Walsingham

I think Radio talk shows are generally rubbish though. We have phone in talk on BBC Radio 5 and it's a haven for nutters as is.

No. Should I have?

This business of an extremist doing more harm to the message than good has been fascinating the **** out of me recently. Mentioning no names.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/236309?obref=obnetwork

For me, Aria Giovanni would be NSFW in a spacesuit.

I don't buy all this 'a tiny bit of censorship is censorship of everything' argument. I have nothing against the colour lime greennormally, but a 400 foot high column painted lime green would be something I'd oppose. Surely I can oppose the column and not advocate the extirpation of all lime green objects?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/236096 Will attempt to respond more fully later. I had not looked at it in those terms [priests abuse at the same rate as the population as a whole]. I'd be hypocritical if I did, since I've argued many times that incidents of violent abuse in the Army are not higher than those in the general population. So, I concede the point. However, this is not just about incidents of abuse, it is about the way the Church has handled abusers. Specifically it has concealed their crimes both actively and passively, to a degree which suggests an institutional policy. That is, in the technical vernacular, totally ****ing mental.

Apparently the Vatican are appalled because the email hasn't resulted ina sacking from the FO. Obviously they consider this email much more serious, than say serial child abuse.

I still really like the artwork, but you REALLY need to punch up the stories a bit. It's fine to be inspired by the normal, but your grass walking one, for example, has nothing really happening in it to my mind. The only way it would work is to massively exaggerrate reactions and staring. Or to have something incredibly unexpected happen. Or to show the glaring from their perspective, as you did with the parabola head (which does work). That's my two penn'orth.

We were talking about this on Saturday, and we decided that in fact it's because all the porn apps are rubbish, and Apple wanted to publicise themselves cheaply to the moral set in the USA. We haven't seen any of the porn apps, but quite frankly porn in any dynamic computerised form is inevitably rubbish because it's composed by computer scientists.

Depressive, yes. Uncharacteristic, no. Sweet gibbering Jesus, if _I'M_ normally depressed then what the hell does cheerful look like?

I was about to say that I thought men coped fine with an internal representation of the environment. Then I wondered if female gamers might ebnefit more, since they're supposed to have more issues. But then I can't recall where either notion came from.

A leaked memo jokingly refers to the Pope having to apologise for things like sex abuse, condom use, and so on. I thought I'd mention it so we can see how level headed RC is after all that hoo-hah with Mohammed pictures. My own feeling is that - as much as I love my RC friends - the Church has some serious ****ing issues. Most of which stem from the lack of accountability and transparency. It's been downright evasive and dismissive over sex abuse issue, which I find as crazy as I do repulsive. I also think that the Church could do a great deal to save lives by permitting condom use in countries with a high incidence of HIV.

Yes. In fact, Sweden is so clean, all you have to do is go out and fall down. When you get up again, you're actually cleaner! True story. For some reason I find that notion completely hilarious. Tourists would come in, and keep 'accidentally' falling down, only to provoke weary and angry Swedes to unfold brooms and other more advanced cleaning utensils from their pockets and set about disposing of the mess left by the irksome foreigners.

That sounds cool, until you stop and think about how good most games are. Unless I'm just being uncharacteristically depressive.

I believe we are witnessing the Chevalier effect. Where people's differing recollections are in fact the fracturing of time itself, rather than mistakes of memory.

Done. Hope it's not too late to be useful.

I wouldn't say it was any worse than a dozen fantasy novels I've read. I'd say well done.

I assume that should read 'tv tropes'?

Just look up The Sun and Page 3, when you're not at work, or on a train, obviously.

Actualy, Kotor 3 I'd say (actually I did say) that his objection was logical. My assertion was that a communist state is created and maintained throguh use of mass murder. Now, I'd normally like to go to town (literally) on this and get into a university library. However, since I'm effectively crippled at present that's not realistically going to happen unless I have a better reason than fielding an argument which willl be ignored. NONETHELESS, I had a think, and dug in my personal library, and believe I have a rejoinder: 1. You already accepted that the creation of the communist state required massive use of force and terror. 2. The Mitrokhin archive states in chapter 19 that the first public appearance of dissidents to the regime was in 1965, where they attempted to get a fair trial for Andrei Sinyavsky and Daniel. The protesters were marched off and imprisoned. 3. Communist regimes, right until their fall have relied on immense police forces and secret police forces, e.g. the Stasi. 4. You will no doubt argue that the gradual easing of police pressure, arbitrary imprisonment and torture represent a maturation of the revolutionary communist state into a functional state. 5. In fact what we find is that _without the threat of extreme violence, even these heavily policed countries came en masse to reject communism, and held what you would call a counter-revolution, and they would call a liberation.

They get a lot of their guns from the US because it's the easiest path thanks to our open borders. Surely if they can smuggle tons of narcotics they would have no trouble obtaining guns from elsewhere if necessary. As far as Afghanistan, that's a civil war, quite different from law abiding citizens being defenseless and at the complete mercy of criminal gangs as in Mexico. So you're saying that you want Mexicans to all be armed so that there actually IS a civil war, like in Afghanistan? Because so far as I can tell, that's what you are advocating. Armed groups of citizens duking it out with the drug cartels? It's a fantasy! It takes more to create an effective fighting man than just giving him a rifle. The Mexican army and police struggle to engage with the cartels! FFS, remind me how long it is before you are going to sign up? I think you'll be a perfectly sound individual once you get some of this right wing idealism ground off, but right now you're just startling. Look at it this way: serious criminals don't sweat the fact that their competitors are armed to the teeth. And their competitors are armed, oriented and organised to defend themselves. You think they are going to be deterred by a bank clerk with any sort of gun? EDIT: I have been thinking and I believe this is still relevant to and consistent with the OP. A government with despotic tendencies can be deterred by a mass movement for the simple reason that the mass may move on them aggressively. People know where the government is. But individual citizens can only work reactively to crime. In such circumstances the criminal has the luxury of being aggressor and can leverage all the normal factors to come out ahead.

Doesn't that knacker the graphics card?

I have to agree that someone who can't keep their eyes off another man's phone is probably not English, and ought therefore to be more reticent about exposing that fact by objecting to the phone's display. Purely from a sense of personal inadequacy.