to server the commenter's purpose

should have been: to serve the commenter's agenda

I have, I know several. To a man they tell me that things were much better under Saddam. In pre-war Iraq you could go to to school, (they used to have the highest percentage of PHD's in the world) raise your family in safety, the power was on, and the water was clean.

Sure if you were "against Saddam" he was going to put you in meat grinder. Literally.

The problem is in order to "get rid of Saddam" your noble goal, America had to kill anywhere from 30,000 to 1.2 million people and partially vaporise the country to do it.

Iraq is now a hell. Was it worth it?

The Iraqis don't think so. I think it's their call. Not yours.

I do hear that chicken production is now, almost, almost!, back to pre-war levels.

.. something typed by a monkey.

-- DCLaw1

I doubt that whatever that was made his mother proud.

You're a veritable tabula rasa, aren't you? Not a single glimmer of sentience to sully that pristine slate....

This mutual admiration society where 99% of the readers all say and repeat the same things to one another over and over and over and where one can look at each day's front page for maybe 10 seconds know exactly what every article is going to say and what every letter writer is going to respond.

Not at all, which even a cursory "look" would show. I'll tell ya, though, there is one thing I think we can all agree on -- without even the danger of contradiction or refutation -- and that is: You're an eedjit.

Cheers,

If a million monkeys hammered at a million typewriters for a million years, you'd still be working the second shift at Applebees.

This makes about as much sense as... something typed by a monkey.

man

i can't use these html tags worth a damn.

-- Jkalos

Always, always click preview when you have used tags in a comment. The trouble you are having is almost always as simple as having not closed a tag or of having put a typo in a tag. For example I quite often typo 'blockquote' by putting in two u's for some reason. I hardly ever catch it until I use preview and am forced to find where I screwed up. That is after I have finished trying to blame the stupid tag thing for my error. ;o).

Sorry about the missing S.

I took that test, too, and surprised myself with the number I called correctly.

I can tell you what the secret is: you have to look at the eyes, too, not just the crinkles and squinting a bit, but also for some "light" in the eyes. The fake smiles had eyes that seemed flat.

I don't disagree that public education tends toward regimentation and oppression. This wasn't any less true in my day -- 50 years or so ago -- than it is today, I think, although my impression is that the teachers of my day often had more education themselves than many do today. I'm not sure that's true, mind you, or at least not universally true. It would be interesting to hear what people here say who have more recent experience with the public school system.

What I do think, though, is that the emphasis on control rather than on learning among teachers and school administrators can be attributed at least in part to unhappy truth that physical maturity, and with it the desire for independence, occurs so much earlier in life than the knowledge and mental maturity which a society as complex as ours demands of independent and self-sufficient actors.

So...you've got teenagers bursting at the seams, surrounded by alternate, and very powerful sources of information -- media, entertainment, etc. -- which are in competition with you, often very successfully, for their attention. To top it all off, your average school has really, really lousy production values.

Small wonder, I think, that we give up and turn secondary schools into prisons. My questions are these: what would it take to stop treating adolescents like vermin? What would modern rites of passage look like? Where might we find the modern equivalent of the apprenticeship system?

I'll bet you two have some very compelling ideas about this. Would you mind sharing?

if someone could invent an ad hominem fallacy filter for comments sections. Wouldn't that be cool? Some entries would just show up blank in part or in whole, as the fallacies were simply blocked.

Come one, computer geek genuises! Invent the ad hominem filter!!!

Yes, it would certainly have a clarifying effect on some minds, but I wouldn't call that result "empathy."

Otherwise, would we still have had Abu Ghraib or Fallujah, etc., etc?

Just because we don't have a Draft now does not mean that everyone who's been over there has gone by choice.

What percent of Americans support John McCain? 30, 40, 50, I don't know. I do know that there is a reasonable chance that he will be President.

Can someone tell me how the McCain presidency would be different from the Bush regime? Other than the "straight talk" of course.

Isn't there some lesson to be learned from electing bush?

If a million monkeys hammered at a million typewriters for a million years, you'd still be working the second shift at Applebees.

Nothing clarifies ones priorities like the threat of imminent death; and if they've shown nothing else, these advocates and pundits have shown their sole priority is saving their own necks.-- Iokannan in the Well

It isn't even just the threat of death that they don't want to be faced with or 'bothered' with. They don't want to be in the military and all that it entails. All the way from sleeping in a barracks setting, to getting the military issue haircut, to making their bed in the morning without Mommy's help. They don't want to be faced with that. And, of course, if they happen to be making a comfortable income, they don't want to be having to get by on the income of, say, a Private.