There's a reason that medical coding changes and updates. It's not just for specific reimbursement from third party payers, but to reflect new "trends" that didn't previously exist.....Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
There's a reason that medical coding changes and updates. It's not just for specific reimbursement from third party payers, but to reflect new "trends" that didn't previously exist.....Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Except the facts are not on your side. Violent crimes are down sharply. :bored:
Even gun advocates have said that medical research on gun violence has been politicized. It's not so cut-and-dry either way. Like I said, violent crimes by incident may be lower, but one incident can create several victims. I'm not sure that's something being followed statistically.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
New angle to this thread: Dread posted an article from WSJ with "Blood Libel" in its title. Yesterday, Palin released a video mentioning a manufactured "Blood Libel". I wasn't aware that term had negative historical connotations for Jews. :noob:
Update for some really good news :up:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41018273...h-health_care/Quote:
The Arizona congresswoman has been sitting up, dangling her legs on the edge of the hospital bed and moving her limbs in response to commands. That's after she spontaneously opened her eyes during visits with her colleagues Wednesday night. She is able to lift both of her legs on command and is yawning and starting to rub her eyes, doctors said.
"She's becoming more aware of her surroundings," trauma chief Dr. Peter Rhee said during a news conference at the University Medical Center in Tucson, Ariz., Thursday.
The next milestone will be removing her breathing tube, and perhaps have her sit in a chair on Friday, said Rhee, who has treated soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doctors want to make sure Giffords doesn't regress and are watching for pneumonia and blood clots.
Comes on the same day as young Christina Taylor Green's funeral. :(
I'd "heard" Westboro was planning to protest at her funeral procession :mad:, and a Tucson community group was planning to surround the procession with people wearing angel wings to block out any offensive signs. Not sure if that came to pass. Really, would Westboro stoop that low?
This is hardly new depths for them.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
It's not confirmed, just something I heard. Was hoping someone had the facts, because I'll be damned to give those freaks another name search hit. :sour:Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
I'm pretty sure those are statistics per capita, not per incident.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
I refuse to get drawn into an Alber-argument, where you constantly shift the discussion into broader, more generalized and more vague topics in a desperate attempt to find some ground on which you aren't pretty much just wrong. This thread has a perfectly good topic, violent or violence-alluding speech, specifically in politics.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Suit yourself. Contrary to your preconceived notions, I don't have any particular agenda. All along I've been discussing my personal perspective and impressions about civility or nastiness in political discourse, plus my view that American society has become more dangerous/violent. Surely in the last couple of decades. There was a seemingly "mild" level of violence between the 60's and current day. Reagan and the Pope (and even Lennon) being shot led to a new age of security.Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
It's not so inane to comment on what children experience today, compared to previous decades. Ditto for air travel, international travel, security measures in general. That's my frame of reference. Sue me. :bored:
That says nothing whatsoever to do with the "there are more GSWs and violent assaults than ever." Do you have anything do back up that claim?Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Dare I ask it, do you have any evidence at all for this claim either?Quote:
All along I've been discussing my personal perspective and impressions about civility or nastiness in political discourse, plus my view that American society has become more dangerous/violent. Surely in the last couple of decades.
You mean definitive data, that's not specific by area? Comparing general emergency room census with border states (immigration), gang presence (border states plus urban centers), urban vs suburban vs rural? No, I don't have that fact sheet off hand. Would one fact sheet convince you, anyway? Specific data collection has a lagging factor. Whether it's violent trauma or communicable diseases.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
But we can make a general assumption about severity and impact, by what emergency departments and first responders are focusing on.
In other words, HIV has less to do with "frequency" than "virility". GSWs have less to do with "frequency" than "impact".
Germs and guns have some things in common. Most people don't blink an eye when talking about childhood vaccinations, or STDs. Those "rates" are also lower, historically. That doesn't mean germs simply went away, or pose less of a threat. Indeed, virology and bacteriology has shown us that even "simple" things like malaria or cholera or HIV can kill millions of people.
But the same people will readily argue about whether gun violence or violent assaults are more frequent by incident or per capita? No big deal, the damage done is less than ever, because violence "in general" is less than ever?
:hmm:
http://www.theworldforgotten.com/sho...ll=1#post64396
.....Blood Libel.....I'd like to know if you were aware of its historic meanings before you posted that article from the WSJ, Dread.Quote:
OPINION | JANUARY 10, 2011
The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel
(I'd never heard of it, but apparently it's quite heavy in context. Suggesting Jews killed Christian babies to drink their blood, quite a slur. WSJ used it and so did Sarah Palin, with admonishment from the Jewish community.)
