Yeah, that Edward Tufte. Do not fuck with him when he’s drunk. He’ll fucking cut you.
Kebooo
1582
Did you not read my post? Where I specifically say it’s serving two functions, including the one you just wrote in a way that implies I’m taking the opposite position? Don’t create a straw man to attack, I won’t even begin to argue that blockading children’s toys has anything to do with weapons.
If you seriously believe the only reason they’re out there stalking and boarding ships is because of children’s toys and luxuries, I have some stock to sell you. Yes, part of their agenda is clearly to punish Palestinians for electing Hamas, and part of it is to stop weapons smuggling. Why is this hard for you to accept? You think they “know” it doesn’t work, but they simultaneously don’t realize punishing the Palestinians works even less? They are preventing weapons from easily getting into Gaza, obviously completely stopping it is difficult when there’s tunneling under Egypt, but bringing in weapons through tunnels that can be blown up is a lot harder than bringing in weapons by the ship full. If Hezbollah wants to send them weapons, it’s exceedingly difficult under these circumstances.
If attempting to build animosity to Hamas is the main reason, why are they willing to ease restrictions on the material goods ban in exchange for international cooperation on preventing arms smuggling? Some evil ZOG conspiracy?
Mitya
1583
This is ostensibly their goal, but I’m incredibly surprised at people who either think it will work in this regard or that this is Israel’s real motive. For the former, how do you think it will incite the Palestinians against Hamas? If anything it will make them more pro-Hamas. Hamas isn’t the one they see blocking all of the goods from entering the territory, they see Israel! Thinking they’ll rise up against Hamas is giving people in aggregate too much credit.
For the second, Israel has shown repeatedly that they do not desire peace in the region. The entirety of Netanyahu’s administration is made up of rightist, ex-military characters (though who in Israel isn’t ex-military? but I digress…) who want to create what at least to them will be further reason to “intervene” in the region and take back control of the territory. More terrorist action on the part of Hamas is both the last and the first thing that Israel wants, because those in power naively think that they can crush the Palestinian nationalist sentiment in the region through brute force. And why not? It’s “worked” before! Jews have “succeeded” in casting off outside oppression through force for thousands of years! There’s a reason that IDF soldiers are often brought to the Masada, where they pledge that “Masada shall not fall again.” There is a culture of thought that a strong arm will solve all of Israel’s problems, and when officials bring up events of the past to legitimize present action they conveniently forget that it’s those past actions that have lead them to the place they are now in.
One, the zero point is close to in the data series - in the Druze and Arab population. Two, I’m pretty sure he’s referring to single data point time series.
I’ll just say the second graph pictured previously (the top graph here) was better than the zoomed in graph. Better than bad isn’t great. At least I get a better sense of magnitude out of either of these charts than the original.
The bottom graph shown here has one dependent variable, as far as I can tell. The blue and red bars add up to 100 in each year? I’d scrap both these, and draw a line plot if you’re going to only have one dependent variable…:) Then I’d get rid of all that extra chart ink, and finally switch to some nicer colors. Excel makes some ugly-ass graphs.
So you won’t even answer the simple question I asked? Terrific.
I wouldn’t depict the data like that, either, given a choice. I was pointing out that if you choose to depict it in bar chart format there’s a far better way to get your point across by including only relevant data, and I used an apples-to-apples comparison. You can bitch about Excel and lecture me about choosing a graph type and do whatever else you want to dance around the question all you want, but if you won’t concede that Chart B is superior to Chart A at conveying relative population percentages over time (which is the only comparison I asked you to make) then you really need to get off your soapbox and “up on your Tufte.”
The chart is from the original Framingham heart study, which argued that high cholesterol is the cause of heart attacks. Their web site can be found here:
http://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/
That copy of the graph - with the bizarre discontinuity on the x-axis highlighted in red - comes from this website:
…which I found pretty interesting, although I’m not enough of an expert to know if he’s on the money in his general approach.
Holy crap, look what Schumer said.
“The boycott of Gaza to me has another purpose — obviously the first purpose is to prevent Hamas from getting weapons by which they will use to hurt Israel — but the second is actually to show the Palestinians that when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have an economic advancement. When there’s total war against Israel, which Hamas wages, they’re gonna get nowhere. And to me, since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid and people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go makes sense. “
Kurdel
1589
This Schumer sounds like an asshole. Who cares about democracy, right?
Video of the flotilla being attacked.
