Gorgon

They are afraid they are going to disintegrate because people don't speak French ?

I always thougth the whole light side/dark side was a question of the force manipulating your emotions and making you act according to them. The light side reject their emotions and resist their influence through meditation. The dark side embrace them. But, inexplicably, their emotions always seems to lead them towards egotism rather than altruism. A bit of a flaw in the terminology.

I ran and the lightsabers got stuck in a clipping error by the pillars, then I just force choked/ force lightning untill she went.

Defence is 10% on average, double under Reagan as he spent the USSR out of business Why leave wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budg...e_United_States

uhh, I thougth purality meant that votes could travel states, but it does say that First past the post is an example of plurality voting so it is in fact the opposite. In any case, I don't really see the need to rank candidates in order of preference, one vote should be sufficient which could either be cast for a specific candidate or for a party.

"Plurality voting is another matter entirely, and I think it's stupid." And throwing out votes is not ? Purality voting would allow the creation of an an actual political spectrum represented in choices of paries, rather than two more or less indeterminable cumbersome giants. Presidential elections should be plurality based.

Chinese gymnasts and couchpotatioes all have the same neural pathways. The rest, i'm afraid, is just practice and luck. The test shows abosolutely nothing.

" Post #77 Level 4 Posts: 1,192 All the Nordic countries at the top of the Economist study have relatively small populations compared to that of the UK and definitely the USA for example. Iceland (second in the list) has the a population of approximately 300,000 (around 1000 times less than in USA). So does population size have any bearing on the effectiveness of a democracy? " I would think so, it is easier to be close to government when you don't number hundreds of millions.

If you want to protect the voice of the minority you have to get away from the two party system. There are a lot more than the two choices of political ideology you get to choose from you know. Without the electoral college, independent candidates could be allowed to harness votes nation wide and not have their votes thrown out and their mandates given to the winner. This could facilitate the creation of alternatives to the two party stalemate.

The US is a federal state which means it has to put up with illogical creations like the electoral college. Maybe it's just too big a country for it to gain a sense of nationhood that trumps state and local interests. On the face of it it's quite undemocratic, the net worth of an individual vote is determined by where he or she lives, where of course it should be equal for everyone. Even worse,' 49,9999 %' of the votes in a swing state are just discarded in a presidential election. On the other hand you could argue that the more state's rights the more democratic the overall result, and that you should measure the states individually. " Correct We are a Representative Democracy" That is not the disctinction you wanted to make, every democracy is representative. Direct democracy becomes unfeasible as soon as you get more than 30 or so people involved.

Ohh.. I tend to skip to the last page after reading the first few pages of a thread

'Jokenly' is not a word in the English language, 'Jokingly' is an adverb derived from a verb and is common American English. http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/jokingly

It must have been made to suit the needs of the liberal mafia, of course.

Only in the most forgiving sense of the word, which is exactly why you need to measure and monitor things like freedom of the press, participation, openess of government, corruption, accessibility etc. If all you need is voting, China and Cuba are democracies as well. You just disproved your own point, congratulations.

*Waits for the usual knee jerk reaction of americans with no real condeption of European political systems.*

That would be sweden.

How many ministers resigned for corruption and mismanagement after the first week of the new administration again, huh

They did a trial in Holland, of course, and the experience was that all the hard core users who partook reported improvements in their everyday lives, many were able to have jobs for the first time in decades.

yup

"Yeah because illegal narcotics totally aren't potentially fatal when abused." There is hardly anything that isen't dangerous when abused, eat enough carrots and you could die of vitamin E poisoning. The comparison with alchoholsim is hardly valid across the range of leisure drugs, legal or otherwise.

" You are so f***ing wrong I don't even know where to begin. Sure, you can hold down a job, for awhile at least. You home life's gonna go to pieces, and sooner or later your addictions gonna catch up with you, but yeah,you can hold it together for awhile, especially if you're clever and above all a good liar. My old man managed to keep it together for 20 years before his alcoholism caught up with him." Alchohol isen't illegal. They tried that, didn't work out so well. In the case of alchoholism you have a condition that is potentially fatal, and certainly ruins lives, that however does not mean that the majority cannot use alchohol and suffer no ill effects. So, what would be wrong with increased prevention and treatment for alchoholism ? :S Shot and miss, I should think.

Grants, loans and scholarships are a bandaid, not a viable alternative to gaining access through wealth, statistically and demographically speaking. I favor egalitarianism when it comes to education.

"And that helps addicts out how? Or are you looking at this from a strictly financial point of view?" You can actually live a quite productive life and hold down a job while being a user, what destroys people are the things they have to do to get the drug, and the impure and imminently more dangerous versions of the drug available at your local pusher. The greater part of the vast ammounts saved by just giving pure medical variants could be chanelled into early prevention and treatment, and you would still save money while avoiding the criminilisation and suffering of the current state of affairs. It would be important here to differentiate the really dangerous drugs, crack, meth, etc - those that cause permantent brain and nervous system damage - from those whose criminalisation is more a cultural phenomenon than a health risk.

I suppose you are more likely to chose from a practical standpoint and apply yourself more if your parents had to put down 500.000 Se to pay for a top notch education. It's an elitist system that makes sure the children of the wealty remain in privelege, but it is effective.

I believe that the rule is that all the officer has to do is say 'do such and such, or i'm going to taze you' - three times, and if there is no compliance they can zap away. Of course this presumes that the officer is making himself clearly understood and that the victim understands the whole three times deal. 'getoutofthecarorimgoingtotazeyougetoutofthecarorimgoingtotazeyougetoutofthec rorimgoingtotazeyou" *ZAP* is getting increasingly common.