Raithe

For one perspective on this... The Federalist - Expel People Who Demand Trigger Warnings In other words, how can you be so cruel as to expect these students to engage with knowledge as it actually exists? They’re just trying to get the degrees they paid for in peace. Leave them alone. What I am about to write may come off to many people as cruel. As such, I feel it necessary to begin by stating that I write this piece as a victim of childhood abuse who still suffers some degree of PTSD from the experience. I won’t claim it’s nearly as bad as that experienced by, say, combat veterans, although unlike Myers and her “abusive relationship,” I do have a window into PTSD that severe—namely, the very man who abused me: my father. My Experience With PTSDYou see, my father had severe PTSD from his time as a Green Beret during the Vietnam War. It is probably at least partially because he refused to seek treatment for it that I ended up suffering the same thing to a lesser degree. My father’s PTSD transformed him into an erratic, explosive, psychologically abusive man who instilled paranoid fantasies in me about everyone, including my own mother, starting when I was at the tender age of five. To make sure I never questioned these ideas, he punished any signs of critical thinking with almost Maoist tactics of repression. He also sweetened his psychological poison pill by alternating his rages and interrogations with grandiose flattery designed to make me even more dependent on his fantasies. Thankfully, my mother kicked him out when I was seven, but to this day I find it difficult to fully trust many people because of the pure paranoia I was forced to experience and embrace at an early age. I don’t bring this up for pity. I bring it up because I know what it is to be triggered, and to have to fight your way past a psychological gag reflex that you never wanted, but that the dual cruelties of fate and another person’s mental illness imposed on you. It is because I know this that I must write this article. In the past few years, I have seen the markers of a disorder I have learned to live with cynically twisted into a political cudgel by the radical Left, as well as a number of people I can only believe are still too deluded by their own continued suffering to realize what a mockery and an insult their cause is to their fellow sufferers. I don’t know which of these categories Myers fits into, but, frankly, it doesn’t matter. A snake-oil salesman is a snake-oil salesman, even if she believes the snake oil works. Leave College If You Can’t Take ItLet’s get back to Myers’ “just let the poor traumatized kids get the degrees they paid for” argument. No, don’t let them get those degrees. The whole point of those degrees is to signify their bearers possess qualities beyond merely the credit rating to take out vast amounts of student loans. The entire reason college degrees are supposed to be valuable is that they signify a capacity to absorb and process specialized knowledge beyond what non-degree-holders have. This is, in fact, the whole purpose of education generally. This means if some troubled or weak students have allowed their mental illness to preclude them from absorbing such knowledge, the fault lies not with the college, but with them. Such people are as ineducable as an illiterate English major. The solution is not to expel knowledge from the classroom that is disagreeable to these feeble and fragile minds. It is to expel them. Their place is in a psych ward, not a school, and their money (or, more likely, their parents’) is better spent seeking treatment there than spoiling education for everyone else. I am not exaggerating when I say that the stigma attached to mental illness exists at least partially because “sufferers” exhibit these sorts of cognitive glass jaws. Why should you be willing to spend time around someone prone to breaking down and blaming you at any moment, let alone take responsibility for them as an employer, supervisor, or especially the sort of educator-****-substitute-parent that many college administrations try to be? In our lawsuit-happy culture, there is no reason for any rational being to want anyone who is mentally ill nearby if their most visible “advocates” are so fragile they want to see a Shakespeare play labeled like a pack of cigarettes. You’re Harming People Who Have Real ProblemsThis stigma is more than just an insult to people who do their best not to permit their mental illnesses to affect their lives. It also permits some senseless and unenlightened policies at universities. Witness Yale University’s policy on mental health, which seems to treat everyone with mental illness—even those who want to do nothing but learn in order to escape the circumstances that led to it—as a potential lawsuit. The result? Anyone who shows signs of mental fragility—even when he doesn’t permit it to affect his coursework—gets quietly suspended as a precautionary measure to avoid liability. This policy has already led to one suicide by a suspended student and a pervasive