It’s pretty lousy, but what you do see is Israelis opening fire with paint-ball guns before the helicopter arrives, and people preparing for a melee fight with improvised clubs. Also, a bunch of people plink at the helicopter with slingshots, then the camera goes below deck where injured people, including soldiers, come for triage. It tells us nothing about the scene on the top deck.
I do wonder why the Israelis decided to board rather than… I don’t know. Or why not use teargas or beanbags or some such. A riot-cop kind of thing would have worked much better than fucking commandos.
And what were people thinking, clubbing heavily armed soldiers? That blows my mind.
He says:
“But don’t spend a lot of empty vertical space trying to reach down to the zero point at the cost of hiding what is going on in the data line itself.”
Which, when you see the graph stretching all the way down to zero, makes a lot of sense.
I think this whole problem with that graph is political correctness gone mad!!!
What do you think the United States would do if a nation elected an organization like the Taliban to be its government? How about if said nation later attacked the United States? Wouldn’t that lead to everyone’s favorite phrase, Regime Change? Being democratically elected doesn’t make it so other nations can’t be unhappy (and act accordingly) with the result.
I’m sure we can all think of at least one democratically elected leader or party that the whole world questioned.
Kurdel
1593
Manipulating the people of the country isn’t the solution though. By the means of starvation and poor living conditions, they are only (presumably) radicalizing and angering the civilians. If a government isn’t happy with an election, they can opt for more sensible actions.
Hamas didn’t put up the blockade, Israel did. And the people know that.
Try to imagine, if you can, a couple of things. 1. Say the US had a real POTUS instead of the clueless idiot we are saddled with now.
- Say Mexico started lobbing missles with HE warheads into Texas schools and resturants. And then Mexico started sending suicide bombers into flea markets.
The question is how long to you think it would take the US to erase Mexico from the face of the Earth?
To say Israel should use more restraint against the “Peace Loving Palestinians” is just nonsense. BTW there is no such thing as a “Palestinian,” It’s was a name made up by Time magazine’s man of the year, Nobel Peace Prize winner Yassar Arafat, whose hobby was sleeping with little boys.
Jordan stole the land from Israel in 1950 and Israel just took it back. Fuck the “Palestinians”
Kebooo
1595
What do you suggest they do?
For one, the US wouldn’t wipe Mexico from the face of the earth, nor would we try to annex the country.
Israel has tried occupation, they’ve tried invasion (Gaza offensive), tried blockades and collective punishment, and none of it has seemed to solve the problem, although clearly suicide bombing has been curtailed. So what’s next? Isolate them for the rest of history? Genocide? Keep their land as part of Israel, but don’t allow them to vote? Neither “side” needs to be wiped out, because the serial killer types are the minority, able to express themselves in this conflict. Personally I’d like to see Israel give some on the West Bank, and Palestinians accept that they aren’t going to be able to uproot entire cities there to take as their own. A Palestinian state would be much better than what we have now. Both sides have to give some, and neither wants to.
Israel should use restraint, if for no other reason, because not using restraint hasn’t worked. Even if you feel justified in doing something, if it doesn’t work, why continue it? Even if they have a right to shoot down a suicide bomber, isn’t it better to come to some conclusion where the suicide bombers stop existing? History shows men are willing to throw their lives away to empty violence when they don’t have much to live for.
Johan_O
1596
What does it matter if the none jews that lived in Israel are called Palestinians or Jordanians? There were a sizeable population of them, many of them were displaced from their homes for various reasons after the founding of Israel, but they did live in the land, have ties to it, and wether you call them Palestininans or Jordanians they and their emotional ties to the land still exist.
“Palestinians,” Arabs, Africans and more can all live and work in Israel if they don’t bomb school children. Israel is the most diverse country in the Middle East.
The difference in your hypothetical is that the U.S. recognizes Mexico as a sovereign nation, and vice-versa. There are a hell of a lot of tools at your disposal, ranging from meaningful diplomacy to declaring a legitimate war in that scenario that don’t exist when you have two groups of people who mutually look at each other as large terrorist organizations.
BTW, going by your logic there’s no such thing as an “Israeli,” as it’s a name made up by some angel that Jacob wrestled.
I’m afraid we would. Mexico would cease to be Mexico and probably wind up as the 51st State. America would not tolerate the killing of it’s children by a foreign country. We dropped atom bombs on Japan for attacking a harbor, what do you think we’d do to a country preying on our school kids?
Americans have always killed their enemies. Freedom ain’t free.
Of course with the present pusillanimous shitball in the WH, no telling what would happen.
Jews lived on that land 1000’s of years before Arabs. Look it up.
