Gorgon

Rosie Odonald is the left's easily recognizable idiot, which is why she is only ever mentioned by the right when used as a straw-woman.

If it's alright to use the Olympics to champion the greatness of Nike and AT&T why is it wrong to use it to talk about something that really matters. Perhaps bland commercialism is a safe place from which violence is unlikely to originate, but... Terrorism and activism are scorned because they don't play by the rules of modern societies. They steal attention and aren't founded in capitalism and consumerism. They didn't pay for their air time. Well I think it's well worth the effort trying to steal the terrorists' weapon and use it in defense of liberty. The only real weapon we have against China is trade, but no one is mad enough to threaten China with trade sanctions, after all we are all interconnected in one world economy. What is left then, if you want the kind of attention and air time that only conglomerates can buy.

I tend to think that the important thing here is how such activism is regarded by the Chinese, not how it is regarded by everyone else concerned with human rights. We shouldn't be doing activism just to make ourselves feel good after all. I think we can safely assume that the Chinese media across the board will characterize any protest as either violent, as in the scuffle for the torch, or simply anti Chinese, the latter will work every time regardless of circumstance. So, any protest in order to be successful would have to be brilliant in conception and appeal and less militant than Ghandi.

Well considering that the judges for all intents and purposes were owned by the Nazi party, and towed the line or got sacked, I don't think civil and criminal rights apply at all.

Do you think it's foolish to even try to maintain a distinction between a sports event and the political aspect of a word event with more eyeballs than any other. What would be your views on Olympic competitors using the venue to raise awareness of human rights issues in China. Whats more important, seeing who can throw a spear or ball the furthest or civil rights. Where is the line drawn, will the editors cut away, should they cut away ? Discuss. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080407/ap_on_...u/olympic_torch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics...ck_Power_salute And on a darker note : http://www.infoplease.com/spot/summer-olym...h-massacre.html

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'