Bonam

I agree the criticism is overdone but it seems weird to make the distinction and use that terminology to begin with. Why say "new or old stock Canadians" rather than simply "all Canadians" or "Canadians"? Meh, it's politics. Real issues always get ignored in favor of soundbites and gotchas. The voters get the politicians, and the politics, that they deserve.

You know, though I disagree about the whole "wipe our hands of Israel" thing, I can at least understand the argument. The middle-east is a quagmire and not wanting to deal with any country there is understandable (though in the case of Israel there are many counter-arguments). But looking toward Iran and allying with it as you have mentioned in thread after thread after thread... that I don't understand at all. All I can guess is that you have very deep misconceptions about what Iran is.

I didn't mean that the US entering WWII was a mistake, but rather that the diplomacy that led to WWII happening in the first place was a mistake. Whether you want to blame the Treaty of Versailles or the policy of appeasement or the unwillingness to intervene militarily until after disaster had already struck, those mistakes had far larger cost and consequence than anything related to the war on terror.

The books that tell you everything you need to know to build a nuclear bomb are freely available textbooks...

If you measure expensive in terms of cost in nominal dollars, maybe it'd rank somewhere up there. But inflation-adjust things or scale them relative to the size of economies of the time and it'd be nowhere to be found. Think of the diplomatic mistakes that led to WWII and even WWI, and the cost in both blood and money of those. Or think of the cost and consequence of a single insult that the Shah of Kwarezm made to Genghis Khan. Or think of the adoption of communism by Russia and the cost of that. Human history is full of mistakes that had disastrous consequences, and the war on terror, while certainly expensive, has had relatively minor effects on the world in general. Frankly, your statement is a typical fallacy of the same type that constantly leads people to say things like "this election might be the most significant in history" or "this market crash is the precursor of the collapse of capitalism" or the like. It is the constant sense that whatever is happening now is somehow unprecedented, far larger and more ominous than what has happened in the past. And it's just not. We're not making the worst mistakes of all time and the world is not ending.

Well, there's also the fact of ozone depletion up through the 90s to consider (though the trend is now reversing itself). I'm guessing the higher UV flux that was able to get through the atmosphere during that period would have led to more cancers, which can then show up later in people's lives.

Yes, definitely the worst thing to happen to the world. Ever.

Possibly, or possibly they were just incompetent at dealing with the threat they thought they faced, which I think is more likely. Remember Hanlon's Razor: "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".

I agree. If they had really responded to it as if it was a real bomb threat, that would be one thing. Despite all the humor about how people should be able to tell it's obviously not a bomb since it's a clock, that's totally false. You can make a bomb look like almost anything, and you only need a relatively small amount of actual explosive chemical, which could have been hidden anywhere in the little box he had. And, the vast vast majority of people would have no idea, looking at some electronic components hooked up together, what their purpose is. Frankly any kid's lunchbox could contain a bomb, if they wanted to bring it in and keep it hidden. But the reality is they didn't treat it like a real bomb threat. They treated the kid as if he'd brought in something dangerous, but did not treat the situation as a dangerous one. Can't have it both ways. I would say the choices of the teacher and principal show a high level of paranoia mixed with a high level of inability to react appropriately to the threat they thought they faced. As for racism? Well... the fact that the kid was Muslim probably had something to do with the thought that the device was a bomb entering a teacher's mind in the first place. But, once that thought entered the teacher's mind, they couldn't really ignore it. Once you think you there's a chance that you have a threat like that to deal with, you have to do something about it (though, as I said above, the response was clearly not appropriate to an actual bomb threat). So the question of racism comes down to whether or not it is racist that, when a Muslim is holding an unidentified electronic device, that the thought that it might be a bomb would come more readily to someone's mind than if a non-Muslim was holding the same device. And the reality is that given what we see in the media on an almost daily basis, given that almost all acts that we view as terrorist being committed by Muslims, etc... a person can't really be blamed for having that influence their thinking and their reaction. Is it unfair to individual Muslims who mean no harm? Yes, absolutely. But it would also be unfair to expect people to ignore the thought that something might be a bomb and thus ignore a potential risk to their own physical safety, just to avoid being unfair to a Muslim. Perceived threats to one's physical safety quickly override any other priorities one might have like being non-discriminatory, politically-correct, etc and the state of the world today makes it inevitable that when a Muslim kid in America is holding a homemade electronic device, there's a a greater chance that others will be threatened by it than if it was a non-Muslim kid.

That's kind of what governments have been trying to do with close to a decade of ~0% interest rate policies anyway...

