@BicycleRepairMan
i do not understand what you are arguing against.
you could have stuck with "no" and that would have sufficed,but you went off on a tirade about religion that had very little to do with what NDT was attempting to convey.

simply put:keep science and religion distinctively separate.that you could BE a scientist and still be a religious person.

he didnt get into the details because (and i am assuming here) he is full aware of the complexities of ones personal beliefs,religion being only a single facet.

to say religion has not produced a single novel or new idea,totally ignores the massive contributions in regards to:philosophy,math,astrology,physics.the list is pretty extensive.

you appear,and please correct me if i am wrong,to pigeon hole anybody who claims a religion as being a fundamentalist.this is not only staggeringly inaccurate but reveals a massive lack of understanding.

which is why NDT didnt even mention the fundamentalist,because the chances of a fundamentalist being a scientist hovers around 0%.

so why are you making an argument against fundamentalism when NDT did not even proceed from that assertion?

why do you care if a scientist also happens to hold a religious or spiritual philosophy?
are you suggesting that a scientist who DOES hold to these philosophies can no longer function properly as a scientist?

has it ever occurred to you that an intelligent person may hold a religious philosophy and keep that philosophy separate from their work?

or considered that a religious person may actually view their work as the continuing study of god/creator/universal consciousness? that by unraveling the mysteries of the known physical universe is their way of revealing god?there is a certain poetry to seeking and attempting to understand the mysteries of the universe.

i am totally with you in regards to fundamentalism,which brings a stagnation to the inquisitive mind and hampers the desire to know and seek those answers.the fundamentalist externalizes those questions in the form of scripture and in the process..stops asking the questions.

but to suggest that anybody who adheres to a religious or spiritual philosophy is somehow a fundamentalist,and therefore unworthy of consideration,is just plain inaccurate.

Great link with good info.

I also loved..."I don't comment on internal matters or until we get everything done, all the facts, which we're working on today," the sheriff said....but they'll comment on external matters instantly, accusing others with no evidence at all (just like in this case, accused the kids of doing 'something' in the woods with a gun...a gun that had never been shot or seen outside the car.)

...And this officer has already paralyzed another innocent citizen 'in the line of duty' by speeding 3 times the posted speed limit and driving in the wrong lane of traffic, hitting him head on causing near deadly brain damage costing the state (us) over $6 million!

...and he still states clearly that he'll do this again, unless he knows he's on camera because he knows it's wrong. Why is he still a cop?

Just struck me as weird that VS considers JS as globally unaccepted from external sites, yet it's the only type of embed you provide to external sites.

I mean, why should any other site accept VS JS code as an embed? If it was just meant to be used internally, I would understand. But, the message when you hover over the embed link seems to suggest it's meant to be shared elsewhere.

But, I know fuck all about any of this, so please forgive my ignorance.

@kceaton1
@JiggaJonson

I think there's a big difference between instant fire-able offences (drinking on the job) and mediocre teaching. My mother is a teacher and she definitely talks about a dichotomy between those who try and those who don't.

Unfortunately the system they have in QLD, Australia for end of high school exams is that the teachers can set the exam themselves for their students rather than any form of independently set examination. This means there is a huge incentive, for say Math, to teach to a specific test, then give the exam with largely the same questions but the numbers changed.

There is performance tracking at a school level and principals are incentivised to create good results but often this can be achieved with rote learning rather than genuinely understanding the subject matter due to the lack of externally set examinations.

Meanwhile, while unions ensure that risk of job loss is low, principals can transfer teachers to far away schools with poor conditions easily, and since performance can be fudged, your ability to retain a specific position is largely determined by your personal relationship with said principal.

As far as students being able to address bad teachers directly, how? As you mentioned Jigga, they will likely not be taken seriously if they complain as some will assume it's as a result of work load rather than teaching performance. The only way you can really measure it is student performance objectively measured by externally set examination.

Yes, it's not a perfect measure. Student performance may be determined by the cohort or the effectiveness of teachers in lower grades. That's why you test them before and after to measure progress rather than raw performance. You can also look at average results over 3-4 years to avoid specific class bias and to allow room for improvement.

As far as standardised measures, a good test for say Math will require broad knowledge rather than specific facts as the questions that could be asked would be widespread and would test understanding rather than rote learning. For subjects with wider and less specific knowledge areas like say English or History you avoid advantaging specific knowledge by giving a wide range of options for essay questions.

"You can't do it alone, you have to do it collectively..."

Remember the way they tried to eradicate any sense of collectivity from the cultures in the Southern Cone? How even group presentations in schools were outlawed as a danger to individual freedom?

Who are "they"? The Chicago Boys, of course.

Everything Giroux mentions can be read about in the truth commission reports from all those South American countries that had their culture upended in order to enforce the economic ideology as taught by Friedman in Chicago. Same thing, just imposed by external players and condensed into a rapid series of shocks.

