HereAndGone
12d ago
To be fair to Freddie, I don't think he's claiming "education doesn't work". He's claiming "some kids are academically stronger, some kids are academically weaker, and all the interventions in the world are not going to magically give Susie a six point IQ leap up to the same level as Theophilus if she doesn't have that originally".
It's the push about "all kids must go to college" where experience at the coalface has shown him that some kids are not college material and would be better served being educated for a different path. But if the 'cure' for poverty or getting out of your original social class is being pushed as "more college! college for all!" then you are faced with (a) be honest and some kids won't get into college, any college at all (b) go along with what the government and everyone else is telling you, fudge the figures, lower standards, and graduate kids to go to college who will then drop out in their first year because they are not able for it.
I think Freddie sees (b) happening and thinks that is worse for everyone: schools, parents, the kids, society itself.
HereAndGone
12d ago
Are you sure it's Hlynka? It's easy for someone to tell you "Dude, I think this is him" but if you didn't catch it before, then maybe it's not?
I dunno, I can't identify posters as easily as others on here claim to be able, so if it is him, okay.
HereAndGone
15d ago
What the general population of Israel may or may not want is one thing. What the Israeli government is doing is quite another, and since they're the ones sending in the IDF to shoot people looking for food and water on the grounds of "desperate people didn't patiently form orderly queues and that threatened us with our arms and armour", they're the ones who hold the responsibility as Israelis.
HereAndGone
15d ago
Yeah, that was probably it. Same as with Rotherham - in some instances the police tended to go "well these are trashy little slappers anyway, how can you say they're being abused when they probably ran off with their older Indian/Pakistani boyfriend of their own free will?"
HereAndGone
15d ago
Yeah, I can see the prosecution problem (is this prostitution? so are we gonna charge a 15 year old schoolgirl for being a prostitute? that's not gonna fly with the public) but it's also the kind of thing where if a father learns what some guy has been doing with his 15 year old daughter, at the very least someone's nose is gonna get broken.
Epstein was probably smart enough to get the kind of girls that were already into sex with boyfriends, even if underage, and drugs and the rest of it - that's why he used them to recruit other girls as in the Jane Doe anecdote. He wasn't out there debauching nice respectable girls by getting them drunk/high, he was targeting the kind of girls who were already colouring outside the lines, as it were. That's what gave his lawyers the edge in digging up dirt to discredit the victims and witnesses - after all, the girl had already tried to claim that the $300 was drug money, how could she be any kind of credible witness or complainant?
Still sleazy as hell, but it doesn't automatically mean he was running a literal paedophile ring. I think if he scoped out some potential partygoers were also interested in 14 and 15 year olds, he'd have been happy to hook them up (and record all the blackmail material) but I don't think he was doing that as a full-time service, too risky in the long run (as it turned out anyway). Plausible deniability would have been the name of the game: parties and events that were must-attend attractions for high society where he hosted attractive young women (the girls enticed in with promises of getting them started on modelling careers, and he had legit connections there with the Victoria's Secret CEO: "Epstein often attended Victoria's Secret fashion shows, and hosted the models at his New York City home, as well as helping aspiring models get work with the company") who may have been on the young side but were assumed to be of legal age, and if they were happy to be friendly with the attendees, and maybe if a pretty girl and a rich guy hit it off and they got intimate, well sex is no longer confined to marriage only and that's their own business, right?
HereAndGone
15d ago
French-Mexican fusion food
Vive L'Empereur Maximilian!
HereAndGone
15d ago
if a Tasmanian devil could talk, it might prefer to stay in the sanctuary, where it has safe and clean places to sleep, has food provided at regular intervals for minimal effort on its part, and even has breeding opportunities orchestrated for it
Do humans want to stay in prison, even "Club Med" type prison? Or institutions like mental hospitals and detox clinics? A wild animal might prefer a life in the wild, the same way that even the nicest prison would not suit a lot of people. Heck, we even have homeless people refusing to go into shelters not just because of the dangers and restrictions, but because they prefer living their own lives even on the streets.
HereAndGone
15d ago
"The rabbit has a pleasant face,
His private life is a disgrace
I really could not tell to you
The awful things that rabbits do."
What will make vegetarianism/veganism more widespread among ordinary people is not all the preaching in the world, it's the price of meat. Meat has gone up in price very fast here in Ireland, to the point that a morning radio show had butchers(!) on telling people how to make it go further, to buy (relatively) cheaper cuts, bulk meals out with lentils etc.
