Quote from: Meta Cognition on March 28, 2015, 11:38:48 AM

And fucking this:

Quote

'Dear White Gay Men: Stop Approprirating [sic] Black Women'.

How the fuck do they even have the authority to make policy when they CAN'T SPELL appropriating. No, it's not "sic", it's fucking wrong. You're spelling it FUCKING WRONG.

What would they be refering to?

He's only relevant because he rode the gamergate train.

It's not so much a breakdown as it is an evolution.

Quote from: challengerX on March 27, 2015, 04:04:29 PM

Quote from: Verbatim on March 26, 2015, 06:48:34 PM

according to you, we're all already killing babies by not having them, so

I said forcing people to not have babies is genocide, not whatever the fuck it is you're saying.

If it has specific intent, yes.

All the more reason to keep those faggots from marrying and ruining our society!

Our kids, at least many of them, are not doing very well. The reason, writes Harvard professor Robert Putnam in his just-published Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, is the “two-tier pattern of family structure” that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to prevail today.

Starting in the late 1960s, rates of divorce, unmarried births and single parenthood rose sharply among all segments of society. About a decade later they fell and leveled off among the college-educated, who almost entirely raise their kids in Ozzie-and-Harriet style families today (except that mom usually works outside the home).

Among the bottom third of Americans in education and income, however, the negative trend accelerated. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was alarmed that 26 percent of black births were to unmarried children. The rate is about twice that for the least educated third of Americans of all races today.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Charles Murray’s 2012 book Coming Apart describes the same phenomenon among white Americans. Curiously, Putnam refers only glancingly to Murray’s work. But Putnam agrees with Murray (perhaps grudgingly) that this is bad for the kids involved.

They’re careful to concede that single parents have a hard job and that some do well at it. But the data says those are the exception rather than the rule. On average and by a wide margin, children raised in such households do worse in school, have more trouble with the law and make less money and gain less satisfaction in life than those from the stable families of the upper third.

Putnam is troubled by the resulting inequality and lack of upward mobility. He begins Our Kids in Port Clinton, Ohio, where he grew up in the 1950s in a community unequal in income, but egalitarian in manners and mores. Since then, Port Clinton’s factory jobs have mostly disappeared and the town seems riven between the gleaming condominiums on the now-clean waters of Lake Erie and gritty neighborhoods where many kids grow up in disorderly homes.

With a corps of researchers, Putnam fanned out across the country and found similar trends from fast-growing Bend, Ore., to the down-at-the-heels Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. He tells the stories and quotes the words — often heart-wrenching, sometimes heart-warming — of specific kids identified by first names. 	

“America’s poor kids do belong to us and we to them,” he concludes. “They are our kids.” The nation as a whole has to do something to help them. But what?

Send them money is one answer. But as the Manhattan Institute’s Scott WInship points out, low-level wages and incomes, taking into account proper inflation measures and fringe benefits, have not fallen over the last 40 years. Food and clothing has become less expensive (thanks, Wal-Mart) and most households classified as poor have smartphones, microwaves and big-screen TVs that did not exist in the 1960s.

Like Sen. Mike Lee and other reform conservatives, Putnam would increase the Earned Income Tax Credit and expand the child tax credit. Marginal help. He hails the bipartisan support for reducing incarceration for minor offenses and helping ex-convicts. And let’s, he says, eliminate pay-for-play fees for extracurricular activities.

Other proposals sound unavailing, like moving low-education households to more upscale suburbs; Section 8 housing subsidies already do that. And Putnam’s faith that child care centers and mandatory pre-school can make a difference haven’t been supported by research, except for two experiments more than 40 years ago whose results haven’t been replicated.

Putnam doubts the chances of “a reversal of long-established trends in private norms,” though they’re common in history: The gin-soaked mobs of 18th-century London became the orderly Victorian masses. Like most high-education Americans, he doesn’t want to denounce people for breaking old moral rules even when that hurts their kids.

The libertarian Murray doubts that government can do much. But he thinks that high-education elites, with their strong family structures, can. They need to “preach what they practice.” Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle, agreeing, nominates Hollywood for a lead role. Midcentury America’s universal media — radio, movies, television — celebrated the old rules.

