Walsingham

Nep, I'd have expected you to also mention the thousands of bombing and murder victims of AlQ in Afghan and Iraq into that roster. They still count, even if they're brown...

Additional: We can certainly expect an acceleration of any plans and cells linked to Al Qaeda. Every dingbat between here and, well, everywhere is going to want to prove they are his successor. Terrorists don't tend to recognise much besides body count, so we are going to see attacks increase. I think it is nonsense to assert that these attacks will be somehow provoked by US actions. AlQ cells and plans don't materialise overnight. When they go off you're going to see large scale attacks on multiple targets with big devices, and these take time to prepare. Use your common sense. Also do try to get your head around the possibility that some foks are just plain ****ers, and have been raised with nothing but hate for the West, no matter what we do.

There's a big difference between the folks who died in the twin towers and the man who instigated their deaths. But go right ahead, if failing to empathise with his victims makes you feel cool and intellectual I can hardly stop you.

Socialism = everyone being sober and working to raise the lowest before the highest. In other words cabbage soup and ballet. Paganism = everyone being tied to a destiny rought in spirits of air and fire qand the ancestors. In other words mead and hot sex. Paganism > Socialism.

Yep. Oh I see. So where's the flaw in my logic then?

Kaft, are you seriously suggesting that Islamists are going to get more angry with the US now? I dare you to say that again, with a straight face.

I would very much like to hear how you think an international order is supposed to function without preference for the powerful. One founded entirely on the not-powerful is going to have a gnat fart's survival chances. Order has to be maintained by the exercise of greater power (almost without exception). I will grant you that NATO is democratically based, so we could vote them out. But that would leave number two shaping world events in the coming century. And that means China. So personally I say **** that in the ear.

Slept for twelve hours. Woke to a bright spring day and a dead Bin Laden. Made corn beef hash, and fresh coffee. Life is good.

Fair point. However i'm suggesting Bin Laden was a kind of geopolitical marmite. There's no-one kind of "Yeah, I'll have him round for tea, but he's not staying for supper."

As for not celebrating. Seriously? You want to mourn this over-priviledged psychotic messiah wannabe then go right ahead. But you can do it after you hold a candlelit vigil for the thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans and Pakistanis and Indonesians... dead because of his poisonous lunacy. After you do that, feel free to shed your tears. Or I may be tempted to think you are simply revelling in an opportunity to strike a saintly pose of noble understanding, rather than any actual emotion. ~~ Yes, there will be others after Bin Laden. Yes, there are already people actually running Al Qaeda. Yes, AlQ is more than an organisation, it is a racist, delusional, and hateful philosophy that can't be struck out with a bullet. But this operation has proved that nothing will ever stop the Yanks from getting their man, if you p*ss them off enough. It is going to have a pleasing notional impact on how well the ****ers sleep at night, and a practical impact on their having to try and increase their security even further.

Good point, Meshugger. In some ways that's what I was really driving at. All this flimflam about democracy, but what it's reallly about is about how you count votes. Prop Rep for examples is based on a circular argument. Obviously it's democratic, if 'democratic' means essentially prop rep. But I'm contrasting that with the notion that democracy is about the will of the people. Yet the will of the people is about hammering stuff they don't like, not pushing for stuff that they do. (Incidentally, in case anyone's forgotten, I notice that Nick 'democracy' Clegg was voted in with a strong backing from people who were anti tuition fees. Nice to see he takes democracy so seriously. I mention it as an example of pushing for things, even though it was arguably against something.) However, apparently we don't like the notion of capturing the negative will of the people in the basic scientific sense. If democracy isn't just about counting votes as equally as possible (circular), and we don't like the fact that people naturally vote like mentalists, then we're right back where we started, trying to make people vote in ways that are less than pure democracy and produce moderately sensible government. unless that's just the rum and fatigue talking.

Finally... Four Lions. Hysterically funny, moving, intellectual. Bloody see it.

Man. How big is that sandwich? I think you should go canoeing in a massive baguette. *peers at rum bottle to check ingredients*

ROFLMAO

Pagan festival. Back me up here, pagan dude.

Mate, I'm not being funny, but if you can only say one thing for mid easterners it's that they aren't ambivalent about the utility of force. They don't read the Independent, and they don't regard assassinating a head of state as either weird or reprehensible. Inconvenient or aggravating, but not unsupportable. What they DO find weird is the notion that we could be anti Ghaddafi, know he won't leave, and not do the logical thing of blowing the bastard up. * I happen to agree with them. *Walsingham, PhD from the Fred Dibnah school of Foreign Affairs.

Survived the wedding with the three exes after adopting the option of simply being insufferably smug about having been out with the three best looking women at the occasion! The resulting air of moon-faced benevolence left me free to socialise almost uninterrupted except by number three who was naturally annoyed that I wasn't a gibbering wreck. So she tried to make me feel guilty with over an hour of anecdotes about how rubbish I am, so I got drunk with her current fiancee, parting on excellent terms, which naturally made her practically incandescent with frustrated rage. Anyway, am back home now, enjoying a glass of bad rum and smiling at the garden.

At a friends I heard Thai funk from the 70s. From the album/compilation Sound of Siam. Just loving the rolling flow of the vocals.

Currently eating curry with both sets of fingers crossed there won't be any bloody bombs as I watch the royal wedding.

Good review style, Hurlshot. Clear and concise. Makes me not want to play it, but for the right reasons.

I agree with LC. Very few total freezes. In general I like being asked for permission to do things.

Largely as a conseuqence of listening to counter-arguments on this forum, I've been re-examining socialism. Being nice to others is not actually what happens when it's enacted. Knackering things is what happens. I don't think that's awesome.

That is often the case in a first-past-the-post system, it is not the case in a preferential or prop rep system. And if you think about it for a moment, you quickly understand why. Because in a FPTP system it's almost always a 2 party state where a vote for a third party is wasted, so they can't really do anything BUT vote against the party they like least. So if you want to a system where people are forced to vote for the lesser of two evils rather than vote for what they actually want, sure, stick with your system. Krez, are you not listening to a word I'm writing? <sic> The problem isn't the process. The problem is the raw cognitive input. Are you honestly suggesting that people know what they vote for when they vote 'for' it? If so, fair play. But I really think you would have been better spending three years meeting real people, and not in that monastery. My solution is not to denigrate them for it, but to consider whether they are in fact correct to accept they haven't a hope of formulating grand visions of the future, and are best off simply objecting when things get really ****. Surely, if one accepts for the sake of argument that people aren't thinking of voting for anytthing, then pertending that they are is monstrously undemocratic?

The thought of absorbing even more media even more easily is enough to induce a kind of mental retching.

I've never played DA, but whenever I've run across material from it in wikis I'm always underwhelmed.