People may not give a damn about the moral worth of a cow or a pig, but if beef and bacon are too dear to buy the usual cuts and instead they're eating mince bulked out with lentils in stews and so forth for family meals, it's a lot easier to move towards "more veggies, less meat" in ordinary diet.
HereAndGone
16d ago
Hamas are shit, and they're making things worse, but I can understand why Palestinians might consider them "better the devil you know".
And now Netanyahu is talking about seizing Gaza. Well, well, I'm sure all the people telling me Israel only wants to treat the Palestinians like fellow-citizens will be making sure that no war crimes happen. Gosh, what a totally surprising decision, nobody could have seen this as a possibility: Israel occupies the last piece of territory it wanted.
HereAndGone
16d ago
Yes, when the people telling me "you know, these are the Usual Suspects" are falling over themselves to lick Israel's boots.
Ignore those photos of starving people, it's all photoshopped by Hamas and their Western stooges!
HereAndGone
16d ago
State's Attorney Barry Krischer wasn't sure how to proceed, as there wasn't much Epstein could be charged with, from a legal perspective.
Thank you for this, it really explains what happened when at the time of the alleged "sweetheart deal". But the above makes me wonder - the initial girl (Jane Doe) was 15, yes? So if there is evidence (or at least accusations) that he got 15 year old girls to strip down to their underwear, 'massage' him while he was naked, and he used vibrators on them and/or jerked off in their presence, then paid them - surely that is something more than "well he did a little bit naughty in paying for a massage from an unlicensed person"?
I get that the girls weren't credible (all the dirt the defence dug up on them) and it really was 'he said/she said' but that only makes the computer evidence, if any, more urgent: get the computers, see if there are recordings of him doing what was claimed, or doing more.
If the state prosecution was slow-pedalling on all this because they weren't sure what they could charge him with, then the rest all falls into place, but I do have to ask why they were slow-pedalling at the start: naked man with semi-naked fifteen year olds and money changing hands is surely enough to bring a charge?
I agree that the Ken Starr/Bill Clinton connection is hilarious, and even more hilarious in this context: all the accusations that Trump is a paedophile (for true! proven!) and that this is why he's covering up the papers, and it could come out that Epstein got a soft punishment in Florida because of Clinton's influence 🤣
HereAndGone
22d ago
After all, few men are so much into MILFs that they would not enjoy a blowjob from a busty 16yo.
Yeah, but the allegations are not "blowjobs from 16 or 17 year olds who would be legal, depending what jurisdiction you were in", it's "Trump and Epstein raped twelve and thirteen year olds".
If it were just "sexy hot 17 year old" nobody would much care. It has to be "frightened coerced beaten thirteen year old" or nothing, because the mud has to be the blackest, dirtiest, stickiest mud to throw.
Politico, back in 2019, did an article on all the assault allegations (as of then) against Trump. While there's plenty of gross, disgusting, and immoral acts (by my sex-negative prudish religious anti-fun judgement), there's only two (unless you go by the updated definition of rape) charges of rape: 'Katie Johnson' with the Epstein allegations, and E. Jean Carroll with her Bergdorf Goodman adventure - which, let me say, I don't believe or at least do not think it proven. Read her account, replace "Trump" with "Biden" and imagine for yourself all the media articles ripping the holes in the story wide open and claiming she was trying to smear a decent man for nefarious reasons, ranging from trying to extort money to being a Republican plant.
The rest are all of the "grab 'em by the pussy" kind: groping, kissing, unwanted touching, invitations to go back to his room. Distinct lack of "I was only twelve and he raped me in the hotel bedroom" accounts:
Sixteen women have come forward with allegations against President Donald Trump, each accusing him of inappropriate conduct. The most recent, from writer and columnist E. Jean Carroll, appeared in NY Magazine on Friday.
The women’s charges range from unwanted touches and aggressive, sudden kissing to the latest accusation against Trump — that he attacked a woman in a dressing room and forced his penis inside her. Donald Trump, his campaign and the Trump White House have insisted all of the stories are fabricated and politically motivated.
HereAndGone
22d ago
The "Trump is a paedophile" stuff is fitting in with the "Trump is a rapist" stuff. People who hate him and are dazzled by the whole "they're going to throw the gays into concentration camps and shoot all the brown and black people and force women to be pregnant every year of their lives" material are just going "well of course he's a rapist, of course he raped thirteen year olds, look at this very credible case of an accuser we should all believe" (I've seen the Jane Doe/Katie Johnson story floating around again recently online years after even the journalists who wanted this humdinger of a story to be true dropped it) because they so desperately want it to be true. Cue relevant C.S. Lewis quote here:
“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
HereAndGone
22d ago
No, I don't believe what Hamas says, because it's not Hamas saying it. We very much have Israeli government sources saying stuff. We also, since I don't live in America, have voices from other parts of the world saying things.
