Let Me Pick Your Brain, Surgeon

[liberty]

I could support an American born Muslim for president but I would not support someone who thinks going to prison makes you gay and that Muslims should not be allowed to run for president.

If you criticize Dr. Carson you are Racist.

[liberty]

Saw this post on Facebook today:

I've been thinking about getting some brain surgery. You know, just for fun. Thing is, I don't really trust brain surgeons. I've heard that most of them are incompetent, and some are corrupt. So in selecting a brain surgeon, I've decided to go with someone who never went to medical school, has absolutely no experience practicing medicine, and has never conducted brain surgery before--but who also shares my frustration with brain surgeons and gives powerful voice to my anxiety. I feel that's the best solution to my frustration with the general state of brain surgery these days. Experience, education, and skills count for absolutely nothing. There's no one I rather have conducting a difficult and dangerous job in which my personal safety is directly implicated than someone whose shared sense of frustration outweighs their complete lack of knowledge about brain surgery. This can't go wrong.

If you criticize Dr. Carson you are Racist.

[Crackpot]

Quit spamming the board you racist price of shit.

[liberty]

Quit spamming the board you racist price of shit.

You’re the bigot. How can he be a brain surgeon and an idiot at the same time. Only in your mind and only because you are a bigot. If Dr. Carson misspeaks you are to ignore it like you would for Obama.

[Crackpot]

There are different kinds of intelligence Carson lacks in the areas required for politics. I on th other hand am a medical moron. I'd probably b dead right now if I didn't marry a nurse.

You are the one who keeps bringing race into the equation.

[rubato]

Quit spamming the board you racist price of shit.

You’re the bigot. How can he be a brain surgeon and an idiot at the same time. Only in your mind and only because you are a bigot. If Dr. Carson misspeaks you are to ignore it like you would for Obama.

Fritz Haber was a brilliant Nobel-prize winning chemist who was such a total moron socially and morally that he drove his first wife to suicide after he oversaw the first use of chemical weapons in WWI and then believed that his conversion from Judaism to Christianity would protect him under the Nazi Reich. He also contributed to the development of Zyklon B which was used to kill large numbers of both converted and unconverted Jews.


It is common both in medicine and academia to find people who are brilliant in their own narrow fields but are wholly inept as leaders and administrators.


You are a naif.


yrs,
rubato

[Econoline]

(Link is in the headline.)

Religions Are What People Make Them

The current crop of Republican presidential candidates is accomplishing something I would have considered impossible: making George W. Bush look like a statesman. Say what you like about his actions after 9/11 — and I did not like, at all — at least he made a point of not feeding anti-Muslim hysteria. But that was then.

Reason probably doesn’t do much good in these circumstances. Still, to the extent that there are people who should know better declaring that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, or science, or good things in general, I’d like to recommend a book I recently read: S. Frederick Starr’s Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age From the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane. It covers a place and a time of which I knew nothing: the medieval flourishing of learning — mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy — in central Asian cities made rich by irrigated agriculture and trade.

As Starr describes their work, some of these scholars really did prefigure the Enlightenment, sounding remarkably like Arabic-speaking precursors of David Hume and Voltaire. And the general picture he paints is of an Islamic world far more diverse in its beliefs and thinking than anything you might imagine from current prejudices.

Now, that enlightenment was eventually shut down by economic decline and a turn toward fundamentalism. But such tendencies are hardly unique to Islam.

People are people. They can achieve great things, or do terrible things, under lots of religious umbrellas. (An Israeli once joked to me, “Judaism has rarely been a religion of oppression. Why? Lack of opportunity.”) It’s ignorant and ahistorical to claim unique virtue or unique sin for any one set of beliefs.

[wesw]

jane you ignorant slut......