Political Correctness Gone Mad

Send them all back to where they belong–driving trains.

I protest the use of my alma mater as the prime example of a terrorist nursery. The vast majority of MIT graduates reject the violent tactics adopted by a vicious few of our brethren. We will of course dominate you in the end because of the superiority of our values (not to mention our intelligence). But until then, we wish only to coexist in peace and harmony with our imperial overlords, who occupy the banks of the Charles to our west. The rents you willingly pay to our technology cartel will eventually bankrupt you, and unlike you, we are patient and content to worship our deities in obscurity while awaiting the ruin to which your hedonistic ways will ultimately lead you.

All hail Athena! We are not concerned about your puny targeted screenings. As you are no doubt aware, we get what we want – we can carry machines with high-energy-density storage onto airplanes with impunity. On many flights, we even have full access to the Internet in our chairs in the sky. Resistance is useless. Bow to Athena’s might!

Well said Henry.

I note that we have not seen any condemnations[1] of this outrage from the so-called “moderate” engineers.

[1] using this phrase in the normal columnists’ sense – ie, “we” meaning “I” and “have not seen” meaning “have not looked for, and intend to ignore any that are pointed out to me”.

Gosh, I’m glad I looked at all the links before commenting! I thought the world had gone a bit carnivalesque for a moment… well done.

“I protest the use of my alma mater as the prime example of a terrorist nursery.”

<a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N15/nye.15o.html">An MIT commission is being established to study the impact of military funding on MIT’s educational and research environment. The commission will include students and faculty members. A broad coalition of student organizations and individuals publicly endorsed the creation of this commission in The Tech [“Students should look into funding,” March 19] and at the March 20 faculty meeting.”

Who are my wife and I supposed to denounce? I’ll happily denounce Brett Bellmore, last seen crapping out his banal engineering libertarian fantasies on samefacts comment threads with the identical graceless style he began with a decade ago. But he doesn’t seem to be especially terroristy in a tangible way. I suppose we could denounce the poorman, but he seems to be non-tangibly-terroristy and funny and on the Right Side.

Sort of inside gearhead baseball, but said wife and I have puzzled over this weird tendency of a very few of our cotrainees to (set out to) fuck shit up. I mean, we gearheads are all essentially taught to take all that enlightenment science goodness and build things with it. Hopefully useful things (like toilet paper, say), but often not (cf military industrial complex). Consider two other ways of training people. You could end up like D^2, knowing a gigantic amount of stuff about how to make money with money (among many other things). Is that more useful than toilet paper? Less/more damaging than the military industrial complex? Or, my personal favorite, lawyers. All one has to do is routinely peruse the rightcoast and volokh to detect certain, ah, antisocial pathologies on constant display from very highly educated people. And no one can disagree that lawyers provide nothing but gigantic net loss to society. (well, ok, IMHO) Yet as it happens these two kinds of training don’t seem to lead to detectable amounts of FSU inclinations.

Maybe (some) engineers as a side effect of their training get a little bit too much of that CAN DO with REAL STUFF attitude, and decide that a little bit of chemistry here or a little application of machinery there will speed up getting to where ever it is they want to go. Or not.

“but can I just say that I’ve never understood why everybody seems to think that William Safire’s comment about the “nattering nabobs of negativism” was the cleverest turn of phrase ever.”

People don’t think it is clever. I can assure 99% of people using it are doing so ironically. Like you we think it is “not elegant, poetic, concise, or even witty.” It is funny though. In the sense of, let us all laugh at Safire and Agnew.

Argh. …plus c’est la meme… My French is not only scant but very rusty.

just *slightly* seriously:

perhaps what we’re seeing is merely that underdeveloped countries are sending a lot of their youth to the west in order to be trained in useful things, and engineering is one of the things they consider useful?

i mean–suppose we looked at the total number of foreign students studying in the states or europe. how many of them are studying, say, french literature? (or analytic philosophy?) now how many of them are studying engineering?

the apparent prevalence of engineers in the young disaffected foreigners who try to blow stuff up set is probably just the result of their total numbers.

(and sure, a lot of young foreigners are also sent west to study accounting, business, and finance. but those professions have their own methods of terrorism–they already did more damage to the west during ’08-’09 than any bomb-laden terrorists could do).

