Your considerations may be true but there is simply no denying that there is some serious hypocrisy going on at the core of our value system. We fume when muslim terrorists bomb Paris, but we claim the right to bomb pretty much any muslim country whose government is not laying in bed with the West. The fact that we make some half-assed efforts to avoid "innocent" victims is no proof of moral superiority. The next time NATO blows up some wedding party in Afghanistan, I'd like to see the flag of Afghanistan projected on the opera house of Sidney.
Actually, both Israel and Palestines are a bit befuddled that their eternal little conflict has lost a good deal of importance to the rest of the world in view of the bigger events in the Mideast. Which probably is a good thing, since both parties were acting like the spoilt children of global attention.
> It's not intentional but I doubt ISIS sympathisers see the distinction.
I don't see the distinction either. If you drop a bomb and kill some people that you didn't intend to kill, you're still 100% responsible for those kills.
It is the saddest thing that we have found no better response to terrorism than limiting civil liberties and sending 18 year old boys with guns to foreign countries.
If you procrastinate a lot, it usually means that you really want to do something different with your life. Go find out what it is, rather than submitting yourself to all sorts of masochist self-discipline schemes.
Of course, but there are things that can't be avoided like seeing your doctor about that pain you've been feeling/paying bills/finding a job/finishing that task your boss asked you to do/doing house work etc. Procrastinating can appear in various different areas of life, not just in those related to following your dreams and passions.
This canard keeps popping up with such regularity that one start to wonder what kind of interest group is spinning this. The space around Chernobyl is still a dead zone. The only reason why animal life doesn't die out there is the permanent inflow of healthy animals from outside contaminated area.
> I think the fact that Obama won in 2012 supports my argument that most people see him as basically competent. Not bad. A reasonable moderate who did a moderately reasonable job.
My basic understanding of Obama's reelection in 2012 is that the liberal vote wasn't ready to admit how simply they had been conned by some clever marketing in 2008.
I think that this leftist disappointment is largely manufactured. Yes, Obama is a moderate, not a leftist, and many leftists are sad about that... but the man presented himself as a moderate all along. My belief is that the leftists turned out en-masse to support him for the same reasons that the vast middle (my whole thesis here is that most of us are moderates) turned out to support him. After GWB, any minimally competent moderate would represent a huge amount of "hope and change"
I think the set of people who voted for him that also later felt deceived by his policies is pretty small. I think that the talk of this feeling of betrayal and deception is largely manufactured by his political opponents; it's something I hear a lot from my friends on the right, and something I hear very little from my friends on the left.
The truth of the matter, as I see it, is that while he's not one of our best presidents, he's basically competent. He does his job, and after GWB, I think most people see a guy who can do the job with a basic degree of competence as pretty great.
Humanity is suffering from a collective ADD epidemic under the spell of computers and internet and children are getting the worst of it. Computers are the last thing that kids under 12 need in a classroom. Teach them something that involves quiet focus, like 19th century cursive writing.
Humanity is suffering from a collective ADD epidemic
No, it's not. The US and a few other developed countries are suffering from an epidemic of ADD diagnoses. Unrestricted computer use is certainly not a good education policy, but there's no evidence that it causes ADD.
Oh, it causes ADD, alright. Without a proper way to use it, the Internet just leads people to jump between pages, bits of information and topics, which often devolves in distraction on the many entertainment bullshit resources out there...
You can't read a book properly when you know you can just jump to the middle or the end to see the most interesting bits.
Books just leads to people to jump between books, bits of information and topics, which often devolves in distraction on many of the entertainment books out there. Oral tradition was so much better because you had to be focused on the expert who was giving the information and you had to learn it to a great enough detail you could recount the information yourself. With a book you can just jump to the interesting bits, but with oral tradition you have to stick around for the whole story.
And lest you think I am just being facetious, this was a legitimate criticism of writing back in the day.
>Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.