culture among Yale students of not reporting their mental-health issues, which should surprise no one. But can we truly say it is irrational if the trigger-warning proponents are right that any mentally ill student who reads “Titus Andronicus” is liable to suffer a panic attack or become suicidal? If that’s true, the only rational response for educators is simply to either avoid contact with the mentally ill, or to shy away from teaching anything that might possibly implicate the darker side of human existence. This is why colleges like Yale drive their students to suicide rather than risk a lawsuit, and why college professors fear that teaching “triggering” material might prematurely end their careers. In the guise of sensitivity, mental-health “activists” have convinced them that sufferers are ticking time bombs. I hope that I speak for many, many other people who’ve dealt with mental illness when I say we are not so easily exploded, and many of us, especially those who have been acutely afflicted, resent the hell out of being portrayed that way. I refuse to give people who spread this meme of the easily breakable sufferer even the benefit of praising their noble or empathetic intentions. What they offer is not compassion, but idle, sniveling condescension disguised as such. Can’t Handle the Heat, Get Out of CollegeTo give one example of just how insulting these coddlers can get, consider the following argument that many proponents of trigger warnings have voiced to me: “Surely,” they say, “you wouldn’t throw spiders at an arachnophobe and claim it’s defensible behavior? How is bombarding people with triggers in a classroom any different?” Setting aside how infantilizing the logic is, the problem with this logic is its generalization onto the classroom, which comes equipped with a few implicit expectations about your ability to absorb information. Sure, one might not throw spiders at an arachnophobe in a social setting, but when an arachnophobe decides to major in entomology, he forfeits his right to complain about seeing spiders. Yet this style of argument clearly rings a chord with some people who suffer from mental illness. This is depressing, but also helpful, for it gives us a much clearer sign of who the ineducable and broken among us are. When they lend their support to the professional coddlers masquerading as “activists,” they advertise their presence. Like it or not, the activists have done us a service in flushing them out, as surely as the exterminator does a service by drawing out termites. The “victims” they hold up as poster children should be the first people that colleges suspend, expel, or forcibly commit to whatever mental-health facilities they retain. This will take the stigma away from most mental-health sufferers and put it firmly where it belongs: with the ones whose inability to hack it in an educational setting is so all-consuming that they can’t stop talking about it. Sick People Need Treatment, Not Trigger WarningsIs this cruel? No. What is cruel is leaving people that troubled without treatment, and then expecting them to survive in institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to seeking truth. It is true that some people are so damaged that, in the immortal words of Col. Nathan R. Jessup, they “can’t handle the truth.” It’s not fair to the colleges or to them to expect them to hack it any more than it’s fair to expect someone with easily broken bones to become a body builder. Either the college will have to dumb its educational mission down to the point of meaninglessness, or the extremely damaged will have to put themselves at risk of interminable mental agony. The first option destroys learning; the second destroys people. Better to keep the people incapable of learning away from it. I know what it is to be triggered. I also have never resented a professor for not warning me in advance. If anything, I was grateful. For me, something being triggered was a bright flashing arrow indicating precisely what I most needed to work on to be able to live a normal life and cease permitting my painful past to control me. Seeing that truth and your own disorders don’t line up can be frightening or liberating; often both at the same time. Like Plato’s philosopher, whose eyes burn in the light of the sun when he first emerges from the cave, stripping away your own mental illness’ illusions can be very painful. As in Plato, it is also worth it. But if you can’t brave that light, you don’t deserve it. If you need trigger warnings in order to learn, then the only warning we should hear is a warning against letting you in the classroom. There will always be those who prefer to be lost, but we don’t need to burn maps to accommodate them. To get back to educating students, colleges need to understand that some would prefer to remain lost in a dark wood of error. For those students, there can be only one option, and it is to inscribe above the campus gates the only warning the ineducable deserve to read: Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

