Tom (thomasneal)'s Public Profile in the Diigo Community

Member since May 08, 2006, follows 9 people, 0 public groups, 732 public bookmarks (1405 total).

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Our Man in Havana - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on 2008-08-15
- Rather than admit they were taken in by his invented sketch along with the fear the embarrassing story could not be classified from being published by discharging Wormold, the top officers of the service assign Wormold to headquarters and decorate him with an OBE. Wormold and Beatrice want to marry and Milly agrees.
The last word on P.Z. Myers - Crunchy Con on 2008-07-19
- The absurd thing about Myers attempt to transmogrify his naked act of aggression, theft, vandalism and incitement into victim status is that he is basically saying that if we all are not going around the world desecrating whatever it is we don't believe in, we are ipso facto respecting and honoring same. So my failure to desecrate a Quran or the Satanic Bible means I am somehow respecting and honoring them.
Op-Ed Contributor - If Israel Attacks Iran’s Nuclear Sites, Iranians Should Hope It Succeeds. - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com on 2008-07-19
- ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.
Toddlers who dislike spicy food racist, say report - Telegraph on 2008-07-18
- The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from
  Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and
  nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among
  youngsters in their care.
- This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in
  response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.
- 1 more annotations...
- - Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their
    local council. The guide added: "Some people think that if a large
    number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the
    institution. In fact, the opposite is the case."
Religion News (RSS): Muslim clerics annul rape victim's marriage on 2008-07-18
- Lucknow: In a chilling reminder of the Imrana case, yet another young woman from Muzaffarnagar who allegedly fell victim to her father-in-law's sexual assault faces a bleak future after mullahs called for the annulment of her marriage.
- "A woman who has had a sexual liaison with her husband's father cannot be his consort anymore. A divorce is a must," Mufti Maulana Imran, senior cleric from Darul Uloom Deoband, said on Monday after his view was sought. The prescribed punishment in the case, he maintained, was 'sangsar' or public stoning of the victim and the culprit until death.
Europe as a giant nursing home - Crunchy Con on 2008-07-17
- That's the view Shorto says makes sense from all the data. Ross says he and Reihan believe there should be no necessary antagonism between feminists and social conservatives with regard to the desirability of policies that make for more workforce flexibility -- that is, the state should make it easier for companies to allow women to blend childraising with employment. Agreed.
- Still, the depth and magnitude of the fertility crisis in Europe (and elsewhere, though Europe's the only place I really care about) suggests that there's something mysterious and, to my mind, malevolent, working in the deepest currents of the postmodern psyche. Despite all the financial hardships having larger families -- and we're not talking five or six kids, but two or three -- brings to modern Europeans, the fact is Europe, as a whole, has never been more prosperous. In times of greater material poverty, Europeans still managed to have more than enough children to replace themselves.
- 2 more annotations...
- - And today? As wealthy as they are, they're choosing civilizational suicide. Despite some attempt to see the sunny side of collapse, here's how Shorto's piece ends:
  - Haub wasn't buying it. "Maybe tinkering with the retirement age and making other economic adjustments is good," he said. "But you can't go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can't keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can't have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home."
Rule of law? Screw it, says US president - Crunchy Con on 2008-07-17
- Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."
- A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
- 11 more annotations...
- - "[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."
  - [T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law".
  - That's the inevitable outcome when a country's political establishment decrees itself exempt from the rule of law. If the rule of law doesn't constrain the actions of government officials, then nothing will. Continuous revelations of serious government lawbreaking have led not to investigations or punishment but to retroactive immunity and concealment of the crimes.
  - Judicial findings of illegal government behavior have led to Congressional action to protect the lawbreakers. The Detainee Treatment Act. The Military Commissions Act. The Protect America Act. The FISA Amendments Act. They're all rooted in the same premise: that our highest government leaders have the power to ignore our laws with impunity, and when they're caught, they should be immunized and protected, not punished.
