Walsingham

I thought it might be quite fun to have permanent stocks in the form of concreting the buggers' feet along London thoroughfares. Of course, you need to keep in mind the fact that I dont like London anyway.

History Repeating Jazz funky beats and stuff

The truth is that the thing you call jifscism was formed by British-American Intelligent Services to weaken Soviet Union. However, now, it is weakening themselves. I believe that it may also destroy those countries similar to Soviet Union if they insist on invasions as no country has the economical power to continuously deal with them. The things I have mentioned in my former posts were the possible logical ways to end Christ-Muslim conflict, if it is desired to end the terror which was formed by again USA or England. If they are happy to continue test weapons on Muslims, and if Muslims are happy to continue to fight against them, this vicious cycle shall continue. In this case western media must not cry or bleat when a terrorist kills western citizens, as they are triggering this with hatred filled propogandas against the Muslim world. If they 'had' an army, surely USA or England could not dare to invade them, as they always choose the countries having 'no' army, when they decide to invade somewhere. Also I have no reason to bleat as I am not the one who is suffering. You must read my posts with a different imagination about me in your mind it seems. Oh man, that's just cute. Created by the secret services? 1. All financing and weapons went via the Pakistani ISI 2. The ISI to give them the benefit of the doubt chose groups who did the most. The moderates simply spent less time and money actively fighting the Soviets than the extremists 3. Al Qaeda is far more influenced by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who were in turn marxist influenced. The traces are everywhere from the revolutionary aim, to the operational goals, and tactical trade skills. 4. I'm not denying there have been dark chapters in the various secret services, but to infer this makes everything they've ever done suspect is pure fairytales. What is less cute is your comment about 'bleating'. When a western government deploys force it does so with a democratic mandate and democratic oversight, not to mention a free media. It doesn't magically wmake everything ok, but it means there is at least some sort of verification of cause and behaviour. There is a good deal of difference between that and 16 guys getting together over coffee and deciding they want to blow up, behead, and torture people because they're unhappy. Let me be quite clear. There is NO DIFFERENCE between some bloke killing 100 people solely because he thinks he's fighting for God and one bloke killing 100 people because the voices in his head told him to. I'm fortunate enough to have lost no-one directly to terrorism. But I have friends who have been directly affected and I'd appreciate it if you'd think a little harder than you are about which team you are cheering for.

I fully intend to give them all a try when I'm old and have few responsibilities. If i make it that far!

Something I hadn't been giving enough mental time to: we are naturally quite violent. As a species we react violently and aggressively when deprived or threatened. And that is as much true of closeted academics as the sons of the ghetto. I mean sub-Saharan africa isn't the way it is because they have too many playstations! Nor, now I think on it is the UK, because we have bucketloads of the damn things and according to widely accepted figures violent crime is going down.* However, as 11xhooah once memorably said: "freedom, peace, and security aren't magically crapped out of a rainbow". Complacency is dangerous. What worked for existing generations may not work in future. I think what most alarms me is the extent to which children appear to be raised by electronic media rather than human interaction. I sit any wonder - assuming that is true - that I would be alarmed by that media focussing on concepts of unleashed violence? * I'm stilll very concerned about the remaining violent crime, but that's another story.

Given your political affections, which are those of an 18th century British Prime-Minister, I can only regard this as moderate and progessive.

Moma told me not to come Woke up with this in my head because it was on the soundtrack to my dream. I love not being stressed.

I use pay per month napster and I rarely buy anything unless it's as a gift. It was simple logic when I realised I was buying maybe two or three albums a month. Cheaper to get a subscription, not to mention more convenient.

One interesting question would be to determine whether people downloading something for free would EVER have paid for it.

What about fixity? That is the inertia associated with playing one winning strategy? You're all psych types so I'm not going to cite it though I can if anyone's interested. What I mean is that the mind must attach some significance to the motions it is going through or it would not have difficulty relinquishing them. As for it being 'obvious' that there's no psychological component. Yes I accept that people are able to tell it's make-believe. However, there are preconscious architectures being built every second of every day. Our mental 'bureaucracy' which filters and collates information for the attention of the conscious mind. I suggest that by its very nature this level is NOT able to 'tell the difference', because it has no context beyond what is immediately obvious. Space invaders may not tell anything significant, but a full 3d surround sound representation of realistic human bodies exploding is different. Consider, for example, the 'straw dummies' used to train bayonet practice in the old days. No-one thought they were real people, but the officers and NCOs of that era believed they were good practice. I can't say that I see HOW, but I'd be an arrogant fool if I ignored their opinion. Consider also the effect of reading violent fiction. If a child were raised on nothing but those weird Sven Hassel books then what are the odds they would have a caring attitude? HOWEVER, none of this is to say that I consider violent games 'bad'. In and of themselves they represent one strand among the ropes which pulll us this way and that. As the above example highlights it is a question of balance among forces, and the nature and timing of application. A fish can be a tasty lunch or it can be a colossal and unpleasant surprise.

