ffs USA, surely you know that democracy is about electing the people most citizens like, rather than the people most citizens don’t not like…

Indeed it would be unfortunate if the press started printing gruesome images of skeletal starving women, men and children, isn’t it… You know, photos that reminded people of some sort of horror that was revealed 80 years ago.

This is more or less how “Ministry for the Future” starts, isn’t it?

And meanwhile, in Ireland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheela_na_gig

Around the same time, in Turkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_inscriptions_in_Hagia_Sophia

In 1976, Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother died. A flight from Israel to Paris had been hijacked by some Palestinian and German terrorists, and flown to Uganda, where they demanded release of prisoners, threatening to kill the Israeli and Jewish passengers (the rest were released). Israel decided to launch a mission on foreign soil to rescue them, and I think Bibi’s older brother was the sole Israeli casualty.

What we are seeing today in Gaza is most likely, mostly, as a direct result of that death. Raw caveman emotion. (with a few decades of carefully layered public relations)

[now I’m going to go upvote all the heart-warming examples of human kindness in this thread]

In Biostatistics - only ever use pi in the variance of the logistic density. Using 3.14 gives substantially equivalent results to using arbitrarily large precision. But I use whatever my calculator or R give me.

Rather than deliberately misunderstanding, maybe they are trying to reclaim it in response to its widespread misuse in recent years.

I’ve heard the socioeconomic differences thing many, many times, and have kids that wear uniform. But I’ve never understood that argument.

It conceals socioeconomic differences. Which in the case of economic differences, is probably not egalitarian, strictly speaking? Ditto for social “class” in the sense of whether the family is historically “monied” and has particular dress style. In the case of cultural or ethnic differences, I do not see how the egalitarian logic follows either, as freely expressing your identity is restrained.

In terms of bullying… in my experience bullies will always bully. They will just do it on your overcoat, or how old your uniform is, or your earrings, or your accent, or the colour of your hair. I don’t know, maybe the uniform helps a bit…

Or when you’re looking for the Chinese consulate.