  - Now, think about this. Not only did the White House condone torture, in contravention of law, but it did not care to discover if the men it had rounded up and put into prison actually deserved to be there. A CIA analyst believed one-third of Gitmo detainees didn't deserve to be there, and the then-commander of the camp believed that number was probably 50 percent. And the Commander in Chief didn't care.
  - The progression of apologists for the state is always more or less the same: to suggest that the government is doing something flatly illegal and immoral is disloyal, and then once it has been proved that the government has been doing something flatly illegal and immoral it is only soft-headed idealists who think that such things are unjustifiable. "We have to be pragmatic!" they tell us. This is where the logic of wanting to "get things done" takes you.
  - Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.
  - Under the guise of "enhanced interrogation techniques," it has succeeded, in Mayer's words, in "making torture the official law of the land in all but name." Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.
  - To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, "hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system" and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.
  - The thing that gets to me is that it's possible, even probable, to make mistakes in a time of war. But in this case, the White House didn't even want to know if it had made mistakes, and innocents were suffering. That's not tragic; that's malicious.
  - Why has two years of Democratic control of Congress failed to stop it or reverse it?
L'Hôte: I am not you, atheism. on 2008-07-17
- And yet Myers has unabashed contempt for every religious person, whatever the explanation. And ironically, he is himself quite ignorant of religion, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and epistemology, knowledge of which would enable him to make better arguments. And if he doesn't know he's ignorant, he's self-deceived. I'm sure if he read this, though, he would disparage it as the "courtier's reply". So I invite him to get into a public, taped debate with, say, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen, Michael Rea, Dean Zimmerman, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Eleonore Stump, Marilyn McCord Adams, or Robert Adams. I believe it would be quite illuminating.
- I honestly doubt Myers has given the status of his moral views, or any of his normative views at all, really, much thought. For instance, he would probably claim that moral beliefs are mere preferences for the world being one way rather than another, or expressions of emotions, etc. But when he's actually expressing them, I doubt very much they seem to him like other preferences, such as his preference for vanilla over chocolate ice cream. They probably seem to him to be 'objective'--not just the way he would like things, but the way things really ought to be, such that if you disagree with him you show yourself to be somehow deficient (whereas he wouldn't think that your disagreeing with him about ice cream preference shows you to be deficient).
Atheist rejects neo-atheism - Crunchy Con on 2008-07-17
- If someone was a political commentator, and operated the way Meyers, Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens did, would anyone listen to them? No. As much as the success of the Ann Coulters of the world suggests otherwise, we largely understand that a basic level of decorum, mutual respect, and the assumption of good faith should under gird our national dialogue. Indeed, without these assumptions, the dialogue is not worth having.
- But then there is atheism, where it is apparently the case that you can always come closer to righteousness by expressing still-greater contempt for those with which you don't agree. Now, this is all very strange; though growing, the atheist minority is stilled dwarfed in this country and in this world by the religious. And how can you possibly change people's minds if you're constantly ridiculing them? Doesn't make much sense.
- 2 more annotations...
- - But I suspect that it makes perfect sense. It makes sense because the goal of the new atheism has never been to convert. It has never been to include. It has never been to change minds. The ridicule is the goal; the contempt is the end; the sheer fun of sanctimony, self-righteousness and loathing are the purpose.
  - That is one thing you have to hand the Africans. They may not be producing a Richard Dawkins. But England is not producing a Peter Akinola. In the long run, I'd bet on the culture that produces an Akinola, not a Dawkins.
The bear cometh. Where be the bullets? - Crunchy Con on 2008-07-17
- He puts his finger on something that bothers me about all this "too big to fail" business, and it's namely this: that if investors come to believe that the government won't let something fail, then there's no reason for that something to take risks responsibly. The whole thing ends up being a confidence game. The other morning I was listening to an interview on the (excellent) public radio program Marketplace with Jim Rogers, a Singapore-based US investor, who was ripping the federal quasi-bailout of Fannie and Freddie. Here's an excerpt from the Rogers interview: