just don't fall for the "liberation" crap.

Iraq practically was liberated up until we got the fuck out of Dodge.

Now, did George Bush want to liberate the Iraqis? Was it George Bush's motivation? No, I wouldn't think so. But I'm not even sure George Bush knows George Bush's motivations.

How is that a false pretense? One reason for the war was that Iraq was in possession of WMD's, which they were.

Not to mention Iraq had held on to a latent capacity for the production of nuclear weapons.

How anybody can support her is utterly beyond me. Not only do certain facets of the media seem to hold them to lower standards (specifically Stephanopoulos's duplicity in interviewing Peter Schweizer), but they seem eager to shoot down any criticism in the most facile and unintelligent ways. Not, of course, that this isn't a staple of the media in general.

The IBT broke the story that regimes which donated to the Clinton Foundation received a spike in arms deals while Clinton was Secretary of State. And Slate, of course, jumps into the fray claiming that there is no "smoking-gun evidence" of a quid pro quo transaction. Which is a perfectly valid observation to make, but when it comes to who will be sitting in the White House, are you willing to play chicken? We know that Bill Clinton gave eleven speeches during Hillary's time as Secretary, each connected to certain companies with pending business before the dept., and all of which were concluded favourable for each connected company.

And, of course, we have people like the insufferable Nick Kristof making proclamations about how the Clintons' greed is actually driven by a political system which needs money as an incessant form of fuel; yet the idea that the Clintons are making $700,000 speeches in countries like Nigeria (with connections to those aforementioned companies) to "fuel their campagin" is ridiculous, especially since the Clinton Foundation pays for all their travel expenses.

We've already had one duplicitous Clinton at the helm, let's not have another.

. . . As well as some police attention.

I recently got an air rifle and took it down the local shooting supplies store to get the sights sorted and buy some .22 pellets. Afterwards, my mom was putting some shopping in the boot and I had to hold the rifle while she sorted everything out, and some bitch flagged down a copper.

Nice rifle, though.

But no one who is under the age of 45 takes those two seriously.

Speak for yourself; I'm gunning for a Bush-Rubio ticket.

Although Bush will probably pick a different VP candidate. Ah well, one can dream. Still, #bush4prez

After following the news on it for a while, and initially being a strong opponent of the Patriot Act and the NSA's metadata collection programme, I consider myself in favour of it's actions. The empirical evidence  seems to suggest that it is an asset to national intelligence, not a violation of the Fourth Amendment nor a violation of privacy.

are you arguing from authority here

Considering it's a legal matter, it isn't fallacious. You can criticise any ruling all you like, but a descriptive statement about the legality of something is determined by the relevant institution's ruling.

If the Security Council says it's illegal, it's illegal; if it doesn't, then it isn't. You can criticise that all you like, and tear the Council a new arse, but as far as it stands the Iraq War wasn't factually illegal.

01000010 01101001 01110100 01100011 01101000 00100000 01100001 01100010 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110011 01101101 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 01101110 01100101 01110100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 01110101 01101101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101110

01010111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01100101 01101100 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100100 01101111 00111111 00100000

unnecessary

Highly, highly debatable.

illegal

Yeah, it wasn't illegal.

National Review

In 8 a.d., Ovid, the poet, the toast of Rome, was suddenly exiled to the remote outpost of Tomis. The reason remains a mystery. Ovid himself said only that his fate was caused by carmen et error — “a poem and a mistake.”

Two millennia later, a new effort to exile Ovid — not from Rome, but from Columbia University’s famed Core Curriculum — could be attributed to the same: carmen et error, where the poem is his Metamorphoses, and the error is that “like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.” So wrote four undergraduate students earlier this month in Columbia’s campus newspaper, the Spectator. They would like a “trigger warning” affixed to Ovid’s masterwork.

It is safe to say that these students (all members of Columbia’s “Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board,” by the by) overreached. Critics have been many and swift and savage. In her weekly Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan pardoned the students on the grounds that “everyone in their 20s has the right to be an idiot.”

But idiocy is notoriously infectious, and it is not obvious that the obvious rebuttals will suffice. For instance, critics have posed the natural reductio question, namely: If Ovid merits a “trigger warning,” doesn’t Shakespeare? Milton? Chaucer? The Bible? (Yes, yes, yes, and it doesn’t have one already?) But appealing to the power of Great Names — Shakespeare! — or repairing to mockery are sufficient responses only as long as a Great Name has the power to inspire awe, or mockery to inspire shame.

One cannot assume either today. The “trigger warning” crowd has placed the past on the defensive. The text must submit to the reader, not the other way around. Or as Columbia’s op-ed writers put it: “Students need to feel safe in the classroom, and that requires a learning environment that recognizes the multiplicity of their identities.”

Notably, Columbia’s administration has played somewhat into this view. On the website for its Core Curriculum, Ovid is advertised as “a particularly modern poet. He knew how to take genres apart, recognizing and exposing their codes and patterns,” writes Classics professor James Uden.  “Then he delighted in reassembling them in surprising ways.” The Metamorphoses is itself “a radical kind of epic poem.” So, to students who have said, “Look how old and primitive and cruel Ovid is! He is nothing like us, which is why we should not read him!” Columbia has responded, “Look how fresh and contemporary and subversive Ovid is! He’s just like us, which is why we should read him!”

In an age in which quashing dissent in political and cultural life is increasingly the norm, Columbia’s response is alarming. Maybe Ovid is old, primitive, and cruel (he’s not, but let’s say so for argument’s sake); he is still different. And that’s increasingly important.