Same ideology.

if you view this video with a western theosophy perspective,in which god is externalized,then yes..this clip makes no sense.
but if you view this with a more eastern theosophy,where god/gods are internalized,then this woman would not be so confusing.

the olsteens preach the 'prosperity gospel".though they deny it when asked directly,but thats what they preach,with a side order of mutated gnosticism.

see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
see:http://www.sacred-texts.com/gno/

@ChaosEngine

A bit off-topic, but you can get access to Netflix in pretty much any country that has internet access if you use the Hola unblocker extension for either Firefox or Chrome. We use it here in Japan with my old PC hooked up to our HDTV via HDMI and love it.

More on-topic, this video is specifically addressing news--no one is willing to pay for news because thanks to the Internet and all the ways we can interact with it (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), "news"--as in just the facts--is freely available in seconds moments after it occurs.

Of course, really good reporters don't just provide the facts but also provide background, context, and sometimes insightful analysis of the situation. But I'm not sure the majority of people care about that stuff which is why hiding it behind a paywall just isn't profitable.

I don't know what the solution to this problem is. We need veteran reporters who are free to report on the happenings in the world without external pressure to change or hide facts. Someone has to pay their salary. Right now it's corporate sponsors that are ponying up. Even NPR receives a pretty hefty chunk of its funding from corporate sponsors. Like John is saying in this video, it's not really a problem if there's a wall between the sponsors and the news.

Maybe publicly funded news is the way to go? Something akin to BBC but that's legally insulated from government influence and provides "free" (you'd technically be paying for it with your taxes) news reporting.

There is no doubt that these people are disgusting, but thankfully they are also rare. Every society has their fringe crazies - the US has Westboro Baptist Church, for instance - and they generally get way more attention than they deserve by being controversial.

This isn't to say that there isn't a problem with Israeli society's attitude toward the Palestinians, it's just to say that I think it is a problem that is far more subtle and widespread. Focusing so much attention on a small percentage of religious fanatics can be important because it does represent a movement and ideology that is problematic, but it has very little direct relevance to the current conflict.

The real problem, in my opinion, is a unique mixture of nationalism and a lopsided insulation from the reality of the conflict that is very common in Israeli society.

Israeli society is uniquely coherent in a particular way that stems from the relatively homogenous cultural identity facilitated by Judaism, and this coherence is also strengthened by the fact that Israeli society was built in the face of and as a direct result of considerable adversity. I think that this does allow for a sort of groupthink that inhibits Israel's ability to treat the Palestinians in a humane manner, but the effect manifests itself through society as a sort of cultural blindness and it manifests through the political process as hawkish policy.

(Also, whether or not you think they had the right to build that society in the first place is beside the point right now, I'm only talking about the existence of the unifying influence of adversity, and the effect it has on policy and the national psyche)

The other component of it is the simple fact that Israelis are extremely insulated from the realities of the Palestinian sufferings.

Even in the heat of a conflict like this, Israelis can pretty much go about their lives unimpeded. It is true that the rocket attacks are disruptive and that there is on a whole an unacceptably high level of danger from external attacks, but Israelis have leveraged a security apparatus that minimizes these realities in day to day life to an astounding degree, all things considered, and this fact is a double edge sword that creates a perfect breeding ground for indifference.

One side of the sword is that these measures are extremely effective at improving the lives of Israelis in the short term. However the other side of the sword is that it obviously makes these measures popular and politically successful. Furthermore, with all the calm and prosperity, it is very easy to forget about the abysmal conditions being imposed on 1.8 million people just thirty kilometers or so from your doorstep. The only time they really have to deal with the issue is when there is an inevitable flareup of violence at which point, naturally, people tend to be less empathetic. The rest of the time, during the lulls, the prospect of empathy is just placed on the back burner.

These are the tendencies that need to be addressed.

However calling Israel the 4th Reich and placing so much focus on youtube videos that give Israel's religious fanatics undue prominence is just as useless and destructive as all the Israelis and Israel sympathizers who insist on viewing Palestinian society as an unchanging, violent monolith that is accurately represented by its extremist elements.

The fact of the matter is that there are significant movements within Israeli society that are in fact attempting to change these trends. The same is true of Palestinian society, however it is more difficult for those movements because of the repressions imposed by Hamas, culture and environment.

If there is to be any hope in this situation, Israel's role as the dominant, occupying force means that they have the first move. They will have to shift from focusing on isolation and self-preservation to one of empathy to the average Palestinian, an empathy that is so strong that they must be willing to take considerable personal risks and let up their stranglehold on Palestinian society and allow them to prosper.

Because only then will the environment be in any way conducive for Palestinians to take considerable personal risks and defy the status quo en masse. Only then will the false succor of violent religious extremism loose its appeal.

Until that happens, we'll the cycle seems to return to square one every two or three years and I expect to have this discussion again sometime around 2017.

Unfortunately, it is going to be a hard and unlikely road because it takes a lot of empathy and effort to rise up and take huge risks during the times of quiet when prosperity and security easily distract from the continuing plight of the Palestinians. These aren't common traits. Humans are a very tribal species and we're not good at this kind of stuff when it concerns someone different who you don't have to interact with. This challenge is hardly unique to the Jews.

