware, but there some documentaries such as Earthlings and Cowspiracy which paint a pretty clear picture.
Anyone can do the maths even at a rough level - there are 56 billion animals bred and slaughtered each year. Feeding 56 billion animals (many of which are bigger than people) takes a lot more food than a mere 7 billion. Therefore it must take more crops and land to feed them, not to mention the land the animals occupy themselves, as well as the land they destroy by dump their waste products (feces are toxic in those concentrations, where as plant waste, is just compost)
The other thing is that many of these crops are grown in countries where people are starving, using up the fertile land to feed our livestock instead of the people. How f'd up is that?
It's reasons like that why countries like the Netherlands are asking their people to not eat meat more than 3 meals a week.

Productivity and economics:
Countries like Finland have government assistance to switch farmers from dairy to berry. Because they got sick of being sick:
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/dietary-guidelines-from-dairies-to-berries/

The world won't go vegan overnight, and realistically it will never be 100% vegan (people still smoke after all). There will be more than enough time to transition. And surely you aren't suggesting that we should eat meat and dairy to keep someone employed? I don't want anyone to lose their job, but to do something pointlessly cruel just to keep a person working seems wrong.

Animal industries are also heavily subsidized in many countries, so if they were to stop being subsidized that's money freed up for other projects, such as the ones in Finland.

The last bit:
If you eat a plant based diet, just like the cow you'll never have constipation, thanks to all of the fibre
When it comes to enzymes, humans are lactose intolerant because after the age of 2 the enzyme lactase stops being made by the body (unless you keep drinking it). Humans also don't have another enzyme called uricase (true omnivores, and carnivores do), which is the enzyme used to break down the protein called uric acid. As you might know gout is caused by too much uric acid, forming crystals in your joints.
However humans have a multitude of enzymes for digesting carbohydrate rich foods (plants). And no carbs don't make fat despite what the fitness industry would have you believe (as the books above explain).
Appealing to history as well, when they found fossilized human feces, it contained so much fibre it was obvious that humans ate primarily a plant based diet. (Animal foods don't contain fibre).

The reasons why you wouldn't want a whale to eat krill for you is:
1. Food is a packaged deal - there is nothing harmful in something like a potato. But feed a lot of potatoes to a pig, and eat the pig, you're getting some of the nutrients of a potato, but also heaps of stuff you're body doesn't need from the pig, like cholesterol, saturated fat, sulfur and methionine containing amino acids etc And no fibre. (low fibre means constipation and higher rates of colon cancer).
2. Your body's health is also dependent on the bacteria living inside you. (fun fact, most the weight of your poop is bacteria!) The bacteria inside you needs certain types of food to live. If you eat meat, you're starving your micro-organisms, and the less good bacteria you have, the less they produce certain chemicals and nutrients , and you get a knock on effect. The fewer the good bacteria also makes room for bad bacteria which make chemicals you don't want.
Coincidentally, if you eat 3 potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you have all the protein you need - it worked for Matt Damon on Mars right?

dannym3141 said:

@transmorpher

It's a little difficult to 'debate' your comment, because the points that you address to me are numbered but don't reference to specific parts of my post. That's probably my fault as i was releasing frustration haphazardly and sarcastically, and that sarcasm wasn't aimed at you. All i can do is try and sum up whether i think we agree or disagree overall.

Essentially everything is a question of 'taste', even for you. There's no escaping our nature, most of us don't drink our own piss, many of us won't swallow our own blood, almost all of us have a flavour that we can't abide because we were fed it as a child. So yes, our decisions are defined by taste. But taste is decided by the food that is available to people, within reasonable distance of their house, at a price they find affordable according to the society around them, from a range of food that is decided by society around them. Your average person does not have the luxury to walk around a high street supermarket selecting the most humane and delicious foods. People get what they can afford, what they understand, what they can prepare and what is available. Our ancestors ate chicken because of necessity of their own kind, their children are exposed to chicken through no fault of their own, fast forward a few generations, and thus chicken becomes an affordable, accessible staple. Can we reach a compromise here? It may not be necessary for chickens to die to feed the human race, but it may be necessary for some people to eat chicken today because of their particular life.

I don't like the use of the phrase 'if i can do it, i know anyone can'. I think it's a mistake to deal in certainties, especially pertaining to lifestyles that you can't possibly know about without having lived them. Are you one of the many homeless people accepting chicken soup from a stranger because it's nourishing, cheap and easy for a stranger to buy, and keeps you warm on the streets? Are you a single mother with coeliac disease, a grumpy teenager and picky toddler who has 20 minutes to get to the supermarket and get something cooking? Or one of the millions using foodbanks in the UK (to our shame) now? I don't think you're willfully turning a blind eye to those people, i'm not tugging heart strings to do you a disservice. Maybe you're just fortunate you not only have the choice, but you have such choice that you can't imagine a life without it. I won't budge an inch on this one, you can't know what people have to do, and we have to accept life is not ideal.

