On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, Faustine wrote:

Jim wrote:

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CNN's poll is asking "Are you familiar with the issues behind the G8 summit". 58% said "No". Perhaps the protesting will help motivate more to educate themselves. True, that would be great. But how many of the remaining 42 percent consider themselves educated, but are nevertheless content to mindlessly repeat mickey mouse platitudes and propaganda spoon-fed to them from on high, and who couldn't pass a rudimentary econ 101 test if their lives depended on it? That's a pretty simplistic view: If they don't know then it's their fault for not being educated.

Whose fault is it then? Anyone well-off enough to be reading CNN online hasn't got much of reason not to educate themselves. Nobody gets a free pass--I take responsibility for my own ignorance, and don't feel the need to be ashamed of it because I'm actively working to overcome it every day. Believe it or not, I went from being a high school dropout literally living on the street to a PhD student with a research job entirely on my own, with nothing to get me there but will and intelligence: why should I feel an ounce of sympathy for people with far more material advantages than I ever had who never made use of them?

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If they claim they do know then it must be platitudes and propoganda.

No, I'm just disgusted with the majority of the great smug, lazy, and complacent middle class of America. I find their peculiar brand of mushheadded apathy to be beneath contempt. One of my hot buttons, I guess.

More analysis, less rhetoric.

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Analysis is rhetoric, just better organized.

John von Neumann is spinning in his grave...

Lies, damn lies, statistics.

Bah! How about this one: The fundamental difference between engineering with and without statistics boils down to the difference between the use of a scientific method based upon the concept of laws of nature that do not allow for chance or uncertainty and a scientific method based upon the concept of laws of probability as an attribute of nature. - W.A.Shewhart There!! :) ~Faustine.