@kidbitzer – not sure your tongue-in-cheek last para gets the profile of the Financial Engineers of Destruction quite right (age/nationality just for starters)?

“not” s/b “now”.

I’ll happily denounce Brett Bellmore

According to my physician, this should be done daily, preferably before breakfast, for optimal mental health.

Worrying that some of them work in the nuclear industry.

Eh, Homer Simpson will kill us with incompetence before nuclear-power engineers get a chance to kill us with malice.

Well, the Engineering School of my alma mater refused to participate in the first Earth Day.

They have uniformly, it seems to me, been very uncomfortable in considering rival explanations of an event and admitting that sometimes more than one might be a reasonable take on things.

My anecdotal data may be flawed, but if anybody agrees with me, is it because of the training that engineers receive? (And what about it, exactly?) Is it because of the kinds of people drawn to engineering in the first place?

I think it’s just the nature of the work. As an engineer, you solve problems. “I don’t know” is rarely a useful answer, but it’s fine to say “it’s either X or Y so we’ll fix both”, “I really had to dig into this one, but now I see it’s X”, or “I’m pretty sure it’s X so let’s try that.” On a jury the suspect either did it or didn’t do it so you can’t choose both and you can’t go get more information to help you decide, so your only choices are to make your best guess or to say you don’t know.

Damn those engineers. Especially on the internet, which requires computers, telephone exchanges, electricity transmission lines, microwave transmitters, hydroelectric power stations, plastics …

If you don’t like engineers, get your next meal without them: go hunt a rat by candlelight and grill it over a pile of burning sticks.

On a more serious note, maybe one reason engineers are over-represented in jihadist activities is that, unlike poets, political scientists, philosophers or economists, engineers can give practical effect to their ideas.

Three words: Alexei Nilych Kirilov.

‘On a more serious note, maybe one reason engineers are over-represented in jihadist activities is that, unlike poets, political scientists, philosophers or economists, engineers can give practical effect to their ideas.’

One might make many criticisms of the actions of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. However, I think even his fiercest critic would not wish to accuse him of being able to give practical effect to his ideas.

Touché ;-)

On a less serious note, one might want to profile that group of young adults that do not have the approval of their father. Banning that group from air travel quite possibly will deal with the climate issue as well.

Damn. nzuckerman, not nuzckerman, of course. Sorry.

44- there always is the chance, magistra, that we didn’t choose to become symbolic, & even, that we didn’t choose to be in this group, or that the representation of us finding other people woolly is partly or entirely due to the woolliness of a certain group of non-engineering-degree-holders.

Magistra says: I don’t dislike engineers in any way, but they have tended to become symbols in various kinds of cultural wars.

I had never looked at it that way, although I have to say I missed the part where the humanities where held responsible for 9/11 too. I guess it does explain some of the gleefulness in the responses.

46 – in wolf’s skin then, no doubt.

48- no problem, I was just saying …

“who went into financial services”

I rest my case.

“(That’s meant entirely descriptively with no pejorative intent.)”

The humour just keeps on coming.

If it’s not funny it’s at least folly.

again, could we just see some numbers here?

set aside the issue of overseas students, and just focus on u.s. and u.k. citizens:

how many physics ph.d.s are there? and how many people who have a degree that entitles them to be called engineers?

i honestly don’t know, but i imagine the numbers differ by at least an order of magnitude.

P.S. And as an applied scientist myself why would I be interested in disrespecting applied disciplines? Surely one can point out that science and engineering are two different things while being fully aware that they are both important.

Steve LaBonne: Part of that explanation may require looking into the family backgrounds of the kinds of people who end up in various disciplines, and part may involve the training they receive on the way to their professional careers.

I would add a third part to examine, and that’s temperament. Or is mentioning inborn qualities a can of worms I shouldn’t (have) open(ed)?

I went to MIT a long time ago (and majored in literature, but core requirements involved a minimum of a third of one’s course work being in math, science, or engineering). My son graduated from MIT more recently. My kids’ dad went there as well. I worked there for several years after I finished grad school (elsewhere). So I’ve been around the place a lot, and in various roles, but always as a somewhat fringe kind of character.

Whenever I walk back onto campus after a long gap, the same feeling washes over me: this is paradise on earth for people who love solvable problems. The messier, less “solvable” human kinds of problems? MIT people are no better at those, on average, than anyone else, and some of them are worse, because they think their brilliance at engineering should work just as well on a different kind of problem.