HereAndGone
22d ago
No, everyone who is in your curated source of news is a lying liar who loves Hamas and wants to obliterate Israel. Or is dumb as dirt and don't realize they're patsies for same.
Reporters. Doctors. Independent charities. People on the ground. All lying shills for Hamas, while the saintly IDF forces are just misunderstood bunnies.
My news isn't curated, unless by that you mean "someone turns on the radio set to the national broadcaster station at work".
I'll say this for present day Israel, they've really successfully ridden the "any breath of criticism is anti-Semitism, are you a Nazi who wants to Holocaust us all over again?" wagon to get people blindly on their side.
HereAndGone
23d ago
May you all live under the same conditions as the benign and beneficent rule of the IDF. After all, you're not trouble-makers so you'll be fine, won't you?
I suddenly feel a need for the cursing psalms.
Psalm 10
10 Why, O Lord, do you stand far away?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
2 In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor;
let them be caught in the schemes that they have devised.
3 For the wicked boasts of the desires of his soul,
and the one greedy for gain curses[a] and renounces the Lord.
4 In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him;
all his thoughts are, “There is no God.”
5 His ways prosper at all times;
your judgments are on high, out of his sight;
as for all his foes, he puffs at them.
6 He says in his heart, “I shall not be moved;
throughout all generations I shall not meet adversity.”
7 His mouth is filled with cursing and deceit and oppression;
under his tongue are mischief and iniquity.
8 He sits in ambush in the villages;
in hiding places he murders the innocent.
His eyes stealthily watch for the helpless;
9 he lurks in ambush like a lion in his thicket;
he lurks that he may seize the poor;
he seizes the poor when he draws him into his net.
10 The helpless are crushed, sink down,
and fall by his might.
11 He says in his heart, “God has forgotten,
he has hidden his face, he will never see it.”
12 Arise, O Lord; O God, lift up your hand;
forget not the afflicted.
13 Why does the wicked renounce God
and say in his heart, “You will not call to account”?
14 But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation,
that you may take it into your hands;
to you the helpless commits himself;
you have been the helper of the fatherless.
15 Break the arm of the wicked and evildoer;
call his wickedness to account till you find none.
16 The Lord is king forever and ever;
the nations perish from his land.
17 O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted;
you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear
18 to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed,
so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.
HereAndGone
23d ago
I don't believe the Israelis. After all this time, I don't trust them, I don't think they're honest, and how they are cracking down (not) on the [settlers](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c776x78517po0 who are literally and not metaphorically shooting people reveals their actual preferences, not what they're saying.
I'm going to light my hair on fire here, but Israel is imitating how Germany decided to deal with its 'Jewish problem': can we get any foreign country to take them off our hands? No, nobody wants a bunch of these guys because they are trash? Okay, let's solve this by taking their property, confining them in sequestered areas, and then shipping them off to camps - for their own protection, of course.
HereAndGone
23d ago
You know, right now I'm listening to the news on the radio and it's another interview with someone about what is happening in Gaza.
I have two options:
(1) Everyone in the world is a lying liar who loves Hamas and wants to obliterate Israel. There is no starvation, no Israeli blockades, and the hard-core Zionists who want an ethnically Jewish state for an ethnically Jewish people are just lined up waiting with bouquets and gift baskets to hand over to the Palestinians once they take control of Gaza.
(2) Maybe, just possibly maybe, the IDF are fudging the truth about what they are doing and the Israeli government is being hands-off in hopes that the problem will solve itself - no need for a Palestinian state when there are no more Palestinians (be that 'encouraged forcefully to emigrate to other countries or dead of famine and disease').
I think Hamas are terrible and should disappear if at all possible. But when people are dying, I don't give a flying fuck about their politics. Even the most obnoxious hair-dyed queer tranny activist, if they were literally starving to death, I'd say "help them" and not "hur-dur, they should have picked the right side in the political fight". Stop people dying of starvation first, worry about rooting out the terrorists second.
What I'm reading on here is awfully like all the commentary about problems in red states, with gleeful gloating about "natural disaster/economic crash serves them right for voting for Trump".
HereAndGone
23d ago
If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests.
There won't be a current generation, they'll be dead before they can leave infanthood. And any who do survive will have learned: you don't have a place here. Israel wants you gone. Not even toleration, they intend to take this land and give it to their people.