1) How about 'Thin Kit'? It's vaguely techie, and provokes a parsing hiccup, which makes it memorable. 2) Don't choose Tolkein names no matter how big a geek you are.

Two thoughts: 1) Games are not 'just games'. Cultures are most differentiated by the early socialisation that games provide. I don't think it was accidental that Zulu culture revolved around games of throwing and striking skill and tests of bravery with animals. 2) I was thinking just the other day what an impact BIS games have made on me these last ten years. I really do have a slight but definite tendency to go into conversations with new people in search of quests. Three. Three thoughts: 3) If games are pointless in training for violence someone better let the DoD and MoD know. They spend millions on FPS training.

It says a lot about me that I'd genuinely rather have the steak.

Do people really do that though? Most (all) of the people I know are the same way they have always been, every once in a rare while people go through profound changes, other than that......Same as it ever was. A friend of mine convinced me several years ago that we DO. Just because we generally choose to repeat the choices doesn't mean we aren't doing it fresh every day.

It just upset me as a child that the Empire had clearly worked a lot harder than the buffoons in the rebel Alliance, and yet the Alliance was intent on spoiling it all. I mean the Death Star was fricking awesome, and the rebels were just jealous and smashing it all up.

I know you're joking, but I'm pretty sure I'm older than you are. *Coughing with laughter* I hope for your sake that you're not.

Nope! We can leave at any time. Incredible, I know; we can just pull out. We have been in Afghanistan for the better part of the decade, and we have made very little progress. We seem to be going quite slow, and this is already going to be a long, drawn out process. Just look at the Russians in Chechnya: it took them fifteen years to get the locals back in line. Do you really want to throw tens of thousands of dead Afghani civilians on the pyre for the next twenty years? Just so we can establish some American client state that'll be collapse before the century's out? I know you're a touch last century with the whole communism thing, but if any state lasted until the end of THIS century I'd be damned impressed. Hell, FRANCE can't go 100 years without changing their constitution and allegiance. I'm sure you would have a wonderful career working for the CIA. Afghanistan is totally unsuited in both geography and temperament to a strong centralised state. Nor is it actually suited to being dictated to. This is the fundamental frustration for me. The afghans are natural democrats at the local level. They don't hold votes, but the whole style of local decision making and opinion forming is extremely egalitarian. They may bond strongly to a given leader, but that's only when the leader is resonating with their aims and faiths. They're not docile peasant paddy farmers, they're hard independent hill men.

Awesome. Note that I mean absinthe with the whole burning spoon of sugar in it. I can imagine doing an evening of straight absinthe, I just can't imagine such an evening producing any names other than 'Hngrk' and 'Sweetjebus'

True. Confirmation bias and all that. But you make a good argument in favour of it in a way. It would cause people to work for the company as well as just buying the games. Unless that's just creepy.

Played a good four hours today. Is it just me or is the NO's story as much about the way we reinvent ourselves from day to day?

I'm stilll in a radge with THQ because they are completely ignoring the pleas of large number of Euroweenies like myself over the NAT negotiation failure. It's pretty clear that it's a failing in the way Relic handle their processing of IPs but some chowderhead at THQ must have blocked the feedback because they just blankly state it's a router failing when the community now says otherwise. Until they do fix it I can't buy any of their bloody games, which means so far they've lost out 100 bucks. Goddamn I hate bad customer service.

Why isn't there a sarcasm emoticon?

Yeah, but what if the good Afghans want you to up and leave? Because if that isn't the case now, it'll be soon enough. Heh. Well that's the 64,000 dollar question, isn't it? I think that would mean we'd have to leave. So we'd better make sure they don't.

Gentlemen, please. WoD is clearly feeling pressured. I suggest we accord his youth some slack. Isn't it good for a young man to believe in self-control and achievement over indulgence? I know many high flying individuals, even those acting on the world stage, who smoke dope. I tried it in college and found I had only thought I was relaxed before! lol I don't take it now because I feel it's not my style, and in any case you can't if you're in the Forces. This is not to say you can't go overboard and take too much. But this is true of literally everything. I'm a serial over-indulger of pies and ale. But I don't regard that as a failing of either object. Nor, frankly, do I feel it's a great failing in myself. I have a deep suspicion of the abstemious, and often wonder if denying yourself things isn't as much of a power-addiction as cutting, if taken too far.