A fair point, but also too dramatic with the spilling over of course, especially seeing as birth rates are dropping across the world. http://www.prb.org/publications/datasheets/2014/2014-world-population-data-sheet/data-sheet.aspx And as you can see, basically we just need to help Africa now with literacy and development now. No need for hyperbole, no need for exaggerations, lets take this discussion at face value - there is no "crisis", but we certainly benefit a lot more by helping nations help themselves. Especially because he's right in the fact that its basically the better offs that leave, which is a huge problem for the country they flee from. The trouble with helping Africa with literacy and development.. is how much of the money and aid sent gets skimmed off by the local warlords or actual members of the assorted official governments in those countries.

Exactly, just like the English have tolerated the French, and the Germans... I wouldn't say that the cultures are incompatible, just that they are quite different in their perspectives and attitudes on certain things. As such, they need to develop ways to mesh together and find a balance. Unfortunately, the EU doesn't try that. It's a duct-taped monstrosity that evolved over time as a series of bureaucratic organisations between governments and now tries to apply a top-down "do what we say" approach full of red-tape. -- Then again, you do know why God made England so small? Otherwise we would have conquered the whole planet, not just run 3/4's of it for awhile.

I just wish you could use the harpoon on all vehicles. The tougher ones, I could understand first having to use the harpoon to remove a layer or two of armor, but then it should expose a weak point for your next shot. Some of the cars I've come across, though, my harpoon doesn't seem to lock on to anything. Once you have all the upgrades for the harpoon, I don't think I encountered any vehicles that didn't have a couple of lock on points. The trouble is that some seem to only show when you're on the side of a car rather than behind it. Also, some other lock-on points only show up after a certain amount of armour has been reduced.

So.... Rupert Murdoch just bought National Geographic

I pretty much went through the entire game with only the 1st level of armour on the car. Went with the.. 2nd level of ram, and just kept pushing the engine/suspension/exhaust to max. That and kept the tires that improve both asphalt and sand handling. The right mix of swerving and boost should give you plenty of time for thunderpoon reloads.

I think the general historical viewpoint that people in the US take... Is that to break the law in defence of liberty and freedom for yourself or others is viewed as American. But to break the law on the basis of ensuring your "freedom" to prevent others having liberty or freedom is un-American. Of course, that's always subject to re-interpretation every 20-30 years (possibly shorter).

Eh, do enough of the story missions to get access to the.. Thunderpoon!

Part of the trouble is when you have large waves of refugees or immigrants in this manner, is that when they do get to the country they want to settle in they naturally localise together. It forms what I hate to call ghettos or little suburbs of that group. So in a short space of time, everyone in that area is from a different culture, they continue to use the language of their previous home as the primary language, and again, naturally, they close ranks against people from outside that group as a means of protection. You then get the calls of multi-culturalism that the surrounding groups then bend to help this group out, that potentially local laws flow to them because they are now a minority group. All of this gets in the way of practical assimilation between this new cultural group and the native cultural group. Then ten or twenty years down the line you'll find that there's now cultural/racial tension on both sides because rather than merging together they've stayed apart and both view the "other" group as having benefits for one reason or another that "they" don't.

This made me want to go hunt up Sky High and re-watch it for the amusement value... io9 - Sky High Really needs to be a tv show

Well I'm currently sleep deprived so I probably won't hit the mark in that accurate or coherent a manner, so I'll try to make a brief point on it. The EU as such has evolved out of several treaties, and amendments over time. It isn't really an elected form of government, its a bureaucracy that's grown, sprawled, and twisted itself around more and more over the years. The idea of the EU has developed and changed over the decades - which I have no problem with. What I think is one of the issues with it, is that in many ways its trying to do a top down forcing of control onto a wide group of people. Just for an example, the way the legal systems work, not only from a strictly legal standpoint, but from the very cultural approach is insanely different between the separate countries in the EU. A huge chunk of European countries are inspired or based on the Napoleonic codes, but the UK uses a completely different system. The German's have another, although that still uses some elements of the Napoleonic (I think). But it's not just in the technical aspects, but look at the cultural. For example, the French have a habit of making a point over how they have higher motoring standards in their frame of law. They have tighter legal codes on whole lot of things. But.. they don't try to enforce those codes at that standard. A few years back the UK inspired the French truck drivers to go on a massive strike, because the UK insisted on giving their trucks mechanical tests according to our "lower" standards, and most of the trucks failed and were deemed "unsafe". Because, culturally the UK sets the laws at a level they can enforce. Hell, look at the Italian court system, they allow people to be tried for the same crime multiple times, and they still have a large chunk of the culture looking at "who is the defendant related to" in just how stiff prosecutions are. There's a lot of nudge nudge, wink wink to it all. But it's culturally acceptable to them. You can't take groups that disparate, force a point of view on them, and expect it to actually mesh that well in real life. Yet , according to the morass of treaties.. "Under the principle of supremacy, national courts are required to enforce the treaties that their member states have ratified, and thus the laws enacted under them, even if doing so requires them to ignore conflicting national law, and (within limits) even constitutional provisions.". Now point of thing, you get a lot of these amendments get slid through without public awareness. No-one I got to vote for was involved in the process. The bureaucratic level of the EU pushes things back and forth, it gets signed into being, and before you know it the things that a group of people who have completely different cultural perspectives and viewpoints, who have no experience with my country have created a situation where my laws don't matter. I mean, sure there's the whole thing with the European Parliament.. but again, that wasn't designed as a form of government. That started out as a .. common assembly of the old European Steel and Coal Community and has been morphed and warped and added to over the years. Now it has all of these legislative and executive powers that I, as a joyful member of the EU, have bugger all say in. It has bizarre levels and redundancy, its complex, there is little real transparency to it. There are over 20,000 civil servants forming the administrative body of the EU commission, and, in all fairness, civil servants of all stripes have a distinct tendency to build empires in any bureaucracy, and evolve into that "this is how things work, regardless of what the politicians do". Now make this a bureaucracy where a ridiculous amount of money flows and there's no real transparency or question of how or why that money gets spent... But where EU politicians and Civil Servants seem to live incredibly well. That seems to be the general perspective from around me.