Comments?
Doesn't really bother me. At it's most basic, a blood libel is a "big lie" that holds an entire group responsible for some kind of horrific murder of innocents. That's what some elements on the left are doing with this shooting.
That one of the victims happens to be Jewish is sorta incidental.
About 3minutes + she mentions the "manufactured" Blood Libel. Yeah, she really said pundints. :donkey:
Here's the definition of Blood Libel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel
It didn't really bother me, either. Until I read how it upset the Jewish community----that Palin thinks she's being martyred like the Jews? :confused:
Also, who the hell is her advisor and speech writer? If this is the best she can do, she's toast.
It's upsetting partisan Democratic Jews who didn't read the WSJ use the same analogy a day or two before. And who understandably don't like issues that have historically involved Jews to be turned into catchphrases.
Which I get, but doesn't mean the comparison isn't at all valid.
What? You mean it's valid for her to compare herself to the same kind of "victim" as Blood Libel? :confused:Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
I think she probably had read the WSJ article, and so did her speech writer. But they had no idea what Blood Libel meant historically for Jewish people.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/what-bloo...ly-803503.htmlQuote:
What ‘blood libel’ really means
By Jonathan Zimmerman
In 1255, an 8-year-old boy named Hugh was found dead at the bottom of a well in Lincoln, England. Rumors spread across the village, and soon everyone knew who had done it: the Jews.
But the Jews had done more than simply kill “Hugh of Lincoln,” as the young martyr was called. No, villagers said, it was much worse than that. The Jews — always “the” Jews — had kidnapped the boy, fattened him on milk and white bread for 10 days, and then slaughtered him to use his blood in their Passover ritual.
And that, my fellow Americans, was a real “blood libel.” Not the kind invoked by Sarah Palin, who needs a little history lesson of her own.
By now, you’ve probably seen or read about Palin’s Facebook response to last weekend’s Arizona tragedy. In an eight-minute video clip posted on Wednesday, Palin lambasted critics who blamed angry political rhetoric for the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the deaths of six others.
“Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn,” Palin declared, looking straight at the camera. “That is reprehensible.”
Fair enough. But politicians shouldn’t use careless metaphors that do violence to real historical suffering, either. That’s reprehensible, too.
Let’s be clear: Palin was right about her critics, and she had every right to fight back. It was grossly unfair for Democrats to fault her — or any other Republican — for the heinous acts of Jared Loughner, who shot Giffords outside a Tuscon mall last Saturday.
True, our airwaves are full of violent political rhetoric. And yes, Palin’s own website once posted a graphic depicting Giffords’ congressional district inside a rifle’s cross hairs.
But we have no idea if any of these words or images affected Loughner, whose motives and politics remain largely unknown. At this stage, then, pretending that Republicans are responsible for the Arizona tragedy is, well, a libel against the GOP.
But is it a blood libel? Of course not. And to see why, consider what happened after the death of Hugh of Lincoln.
A local Jew was arrested and tortured into “confessing” to Hugh’s murder. Then he and 92 other Jews were jailed; eventually, eighteen of them were hanged.
So it went, across Europe, from Gloucester and Bristol — two other sites of blood-libel charges in England — to Paris, Salzburg, and Seville. Historians have counted over 100 such episodes between the 11th and 19th centuries, all of them ending in torture, imprisonment, or death for Jews.
Why did Jews want Christian blood? It depended on whom you asked. According to one well-worn myth, Jewish men sought to replenish the blood that they shed when they were circumcised. Others speculated that Jewish men menstruated, which also led to blood loss — and the need to replace it.
And when Europeans came to the Americas, they brought the blood-libel canard with them. In 1850, a New York newspaper ran a front-page story reporting that Jews had bled a Christian missionary to death in the Middle East and mixed his blood with matzoh (unleavened bread) for Passover.
Other Jewish holidays raised similar fears. A few months after the missionary story, on the eve of Yom Kippur, New York was seized by rumors that Jews had killed a Christian girl for the holiest day of their year. The next morning, on Yom Kippur itself, a mob of 500 ransacked a local synagogue to avenge the imaginary crime.
As late as 1928, in Massena, N.Y., Jews faced blood-libel charges in the disappearance of a 4-year-old girl. After all, the town’s mayor noted, the girl had disappeared just two days before Yom Kippur; perhaps Jews had killed her as part of their worship. When the child was discovered a few days later, unharmed, the mayor was forced to apologize.
