Kroney

I'm just well aware that most people don't care, that's all. No waist covering, incorrect lapels, a variety of improper ties including a four-in-hand; to be fair he does seem to be getting better as time goes on. Black tie's not exactly a uniform, but it is a code. You look daft if you do it wrong, particularly if you have a team of advisors. It's not a difficult thing to do right, so it annoys me when people can't be bothered.

Can't really get along with a chap that needs a team of professionals to tell him how to dress incorrectly. Sorry guys, let's not fall out xx

I see.

I think he's confusing "best it's ever been" with "best it could possibly be".

I don't see much of a difference in your post from putting a child up for adoption, but it doesn't follow that adoption should be illegal.

Hugely thorny issue, isn't it? Women obviously have an inalienable right to do what they want with their bodies, but that can have the effect of forcing a man to be an unwilling father. Legally speaking, a child can divorce their parents. Logically a parent should also be able to divorce their child. That is a different question to whether it's ethically or morally right to do so, of course. I'd be hard pressed to think of a set of conditions in which I wouldn't find this hypothetical man repugnant.

I simply cannot respect a man that either cannot or will not wear a simple dinner jacket correctly.

I just bought a couple of new lenses for my camera. Fingers crossed they turn up before I go on my winter holiday next week.

This is what is known as a straw man argument.

Pretty rude of them not to be around when I finally make an unannounced return after six years, really. I really do not approve of this business of other people having lives that aren't lived to my convenience at all.

I cannot stress the importance of not having to throw my effluence out of a window highly enough.

That all depends what you mean by living standards. Also, where are we talking about? Do Somalians for instance, have better living standards compared to 30 years ago? How about the Iranians? Noticed any significant change in their history? Well, Bruce said "history of mankind". I would take that to mean mankind the species. Therefore you have to take the species-wide view. Extreme poverty is falling, the numbers of people dying from medieval diseases are falling, the global infant mortality rate is falling. All of these things are yardsticks by which you judge the betterment of mankind. Somalians may be having a pretty **** time of things currently, but they are not representative of mankind as a whole. The fact that they jump to mind is precisely because they are pretty unusual. Even then, I would be willing to bet that the average Somali has better access to food, clean water and medicine than he did 30 years ago. The average human being has a longer life span, is richer, has better access to all the basic necessities of life than at any other point in history.

Then we don't have much in common and it would be pointless to have any sort of discussion/dialogue regarding this matter. I really don't know how you argue otherwise. Living standards are immeasurably better now than they have been at any other point in human history by any yardstick that you care to name. Not that there isn't plenty of ****ty things you could point out, but to say that life isn't better now than it's ever been is pretty extraordinary.

New series starts on 1st January over here. Hugely looking forward to it.

Took delivery of an armful of parcels from Amazon today. None for me. This time of year is both fun and a huge ball-ache. During the weekend, I went to the top of St Paul's on Satuday and Warwick castle on Sunday with the missus. Got some pretty good photos.

Any idea what happened to the rest of the old lot? Krezack and Tess and Lanie and Rayt and Onkel and so on?

At the risk of igniting a nerd crusade against me, I found all of the Dune books beyond the original to be pretty daft. I'm like that with a lot of sci fi series. I loved Rendezvous with Rama, but the rest just left me cold.

No, he really is that massive a prick.

Why, will we be overrun by rubbish racially-insensitive KISS tribute bands?

There really ought to be some sort of distinction between people committing acts of organised terrorism and a pair of nutters committing murder. People murder for all sorts of ****ed up reasons, including but not limited to the old "god told me to" defence. That doesn't make it an act of terrorism. In any case, the reasons for them doing it are irrelevant. The law will try them for murder. They will go down for murder. The law really only distinguishes between "did you kill this guy on purpose, by accident, or during a moment of madness?", it does not legitimise it. The only thing that legitimises killing is society's attitude. Since society's opinion is that this killing was abhorrent and unjustified, peoples' attitudes towards Islam are also irrelevant, just as the killers' attitudes toward Islam are irrelevant.

All the help the Indians and Nepalese offered was offset by all them Antipodeans

Yeah, I won't repeat what they said. They seemed shocked their views weren't shared.

Well I hope I can change that perspective that not all white south Africans are that bad I'm sure they weren't representative though, I should warn you, there's a song.

Anyway, Nelson Mandela did a lot of great work to try to improve the lot of people in South Africa. It's a shame that the people who followed him haven't picked up the baton. I have only ever personally met a few South Africans, all white, and their attitudes were breath-taking. I truly hope they're a dying breed.

Well you should tell him to research the financial crisis that started in 2008, that was the closest the world came to real global crash. And it was obvious to all that the impending results was something that no-one and no country wanted or would have benefitted from. That's not true. There are always people that make a ton of money from an economic crash.