Yes — these are both vast generalizations, and personal impressions. But as has been noted often recently, this is a blog thread, not a scientific journal.

And just because the more serious side of the thread keeps making me think of it, there’s this.

I don’t have a lot to say on this subject, because I don’t have an engineering degree but a BA, I don’t have an MS either, and software engineering is arguably different from “hard” engineering fields (including in being stronger outside of academia than inside). Also, a lot of people in software were basically self-educated regardless of what degree they had. And I’ve worked with such a wide variety of people that I can’t generalize. Either extreme is bad: either thinking we can’t do anything because we don’t have Ph.D.’s, or thinking we have everything we need and don’t need to be creative and learn new things. The combination–thinking we are screwed because we can’t learn new things and we know the wrong things–is also bad.

Also, I find magistra’s comment offensive. It’s just the case that in our culture engineers are considered low-class or something? That’s supposed to be an explanation? Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising people who are talked not only about, but to, in that way, might become alienated (which is not to condone what they do afterwards). And what does that imply in our culture or in some other?

Re JoB’s comment to Steve: I thought the post was “more or less about” how the leap to stereotyping is so selective. If a surprisingly large number of people who attempt to blow up airplanes are both engineers and Muslims, there’s a broad swath of people (another generalization) who are all too happy to notice the “Muslim” and ignore the “engineer.”

And just to clarify: the point I took from the post, and think is interesting, is about the people who do the stereotyping, not about the engineers.

Here is a letter in today’s Globe and Mail.

Surely it’s time for profiling. The howls of outrage from some would probably be drowned out by the sighs of relief from others. And maybe the planes would run on time again. — Colin Proudman, Toronto

Mr. Proudman is undoubtedly right, and we should keep engineers off our planes. I’d write to agree with him, but I had a letter published last week. Any takers?

63 – indeed, but both generalizations are generalizations

64 – your 52 is unsupported by your link, it’s feeling rather than fact

One more contrarian comment: Engineers take more math than anybody else besides math and physics majors: basically, they are required to take the math department’s entire curriculum up to where you get into stuff only academic mathematicians care about. Their program is one “weed out” course after another. That’s why they are able to move immediately after graduation, very often, into any field that requires math skills, such as financial services. They have to work hard and they have to be smart, and are among the very few people in the world who know how to solve a differential equation. That seems at least as important as anything like a “can do” spirit.

Full disclosure: BS Mechanical Engineering and MS Engineering Mechanics (What ever that is)
Love the engineer jokes! Keep em coming.
Civil Engineer makes targets
Mechanical engineer blows them up
I’ve got a lot of “blows things up” to account for in the next life. I built a few targets that were not very life enhancing also.
My experience with the engineering community is that it is very heterogeneous – a full spectrum of humanity. I have some relationships with the CPA, Accountant, bookkeeper groups and they are the same grab bag of humanity.
Happy New Year

Engineers are also over-represented among climate change deniers. They are also overwhelmingly male. At least in the U.S., the curriculum is front-loaded, an explicit process of elimination, encouraging competition and discouraging breadth of education, permitting existing beliefs to persist unchallenged.

I do wish to defend my clan against the charge of humorlessness. EE’s, at least, are addicted to humor; no one takes April Fools’ Day more seriously, and you should never take any article or press release with that date at face value if it originates from that quarter.

roac, that was a blonde joke. Here’s an engineer joke.

French Revolution. The Terror. Three suspects ride the tumbril to the guillotine, and, resisting to the end, agree to die facing the descending blade. The priest goes first, the lever is released, the chop drops and stops halfway. A miracle! The crowd cheers! The priest goes free!

Same thing the second time. Don’t like it? Get a more patient story-teller.

The third was an engineer, looking up at the engine of death. It drops and stops just short of his throat. He calls out, “Wait! I see the problem!”

and this recent one:
http://xkcd.com/670/

OK here it is: http://mises.org/story/2782

“The application of engineering technique to the whole of society requires indeed that the director possess the same complete knowledge of the whole society that the engineer possesses of his limited world. Central economic planning is nothing but such an application of engineering principles to the whole of society based on the assumption that such a complete concentration of all relevant knowledge is possible.”

It’d be interesting to compare Hayek against engineers, to Popper against artists and for piecemeal engineering, in social design (he said vaguely, not actually planning to do it…).

