Seneca the Younger Quotes

Description of one of his experiences in the Spanish American War.

This quotation is a classic case of conflation. The politician who is asked about the dangers of assault weapons and who is opposed to gun control, observes that a pencil could kill someone and that a terrorist MIGHT attack with a pencil. Therefore she conflates the semiautomatic rifles like AK47s with pencils. No one would think of legislation making it difficult to obtain pencils; therefore she makes the gun control efforts appear trivial and silly. The problem is that many Americans are killed every year by weapons designed for assaulting in battle and killing an enemy. No one can find the a case where anyone ever assaulted and killed another person by stabbing him in the heart with a pencil.

Ever since the invention and manufacturing of firearms, Bedouin Arabs have prized gun ownership highly. Gun ownership percentage is much higher than even the United States. Over time one or more guns appeared in every tent. With children about, the loaded gun has ever been a danger. Further, anger leads to gunplay in a society where guns are ubiquitous. Even for the gun owner, the additional time it takes to load a gun before using it is a safety valve that allows time for cooling off.

He stormed offstage leaving the other panelists shocked. This boorish behavior and other at a dignified world intellectual meeting shocked most participants, diplomats, and government officials who castigated Erdogan. However, he returned to large popular approving crowds of his religious Islamic base who thought his behavior heroic. One irony of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the Middle East as that with 60 years of war, occupation and conflict, the winning and dominant Israelis have killed very few Arabs, especially when one compares the number with the Arabs who were killed by their coreligionists. The Jordanian Army killed 7000 Palestinians in a single week when the Palestinians tried to take over Jordan. The Syrians killed 20,000 and decades later killed over 100,000 of their own people in their internecine civil war. Sunnis have butchered Shiaas and vica versa for over 1000 years, and more Muslims have been the victims of Arab Terrorism than Jews. But in the killing of Arabs, the over 1000 years of Turkish Rule of the Middle East produced incredible butchery by the Turks, which even they exceeded in the Armenian Genocide of Christians in the early decades of the 20th century. The Turks however tend to deny these events were deliberate policy and action but claims the dead were collateral damage of legitimate war. But killers they were, and they currently have one of the best and strongest militaries of the world.

It was common then for people to die in tenements as a result of shoddy construction, poisoning by sewer gas, and unsanitary conditions. As the result of the efforts of reformers like Riis and Theodore Roosevelt health inspectors were appointed and errant builders went to jail—in some cases for manslaughter.