In an introductory essay to St. Athanasius’s De Incarnatione (another very old book), C. S. Lewis made just this argument. “Every age has its own outlook,” wrote Lewis. “It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”

Lewis is not suggesting (at least not here) that old books got things more right than new ones — Dante was not omniscient — but simply that they got things right (and wrong) differently: “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”

Particularly in an age obsessed with “diversity,” such an observation is timely. Even a class of twentysomethings who hail from both Harlem and the Hamptons are likely to exhibit a consensus on a whole swath of fundamental questions. But older writers, not brought up in 21st-century America, won’t. They will think differently. They will use unfamiliar words in unfamiliar constructions; they will combat unfamiliar enemies and call upon unfamiliar friends; they will wrestle with unfamiliar questions and offer unfamiliar answers.

And that unfamiliarity is the point. Reading old books is a way of resisting the cultural and intellectual uniformity that develops when one’s intellectual horizon is one’s own birthdate. A great deal of such uniformity is evident in modern American political and cultural and intellectual life.

Being able to stand outside of it, to offer a detached and learned perspective on our present discontents, is much of the reason for education in the first place. Colleges that seek to turn out original thinkers, persons not bounded by their own time who can offer that substantive critique, are rare. But they remain — as do students up to the challenge.

Any of those students who attend Columbia may want to consider transferring.

What I meant was you don't question certain people, namely economists.

I still take issue with that; I'm fairly certain I don't agree with anybody 100pc.

It's not wrong, it's just not the main factor.

I didn't claim it was; I'm just saying it's a better explanation than inequality. I've no doubt things like inefficient welfare systems and an abusive justice system are also massive factors in the lack of social mobility. In fact, I'd wager there is no "main" factor, just a big collection of a lot of fuck-ups.

Fuck me.

New York police allegedly arrested two men for “manspreading” (sitting with their legs far apart) on the subway, according to a report entitled “That’s How They Get You” released by the Police Reform Organizing Project.

“On a recent visit to the arraignment part in Brooklyn’s criminal court, PROP volunteers observed that police officers had arrested two Latino men on the charge of ‘man spreading’ on the subway, presumably because they were taking up more than one seat and therefore inconveniencing other riders,” the report states.

Metro Transit Authority rules ban people from taking up more than one seat “in a station, platform or conveyance when to do so would interfere or tend to interfere with the operation of the Authority’s transit system or the comfort of other passengers.”

MTA also placed signs on subway cars in December instructing people not to “manspread” as part of a larger campaign to encourage riders to be polite, which also included signs telling people not to hog poles or do their makeup on the train. The “no manspreading” rule in particular, however, got most of the publicity after feminist activists attacked “manspreading” as being not just rude and/or annoying but actually oppressive to women.

Now there’s no doubt that some dude taking up enough room for two people on a crowded train is annoying — but the report claims that the arrests occurred late at night, when the train probably would have been pretty empty: “Before issuing an [adjournment contemplating dismissal] for both men, the judge expressed her skepticism about the charge because of the time of the arrests: ‘12:11AM, I can’t believe there were many people on the subway.”

Of course, even if the train was super crowded, it seems as though simply asking the men to move over might have been a more reasonable option. As the report itself also notes, however, our current system demands that officers meet quotas and therefore directly discourages them from seeking other solutions to problems — whether or not those would be reasonable. In fact, the report even claims that in some cases officers had admitted that the quota policy was their reason for making an arrest.

 All-in-all, the report listed nearly 120 allegations of abuse, including one claim that a Latino teenager was charged for having a backpack next to him on the train, and that officers “arrested him — cuffed and confined him overnight — when they ran a check and found that he had an outstanding warrant for skateboarding in a Middle Village, Queens park after dark.”

PROP president Robert Gangi told Newsweek that the organization’s staff and volunteers had observed arraignments for misdemeanors in the four boroughs of the city since June 2014 over the course of about 35 sessions lasting a few hours. The observers found, according to the report, that “out of the 850 total cases seen, 797, or about 94 percent, of the defendants were people of color. 756 people, or 89 percent, of the persons arrested or ticketed were able to walk out of the courtroom.”

Fucking Jesus.

Also, has Comms been perma'd? Because I'd be interested in his thoughts, too.

Now, Challenger can say that it's going offtopic for sure. I question, who says it's right?

This is a great way of nullifying every advance we've ever made in any empirical field whatsoever, but the fundamental assumption behind it isn't true. I'm not claiming the break-down of the family is the be all and end all of the lack of social mobility, I'm saying "Look at this paper, and the work by Putnam and research done by the Federal Reserve" and then consider the empirical evidence in favour of this hypothesis over the other.

Of course information can be bent and warped to fit a certain view, but when you have numerous corroborating sources it becomes progressively more difficult to simply reject the information in front of you. Just look at Thomas Piketty's work, it's internally solid, but we know it's flawed because other people have tried and failed to replicate his findings. Saying "Just because an economist says its true doesn't make it true" is not only facile, but it completely denigrates the empirical method in the face of all the evidence in favour of it and whatever hypothesis is on the table.

If you honestly believe 100%

I don't, I could name you a number of things on which I disagree with when it comes to anybody, be they economist, philosopher or whatever.

Can't happen. Expansion of any benefits is seen as socialism and enabling the welfare abusers, whether it's actually the case or not.

Is that why Republicans are usually the ones calling for EITC to be expanded?