You and Hanania are telling the Warsaw Ghetto to just play nice with the German government, then it'll all be okay once they have total rule.
Please forward me a link to that. I'm hearing that the Israelis do things like deliberately route aid convoys the long way round and into territory where they will be ambushed and robbed, and similar fun things like that. Oh those wacky Zionist boys, such a sense of humour!
What I'm hearing is the Israeli ambassador claiming this, and at this point I don't believe one word out of any Israeli officials, not even "water is wet". They pulled their ambassador out because apparently us here in Ireland are so anti-Israel or pro-Palestine, maybe that's why their army is shooting at our diplomats. And our peacekeeping troops.
Okay, maybe I believe the words of the likes of this Israeli minister, because he's not pretending about what's going on:
Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu said Thursday that Israel is advancing the destruction of Gaza, and that the Strip will be made totally Jewish, drawing outcry among opposition politicians and eventually from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.
“The government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu told Haredi radio station Kol Barama. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.'”
Eliyahu said that Gaza will be cleared for Jewish settlement and that Jewish towns won’t be “fenced in inside cantons.”
“All Gaza will be Jewish,” he said, though he clarified that Arabs who are loyal to Israel will be tolerated.
“We aren’t racists,” the far-right Otzma Yehudit politician added. “We are fighting those who fight us.”
Eliyahu also denied that Gazans are not getting enough food, calling it a campaign against Israel, but noted that the country was at war and trying to kill “these monsters.”
“There’s no hunger in Gaza,” he said. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”
HereAndGone
23d ago
Look at Northern Ireland. The greatest recruiting campaigns for the IRA were when the British Army did something stupid and cruel.
If you're a Palestinian, your choice is between "Trust the Israelis and the IDF, the same IDF targeting hospitals, the same IDF shooting kids collecting water. Or Hamas, who may be sons of bitches, but they're our sons of bitches".
HereAndGone
23d ago
Which apparently is Israel's fault?
When they're the ones blocking all routes and all aid in, yes.
HereAndGone
23d ago
That's what it means to be a nation-state.
A Palestinian doctor has warned: "We are out of options, and we are running out of time."
Dr Salha, working at the al Awda Hospital in northern Gaza, warned of the dire circumstances they said the hospital was operating under.
Salha said: "We used to care for 200 women and children a day, now it's over 2,000.
"We simply can't cope. Malnutrition is devastating mothers and newborns.
"We're seeing a sharp rise in caesarean sections, miscarriages, and babies born underweight."
Salha warned they were running out of vital supplies for newborns, and that their own staff were surviving on just one meal a day.
"Three colleagues collapsed in our emergency department last week due to hunger, while working around the clock to care for patients. This is a humanitarian catastrophe," Salha said.
Sorry, newborn baby, you are an immediate threat to this poor defenceless country and have to be crushed before you can attack it. But it's okay, that doctor is really a secret Hamas plant and he's lying about it all.
So is this British doctor. Everybody is lying, it's all Hamas propaganda, and Israel is totally blameless and only wants the chance to create a nation where Arabs, Christians, Jews, secular or whomever you are, wherever you are from, are all equal citizens and cherished by the nation as its people.
HereAndGone
23d ago
Try not rounding up the civilian population into camps, or shooting people rushing forward for food aid because they're starving. It's amazing how not being stormtroopers helps shift the views of the people on the other side.
Yes, I said stormtroopers. I don't think the IDF is behaving in an honest fashion. I'm hearing news reports on our national broadcaster every morning about what's going on in Gaza. Unless you want to convince me every single one of the people, the doctors, the volunteers, the journalists, the UN observers, interviewed on those reports is secretly a Hamas mole, horrible things are going on and Israel is doing them.
Luckily I went to school before the "whole reading" thing kicked off (indeed, I was able to read before I started school) but I was there for when the New Maths kicked in, and oh brother.
I think they did to English what they did to Maths: don't teach it the old boring rote way, be the guide helping children discover for themselves, draw out of them what is naturally there.
That's fine for people who have talent for maths and can figure out on their own from first principles. For the likes of me, it meant I understood nothing of what was being taught and scraped along with barely passing. The old "rote learning" would have worked a whole lot better for me, rather than "now we'll just write this on the blackboard and you can all figure it out for yourselves". Even the teachers were stuck at times! They couldn't follow the methods in the new textbooks and were reduced to "just look up the right answer in the back".
For kids who got thrown in at the deep end with "just look at the shape of the entire word and take clues from the context and then you'll figure it out", that must have been a nightmare if your parents weren't teaching you how to read at home.
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