And just last year, in British Columbia, a Muslim newspaper reported that Israel was allegedly conspiring to kidnap 25,000 Ukranian children and to harvest their organs. After a sharp public outcry, the newspaper removed the article from its website and apologized.
Palin should apologize, too. And not just to Jews, including Giffords.
No, Palin should apologize to all of us. In a speech condemning the irresponsibility of her critics, who have played fast and loose with the facts, Palin did something even worse: She trivialized one of the great crimes of human history.
Are the Republicans to blame for the Arizona shootings? Of course not. But by suggesting as much, were the Democrats doing something akin to mass murder? Palin knows the answer. Now let’s see if she has the courage and the decency to say it.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”
Just asking, because (like I said) I'd never heard the term before. But it's not too much to expect VP candidates, future Presidential candidates, political leaders with a large following, or their speech writers to know this historical information.....right? After all, they're our international diplomats.
It's not unusual at all for them. This is pretty much all they do these days.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
I think Loki already posted the numbers for this. If five people get injured in a single violent incident, that counts as five counts of assault. The crime data numbers already takes into account what you've been talking about, and the numbers have been steadily dropping for a while now.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
It's really not much more different than using the phrase "lynching", is it?Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
In the year 2000 United States had an estimated population of 626,932 which ranked the state as having the 48th in population. For that year the State of United States had a total Crime Index of 4,249.4 reported incidents per 100,000 people. This ranked the state as having the 22nd highest total Crime Index. For Violent Crime United States had a reported incident rate of 566.9 per 100,000 people. This ranked the state as having the 10th highest occurrence for Violent Crime among the states. For crimes against Property, the state had a reported incident rate of 3,682.5 per 100,000 people, which ranked as the state 23rd highest. Also in the year 2000 United States had 4.3 Murders per 100,000 people, ranking the state as having the 26th highest rate for Murder. United States’s 70.3 reported Forced Rapes per 100,000 people, ranked the state 1st highest. For Robbery, per 100,000 people, United States’s rate was 78.2 which ranked the state as having the 33rd highest for Robbery. The state also had 405.1 Aggravated Assaults for every 100,000 people, which indexed the state as having the 10th highest position for this crime among the states. For every 100,000 people there were 621.9 Burglaries, which ranks United States as having the 31st highest standing among the states. Larceny - Theft were reported 2,685.8 times per hundred thousand people in United States which standing is the 22nd highest among the states. Vehicle Theft occurred 374.8 times per 100,000 people, which fixed the state as having the 24th highest for vehicle theft among the states.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
I don't see GSWs or gun-related violence delineated in that data. Not even sure what "population of 626,932" means.....we have 300 million people +/-. :confused:
You tell me. It was only from reading various news sites where prominent Jews expressed their dismay at the use of "Blood Libel" that I even knew about it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
Certain words DO have relative context, sometimes only important to certain groups. That's kind of the point---that our leaders should know their history and choose their words with care, or at least choose smart people to help them write speeches. If they surround themselves with a bunch or ignorant yahoos, that will effect diplomacy.
Indeed, to some people saying "lynching" has a particular context. Does that mean the word has been banished from the lexicon?
People were accusing "the right" generally and Palin specifically of being accomplices to murder. There are only so many ways you can describe that kind of accusation.
Not at all. But if you're a public figure with an audience of millions, and you KNOW your speeches will be taped and shown on the internet for everyone to see within a nanosecond, wouldn't you avoid using the word "lynching" in any context?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
Maybe some "people" were doing that, but no one at TWF was doing that. I accused Palin of being cavalier with her speech, and the latest thing on Blood Libel just confirms that. That's not to say that the left isn't guilty too. It's a bipartisan mistake, using charged rhetoric to get folks charged up.Quote:
People were accusing "the right" generally and Palin specifically of being accomplices to murder. There are only so many ways you can describe that kind of accusation.
Thanks for that. You Brits and your quirky ways!Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Well since Palin was not responding to TWFers but to those on the left that decided to go after her...what's your point?Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
LOL :haha:Quote:
Originally Posted by Veldan Rath
Something Stephen Fry noticed on the way we use speech. We have no problem saying: "Traffic was murder", or "This is killing me", or "Watching that play was torture". All perfectly acceptable. But there is a taboo on the word "fuck".
For some reason we don't mind using words that have terrible connotations and they're perfectly acceptable, but when we dare refer to a pleasurable activity it's considered rude.
Try explaining that to the Aliens when they land here.