And within that idealism and choice problem we can include illnesses that once again in IDEAL situations could survive without dead animals, nevertheless find it necessary to eat what they can identify and feel safe with.

Yes, those damn gluten hipsters drive me round the bend but only because they make people think that a LITTLE gluten is ok, it makes people take the problem less seriously (see Tumblr feminism... JOKE).

I agree that we must look at what action we can take now - and that is why i keep reminding you that we are not in an ideal world. If the veganism argument is to succeed then you must suggest a reasonable pathway to go from how we are now to whatever situation you would prefer. My "ideal farm" description was just me demonstrating the problem - that you need to show us your blueprint for how we start again without killing animals and feeding everyone we have.

And on that subject, your suggestions need to be backed by real research, otherwise you don't have any real plan. "It's fair to say there is very little risk" is a nice bit of illustrative language but it is not backed by any fact or figure and so i'm compelled to do my Penn and Teller impression and call bullshit. As of right now, the life expectancy of humans is better than it has ever been. It is up to you to prove that changing the diet of 7 billion people will result in neutrality or improvement of health and longevity. That proof must come in the form of large statistical analyses and thorough science. I don't want to sound like i'm being a dick, but any time you state something like that as a fact or with certainty, it needs to be backed up by something. I'm not nit picking and asking for common knowledge to have a citation, but things like this do:

-- 70% of farmland claim
-- 'fair to say very little risk' claim
-- meat gives you cancer claim - i accept it may have a carcinogenic effect but i'll remind you so does breathing, joss-sticks, broccoli, apples and water
-- 'the impact to the planet would be immense' claim - in what way, and what would be the downsides in terms of economy, productivity, health, animal welfare (where are all the animals going to be sent to retire as of day 1?)
-- etc. etc.

Oh, and a cow might get its protein from plants, but it walks around a field all day eating grass, chewing the cud and having sloppy shits with 4 stomachs and enzymes that i don't have................. I'm a bit puzzled by this one... I probably can't survive on what an alligator or a goldfish eats, but i can survive on parts of an alligator or fish. I can't eat enough krill in a day to keep me going, but i can let a whale do it for me...?

Understanding The Pedophile's Brain

coolhund says...

Funny thing is, it has been proven that there are also a lot of irregularities in the brains of other criminals. So yeah... I think youre right, but not quite there yet.
Cause and effect is massively underused in our society, and the guy explained why. We tend to see things much simpler than they really are. Which is mostly the fault of religion and media (good and bad bullshit, which effectively shuts out differentiated thinking).

newtboy said:

10-15 IQ points BELOW AVERAGE?!? That means gorillas and birds may be more intelligent.

If this study is correct, and pedophilia is a brain disorder, that means by law we need to excise all pedophiles from prison and put them in treatment/mental hospitals. Suddenly, prosecuting pedophiles is a violation of the American disabilities act.
Putting people in prison/to death for physical deformities is not what we do in a free society.
I hope these findings are a step towards an effective treatment.

It does seem that we, as a society, are so disturbed by their actions that we create restrictions for them on release from prison that invariably put them back in, restrictions like where they can live, work, walk, who they can talk to, often not allowed to use computers, etc. It seems to me that if we're going to hold their crimes against them for life in that way, we should maybe simply make it a death penalty crime and quit pretending we think we can rehabilitate them when we don't really think that.

Americapox: The Missing Plague

Babymech says...

There is something innately fascinating in finding technical, biological and economical explanations of historical developments, and it's definitely so much more satisfying than having to resort to nationalism, racism, or religion to explain one region or another's successes.

The risk, I guess, in treating human history as a set of engineering problems, is that the human mind is so attuned to finding cause and effect that it might make us a little blind to situations where the answer is actually more blind chance than anything else.

One of my favorite of these explanations is when China's 'failure' to colonize the world is attributed to the success of porcelain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0OhXxx7cQg

It seems almost too neat to be true - like the false etymology of Marie est malade - so does anyone know if there are scholars who poke holes in the Porcelain vs Glass explanation?

Edit: Improving my googling shows that this explanation remains reasonable but still also involves a bit of blind historical chance. Colored glass was available in ancient Greece, and the Romans and Egyptians used manganese oxide to decolor it, which led to transparent glass and the basis for lens-grinding... that decolorization process apparently didn't pass on to China or wasn't valued by their culture, perhaps due to the clear competitive advantages of porcelain.

Enzoblue said:

I read Guns Germs and Steel cover to cover, was fascinating

Husky/Baby imitates baby/husky.

Paris - Doctor Who Anti War speech

coolhund says...

