Monte Carlo

You're still a young guy and already you're doing All The Right Stuff. I predict a glorious future for you KP, packed with awesomeness.

No 'Tep the tea you describe sounds awful. The chilled fruity stuff OTOH is ok.

Freedom of movement is fantastic. But once poorer countries were admitted it was inevitable that swathes of people would choose that freedom of movement to claim benefits in richer countries. Add to that the near-collapse of the Euro and a global Depression and you can see why things have gone the way they have.

I quite like iced tea, actually. Lipton's peach, or that chilled green stuff with orange and honey. It's even better if you dump some rum or vodka in it.

Yes, I would prefer an independent Europe of nations with a strong trading partnership and defence / diplomatic alliances. The once-dominant issue of subsidiarity (that decisions should always be taken locally, at the lowest appropriate level) went out of the window years ago. We are run by people we didn't vote for. The last time anyone got a say on this was the 1970s. And freedom is like water: it always finds it's own level. The votes over the weekend were a massive protest against 'ever-closer union.' Let me give you an example that isn't the usual Immigration-based concern (although it's a core issue). A few years ago the UK Government wanted to lower the fuel duty escalator for people in rural areas, specifically the more remote parts of Scotland. Because those areas don't get much in the way of public transport infrastructure, and rely on their own vehicles, it seemed eminently fair to give them a tax break on fuel prices. Turns out it was illegal. An EU directive stated that this sort of tax break was inconsistent with EU competition law. And do you know what our Govt did? Just shrugged. "There's nothing we can do." Rolled over. Surrendered to a bunch of unaccountable buffoons in Brussels. Now if they're like that over fuel duty what do you think they are like over immigration or EU arrest warrants (get caught speeding in Poland? ARREST WARRANT!) or taxation? Useless is the answer. It's time to roll the whole thing back and let voters connect to their representatives properly. Supranational entities always end up the same - rules by a clique more interested in spreading their power than using it to support those they purport to represent.

I am not allowed to talk about the alpha I might or might not be involved with atm

As I am British my tea preferences trump all of yours. Earl Grey tastes of perfume and is disgusting. My preferred tea is plain and simple PG TIps, milky with two sugars. Anything else is for effete hipsters with waxed facial hair and a dainty tattoo on their pinky finger. That is all.

We could start by abolishing it.

I suggest you look for some r/w pen and paper groups or maybe even some play-over-internet games. Seriously. The original IE games were combat-heavy, bar PS:T.

Boob-plate.

So SP is a chippy Scot, Irishman or Welsh person? Quel surprise!

I thought you considered yourself a focus of interesting debate and that's the best you can come up with? My work here is done.

Not sure I get your point, I think Jews are a minority group that also gets discriminated against because they are Jewish. Not because they are white males I'm not surprised, Bruce. You seldom get the point because the more open-minded you try to be, the more it closes. Intellectual curiosity is seldom a feature of the liberal Left, it tends to get in the way of prefabricated ideological certainties. My point is that there are more metrics to 'diversity' than gender. Or race. Or religion. Or sexuality. You say 'white men' are traditionally not discriminated against. What if that white man happens to possess another metric that opens him up to discrimination? Of course, this leads to a politically-correct game of top trumps where we can all compare our diversity scores (You're Jewish! Yay! Gay too? thats FIVE POINTS! I'm white. Shame, take away four points). I've seen otherwise sensible, well-educated people wander off down the blind alley of gender and identity politics far too often. We can all be discriminated against, and that discrimination can be for trivial things with profound circumstances. I remember once losing out an amazing career opportunity because a female colleague was a die-hard fan of the same soccer team as the boss. They went to games together and spoke of little else. I got on fine with them both but found soccer dull. My female colleague was nowhere near as experienced as me, nor suited for the assignment she was given. She still jumped on the opportunity like Tom on Jerry, totally oblivious to the obvious nepotism at play. It wasn't sexist or racist or soccer-ist. It was Life. I manned-up (see what I did there?) and got on with it. This is your First World dilemma, wandering around in circles crying about boob-plate and Anita whatever she's called. Meanwhile bastards kidnap girls and sell them into slavery due to their gender and religion and you still wander around in circles crying about boob-plate and Anita whatever she's called. There are millions of women who would love to have nothing more urgent to worry about that their depiction in video games that cost six months salary in their countries. * sigh *

Of the 6000000 Jews murdered by the Germans during the Second World War, let's assume roughly half of them were white and male.

It's like the debate on Human Biodiversity. On the one hand, some of the science could advance our understanding of certain diseases and illnesses. On the other, too many racists and bigots find it irresistible. So you have something forbidden but potentially useful. Ethics comes into play. When I studied sociology many, many moons ago we were provided with Tiger and Fox's 'Human Biogrammar' as an example of evil, determinist theory on gender. http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Imperial_Animal.html?id=fg5MXnnq4u0C&redir_esc=y Naturally, given that the lecturer were a slovenly, man-hating communist I found myself in full agreement with Tiger and Fox.

Really? You should.

Wow. You must have been one-shotting bosses.

+1 I don't buy the whole idea of "group guilt" and "group responsibility" among conceptual groups of people who have nothing to do with each other but just happen to share some identifying characteristic. Too much Marxist class theory still floating around in the heads of "progressive" liberals; they transferred it from social classes onto genders etc. but that doesn't make it any less irrational and morally dubious. QFT

And I think Bruce is attracted to being a Social Justice Warrior (god, how I hate this term) because of his idealistic outlook, not out of any kind of man-hating. Bruce is South African. Liberal South Africans are like those Germans born in the 1950s who felt guilty about the war and never stopped apologizing for it. They ended up joining the SPD and Greens while feeling tender towards the Commies who'd stolen the other half of their country. Their liberal self-loathing radiates from them like Polonium 210. Nice people, when all's said and done, but the product of a system that lionises guilt. Mind you, they've plenty to feel guilty about but how you process it is what counts. As for our Social Justice Troll, who seems to want to police an entire gender to suit his tastes... whatever.

Thanks. That's the rest of my day ruined now.

There's a 100% increase in legendary drops event for the rest of the week, Hiro, time to FARM MOAR JUNK!

Crusader is now as chunky as Barb and Monk with the damage reduction. I just need to gear mine up, compared to my Barb he sucks.

Ha ha ha ha ha haaaaa

In fact, to back up Gromnir's point, the Americans adopted French political traditions, an ersatz version of Napoleonic Code. The American justice system, for example, feels more familiar to a European than it does a Briton. The Americans don't have a Common Law system and deliberately chose not to have a Parliament. FFS their first dictionaries deliberately subverted the Mother countries' spelling to be less like that of the Colonial overlord (boo! Hiss!). Nonetheless, there is a cohesive argument to be made that it was a Civil War of sorts.

It wasn't a revolution. It was a Civil War between Brits. Ha ha ha ha haaaa.