No, I mean comparing now to the past. Whether specific, general or whatever. You said "there are more GSWs and violent assaults than ever." Key words "than ever." Why did you say that? What evidence do you have for that.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
No, we can show that may be a priority now but it demonstrates nothing about now versus the past.Quote:
But we can make a general assumption about severity and impact, by what emergency departments and first responders are focusing on.
Ziggy: While a good observation, murder, killing, torture etc are not used regularly as swear-words, on the other hand a minor equivalent one is "bloody" - not pleasurable but it is frequently a swear word.
Blame the Victorians and their prudishness.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ziggy Stardust
The word was not an obscenity before they came along and fucked things up.
~
Interesting dynamic though. In pre-Victorian times it was blasphemous words which were taboo. Saying 'My God!' or 'Jesus' as an exclamation, like we all do every day, were outrageous curses in pre-victorian times and not to be uttered lightly. Yet currently taboo words like cunt didn't have anything like the stigma they do now.
For some reason I doubt that pre-Victorian gentlemen would never have used that word either anyway.
Indeed. That's the whole point. Their connotations would cover the emotion a swear word is meant to convey more closely, so why aren't they used as swear words?Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Sure. I'm not stating a general rule, just an oddity of language in specific cases.Quote:
on the other hand a minor equivalent one is "bloody" - not pleasurable but it is frequently a swear word.
Bloody Victorians. :mad:
Westboro was bribed with airtime on two radio stations to keep them from showing up, and they didn't. The angel wing people did anyways. Those things are incredibly stupid looking.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
That's even fucking tackier than the Westboro jackasses.
Newsflash 1: Americans didn't fall for the blood libel.
Newsflash 2: Not all Jews are up in arms about using the phrase "blood libel", because as a rhetorical device it's ultimately more about false accusations of murder than about Jews.Quote:
Poll: Conservatives not to blame for Ariz. shooting
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Most Americans reject the idea that inflammatory political language by conservatives should be part of the debate about the forces behind the Arizona shooting that left six people dead and a congresswoman in critical condition, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.
A 53% majority of those surveyed call that analysis mostly an attempt to use the tragedy to make conservatives look bad. About a third, 35%, say it is a legitimate point about how dangerous language can be.
And there is little sense that stricter gun control laws in Arizona might have averted the tragedy. Only one in five say they would have prevented the shooting; 72% say tighter controls wouldn't have prevented it.
Meanwhile, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin posted a statement and a video on her Facebook page denouncing criticism that she bore some responsibility for the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The congresswoman was one of 20 congressional Democrats whom Palin had targeted for defeat in November's elections on a map showing their congressional districts in cross hairs.
"Within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn," Palin wrote. "This is reprehensible."
The phrase "blood libel" is a false slur against Jews that has been used for centuries to justify their persecution.
There are partisan differences in views of the shooting. Even among Democrats, however, a third say it isn't legitimate to single out conservatives' language for criticism; just over half say it is legitimate. Seven in 10 Republicans call that analysis mostly an attempt to make conservatives look bad.
In the poll, the public is precisely evenly divided on whether the heated language generally used in politics today was a factor in the shooting: 42% say yes, 42% say no. Another 15% have no opinion.
Those who see political rhetoric as a factor are almost evenly divided over whether it was a major one or a minor one.
Most of those surveyed see inflammatory language being used by both Republicans and Democrats. And the Tea Party movement gets slightly less blame than the two major parties, although the difference is too small to be statistically significant.
Fifty-three percent say Republicans and their supporters have gone too far in using inflammatory language; 51% say that of Democrats; 49% say it of Tea Party supporters.
The poll of 1,002 adults, taken Tuesday, has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
J Street, a political organization for Jews and supporters of Israel, criticized Palin's choice of words.
"The term 'blood libel' brings back painful echoes of a very dark time in our communal history when Jews were falsely accused of committing heinous deeds," Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street president, said in a statement. "When Governor Palin learns that many Jews are pained by and take offense at the use of the term, we are sure that she will choose to retract her comment, apologize and make a less inflammatory choice of words."
FYI "Rabbi Shmuley" is a notable public figure in American Judaism: http://www.shmuley.com/Quote:
HOUSES OF WORSHIP | JANUARY 14, 2011
Sarah Palin Is Right About 'Blood Libel'
Judaism rejects the idea of collective responsibility for murder.
By SHMULEY BOTEACH
The term "blood libel"—which Sarah Palin invoked this week to describe the suggestions by journalists and politicians that conservative figures like herself are responsible for last weekend's shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz.—is fraught with perilous meaning in Jewish history.