My "side"? I was unaware that I had a side. I should get this side to start doing something for me I guess.... Our economy does have socialist principles built into it. The question is one of how much socialism you build in. If you do some simple math you'd see that this argument is deeply flawed. Just sum up all the extra gains that "capitalists" have made over the last few decades and divide that number by the rest of the population. The extra gains, once redistributed, would make only a small impact. Not enough to reduce people's work week by 1 hour, let alone 22.

Indeed. That most certainly includes Christianity as well as Islam. Both have motivated endless generations of fanatics and murderers throughout history.

So your belief is that no religion has any teachings which, when properly interpreted, encourage hurting other people?

The sooner we automate whatever can be automated, the better. If minimum wage policies help to speed that along, why not? Progress.

And yet media reporting over the last few years gives the impression that these incidents are on the rise, that there is a recent epidemic of such incidents. Do the stats agree with that? Reality is the media always wants to present the world as if it is falling apart, because that is what gets viewers. If someone were to watch the news and decide that the world is what's shown there, they would conclude that we are in a constant state of apocalypse. In what case does the media ever NOT do that? The first thing any reasonable person should do when hearing any news story is assume that it was a complete fabrication or misrepresentation. Then, if the news actually has any relevance to them, they can dig deeper on the topic and find out what the truth of the related matter is.

Not my fault you've drifted so much farther to the left over the years In my opinion, picking sides in a civil war should only be done under one (or both) of the following conditions: 1) It is the only way to prevent a genocide 2) The outcome of the civil war has a real impact on the security of the intervening nation(s) In regards to (1), it is often easier to prevent the genocide by providing a means of escape to the endangered population rather than defending said population where it currently is. In regards to (2), almost all the violence of the middle-eastern regimes is inward-focused and so does not pose any real threat to Western nations.

I honestly can't believe your viewpoint on this, MH. The terms "racist", "bigot", "sexist", "mysognist" and similar are used as an insult and a means of dismissing opposing opinion on this forum in the overwhelming majority of use cases. Yes, in some cases, they could be used as a factual statement (just as Argus points out moron and idiot could also be used as factual statements in some rare cases), but they literally almost never are. Forum policy should address the typical usage, not the edge cases.

The money doesn't do the company any good just sitting around as cash. No person can benefit from it, nor does it help the company grow or make more profit. The money will be spent, sooner or later, in some kind of economic activity. If the money is hoarded as cash for now, that just means the growth that would be created by that money being spent is being deferred, not lost. In any case, the money isn't paper bills stuffed under a mattress, it is likely held in some kind of investments, and that means the capital is still working in the economy.

I guess next time someone mentions they are vegetarian we should let them know Hitler was vegetarian too, and ask them about the "connection"? Just because some particular idea is shared by someone "bad", doesn't mean the idea itself is bad. Arguments can and should be evaluated to and responded to on their own merits, rather than pointing out that some bad people also made that argument at one point and therefore it must be bad.

Fair enough on the assumption of an extra 50 C being the final equilibrium value. Still, a 50C increase in the equilibrium temperature would not be survivable in any meaningful sense. It would spell the end of any significant human civilization and kill not just the majority of the Earth's population (even if some tiny fraction could survive underground) but would eliminate almost any chance of humanity realizing its full long term potential. In contrast, ISIS is just another petty brutal group, who would kill a lot of people given the power to do so but would fall sooner or later.

Hitler controlled a technologically advanced state with an educated population that could build a powerful military. ISIS has no such capability, nor are its policies likely to give rise to such a capability.

Haven't double checked the numbers but my guess is if a significant fraction of the Earth's ocean mass goes into the atmosphere as water vapor, that will quickly generate the needed extra warming to evaporate the rest of it, since water vapour is itself a greenhouse gas.

ISIS doesn't have the ability to seriously threaten any developed country. Even Canada's military could easily destroy any ISIS attempt to take anything over. The only countries that ISIS can take over are the ones that will welcome them with open arms.

What happens there impacts us here only minimally. Instability may lead to higher oil prices but the West is now well adapted to $100+/barrel oil anyway and new technologies make it largely self-sufficient in terms of energy supply, if need be. And there might be the occasional terrorist act out of there but they are mostly focused on slaughtering each other. As for the spread of Islam in Western countries... daunting as it is politically, changing immigration policies would be a heck of a lot more doable than trying to militarily impose order in the ME. There's already non-negligible popular support for revisiting mass immigration policies in European countries that have them.

If the people of the ME and North Africa want to live under a caliphate, let them. We already let similarly brutal regimes exist, such as North Korea.