Gorgon

I'm JudaBenHur

I think i'm gonna hang back and wait a few months so I can have a decent amount of episodes to watch.

A natural consequence of the American system of "catch-all" generalist parties. Instead of voting for members of lots of different smaller parties, and forcing those elected to compromise with each other to form a working government, we make the voters do the compromising in picking which of the major generalist parties best represents their views. Theres only two. one or the other is a choice I guess, but it's not much of one. Other democracies have been effectively two party systems through relative size, England for instance, but at least you could still find a party that fitted your personal convictions. Two just isn't enough. I think you ought to make it easier to form political parties. The role of the smaller parties are filled by single issue organizations and lobbyists. Some people consider that kind of dollar bill influence democractic, I think it's a weakness.

Why would a set of headphones be illegal in the us. Incidentally, I use Senheiser HD212, mid range, kinda deal it's just grand. I guess if you spent thousands you would get something noticeably better, but who has that kinda money, and I have moderate hearing loss in the high frequencies anyway, would be a waste.

I'm on the site right now, and as expected it doesn't work, probably they are just not interested in wasting bandwidth on Europeans. Anyway you can't download anything, it's a streamed browser plugin, either media player or flash. So unless you are savey enough to get around that, it's pretty useless.

I blame Keefer Sutherland

I can't believe I just wrote that, I must be more tired than I though. Anyway I still don't think i'll be able to watch it off sci fi

Acutally, according to the time gizmo in windows the US is GMT - 6 and Copenhagen is GMT +1, that should make it 7 hrs earlier here. Of course they will probably find some way to ruin that to keep the suspense going. I don't even think it will work, half the time I get the 'sorry clip not available in your location' message when I try to watch something on Sci-FI

well, I woke up, went down to get something to eat, vacuumed, researched a bit on a paper i'm writing. Now i'm watching the simpsons. Wow what a fantastic premise for a thread.

What does that mean if you live in Europe, I can never figure these things out.

R00fls

Why use the word 'wrong' if it's not a moral question. I know, those are demanding on the little gray cells.

There was a cat and a dog

Eradicating a terrorist organization by anti terror means such as torture, abduction, death squads, assassinations, seems to have a very poor track record. Israel has tried assassinations for decades with no tangible results, and there are costs to draconian measures for a democracy. The threat posed by terrorism compared to say ,war, is negliable. One response would be to simply accept that a liberal democracy is the target of terrorism once in a while, because the weaknesses that make terrorist able to operate are the same ones that define the country: freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of the press, due process of the law. If we are to be permanently on vigil, do we permanently damage these constitutional guarantees ? There are, in short, very few truly effective choices, and doing something, is not always better than doing nothing.

You can't qualify that statement or make any about how often either result occurs because both failure and success is kept a secret after the fact. Rather we are left with some airy notion that so and so many terrorist actions have been prevented through torture, that significant intelligence obtained through torture helped a military campaign to fruition, these are claims though that by their nature are never fully investigated.

Lets stay away from straw men shall we, obviously the observation that torture doesn't work is general, not specific.

Thats not the point he tried to make at all, rather torture induces the subject to tell the interrogator any wild tale he thinks will make it stop. Everyone breaks sooner or later.

At least McCain can't subscribe to this relative weighing out of torture, as if 'torture light' existed. He was tortured himself and doesn't mince words. I think we ought to consider torturing the president and the secretary of state, it would be a valuable life lesson with practical applications. The central question of whether torture works. Well, here's the rub, it does work if you are able to cooperate the information gathered, in essence it is one source with just as many motivations for telling the truth as for telling what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. It all depends on how ruthless and impatient you are in search of intelligence. As for this 'being a war after all' - when does the war on terror end, are we pretty much indefinitely committed to the pursuit of stamping out a strategy employed since the birth of anarchism in the late 19th century, well you could go further back and include the Assassins, the Thugs in India, the Jewish Zealots, and claim that terrorism has been at work for as long as marginalized factions have been trying to seize and change the social and political agenda.

He ran the place into the ground, I can't think many examples of a socialist revolution gone this wrong.

I voted for 'wedgie'

No. Thats not as stupid a maxim as it sounds, all empathy derives from self, on being able to sense your own pain, or pleasure in others (I dunno why but that sounded a little kinky). By protecting the group you protect yourself.

Everybody owns a little bit of everybody else, that is the basic premise of financial institutions in a global marketplace. It's also why a collapse of a few key loan institutions as a result of the housing crisis could, if we are not careful, create a cascade effect not seen since the 1920s.

Security methods these days offer excellent protection against lone crazies. A lot has been learned from the attempt on Reagan. Ted Kennedy was in the middle of a crowd, poorly screened, and John Lennon had no protection. Nevertheless it could happen again, you can't foresee every eventuality or completely examine every person a politician shakes hands with.

I guess that depends on intent doesn't it. If you believe the coalition acted out of an altruistic desire to free the people of Iraq, it could be considered moral. I actually think that was a small part of it, emphasis on small. Morality can be divorced from legality and perhaps truthfulness as well, although starting a war on a purely moral basis, I don't think there is a real world precedent.

Morality has a tendency to be swallowed up by international politics, at best the UN can be convinced to intervene in some third world plague pit not directly in the crossroads of so many different strategic aims. A majority broke the rules in dealing with Milosovich, and the international outrage was decidedly muted. I think though, that an action in order to be moral has to be free of lies. The coalition wanted weapons to be there and in their rush to prove it asked the people they are ultimately responsible to, their own voters, to risk their lives based on exaggerated and unsubstantiated intelligence claims.