Moonbox

You can trust whatever you want. Just don't expect anyone to consider your anecdotes as anything more than worthless. At least writers of the Globe and Mail (I laughed when you called it a left-wing rag) have some intellectual and journalistic responsibility to publish facts, and those facts are 10000x more reliable than you telling us about "some guy you know".

That's what you'd like to believe, but it's only because capitalism is the bogeyman on which you've chosen to blame all of the world's (and your own) failings . The fact that this sort of sectarian violence (and worse) is a consistent theme throughout the region's history would suggest you're way off base, but facts and history don't seem to matter much to you.

Your charts don't even qualify as citations. I could quickly doodle something showing the opposite and link it to a blog as well. There's no mention of the source, no defined methodology and no explanation of what constitutes a terror attack. Give us something with some substance and we can review it.

I can agree with a lot of that. My biggest point of criticism has always been their complete betrayal of the Shia in the first Gulf War, where they incited tens of thousands of Shia in revolt against Saddam and then abandoned them when he surrendered and backed out of Kuwait. Saddam murdered literally hundreds of thousands of his own people, however, so it's hardly as if things were grand before the (second) US invasion. He needed to go. That said, the Americans clearly didn't have a clue how to handle the sectarian divide in Iraq, and the idea of Iraqi Kurds, Shia and Sunni's cooperating in government was preposterous. The violence among these groups is not at all a new thing. It's been happening for centuries and only a strong central government or imperial rule has ever managed to curb it. The end result of any war is generally disastrous. I hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but you could say pretty much the same thing about WW2. Millions were dead and the were participants heavily indebted. The end result was the Cold War and an equally vicious regime in control of Eastern Europe. You could say the West played into Stalin's hands... At the time, however, the Germans appeared to be the real enemy and it was inconceivable that they shouldn't be stopped. So it is with ISIS and so it was with Saddam.

There's no doubt that there are elements within Saudi Arabia that support Islamic militancy. Most of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudis and most of ISIS's funding (by most accounts) comes from SA or Gulf states. Saudia Arabia's former head of Intelligence, Prince Bandar, was dismissed last summer and probably because of this. That being said, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are currently engaged in an air campaign against ISIS and are heavily cracking down on local supporters/sympathizers within their own countries. Saying that they're friendly with them, therefore, is pretty dumb.

It doesn't matter. It's still completely absurd. The formal semantics of your wording don't make it any less so. There is such a thing as reasonable and unreasonable speculation. Saying "I may be a vampire" isn't any less stupid than "I am a vampire." Sadly I don't doubt that. Spend more time thinking and reading about the world and that might change. You really need to keep better track of what you say: You blamed the US for ISIS. Nobody was ever arguing that Al-Qaeda didn't feel they had reasons to attack the World Trade Center. So if Al-Qaeda are murdering and mutilating people for reasons as lousy as that, how can you not suggest they don't have similar aims for the rest of the world, or that it isn't a worthy goal to stop them?

No, sorry. Semantics don't save you from your own ridiculousness. If I said, "Stephen Harper may be preparing an invasion of the USA," the use of the word may does not make the statement any less stupid. Regardless, at another point you said: so your embarrass yourself not just with your poor reasoning, but also with your poor memory and lack of conviction/honesty about what you already said. We don't need much more evidence that you're just blathering nonsense. So when girls in Afghanistan/Pakistan etc get acid poured on their faces for attempting to get an education, you're saying that this is because of western meddling? That's beyond absurd. That shows a remarkable level of ignorance.

Was that a rhetorical question? It obviously does bother you, because you're very clearly taking exception about what's being said. I didn't insult you either, but you helped prove my point. What you call an insult is actually just you not liking what the other person has to say.

Greed and loud complaining. A lot of the people that would insist on this 'right' are the same ones who'd dismiss any suggestion that local residents should be able to veto wind turbine developments in the middle of their communities. Going back to your original points, I would have to say I agree with virtually everything you've said. Personally, my #1 priority is always a balanced budget. I'm not old enough to have enjoyed the spend-thriftTrudeau years, but I'll live with the consequences of the Baby-Boomers' fiscal irresponsibility probably my whole life. This touches back on the issue of elderly care, which is going to be one of the biggest crises my generation is going to have to deal with it. It's a grossly understated problem and the economics behind it are grim. The sad fact is that it's unlikely the younger generations are going to be able to afford to support pension and healthcare expenses for the Baby Boomers, at least not to the same standard which they supported their own parents. Simple demographics show us this is a ticking time-bomb and either elderly care will suffer or the new working population is going to see enormous tax increases and/or high inflation.

And the fact that any of you support this nonsense based on nothing but the fact that Islam is your pet boogeyman and scape-goat for all thats wrong in the world is quite frankly astounding. I have no problem with Islam. I have problems with vicious idiots using it as a basis for religious politics and violence. Saying that I'm blaming it for everything that's wrong in the world is also a ridiculous hyperbole but very typical of your brand of reasoning. Muslim extremists aren't bogeyman. The Yazidi, Kurds, Assyrians, South-Sudanese, Mali and others have all been victim to the sort of barbarism we haven't seen since the Middle Ages. 9-11 wasn't caused by the bogeyman either. It's a real danger, whether or not you choose to believe it. The fact that you'd even suggest that it isn't is ludicrous, having more to do with your own anger towards your own bogeymen (the West/capitalism etc) than anything else.

You feeling that way likely has a lot to do with how your own favorite posters (and the ridiculous positions you collectively support) get regularly discredited and mocked out of threads.

