Walsingham

Malaria too. They didn't make these things, they just profit from them. Both these diseases are hardly fatal for someone lucky enough to be born white, yet despite the fact that they could fix this, the first world twiddles its thumbs. Do you think we in the first world are left to want for money? Do you think that nobody could spare some cash for this enterprise? Do you think that the US could not single-handedly carve these diseases into the dust if it dropped its rampant, pointless aggression and moved its military budget into aid? And yet. Yes... poor helpless brown people. Their only hope is that the big strong white man intervenes. You're making me feel ill. I thought _I_ was supposed to be the neocolonialist. Has your wallchart fallen down or something? Get your arse out to Africa and actually LOOK at what is happening. Maybe expose some of your cosy Bolshevist theories to the real world.

I liked your emphasis on the RPG. "RPG! Tank! Return on compound interest!"

They don't need to. It grows like spun candy.

I'm happy to accept, but there is a stipulation that we be allowed to build an Indian casino on your land to make up for the transgression. Deal. But we get to have the leftovers of that pie and cream. Sounds delicious.

This is indeed perfect logic. You are too kind, sir. Let us set up an institute where we will alternately confound and support global warming by inventing awesome names for stuff.

OK, well so far as I know you can go unemployed in the UK long term with minimal hassle provided you only want benefits not you know an actual life.My point being that if that free handout approach is 2% more than another system where there are no handouts then it says something about how many peopel are prepared to simply sign off on life and just scrounge. It might inform our expectations of how many would just sit about taking free drugs. Or as I say I could be way off. It's just a thought. Going back to the idea that it's harder to stop kids if the govt says something's legal, there's all sorts of things which are legal but standard for parents to explain. Not sticking your tongue in the toaster, for example. Not shouting loudly near large angry men. Not shouting loudly near small quiet men. Not rubbing poo on your face. Not going on holiday without taking your malaria medicine...

Smite the un-unbelievers! Burn them all! Only when their wrongthoughts are expunged in blood will the trueness of atheism be universal!

You are completely insane. There. I said it. A biological weapon?

Now I'm annoyed that my own gift to the yankees has been rebuffed.

After reading that article I'm inclined to agree. Good find.

I think Horava gravity sounds far more scifi, and it tehrefore must be true.

I think it's cute that labelling people counter-revolutionaries makes mass murder ok. I've actually seen a mass grave (unknown perpetrators, Mozambique), not a huge one, but big enough. It was grotesquely ordinary. Just bits of bone sticking up out of the sand into the jolly tropical sun. As seemingly irrelevant and embarassing as a grandparent at a university dance. But that's fine. If you think the smell of progress is the smell of the putrifying corpses after the systematic extermination of millions then good luck to you.

In my experience it's far harder trying to convince a kid that heroin and crack are bad when the government tells them things like e and marijuana are the work of satan. Kids generally do whatever they're told not to do on general principle. Changing tack slightly, I thought I'd test the notion that government handouts make for an increase in crappy behaviour being supported. I thought I'd look at unemployment rates in the UK and the US. I've only done some desultory checking in case my basic logic is flawed, but UK unemployment doesn't seem higher than the US according to any. Thoughts?

You're not even trying. It's cute how you justify as "understandable", the mass deportations, purges, summary executions, show trials, russification etc, that constitute as a whole the largest centrally organized genocide effort in history, but dismiss out of hand other authoritarian regimes on grounds that they are "right wing". I already gave you Miguel Primo de Rivera's dictatorship as an example of a practically bloodless regime that worked well. Your rhetoric (for a lack of tangible arguments) is destroyed with a simple counterexample. Can you put down the hammer and sickle for a second and look at things from a factual perspective? The whole "no war but class war" schtick may be cool, but you can only do so much with it. It's cool how you pretend like the Soviet Union ever engaged in genocide. Newsflash: aside for war crimes during WW2 (for reasons which should be very obvious), the USSR never engaged in anything like a genocide. Ever. Counter-revolutionaries isn't a race or ethnicity. Cossacks.

I do think that abstinence programs are completely retarded.

Has anyone tried this out yet?

I kinda follow your reasoning there, Raithe. I don't PnP very much these days, ude to lack of energy. BUt I'd certainly PnP if I knew a good ref, and I'd probably be up for Starwars on pure cheese value alone.

WTF?

You're not even trying. Can you put down the hammer and sickle for a second and look at things from a factual perspective? The whole "no war but class war" schtick may be cool, but you can only do so much with it. It's his schtick. I'd put a twenty on him being around 22-23 years old, recently left college. He's looking for an extension of the revolutionary kudos he enjoyed there by coming online. Hopefully he'll get more dimensions as time goes by.

We often talk about crises on these forums. For example we've just been discussing Israel-Palestine. I'd like to draw your attention to the crisi in HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and southern africa generally. One in ten South Africans have HIV. That means 5.7 million people. Perhaps 1,000 people die PER DAY from AIDS related causes. Friends of our family who work for charities in South Africa suggest the infection rate could be 40% or higher in some places. I'm not saying there's a solution I have in mind. But a tragedy such as this deserves witnesses if nothing else. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2...2180763259.html

Heh. Nice. Although I suggest that they knew Lucy before she turned and she seemed nice, while Count Vlad-u-like was probably quite evil. God, I sound like LoF. He could have been a progressive nobleman for all I know.

Look, I tell you what, on behalf of the British people* I am going to accept responsibility for turning on the Natives. Mel Gibson can make another of his fantasy epics like Braveheart and the Patriot about it, call it Stuffing or something, and we can all move on and you can have a clean holiday. Consider it a gift. *I have more right to act in this capacity than Gordon Brown, IMO.

I'm thinking... if you were a TV producer, you'd be out of a job faster than you can say "Lenin". And, as usual, you are cherrypicking. Saddam was unequivocally a mass murderer, but that was the point. Is Iraq better off now? If so, it's time you gave American imperialism the credit it's due. At any rate, I wasn't specifically advocating military juntas - Soviet leaders weren't military men, but they knew a thing or two about repression and keeping order. So why don't you explain in detail how democracy and more "freedom" are under all circumstances, always, better? I was asking for opinions. Numbers has another point which pleases me greatly. France and Russia also backed Saddam during the 1980s but unlike the US and UK tried everything they could to block the decision to remove him with military force, in an effort to protect the billions still owed to them by his government in cash and corporate deals. As Numbers says you can't have it both ways.

Numbers: I'm reminded of something I once heard about how it doesn't so much matter where you're standing as which way you are facing. I guess it matters less whether you are being slightly oppressed than if you are going to get less oppressed or more oppressed as time goes by. Not sure I agree about Mexico needing a military junta. Juntas get coorupted as well, you know. Look at Burma.

You should check his effects and make sure anything historical gets preserved.