Henry’s a bit over-the-top on this one – even a tad Fox Newsish. The London Telly likewise, comparing Al Qaeda with the Third Reich no less.

This dumbass effort by the unbelievably inept and poorly trained Abdulmutallab is being spun into chapters of needless add-on with serious loss of perspective in some quarters. Obviously there are security matters to consider but the histrionics this incident has inspired is evidence of other political fish-to-fry… little to do with a pragmatic appraisal of the actual threat.

There are maybe… 200 alleged Al Qaeda members in Yemen. I say ‘alleged’ because really Al Qaeda is about as real as a mirage in the Rub al-Khali.

Al Qaeda is in large part a media invention. It doesn’t exist in the form of an “international” terror organization with tightly knit cells and communications networks “spanning the globe” etc etc – fave Islamo-fascist bogeyman of the Hannitys and Becks of this world. Old grainy footage of bearded dudes using gym equipment somewhere in Afghanistan gets replayed endlessly by Fox. Why? Because that’s all they’ve got. A lot of this hype is really silly shit, but it’s amazing how many otherwise smart and informed people kinda buy into Al Qaeda comic book scenarios.

The disparate groups that claim to act in AQ’s name are driven not so much by visions of the caliphate as poverty, alienation and other factors – most of which have eff all to do with the ambitions of bin Laden. The AQ links on the part of alleged affiliates would require separate case-to-case consideration in order to figure out just what those supposed connections mean in real terms.

The concerns of these groups whether in Algeria, Indonesia, Yemen or elsewhere are mainly local. Claiming – as Fox News routinely does – that an attack by one of these outfits on their own turf is ‘Al Qaeda at work’ (the inference being threat to the US) is a bit like claiming that a provisional IRA car bomb in Belfast back in the 70’s was evidence of the Celtic World Revolutionary Movement in action in its drive to create a global celtophate.

This Nigerian youth – who by the way is a huge Liverpool FC fan – fell under the spell of a few loonies and fucked up his mission in about as incompetent a manner as it is possible to conceive.

Hauling up the Nazis as some people are doing in the wake of this episode and calling for profiling measures is a bit like riddling decoys full of lead. It might make you feel good but it’s not going to solve the problem.

Worries about theocracy and extremism never seem to include Zionism in certain circles – it’s always the dreaded Muslim threat. During the Gaza campaign hundreds of Jews in the UK, a number of them prominent academics, signed a petition that appeared in the Guardian drawing a direct link between the abomination in Gaza and Nazi tactics during WW2. Militant Zionism is just as racist and deluded in its “chosen” conceit as the Aryan supremacist fantasies the Nazis. There are many theocratic lunatics in Israel – a few of them were on the front lines in Gaza handing out leaflets to the troops and evoking visions of the Children of Israel while casting the Palestinians as modern-day Philistines.

I’m not going to labor the obvious except to say Israel is a massive provocation and as it is presently constituted an ongoing goad for terror. American policies vis-a-vis Israel need to change. Until fundamental shifts occur in American policy and until issues are addressed in a just and equitable manner across-the-board – it is unlikely there will be an end to terror in the skies and elsewhere no matter how many nudie scans, profiling measures and body searches are put in place.

TY – just did. I get the irony but this is equally about the BS that has surfaced in the wake of the incident.

I think Popper must have misread the original study. The 60% of immigrants to America who are terrorists who are also engineers must be from before the researchers controlled for nationality, because I can’t believe they ignored such an important factor as the overrepresentation of engineering as a profession among Asian-Americans generally compared with Americans overall. I stopped reading there.

Bianca@84 – the reference to Veblen is interesting, as showing another of the different symbolic roles that the Engineer can take on, and also showing that hero-worship of the Engineer hasn’t historically been purely a right-wing process. I think the earliest idea of the Engineer as symbol was of him as a hero of capitalism, summed up in Matthew Boulton’s line from the late eighteenth century: “I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.” I’d presumed that the engineer as soci*list hero was derived from Lenin’s idea that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country”, but it’s obviously earlier.

I suspect that the Engineer as hero is generally more common in countries where there is a perceived need to ‘tame the wilderness’: engineers in the UK tend to be treated rather dismissively, not helped by the general lack of distinction made between relatively lowly technicians and professional engineers. But I think in the US, the Engineer has also been taken up by right-wingers as a positive symbol of the anti-intellectual: someone who is highly intelligent, but not tainted by the liberal arts. (I don’t think this stereotype of engineers is correct, but I think it is commonly held).