There's a very real difference between insulting a poster personally and breaking down a person's line of reasoning and showing how stupid it is. This is usually preceded by showing what the person is saying is categorically false, completely impossible or so outlandishly unlikely/irrational that there's no room for further debate on the point. When someone is arguing that 9-11 was caused by rogue-US intelligence, that the USA is friends with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, that Palestine/Israeli conflicts had nothing to do with Israelis being Jewish, or that western "imperialism/interference" is the sole cause of Islamic extremism, it becomes obvious that they're not interested in a reasonable, fact-based discussion.

More like 2.5. I've been here 76 months. Socialist has been here for 30. Either way I did goof my original math though. Except I didn't. You did, however, try making fun of me for mine when you spend pretty much the same amount. If anything, I may have mocked how much time you spend discussing a single subject, and how that subject happens to correspond with your profession and pay cheque. The fact that you don't substantiate anything you say just makes it more and more apparent that you're not here to have an intelligent discussion. You're here to whine and cry about how you think deserve more money without presenting ANY objective information about why.

Work on your punctuation, paragraphing and spelling. Nobody is going to even bother reading that past the first 2 sentences.

When you make a comment like that socialist, you do two things: 1) You make it obvious how much you're struggling to avoid any discussion of facts. Our number of posts in no way demonstrate how much spare time we have, but it's all you have because you keep getting shut down and laughed at. 2) You're making yourself look stupid. Trying to ridicule how much time I spend posting here when it's clearly less than you is preposterously dumb. I've been here for 6 years. You've been here for 2. Do some basic math (clearly not your strength) and then go hide in a hole. The type of deranged mental gymnastics your mind must go through to convince yourself that the above quote even resembles a rational thought is truly remarkable. If you're actually a teacher (highly doubtful now from what we've seen), we all truly pity your students.

Thank you for your (as usual) brilliant insight. Thus there is no incentive to work harder. The bare minimum is enough. A 300 word essay is less than a page and won't take more than 2 minutes to read. Unless you're dealing with a particularly dense student, cursory corrections and comments don't take more than another 2-5 minutes at most. Average class sizes are also nowhere near 35 Ontario and actually sit at around 25. With 4-8 minutes spent per student on a 300 word essay, we're looking at more like 1.5-3.0 hours spent marking for the entire class, which is something that usually only happens once or twice a semester. (That paragraph was 91 words - Try telling me it took more than 20 seconds to read.) So, aside from working with young people (which we can assume you're okay with if you went to Teacher's College), it's like any other job in the world? Cite it or don't say it, because I'd bet good money that this is categorically false and nowhere near the truth.

That's putting it politely in socialist's case. Not concerned about debt...lol. He certainly fits the stereotype held in the financial industry that teachers are generally awful managers of their own personal finances. Knowing that the pension plan is always there (and subsidized by taxpayers) and that there's virtually no chance they can their jobs, it's spend spend spend all the way to retirement with no worrying about saving or about being debt-free.

Yes I see that now I misread sorry. Right. I think we're all on the same page.

Would you say that ISIL's persecution of Yazidis, Assyrians and Shia muslims happens because they hate our freedoms or because of western imperialism or whatever talking point you choose?!? I guess it's easier to be completely oblivious and form your beliefs based on whatever you feel like.

Good job with the thesaurus. That's an impressive display of redundant adjectives. I didn't argue that in any way whatsoever. I very clearly mocked the idea that the cartels pose any significant danger to the average Canadian or American, which is what another poster was suggesting. You're just getting mixed up and confused like you usually do.

Oh hey I'd never argue that the US doesn't have generally terrible foreign policy, and that in some cases it has worsened the problem. I just disagree entirely that it's the cause for the majority of fundamentalist extremism. There's simply too many hundreds of years of religious violence to go back on (state-sponsored or not) to suggest otherwise. The US is not responsible for hard-line Wahhabi-style ideology. You could make a case if the extremists were simply trying to overthrow their governments and take charge of their own secular destinies (sans Western interference), but we can see that their goals go much further than this. When they're tossing acid in young women's faces for trying to get an education and generally murdering anyone who refuses to submit to their authority and/or beliefs, no argument can reasonably suggest that this is the result of US foreign policy.

Yes, but it will be hit or miss depending which province you're talking about. In Ontario, it's extremely unlikely the Wynne Liberals will do anything even resembling fiscally responsible. Michael I'm curious what these unionized/controlled jobs you're speaking of would be. In all of my research, I've never encountered a single example of union/association/guild keeping compensation lower than it would otherwise be on the free market. That's kind of the whole point.

You posted a link to the BCTF's website! That's like using the Conservative Party's website to find pro-Stephen Harper facts! You almost couldn't have attempted a more incompetent citation. What's worse is that you didn't even discuss it. You just plopped a link into your post and said, "Here you go!" That's so astonishingly dumb I can only shake my head and laugh.

The same as someone with similar aptitudes and qualifications would earn working 40 hrs a week for 39 weeks a year (ie about ~80-85% of what they're making now). Except we do pay teachers already, and far too much at that. The statistics have been provided on numerous occasions to you showing that Canada's teacher's rank in the top 5 best paid in the world. Unfortunately for your argument, Canada's top 5 teacher pay does not correspond to top 5 education and aptitude rankings. We score significantly lower. Germany's teachers are THE best paid in the world, but they also fail. The facts are very inconvenient for your argument. It's no surprise that you neglected to address them in any other threads. They bury you. Are you going to thread-dodge and go create yet another thread posting your nonsense now? How many more threads are you going to create, hoping over and over to find a more sympathetic audience?

Except, as I said, the cartels don't blow up World Trade Centres, subways, air planes, theatres etc, nor do they threaten to murder anyone who doesn't follow their ideology. Your vague and half-baked idea that the cartels have caused even more damage is, quite frankly, totally ridiculous (like most of the stuff you say).