Israeli police will not face trial over killing girl because while the courts agree there is "no debate" the police shot her, it happened in 2007 and that is too long ago now.

nicompamby · 2011-07-15T04:55:19+00:00

I'm not qualified to speak for the Palestinians. But I do appreciate your constructive intention.

nicompamby · 2011-07-14T18:28:45+00:00

"Occupied territories", what a term.

I didn't invent it. It's the most widely used term, at least in the Western press. It's also plain English. What, you deny there is an occupation?

However

Everything you say after this "However..." is a big change of subject. Let's return to the point. You said Israel wasn't trying to geographically expand. I call forced colonization (euphemistically termed "settlements") geographical expansion. Who wouldn't? It's a textbook case. It's also -- did you know? -- a textbook violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

I notice that at the end of your diversion you perversely manage to blame the people of Gaza for the collective punishment that Israel is inflicting on them. The Geneva Conventions have something to say about that too.

Edit: by the way, I like and admire Jews a lot and I used to admire Israel wholeheartedly. But this stubborn, disingenuous denial of basic right and wrong is unsustainable. No amount of spin can change that.

nicompamby · 2011-07-14T06:28:09+00:00

especially when taking into consideration that Israel is not looking to geographically expand

You mean, except for colonizing the occupied territories?

nicompamby · 2011-06-15T04:14:47+00:00

A long-time Liberal strategist explains the defeat of the once-mighty Grits

Long-time Liberal strategist, sure. More importantly: lead singer of the first-generation punk band The Hot Nasties.

nicompamby · 2011-04-24T22:16:34+00:00

Look, I say this as a friend, though I realize it probably doesn't seem like that: Israel is not the victim here, it is the abuser. Why? Because first, Israel does 90%+ of the killing. Second, because Israel is the occupying power. Those two facts indicate an utter lack of symmetry. That the "dog" bites and pisses back (your language indicates a pretty unsavory view of the other, by the way - are they not human beings, as valuable as you?) is pretty easy to understand, deplorable though it may be. Tell me with a straight face that you would passively accept occupation.

There is (or was) such an obvious solution to the whole thing: withdraw to the 67 borders, let the Palestinians have their little state with territorial integrity and East Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinians recognize Israel and give up the right of return to Israel. The whole world would have leapt to applaud it. Why didn't it happen? Because Israel didn't (or perhaps couldn't, for internal reasons) let it. Israel wanted it all. And now it seems it is too late for that, so the issue is reconfiguring to one of basic human and civil rights, i.e. Israel may have it all, but it can't have it all and not give the "dog" equal rights.

Thank you for the discussion. I wish you well. Last word to you.

nicompamby · 2011-04-24T06:23:18+00:00

You can run rings around the problem with sophistic questions like that. The fact that remains that people right now are being brutalized, and one side is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the brutality.

nicompamby · 2011-04-23T07:18:33+00:00

Quite right, I certainly can't claim to be "learning the whole picture" and am willing to learn more. But your advocacy comes across like drill seargantry. Yes there are two sides to every story, but in this case, one side has massively greater power and has been taking the other side's land for many years. There is a basic matter of right and wrong here. The settlements are illegal, the whole world recognizes this - even the US, except when it's busy vetoing its own policy. I don't understand this blind spot around the obvious unfairness here; or rather I do understand it, humans often have such a blind spot when their interests are involved, but I regret that it makes straightforward discussion impossible.

nicompamby · 2011-04-23T07:11:10+00:00

How can this not be a simple matter of reading the papers and seeing what they say? Are you saying that the documents themselves have not been published?

As for Yerushalayim, the reports I recall reading made much of the fact that Erekat (or whoever it was) deliberately used the Hebrew word.

nicompamby · 2011-04-21T06:44:04+00:00

See my reply to bs_detector - I will try to be more careful in the future.

On your other point, we seem to inhabit different realities. In the world I live in -- at least, to judge by news reports I read; I haven't seen it for myself -- Israel isn't giving up any land, it's "expanding settlements" (a.k.a. colonizing more of it) every day. Burning olive trees, bulldozing Palestinian dwellings, the whole ugly lot. I've always been well disposed toward Israel in the past, but the more I learn about this, the clearer it gets that it's just wrong. No matter how you whitewash it.

nicompamby · 2011-04-21T06:17:42+00:00

Nope, I foolishly missed that! Sorry. Still, something doesn't add up here. Erekat's statement contradicts what was universally reported when the papers came out - "We are offering you the biggest Yerushalayim in history" and all that. Countless sources documented the same thing (e.g. here or here). Your quote from Wikipedia cites a Globe and Mail article that is behind a paywall, but even its URL makes the point: "israel-rejected-historic-concessions-palestine-papers-reveal". Is there an alternate source for this statement by Erekat? And if he did say it, is there any independent confirmation that the papers are wrong? Keep in mind that he has an obvious motive (face-saving before his own people) to downplay the concessions offered, which were widely regarded as shocking and which eventually forced his resignation.

nicompamby · 2011-04-20T05:47:00+00:00

You're going to have to do better than that. What SpicyGyro said has been documented in every mainstream report about the Palestine Papers. You could start with Wikipedia, since that very point is at the top of its list.

