DISQUS

This isn't the way to help people. What you are doing is the equivalent of buying things at WalMart and then throwing money at a few random, select people in poor countries. When will the rich nations learn that throwing money at poverty doesn't solve it? WalMart prices are fair prices. In fact, WalMart drives up wages in poor countries. The whole "Fair Trade" movement is nothing more than the failed communist model at its root. It makes the critical mistake in thinking that "fair" is based on one of two things: 1. The wages or standard of living in the US; 2. An absolute standard of living (like, enough to support a family with food and shelter). Neither of these are what is fair. What is fair is what the market determines. If you make it more than that, they will get less in the end. (China's "unfair labor practices" have made their people increasingly wealthy at an astonishing rate.) Anyway... I've had my rant... Tootles! :-D

Bush and the corporations got caught together in bed which means the financial system is in a crisis.

Heh, do you know anything about economics?

Bailey, I am Amish-Mennonite and would be glad to attempt to answer any of your questions. My email address is hansmast at hansmast dot com.

Audrieau, you show within your own comment why your idea would never work and is grossly unfair and totalitarian. You tout "freedom from all religious indoctrination", which is in itself a religious choice. You have obviously chosen the path of atheism or agnosticism or "personal religious" something or other. What you propose is that the all the world's kids are taken and indoctrinated to believe what you believe. Because you believe it, it must be right. You espouse just another religion. Nope, the government should not mandate a religious or non-religious education. The government should protect freedom of religion and freedom of education. It is the right of the parents to educate their kids as they see fit. This include neo-Nazis, Amish, atheists, FLDS, Quakers, and Muslims, and every other group who you don't agree with.

Yes, I agree with you--the values of neo-Nazis, FLDS, etc are awful. But 90+% of Middle Ages Europe agreed that the heretics of the Inquisition were awful too. We are no better than the Inquisition if we follow your path.

This election has shown how much the people of this country disagree with each other on a lot of fundamental issues. The last thing we need is for the 51% majority to be imposing their religious or non-religious views on the rest of us.

You claim to be different from the Amish who are "imposing" their views on their kids. Well at least their views forgive their enemies and don't cause harm to other people in this world. If the whole world were Amish, it would be a lot more peaceable. You claim to be different, but you are no different on this matter. You want to impose your religious ideas too. Actually, you are different. The Amish just want to teach their own kids their values and what they believe. You want to teach everybody's kids your values and what you believe. In this department, you are worse than the Amish.

"beating our kids does not seem to to the trick."

You're 100% right and you've raised the issue why so many people are against corporal punishment. Simply beating kids will not help matters.

However, what makes for amazed people when they see how well my siblings and Mennonite peers behave is loving discipline.

When Mom or Dad would give me a spanking, they never did it because they were angry at me. In fact, several times they gave me no punishment *because* they were angry and didn't feel it would be right to punish in anger. No, they punished me in love. Sometimes they would have tears in their eyes when they spanked me.After they spanked me and I was crying, they would hold me close, cradle my head, and tell me they loved me. They would tell me that the only reason they were doing this was because they loved me. They told me that it would be far easier to simply let me go and not go through the agony of punishment, but that it would be bad for me when I grew up without discipline in my life. They told me it was the only way I would remember to do right.

Comparing the behavior of my siblings with those of my non-Mennonite peers, it is clear that they were right.

One of my Amish friends emailed me this after reading these two posts:

Wow. It's hard to know what to make of a story like this. Did she really have unloving parents? Or did they simply not do what she wanted?

Those who do not know God--Amish or not--will naturally be confused about the Amish culture. Some idolize it and others dismiss it as evil. Both miss the point. We are made alive by the Spirit, not by our choice of culture.

My parents were born Amish and their parents (my grandparents) left the Amish church while my parents were still young. However, I grew up learning how to speak Pennsylvania Dutch.

As many have already noted, many of Torah's facts are fishy, from cold gun barrels, to legal questions, to SS numbers (Amish don't have SS, my parents don't have SS), and most hilarious of all, calling Pennsylvania Dutch "Amish".

I have a funny story to tell about calling PA Dutch Amish. As a kid growing up, I knew PA Dutch was called PA Dutch. But one day I was bragging to somebody how many languages I knew. I was trying, of course, to figure out how to inflate the number. I came up with this: "I know five languages! English, Spanish, Pennsylvania Dutch, German, and Amish!" My audience burst into roars of laughter and my parents still tell that story about how I made up "Amish" as a language! In fact I recently told that story to a group of Amish friends and they laughed, shook their heads, and muttered through their laughter, "Amish!"

I know lots of Amish folks and I've never heard it called "Amish". Furthermore, your arrogance shines forth in that you so confidently disagree with 95%+ of the people who speak the language and the leading linguistic organization in the world: SIL.In fact, as the SIL ethnologue says, Pennsylvania German is an excellent name for it and no, it's not a misnomer. I just came (about 2 weeks ago) from the area of Germany that Pennsylvania Dutch (as it known colloquially among the Amish, Old Order Mennonites, Lutherans, etc, which is a perversion of Pennsylvania Deutsch) originated from and I could easily communicate (mutual intelligibility, which you throw around without having anything to back it up) in Pennsylvania Dutch with the older people there.

I think someone else hit the nail on the head when they said that you are trying to capitalize on your upbringing and make a quick buck by dramatizing and embellishing your story. I'm sure you've heard of the way the internet makes overnight phenoms and I'm sure you hoped to use this blog to accomplish that. What you might not have known about the blogging community (of which I've been a member for a number of years) is the instant fact-checking and quick networking of people who know what they're talking about.

But I'd hate to commit the sin of overgeneralization. Just because your story sounds fishy doesn't mean that there aren't some Amish kids out there that get abused--in fact there are. I've heard some stories. However, it's certainly not the norm.

I'd like to echo what others have said about lumping all Amish into one lump. They range on the conservative-liberal scale from Swartzentruber to New Order. I just got finished hanging out with four New Order Amish girls in Europe for two weeks and we had a blast. They were quite well educated and well read. They had loving parents who taught them well. I have Amish friends in Kansas (my home state) that I hang out with quite a bit. The situation is the same there. Loving parents, extremely well educated, even tech-savvy! Three of them are computer programmers! (So indeed you might see some honest-to-goodness Amish posting on here setting you straight. I'll have to drop one of them an email with the link.)

Have a great day!

That, however, doesn't change the fact that the intel community has consistently concluded until now that Iran had an active nuclear-weapons program, and refused to end it. That conclusion fits the facts somewhat better than the new one does. If Iran ended its nuclear program in 2003, why did they insist on refusing to verify it with their trading partners in the EU for the next several years? Why did the mullahs refuse to comply with UN Security Council resolutions and accept trade and diplomatic sanctions rather than allow verification at key sites? Just to prove a point when the US intel community suddenly reversed course, an event that no one predicted?

I would remind you that it was inexplicable why Sadaam Hussein didn't allow the IAEA to verify that *he* didn't have WMD. Why sit there and get invaded when you don't even have anything substantial? The answer to this is fairly simple. Dictators aren't logical. There was a huge effort during the Cold War to understand Soviet psyche. It's just incredibly hard. One can tell that logic is not one of the strong points of such people if they are in such a position in the first place.