Assuming “they” get it.

The Engineer is a hero of modern revolution.

Bongo – you need to settle on criticizing me for being like the loons at Fox News, or for being overly flip and ironic about the loons at Fox News. I really can’t be doing both at the same time.

The scariest people in the world are Pakistan’s Islamist nuclear engineers.

Substance McGravitas@#98

You know not to trust anything from World Nut Daily, right?

I don’t “trust anything” from any source, whether it be WND or CT, unless I get independent confirmation. Both the Indian press and the liberal American media appear to take the Al Quaeda-Aq Khan link seriously.

Most of my (far better qualified) journalist friendsroutinely remark that Pakistan is the most likely place for the GWOT to go postal. They should know, having been almost killed there.

tomslee, you deserve this for insisting .. Let me assume that access to higher education is still a world-wide problem, albeit that the problem’s depth is correlated with an over-all poverty of the nation in which said education is on offer. My hypothesis is: that said problem is comparably less regarding access to engineering forms of higher education; and specifically so if you consider the access of poor people from poor nations.

If my hypothesis would be correct the sampling of the population of scientists & liberal arts majors with respect to that of engineers would be flawed by something that has not essentially to do with engineers or their mindsets or other ocult powers for rightsiness. It would be flawed because the engineer’s sample would be a closer approximation of a non-group-specific sample where any other sample would tend to be dominated by the children of rich people of rich countries (the double conditional is of importance here) that themselves enjoyed a higher education.

PS: Hayek is, as often, right – we need to avoid sociolgists and politicians looking at the human problems as, basically, engineering problems, but this issue imo is more related to a misunderstanding of engineering by people like Hayek than by engineers taking up a role of decision maker in society (I would venture the hypothesis that engineers are a vastly underrepresented educational group amongst are politicians, their consultants, & the academia that gives policy advise) – the best example of engineering approach to societal change is agalitarianism

I would venture the hypothesis that engineers are a vastly underrepresented educational group amongst politicians, their consultants, & the academia that gives policy advice

Necmettin Erbakan.

Wen Jiabao and Li Peng.

H. D. Deve Gowda and A. P. J. Abdul Kalam.

Etc.

In much of the world, an engineering is one of the most common academic backgrounds for a senior politician. But then, you were talking about real countries, right, not dinky little places like Turkey or India or China?

“Turkey or India or China?”
The Engineer is a hero of modern revolution and “progress.”
The military are engineers of war. Military utilitarianism.

As far as lasting policy is concerned (and a recent discussion of Brazil is a good example) the problem is not an engineered society but one where bureaucracy leads but does not serve: where government supplants community. The US will become more like Sweden when Americans become more like Swedes. It’s not just laws but people.

A good engineer who is also a good politician knows the meaning of the word “overdetermined.” A good engineer who doesn’t is a bad politician but, may be a good leader in a crisis. It’s not either or. Acknowledging Hayek’s observations does not mean India should have had an open trade policy. I’ve always thought God was smart kill off Moses when he did but it was nice to have him around for a while.

#97 : Bongo – you need to settle on criticizing me for being like the loons at Fox News, or for being overly flip and ironic about the loons at Fox News.

Henry – some fish are slippier than others.

Irony may be a “potent weapon” but the average loon reading your post might take you for a tea party original – even after clicking a link or two. Some of them are so irony-challenged even a line that departs from the literal can throw them off, unless it comes with a jingle. Course I know you weren’t in any sense playing both sides of the fence… just saying.

I haven’t read Hayek: if he opposes an engineering approach to social policy, why? Because it attempts to re-engineer society based on propositional knowledge derived directly from abstracted academic studies, or because the “knowledge” it’s based on is different from the propositional knowledge possessed within universities?

The footnotes to the passage James Conran links to have some peculiar features. I’m not saying I’d dismiss out of hand works published in Germany in the early 1930s concerning the genius of the 19th century German. Marx wasn’t an engineer either.

if he opposes an engineering approach to social policy, why?

Because knowledge is widely dispersed, and engineering (which implies an engineer) would require that knowledge to be collected/centralized.