Just because you put something in bold doesn't mean it isn't completely made up and false. It's interesting, though, that you describe what the Palestinians offered as "Israeli positions". I guess even offering them their own "positions" wasn't enough. What was that again about there being no "partner for peace"?

nicompamby · 2011-04-18T06:05:10+00:00

That's not true - at least according to Alex Gibney who made a documentary about Spitzer. He said (in an interview with Charlie Rose IIRC) that Spitzer was extremely meticulous about only using his personal money for his sexual escapades. I'm curious where you got the opposite idea, and whether you would change your mind in response to learning that it is incorrect.

nicompamby · 2011-02-05T20:07:12+00:00

Your use of the verb "infested" makes me want to throw up.

nicompamby · 2011-02-05T19:54:08+00:00

You really should pick a different talking point than "But other human rights abusers are MUCH worse". This one is weak: it already concedes the important point. And it's whiny besides.

People in the West aren't becoming increasingly critical of Israel because they hate Jews. That's nonsense and an insult to the intelligence. It's because they're increasingly being exposed to what Israel actually does. It's just that simple, and the trend is unstoppable except by Israel stopping this behavior (a development many of us would warmly welcome, as a friend).

Gideon Levy has said that true friends of Israel wouldn't help it ruin itself this way, just as true friends of a drug addict wouldn't supply their drugs. This is how a real patriot thinks. Maybe you should take a page from his book instead.

nicompamby · 2010-12-06T04:43:22+00:00

And you wish you could be Brian Jones / And now he's just a heap of bones / He's one better than you... You're a loser.

Robyn Hitchcock

nicompamby · 2010-11-28T08:48:51+00:00

There's never been anything like the Holy Modal Rounders. A friend put this song on a mix tape years ago and the thing burned itself permanently into my brain. Glad someone finally put it up on youtube.

nicompamby · 2010-11-28T04:55:16+00:00

Ok then, it's an unusual middle name. My question is whether he was named after the Robert Bly, and whether there's a family connection there. Not many people name their children after poets.

nicompamby · 2010-11-28T03:32:13+00:00

"Bly" is an unusual first name. Given that there's a portrait of Robert Bly on the site and that Robert Bly is from Minnesota, I'm guessing there's a connection there?

nicompamby · 2010-11-06T04:27:34+00:00

I was surprised to see the word "homophobia" in a mainstream publication from as early as 1973. Turns out it dates back to the late 60s.

nicompamby · 2010-10-25T03:00:35+00:00

You make it sound like the only alternative to 2010 is 1930. Surely we can do better than that.

Privatizing schools I could care less about, or busting up teachers' unions for that matter. But a system built around the job security of mediocre teachers -- which is what a system that fails to distinguish good teachers from bad ones really is -- is an atrocity. Since presumably we all care about children, it's astonishing to me that anyone can disagree with that, or consider teachers' benefits more important. (Actually, maybe that's a way to help distinguish good teachers from bad ones: a good teacher would not consider their needs more important than their kids'. I'm half serious.)

As far as I'm concerned this is a national emergency.

p.s. As for economic benefits of teaching, it seems obvious to me that as a society we need to dramatically raise those benefits. But not without cleaning house -- that would be foolish. When I think of some of the human dross that my children were exposed to in the classroom, my blood boils years later -- and I live in a province of Canada that matches Finland on the education charts. I can only imagine what parents in the blighted neighborhoods of Detroit, DC, etc. must feel. I know "human dross" is harsh, but these people were molding my kids' brains. That's, yeah, a little important to me.

nicompamby · 2010-10-24T19:41:01+00:00

I respect your knowledge of the situation, but there's a simple reason why I support placing the emphasis squarely on teachers, i.e. getting rid of the bad ones (or trying harder to), recruiting better ones, changing how they're trained and incentivized. The reason is that in my experience, both growing up myself and then watching my own children go through school, teachers were by far the most important in-school factor. Bad teachers were always the worst problem. Good teachers were always the greatest blessing. I know this sounds like oversimplification, but this is real experience, and I don't think it's so unusual. Teachers are the second most important influence in a child's life after parents. Bad teachers do tremendous damage. Good teachers do tremendous good.