No and yes. Its the violent and warmongering western policy in that region. We have always destabilized it, yet have learned nothing from it. We just keep going and then wonder why its getting worse. Its a neocon policy. Easy to stop, many people have already said what the solution would be, yet there are always the powerful neocons who live from fear mongering, suffering and wars. And of course from blind following people like you who support them.

2003 was just another puzzle piece. The support of extremists in Syria too, the support of them in Libya aswell. The support of Saudi Arabia is a very big puzzle piece. The CIA operations in that region just as much.
The support of Saddam Hussein also is another small puzzle piece, just as much as we made him think that he can attack Kuwait and we wont interfere. He thought that because we allowed him and instigated him to attack Iran, then supported both sides, because we wanted to destabilize that region once again. Did I mention the coup detat in Iran yet?
And its not that we werent warned about it. Lots of smart people said that giving the Jews Israel would end in disaster. The signs were easy to spot. Lots of people warned about an Iraq war in 2003. Even the neocons own people warned about the IS in documents, yet they ignored it and kept going, strengthening it even more. People warned about what would happen to Libya after Ghaddafi was gone. Again they did not care. Lots of people warned about what was going on in Syria, that Assad was confronted with an extremists group long before the "revolution" that is now known as Al Nusra, a branch of Al Kaida. What did they do? They weakened Assad. Lots of people warned about the refugee crisis and extremists flooding into Europe among those refugees. What do they do? They open the borders and let everyone in without any checks at all, even inviting the whole world to come, ignoring actual laws.

You see, good knowledge of history is mandatory to understand cause and effect. You dont have that knowledge, as you have proved already, because you try to marginalize it by including things from centuries ago and try to solve those with the same solutions from centuries ago. But I dont blame you, since youre probably American. American history teaching is as messed up as their foreign policy.
You cant see coherences in all that. Lots of people dont. Thats why we are doomed to repeat history.

I mean just look at the policy since 9/11. It was meant to bring us all more security from terrorist attacks like that. Yet it has only become worse. Extremists are stronger than ever before and keep getting stronger with everything we do to "weaken" them. And yet people like you dont ask themselves why, actually attack people like me who have realized whats wrong.
Intelligent species my ass.

aaronfr said:

The problem is that you think that you get to decide where the starting line is. The path you are pointing down requires taking in the totality of history, not using some arbitrary point that is within living memory

For example, when do you think this started?

Was it with the Arab Spring and Assad's put down of the revolution? Maybe the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Perhaps when Iraq invaded Kuwait? When Libya bombed the plane at Lockerbie? The 6-day war? The establishment of the state of Israel? British Colonialism in the Middle East? The Crusades? The Battle of Yarmouk in 636?

Trying to find a singular, root cause is not how you end a conflict. That is done through humanizing your enemy, recognizing the futility of your efforts, finding alternative means to meet your needs, compromising and forgiving.

(source: MA in conflict resolution and 5 years of peacebuilding work)

Paris - Doctor Who Anti War speech

coolhund says...

Of course it matters! How the hell should the shooting stop if we dont (want to) see the cause?? Just give the guy with the broken leg more pain killers and dont do anything about the leg, huh??
We just keep the circle going because we stay ignorant, even though were oh so morally high western countries.
Intelligent species my fucking ass. Cant even learn from simple history or cause and effect.

dingens said:

Does it matter? All that matters is that the shooting stops.

RT-putin on isreal-iran and relations with america

coolhund says...

Of course. People always try to manipulate facts so that they fit their agenda.
History doesnt lie. Historians however... and history is written by the victors.
That doesnt make history meaningless, because sooner or later the truth gets out. It took a long while on WW2 and even WW1 (read The Sleepwalkers), but it happens. Also people, thanks to the Internet, get more and more informed from different sides. Common sense has been reformed. People actually understand cause and effect now, and dont just believe in what the news or some history books say that were written by PC or victor authors.

The problem with history is that it is taught fundamentally wrong. When it happened and who were involved are more or less unimportant. The real importance is that we learn from it, so we dont repeat historical mistakes and know what happens when we do this or that decision. People need to think for themselves when learning history, how that is projected on todays happenings, how we can avoid the things that happened so many times in history and always caused the same bad thing and how it all worked together to cause that. That should be taught. Instead names and dates are the most important thing to our society. No wonder history is so easily manipulated and repeated then!

Lawdeedaw said:

So premise A, B, and C are all inconsequential, that I can give you. But if I give you that, then every piece of information we have is skewered and corrupted in some fashion (Regarding history, less so science such as global warming.) If we agree all information is corrupt, and significantly so, which is also a logical fact, then history in general is meaningless. So the study of history and "facts" is stupid. Not that I agree with Red, for I am more like Socrates.



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