Above the fold
03/07/2008
In Which I am probably going to catch crap for this
I was wondering today… why do teachers get summers off? The rest of the working human race doesn’t, nurseries don’t.
I’m just asking
Because how else would they get people to do that job? Deal with other people’s children all day? I mean, c’mon. I want to be a teacher, but the main reason I’m down for the crazy job/not so great pay: summers off.
I think this originally had to do with schools letting out for the summer so farm kids could work the fields. Although sarahchristine has an excellent point.
To be honest, it has more to do with the kids. Should they be spending their entire summer behind desks? When do they get time to actually be children? Teachers’ hours are based around the kids.
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Cover art for “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” via Penguin Great Ideas Volume III Flickr set, via Kottke
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Wired.com (via somethingchanged)
This is a bit like the Iran-Iraq War. You don’t know whose position to loathe more, but the end result is just miserable (Google’s position that IP addresses aren’t really personal information for example).
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The commercial presses that publish books about atheism are attuned to our fear of religious fanaticism. People tend to think that 9/11 is first and foremost a consequence of Islamic fundamentalism and that we have much to fear also from the conservative Christians in the White House. None of us is safe any more because of religion! So says Stenger, for whom religious people are good “despite religion”.
Yet the truth is more complex: the horror of 9/11 stems from politics more than religion; it’s a fierce backlash against generations of American arrogance in the Middle East. For atheists to target belief in God as a threat to our safety is mistaken. As Robert Pape shows in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), suicide bombers are rarely devout Muslims. Their overwhelming aim is secular: to frighten Western democracies into withdrawing their military forces from Arab states. The problems we face are not caused by religion, not even religion pushed out of shape, but by nationalism and the West’s mixture of ignorance of other cultures and sense of entitlement with respect to them.
„Kevin Hart talks sense like usual. But hey, if you want to mouth dishonest Huntingdon-esque shibboleths about division of the world into “armed camps”, please feel free to provide me with a definitive list of the “camps” and their objectives.
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» Texas man sentenced to 4060 years' gaol
That’ll show him.
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