Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day – A Little Strong Edition

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Islam will be the defining problem of the 21st Century the same way Communism was to the 20th. It is an existential threat to Western Civilization and like Communism, it needs to be eradicated. – Snarkybytes, That Equal Protection Thing?

I see it as more pre-Reformation Catholicism. Islam can’t be “eradicated” any more than Communism can. As the poster says,

Catholicism was never what Islam is, a complete guide on how to live your life during every waking moment, a guide and exhortation to take over the world, but it was the overwhelmingly most powerful force in the lives of ordinary Western people for centuries until its corruption spawned Luther and the Reformation.

Islam isn’t so much corrupted as it is being properly interpreted by those who want to drag the world, beaten and bloody, back into the 14th Century. What needs to happen is a rejection of its teachings. But no matter what, it won’t be “eradicated.” No idea ever really is. It needs to be ridiculed into oblivion.

“A Teacher that Can Be Replaced By a Machine, Should Be.”

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Thanks to an email from Robb Allen, I got to watch a fascinating TED talk that bolsters my position that the best way to fix our “education” system is to take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.

Please pay close attention to Dr. Sugata Mitra (who blogs here) and his experiments in education around the world.  As he says in this post:

My work with self organised learning by children shows that groups of children can learn to use computers and the Internet to answer almost any question. This happens everywhere and is independent of what language they speak, where they live and how rich or poor they are. All they need is free access and the liberty to work in unsupervised groups.

And here he shows that work:

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
As long as we don’t pull the whole thing down around our ears in the next decade or so, there may be some small hope of making it to the Singularity.

Quote of the Day – Billy Beck Edition

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I keep saying it: the basic conflict in American politics is individualism vs. collectivism in all its pretense forms and manifestation. I keep saying it because no arrangements of coalition electoral politics will address this fundamental schism: as the necessary economic implications become real, so-called ‘democracy’ becomes impotent to manage coalition demands, all while the force of ‘law’ becomes more arbitrary at coalition demand.

I’ve been saying it for at least fifteen years: “The pace of this thing is picking up.”

I hate to keep saying it, because I know it’s no fun to hear it and it just wears my narrow white ass out to keep-ass saying it, but the real problem under all this is fucking enormous

I really don’t think it can be fixed before it really goes the way of the pear. We’re really in it. In our lifetimes.

Billy Beck, Two-Four – What Really Happened