Bruce, I think one of the key issues here that you might not be understanding... To a lot of people over here, the EU isn't seen as a form of democratic government. It's pretty much a bureaucracy we didn't elect, that we have no direct representation to, but still gets to have power over us. It's a bureaucracy that keeps expanding itself, keeps inserting further and further into our lives, and seems to have it's own professional career bureaucrats keeping it going in ways that feather their own nests. Now, I'm perfectly willing to admit that that might not be the reality. But that happens to be the rather common perception of it. And frankly, that's the way it seems to ACT to the people who are inside it. You might have this rosy view of what the idea is meant to be, but the perception of how it acts within it.. is where a lot of us are coming from.

From a BBC radio advert for a debate on the migration crisis.. And for the further elements.. BBC - EU Migration in Graphics Although I do note that these seem to have a lot more statistics for those who apply for asylum, not necessarily those who don't apply and just attempt to move illegally into various countries....

To compress it down: Critics look at things from one point of view. Users look at it from another. A lot of critics get games free. Users value for what they spend money on. Neither group is inherently wrong, it's a matter of perspective. Examples of comfort vs innovation. Comparison with Transformers movies between critics and people who still paid money to see it. Why trailers still have spoilers and user psychology. Also, you should always engage in subscribing to wide range of information, not just ones that automatically agree with you. If you only read / listen to people who agree with you, you encourage your own ignorance. Assigning scores is stupid, it works better when you give a reason why you like dislike something and what it is that works or doesn't work for you. Critics or Users who announce their opinions as the be-all and end-all are prideful idiots. Scores are inherently stupid. (Basically) Edit: And before anyone mentions it, yes, scores are deliberately mentioned twice. Because it's one of his prime annoyances.

Just to throw in the metaphorical looksee here.. If you see the guy in the house next to you beating up his wife, are you morally obliged to interfere in some way? Whether by calling the police or going over yourself to try and calm the situation down or put a stop to it? If your answer is yes, does that change if that neighbour just happens to be in a house across the border and thus in another country? Does it change if its a group of men beating up their wives, or shooting people who disagree with them, or say.. using chemical weapons on civilians? Of course, if you then happen to make it a question of if its actions being committed that you deem immoral for one reason or another so you have to smite them to stop it.. That's the same reasoning a bunch of terrorist groups give for conducting attacks on the imperialist and immoral western world. It's a fun slippery slope isn't it? It becomes a wonderful matter of perspective, opinion, armchair quarterbacking, and political ravings of left wing and right wing back and forth. The simple answer is, there is never a simple answer to that discussion, and there's always going to be too many emotions involved and a heavy weight of history on all sides.

For those who don't want to read the assorted books for the new canon.,.. The collected "history" so far of what is known about what's happened in the Star Wars universe between RotJ and the new film... io9 - Everything We Know About Star Wars Post Return Of The Jedi Future

Remember, it's all about hanging out like a Wookie...

I just find it hard to take most nutrition advice. Every 5-10 years, it changes. Oh, too much salt is bad for you. Wait 10 years and they'll turn around and admit they got it wrong and its okay. Specific ingredients, specific types of food, specific types of fat.... One decade all the food nutrition experts have identified it as awful and life threatening and the cause of all these illnesses.. and the next decade its "well, it's not as serious as we thought" "Actually it was something else..". It comes down to eating everything in moderation and having some form of exercise in your life. Beyond that, the science seems to make it a crapshoot because it's ever changing.

It seems to be working. There's just that slightly worrying smell that could either be extremely burnt croissant.. or burnt wiring. I can't quite figure which...

I agreed to dog sit for my sister. What I ended up with was an overlarge, rambunctious german shepard that decided to whine, paw me, and do the jiggy-jiggy dance to go out in the garden roughly every 30-40 minutes through the night. And of course he actually needed to pee every time, so it's not like I could easily ignore him from then on. Of course, that had me somewhat stumble-minded in the morning, so I put the kettle on for a cup of tea, decided to nuke a croissant, went to the toilet..and came back to find I'd put the croissant in for 2 minutes instead of 20 seconds..and I'd grabbed one of the plates with the metal rim to put it on.....