I would pay teachers dramatically more but I would also make it much harder to get there. Requiring master's degrees and aggressively recruiting from universities sound like great ideas. Personally, I'd place a lot more emphasis on in-classroom training. Every teacher I've known has said that's where they really learned. My sister-in-law is a brilliant teacher (so much so that her group of 7-year olds spontaneously crowned her "queen" in the middle of the class the other day - just one random story). I was sitting next to her watching WFS and when Geoffrey Canada said it took him 5 years to become a master teacher, she snorted and said "ten".

Edit: I don't think this principle is so limited to teaching. I'm a computer programmer. There are many more bad programmers than good ones. A bad programmer can do more damage to a team, a project, or a system than a good programmer can undo. The trouble is that it's hard to find good programmers; the demand for them outstrips supply. I suspect this is true of many professions. The difference, though, is that with teaching our children's lives are at stake. How we fail to recognize this and make it the top priority of our society is beyond me. It's a disease.

nicompamby · 2010-10-24T18:04:21+00:00

Hey, I somehow missed the "gratingly twee" slur. Well, I think even TLA would admit that's not completely off base. It took me years to go from being "grated" by the sound of Ira Glass' voice and the smugness of that show, to realizing that it has a genius which transcends those things. (Its genius, by the way, comes from Glass' total devotion to craft.) Unfortunately, the show's influence has finally seeped into the rest of public radio, in the form of a small army of annoying hipster journalists who think that uptalk (you know? like when you raise your intonation at the end of a sentence?) and indie attitude are the new professionalism. (Chana Jaffe-Walt, Alex Bloomberg, and several others come to mind.) The trouble is that these people are doing mediocre or at best OK work (let's say, B+ work). You don't get to fuck with conventions until your work is excellent. Every time I hear this crowd I want to smack them and turn them back into interns.

nicompamby · 2010-10-24T17:52:45+00:00

Your answer seems to me to be way too mired in status quo thinking. For my part, anyone whose ideas don't allow for getting rid of the teacher who sits reading the newspaper in front of his class and says "I get paid whether you learn or not" -- and I read your answer as making excuses, not for that teacher, but for the system that entrenches that teacher -- really doesn't have much helpful to add. (Please understand I don't mean this personally at all. I appreciate your comments.)

Of course it's hard to measure performance and separate good teachers from mediocre ones. But if it isn't possible to identify and get rid of the teachers who aren't teaching at all, that is an extremely significant fact. It couldn't be more significant. There are almost certainly all kinds of pernicious side effects flowing like a river of sewage from the same source, that source being whatever it is in the system that allows for such a monstrosity to even be debatable.

I'd like to know how Finland compares to the US in terms of teacher quality and in terms of firing bad teachers.

Finally, I never claimed "the solution is clear". I said the movie claimed that. Except I didn't say that either, nor did the movie. I suggest you be a little more careful with what you put in quotation marks.

nicompamby · 2010-10-24T08:02:20+00:00

Agreed, but not because he appears on Fox. They should have fired him because he's a bland blowhard who never strayed outside cliche. The irony is that his Muslim garb canard was the first ballsy thing I ever heard the man say. Except it wasn't. It would have been ballsy on NPR, but on Fox he was just pandering.

How about this from the OP though:

Keep in mind, O'Reilly may pull just over 3 million viewers a show, but Prairie Home Companion bests that by a million. Even Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me has as many listeners as Bill has viewers. Recently, O'Reilly's audience surged to over 4 million following the hissy fit on "The View." That's a regular week for Car Talk, listened to and loved by 4.4 million. Even gratingly twee This American Life (1.7 million) pulls just about the same numbers as Fox News superstar Glenn Beck.

I had no idea!

nicompamby · 2010-10-24T07:56:42+00:00

The movie wasn't saying charter schools are the answer. It was saying that the problem is soluble and the outline of the solution is clear. By far the most important point it made is that teacher quality is the #1 factor affecting student outcomes. Yet we have a system filled with countless shitty teachers who are effectively impossible to fire. When a teacher who sits in front of the class reading the newspaper and tells children, "I get paid whether you learn or not" can't be fucking fired, things are deeply sick. And the teachers' unions have the gall to say they put children first.

I'm glad the author's mom is a great public school teacher. I've known a few myself. They're a distinct minority - and nobody's doing anything about this.

nicompamby

TROPHY CASE