There are signs this is happening. Teenage birth and violent crime rates have been falling. Younger millennials may be learning delayed gratification and self-restraint. Maybe, as they grow older, divorce and single parenthood will become less common too. Few kids in broken homes will read Our Kids or Coming Apart. But they already know the story.

i just hate war, okay

JERUSALEM — After a dozen reports by human rights groups charging that Israel had committed war crimes during its air and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip last summer, Amnesty International on Thursday focused on the Islamist militant group Hamas and other armed factions in Gaza, which fired thousands of rockets at civilian population centers in Israel during the 50-day war.

Amnesty's conclusion: The military wing of Hamas committed war crimes, too, by indiscriminately firing unguided rockets and mortar rounds from civilian areas in Gaza at population centers in Israel.

The 70-page report found that rocket and mortar fire from the Palestinian militants also killed 13 Palestinians and six Israeli civilians.

Amnesty investigators report that a Palestinian projectile landed next to a supermarket in a refugee camp on July 28, killing 13 Palestinian civilians, 11 of them children playing in the street during a cease-fire.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion at the al-Shati camp, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri blamed Israeli airstrikes. In a text message to journalists, Zuhri called it a “massacre” and vowed that “this crime will not break our will.”

A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces at the time denied firing at the neighborhood and attributed the explosions to a failed rocket launch from Gaza militants.

The Gaza war left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead; seven in 10 of them were civilians and more than 500 were children, according to Palestinian and U.N. officials. On the Israeli side, 66 soldiers and six civilians were killed, including one child.

Amnesty said the death of Daniel Tregerman, a 4-year-old Israeli boy, “clearly illustrates the tragic consequences of using imprecise weapons such as mortars on civilian areas.” His family's car was struck by a mortar round from Gaza, and he died from shrapnel wounds.

“Daniel’s little sister who was also present watched him die before her eyes,” wrote Amnesty, noting that the Hamas military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, asserted responsibility for the attack.

In Gaza, Hamas official Taher al-Nounou denied Amnesty's allegations, according to the Associated Press, saying the report relied on "the Israeli narrative." He told the news service that Hamas did not target civilians.

In the past, Hamas officials have pointed to the relatively low number of Israeli civilian deaths as proof that they did not target the general population. The Israelis attribute the low number of Israeli civilian fatalities to a combination of the U.S.-supplied Iron Dome air defense system, Israeli air raid sirens, and the small payloads and inexact aim of Hamas rockets.

The conclusions of the Amnesty report were not exactly news, especially in Israel.

After the report was released, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a top spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, tweeted, “Wow, self-proclaimed terrorist organization carried out war crimes. Big surprise there! #Hamas must be so ashamed.”

The Palestinian militias in Gaza fired more than 4,800 rockets and 1,700 mortar rounds toward Israel, according to counts by Israel and the United Nations. Most of the rockets were relatively crude, hand-made projectiles fashioned out of water pipes that cannot be guided after they leave their launch tubes. The mortars fire at a shorter range but are often more deadly.

Many Israelis felt world opinion singled out Israel for civilian deaths in Gaza while failing to appreciate how Hamas and other factions employed human shields.

The Amnesty team pointed out that there are no bomb shelters or warning sirens in the Gaza Strip (though it is unclear how much those would have helped against unannounced strikes by Israeli armed drones, F-16s and artillery when the time from launch to target is measured in seconds).

The report condemned Palestinian militias for storing munitions in, and launching rockets from, schools, mosques, a Greek Orthodox church and at least one hospital. Amnesty also reported that the militias launched attacks and stored rockets “very near locations where hundreds of displaced civilians were taking shelter.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted that Israeli authorities refuse to allow human rights monitors to enter Gaza, including from Amnesty, making it difficult to document war crimes.

Philip Luther of Amnesty International said in a statement that both Israel and the Palestinians must cooperate with U.N. and International Criminal Court probes “to end decades of impunity that have perpetuated a cycle of violations in which civilians on both sides have paid a heavy price.”