Timothy McVeigh was neither a Muslim, nor an engineer, he was just a redneck veteran who had bought into some very kooky theories, quite likely with pharmaceutical assistance. He murdered a couple of hundred people.

Nor were the Italian Fascists who set off the Bolongna bomb in the hope that it would be attributed to communists and enable a repressive state.

Profiling is bad policy because the profiles are ineffective. No country can afford to profile the only type of terrorists who present an existential threat – their own citizens. Bin Laden is not going to change the government in the US, but there are elements that are being drawn to the Tea Party banner that are explicitly making that threat. Orly Taitz of the birther loonies called for an armed insurrection only this week.

Chris E@#115

8 of the 9 members of China’s ruling council are engineers – which lends all sorts of interesting speculations about the ways of negotiating with them.

The comparison between “Arabian”, American and Asian attitudes to technocracy is instructive. Chinese engineers are the group most likely to rescue us from the global warming, with a little help from their economist friends. I am a big fan of the engineer selection bias in the PRC’s Politburo, who are already leading the way to technological solutions to carbon pollution. According to the New Scientist every member of the most recent Politburo was an engineer, although the writer seems to assume the PRC’s governance success occurred despite, not because, of this HR recruitment policy:

CONTEMPORARY China is a nation led by technocrats. The current generation of leaders is made up mostly of graduates from some of China’s leading universities, typically trained in science and engineering. Until this year’s 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which closed on 22 October, every member of the central bastion of power – the Standing Committee of the Politburo – was an engineer by training.

For those in the west, where lawyers dominate the political establishment, China provides an intriguing contrast. How did the country come to be led by a cohort of technocrats? Does their technical mindset define the way they rule? Do they govern as engineers and scientists? And, most importantly, do they govern well?

By contrast America is mis-ruled by over-lawyered cliques of political lobbyists and financial manipulators. And “Arabia” has few opportunities for the technologically competent.

The best hope for “Arabia” is for women to take more power. As has happened in Algeria. They would certainly appreciate it if their tech-savvy and ambitious menfolk concentrated on building things rather than blowing them up.

tomslee, fair enough but if it was just ‘good fun’ to you it wasn’t necessarily so to others.

lemuel, not fair enough – first it was a hypothesis and thanks for what I didn’t know but second I did differentiate between rich and poor countries and you imputing to me the kind of ‘it’s only BRIC-countries’-approach is unfair; in my hypothesis it is normal that in developing countries the overrepresentation of lawyers and humanities is not yet an element of the system. Maybe it would be a good historic study to check whether there is a decaying proportion of leading politicians from an engineering background as such a country develops? Maybe my hypothesis was wrong but plausible enough to avoid an innocent bystander of this discussion to go away feeling slightly aroused against us.

So: not fair enough. Not fair at all. I protest!

how about profiling those who aren’t a terrorist threat and excuse them from full body-cavity searches? —which, if they aren’t next in the series of humiliations, are in line with the prevailing insanity.

Should feeble grand-mothers who are retired elementray-school teachers from Topeka be subjected to the same rigors of inspection and “proof of identity” (which I understand shall now have new and stricter measures applied–LOL!–please prove your identity again!) as those who correspond to the most likely terrorist-profile as indicated by actual events?

Jack, I’m sorry that we don’t oppress the Muslims enough for your liking, but please don’t try to goad us by waving the bloody shirt of our national tragedy.

Very telling observations about the educational background of China’s governing class. Quite disturbing geopolitical implications when we realize the US governing class has little other than Lawyers and English Lit./soft Social Studies grads. Why is US governance such a Science-free zone?

Ted, you know nothing about universities in the Islamic world.

For heavens’s sake, stop this stereotyping. All it will do is drive more of them to extremism, which would be disastrously counterproductive.

Not that I’m suggesting we must essay the impossible by trying to understand them. Just don’t piss them off gratuitously, and humour them if harmlessly possible.

ps: Your anti-PC trope is not merely dangerously misguided, the way it equates our basest instincts with commonsense. It is also boring.

“All it will do is drive more of them to extremism, ”
“Them.”
I suppose you mean Israelis or the BNP
Maybe Max Rodenbeck can teach you something.
Or may you should just watch some “Islamic News.” Like maybe Al Jazeera?
It’s better than CNN America. Odd.

Joaquin, you’re writing before you’re reading.

By “them”, like Henry, I meant them.