@lucky760

I guess as a fellow human being, I'm a bit uncomfortable with anyone not having sympathy for another human being getting hurt regardless of whether they "deserved" it or not (i.e. whether or not external forces were involved).

I think it's easy to say stuff like "I have no sympathy for them" because you don't personally know them. Like @draak13 says you'd probably feel differently if this was a friend who did something like this because they were in a desperate situation.

@newtboy,

Who'd of thought our back and forth would wind up the civil portion of the thread?

On veracity, accuracy and demonstrable evidence please note I twice provided external links beyond my own day so. The last being to a thoroughly researched and documented account from Human Rights Watch. The only claimed verbatim quote I included was italicized to make clear what was quote versus a shorten in my own words summary. I included a link to the full document so anyone questioning my summary is very to call me out on specifics. Thus far the only in accuracy in aware of has been corrected. If you believe I'm in any other way mischaracterizing events as HRW documented it ask you to point it more specifically or failing that cease insisting that my account is anything less than very thoroughly backed by very well evidenced research.

By way of declaring lesser evils, I would ask you to be specific about worst ISIS has done that you feel so trumps the million dead of the Iran Iraq war and Saddam's multiple genocidal campaigns.

Lastly on ISIL, I don't think they are specifically the ones to stay up at night over anyways. Nouri Al-Maliki's credentials as a brutal thug are underestimated quite widely IMO and I very much expect the real nastiness will come from his crushing of Sunni Iraqis in the guise of stopping ISIL. Ugly times ahead, but I fear the guys your worried about are going to be taking it more than dishing it out, sadly leaving more Sunni Iraqi civilians dead than anyone else.

Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't red flag the event until they could remove him.

The description was along these lines btw:

Jack Cottle, 21, was driving his girlfriend's white Volkswagen car and managed to sneak onto the Brands Hatch Circuit in England, where racing was taking place. Jack succeeded in avoiding the security at the stands, entering the track and competing with the real competitors. His girlfriend is terrified and asked him several times to stop, while a friend filmed the scene from the rear of the vehicle. Police arrested Jack following the release of this video, he was released on bail and faces a heavy fine. The participants of the race want compensation for their position on the podium has been greatly marred by the arrival of this competitor. The fine could be up to € 130,000.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140502-climate-change-agriculture-family-farm-science/

Do not rely on external governance for anything except destruction and failure.

Requiring a whole bunch of external boxes and connectors to do something kinda basic like add storage space kind of negates the point of having a very tiny/pretty computer.

I'm advocating passivity because I don't recognise overpopulation as a threat, more an inconvenience, and one that we couldn't really prevent even if we wanted to.

I don't see what's preposterous or optimistic about taking widely accepted birth rate data and projecting based off that. Birth rates are predictable and stable sampled over a large population. The data consistently shows that as societies come out of poverty, their birth rates fall. The only assumption here is that there isn't another GFC event that hinders growth which at this point is not particularly likely.

All taken into account we already know it's plateauing, and have known for decades. This isn't a hypothesis, it's happening right now. Unless you can show me why this trend will suddenly and irrevocably reverse, despite population data being incredibly stable and predictable historically, it seems the onus is on you to explain why you're so pessimistic.

Again, I think you're still conflating (1) what I want / whether it's bad versus (2) whether it could plausibly be stopped. I would also rather live in a less populated world. At current rates of technology and resource utilisation, things would be cheaper, there'd be more to go around. Reality is not like that. But as I said before, every policy focus has an opportunity cost. I don't see a plateauing population as a threat and I would rather see that effort devoted to poverty which will help reduce it anyway.

We're nowhere near an economic bubble. Maybe a short term stock market valuation bubble right now, but there's plenty of economic under-utilisation in the US and Europe, and China and other developing countries have decades to grow.

The term technological bubble is a bit nonsensical. You can have a technology sector bubble but actual physical technology which works now, will not magically stop working tomorrow based on inflated expectations. If you're saying instead we'll reach some cusp of innovation, well people have predicting that for decades.

We're nowhere near a peak oil event. Every time people say current known reserves are dwindling, they either (1) discover a huge reserve in under developed countries that were previously not surveyed (Africa and parts of SE Asia at the moment), or (2) something like fraking comes along which unlocks new supply. The US is forecast to be the largest oil exporter by 2020 based on that second point.

Hell, I'll play devil's advocate with you. Suppose we do reach a glut. We'll know this at least a decade ahead based on dwindling new reserve discoveries. The price of energy will leap up far, far ahead of us running out. That will spur innovation in more efficient sources of energy and will incentivise both individuals and businesses to be more energy efficient. A gradual adjustment like I've talked about endlessly here. Why am I wrong?

Environmental damage is a different issue and something that I agree needs to actually be addressed. I'm sure if you search back through my posts you'll see me talking about the economic rationale of addressing this directly when corporations who pollute aren't subject to the negative externalities that they impose in our current capitalist system and that will inherently create issues. Hopefully countries will take note of the smog clouds in China's big cities.