The term connotes the earliest accusations that Jews killed Jesus and enthusiastically embraced responsibility for his murder, telling Pontius Pilate, "His blood be upon us and our children" (Matthew 27:25). Thus was born the legend of Jewish bloodlust and of Hebrew ritual use of Christian blood for sacramental purposes. The term was later used more specifically to describe accusations against Jews—primarily in Europe—of sacrificing kidnapped Christian children to use their blood in the baking of Passover matzos.
The Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth is generally credited with having popularized the blood libel in his "Life of the Martyr William from Norwich," written in 1173 about a young boy who was found stabbed to death. Thomas quoted a servant woman who said she witnessed Jews lacerating the boy's head with thorns, crucifying him, and piercing his side. While William was canonized, the Jews of Norwich fared less well. On Feb. 6, 1190, they were all found slaughtered in their homes, save those who escaped to the local tower and committed mass suicide.
Despite the strong association of the term with collective Jewish guilt and concomitant slaughter, Sarah Palin has every right to use it. The expression may be used whenever an amorphous mass is collectively accused of being murderers or accessories to murder.
The abominable element of the blood libel is not that it was used to accuse Jews, but that it was used to accuse innocent Jews—their innocence, rather than their Jewishness, being the operative point. Had the Jews been guilty of any of these heinous acts, the charge would not have been a libel.
Jews did not kill Jesus. As the Roman historian Tacitus makes clear, he was murdered by Pontius Pilate, whose reign of terror in ancient Judea was so excessive, even by Roman standards, that (according to the Roman-Jewish chronicler Josephus) Rome recalled him in the year 36 due to his sadistic practices. King Herod Agrippa I, writing to the Emperor Caligula, noted Pilate's "acts of violence, plunderings . . . and continual murder of persons untried and uncondemned, and his never-ending, endless, and unbelievable cruelties, gratuitous and most grievous inhumanity."
Murder is humanity's most severe sin, and it is trivialized when an innocent party is accused of the crime—especially when that party is a collective too numerous to be defended individually. If Jews have learned anything in their long history, it is that a false indictment of murder against any group threatens every group. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Indeed, the belief that the concept of blood libel applies only to Jews is itself a form of reverse discrimination that should be dismissed.
Judaism rejects the idea of collective responsibility for murder, as the Hebrew Bible condemns accusations of collective guilt against Jew and non-Jew alike. "The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him" (Ezekiel 18).
How unfortunate that some have chosen to compound a national tragedy by politicizing the murder of six innocent lives and the attempted assassination of a congresswoman.
To be sure, America should embrace civil political discourse for its own sake, and no political faction should engage in demonizing rhetoric. But promoting this high principle by simultaneously violating it and engaging in a blood libel against innocent parties is both irresponsible and immoral.
Rabbi Boteach is the author of "Honoring the Child Spirit: Inspiration and Learning from Our Children" (Vanguard, 2011). He will shortly publish a book on the Jewishness of Jesus and his murder at Roman hands.
J-Street is a left-wing organization. What do you expect?
I'm not sure how much a non-US person can bring into this whole discussion. The American culture (air quotes if you'd like) is so banal, sick and twisted when viewed from the outside that it becomes impossible to have a reasonable exchange on things such as carrying guns to a political rally. The connotations and subtext, and the assumptions thereon, are so different that the English language fails, especially over an internet forum. What happened was dreadful, but it's also pretty par for the course in the current American climate and, for example, European criticism of that is pretty meaningless since we can't judge the people on their own values.
When they started filming Deadwood, after a couple of days they decided to change the script completely because they were swearing in terms considered swears at the time, which made them "sound like Yosemite Sam". So came to be the series of scatological swears instead of the blasphemous, and all the better for it. :up:Quote:
Originally Posted by Timbuk2
Nein. The whole issue is this isn't par for the course in the current American climate. So unusual even Lisbeth Salander couldn't find a conspiratorial pattern.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nessus
Poor phrasing on my part; it was bound to happen with the hostility engendered mostly by the Pubbies. You haven't had a political assassination in decades, and arguably this guy was a random loon who was going to shoot someone his mind saw as a representative of the Orwellian machinery he saw around him.
This is what the climate was begging for, and now it's sorry it happened. Not all that unusual in human affairs.
Except that everyone knows that the climate isn't begging for it, he was a complete nutball. They just found photos of him in a red G-string posting with a gun in front of his crotch. This is quasi Silence of the Lambs shit. The need to turn the blame inward is not constructive in this case, the guy wasn't really on anyone's wavelength.
Are these 'everyone' the American people you purport to speak for?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught