Walsingham

Can I buy enemies?

Indeed. Alternatively you could have something far more amusing and have tall thin dwarves considered hideous by their own kind and kinda cute by humans. Similarly a short squat man might be thought plain by elves and hot by dwarves. that is, just as fat women are held in different esteem by diffferent cultures.

Sounds like burundanga/rohypnol. I wouldn't take it because I suspect that while the memories may be unavailable to the conscious mind, they would still be laid down in the cell memory as trauma. You just would find it even harder to reconcile, and would express itself secretly. On the other hand if I had nothing else to hand, and you wanted to saw my leg off I might give it a try.

Colrom, I certainly accept that this thread began in a NATO centric way. But I seem to recall inviting divergent opinions. It would be ludicrous of me to pretend otherwise given my well known views on this matter. However, I don't accept your statement about total moral relativism. Some of the terms I am referring to may be loaded in other mouths, but they are mere statements for me. A soldier is a set of mechanical characteristics, just as an insurgent is an insurgent rather than, say, a window cleaner. Even if we assume the thread to be NATO biased I still feel there is much of interest in the debate, in terms of how people make judgements, and interact with their political/national environment. One might equally well ask why people DO support the insurgents!

I'm not infavour of taxing it. Taxation requires monitoring and introduces a profit incentive for the govt. It should be completely free. This may sound weird, but I'm guessing you could give everyone heroin for less than a fraction of the cost ofall the parks and other amenities available. And that's assuming they took it. Plus, as I say, you'd make back money in less crime, and foreign problems.

I propose a theory of Intelligent Sitting.

OK, so to conclude, microwaving babies = bad. That's official.

Whenever I stand up straight I get all giddy from the fresh air.

Are we talking about sensible colleges here, or just ones featured in Playboy?

Speaking as someone who has had dogs set upon him, I think the problem is not the British system but the British people. In fact, it's just as well we have the system.

I haven't played BG with any mods yet, so am very interested. But I am rubbish at installing things like mods.

I think we should have more Humphrey Bogaryt style romances. " I grab the dame by the shoulders like THIS, see? And she gets hysterical, so I have to slap her around to calm her down. And then I kiss her so hard I bruise her teeth." (Old Harry's Game)

Practice?

My sister studied at NYU for about three times the price of attending a UK university. I don't see how that makes US college 'easy'.

Really? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Absolutely true. I've heard old interviews on the BBC. My point is not so much that the state can't intervene to protect the dumb and impressionable. My point is that there are limits to what it can do, and if your intervention actively makes things worse, then quit doing it. In the old days if you were found trying to commit suicide, if they saved you, you'd actually be liable to get arrested! How this was supposed to help with feeling suicidal is beyond me. Yet the exact same reasoning was used. If we legalise it, surely more people will do it! The fact was of course, that making it illegal stopped absolutely nobody. In, I may say, precisely the same way as I see in the UK today. No-one I know who doesn't take drugs does so because of the law.

Couple of things: 1) People who have a go at the US military and their attitudes have rarely met anyone above pfc grade. Don't confuse the people reporters like to show off with how they actually are. They can be gung ho, but very often that is more an expression of courage than stupidity. 2) We can't just apologise and wander off. Nor can we hand over "600 bilion USD". Hand it over to whom? 3) If, as you claim the Iraqis want us out, who are you to judge rather than their democratically elected leaders? ~~ I see us as talking around the topic, and we are often on the button with relating this directly to support for the troops. As I see it, most people here are saying that they can't support the troops without supporting the mission of the troops. In the case of Afghanistan in particular I don't understand what it is that is objectionable about the mission. Therefore I ask again why our troops do not feel supported. EDIT: On a related point, I should observe that feeling we cannot win, expressing that as a desire to bug out DIRECTLY supports the insurgents. It actively encourages them to commmit more acts of violence the more they see us wavering.

The importantthing with gammon/ham is 1) Bring it to the boil in water once, and get rid of all the scum and salt. THEN 2) Boil it for a few hours in orange juice. You will ne'er do finer.

The "We have to do something to help stop people getting addicted" argument doesn't work for me either. I was pondering this last night, and I recalled the fierce arguments we had in teh UK when suicide was made legal. Many moral guardians were claiming people would start killing themselevs in far greater numbers! IMO addiction to class As is a similar process to suicide.

You wouldn't dare. I'd cry so bad you'd drown.

Heh. You can't cut them off from libraries, mate. You can't even deny them access to libraries when they're in jail and convicted! This is a simple case of some fool with a chip on his shoulder behaving like a half wit. He chose to do so when there was another half wit with taser present and BOOM, you have your incident.

There is no Hades any more gentlemen. Show some decorum. ~~ I know from personal experience, having had close friends go through heroin and cocaine addiction, that drug addiction isn't only about the criminality. But I also know that it being illegal only makes it more expensive, not harder to get. I could walk out of my office and score drugs in any town in the UK in one hour, from a standing start. The fact that the drugs cost so much money means a few things to me: 1) To get their drugs, addicts commit crimes, taking up all of their time. All the clean addicts I know only quit when they had a stable supply for cheap, not an unstable supply they had to clock to get. 2) To get the drugs, addicts commit crimes. They steal, they engage in reckless prostitution, they commit acts of violence and destruction. They commit these crimes at a cost to society many times the value of the drugs they consume, which are expensive in themselves. 3) The drugs they receive are of dubious quality and consumed with minimal expense spared for safe equipment. If you give the stuff away for nothing/at cost it is my belief that while you might see a rise in the number of people taking them you would also see some advantages. 1) Our police would be freed up to tackle other crimes than a war on drugs they are frankly incapable of winning. 2) Those who are addicted would cease to commit crimes to support their habit. 3) The organisations that supply the drugs would go bankrupt practically overnight. That means no more FARC, Sendero Luminoso, Burmese Junta, Taliban so on and so forth. Or at least what would remain would be crippled. The cost in financial terms is really peanuts. A heavy heroin user will struggle to put away more than a kilo a year (actually they'd die). But that's barely

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/notting...ire/6172392.stm I thought you chaps might find this interesting. The way I see it the issue is straightforward. We can either spend hundreds of thousands of pounds chasing and failing to stop the seriously addicted, or we can pay the tuppence ha'penny required to buy their drugs wholesale and give them away free.

I don't really think a terrorist is going to hit a library, but then I don't understand a lot of what they do. Maybe if it is an easy target. i guess anything that causes casualties... Neverthless I think assuming everyone who tries to sly access is a terrorist may be a little unreasonable. But i agree with what I think is your main point. He shouldn't have acted like such a jerk. And he shouldn't have been tasered. If the cops had being trained and capable of physically coercing him outside without the taser then fair enough.

If I can condense Pop's post a little, I think he's saying that in an absolutist 'I wear my alignment on my head like amotel sign' universe (D&D) you should be whacking the evil people, no matter what state they're in. Otherwise, what happens when you are in the process of beating a bad guy and just before he is going to die he surrenders? On a more sophisticated note I'd say the problem isn't so much aligment as paladins. Paladins don't think about smiting evil. They just get punching. Or to misquote a train passenger and an honest cossack: "But what if the monk is innocent?" "*Shrugs* This is Russia. We've got lots of innocent monks."

Sand has apoint. I don't care how shiny they look, elves always annoy the bejebus out of me.