gladiator

friend, think about the consequences what you are saying... "marriage contracts" with 1 year old girls (or whatever their age, since he is talking about FORCED marriage) = bondage...

the other implication is that if you live in a society that does not actually prohibit sex with underaged youths then they are fair game whatever their age

if you honestly think there nothing wrong with either of that then that's pretty sick

I've stated routinely on these boards that mohammed was a pedophile, I wouldn't kid on something like that...

"gay men (herein meaning men who have sex with men)"

so that's what primo does??? it can't be yikes

hahaha

1,205

(38 replies, posted in General)

panzergeneral

pizza tycoon

capitalism II

settlers 2

civilisation II

colonisation

duke nukem 3d

heroes of might and magic II

transport tycoon

day of the tentacle

sam and max

monkey island III

daggerfall (I liked it when it came out, in spite of all the bugs smile)

kingdom o magic

1,206

(25 replies, posted in General)

what kind of magazines?

1,207

(12 replies, posted in General)

viva la vida is nice, haven't heard the rest yet

biefstukfriet

you were asked to name 15 politicians from your own parliament; yet you name balkenende who a member of the executive branch, don't know about the others tongue

******

I think a major problem is also that many ordinary voters in the different nations are too delusional or too astranged from politics to make a rational judgement on how to vote on this treaty;

I see that spanish truckers launched a strike "against high oil prices" that cost the economy 1 billion euro, yet what will this strike achieve? If the politicians have any backbone they will refuse to take any short term measures and at best increase support for research/development of alternative fuels or fuel efficient cars or whatever; if they don't have any backbone they will simply take short term measures that effectively subsidise this striking sector at the expense of everyone else taking away incentives to be fuel efficient and ending up increasing the oil prices even more in the long term

the spanish government has litterally no power whatsoever to actually bring down the oil prices, at best they can subsidise and alleviate a short term sting by turning it into a bigger and more expensive problem in the long term

bundeling power in an efficient institution is always going to bring everyone much further than where you would end up if standing alone; yet people don't want to see this and are hesitant to give up their access to short term easy solutions and increase the efficiency of the government level that is able to better tackle these problems but where their power to coax politicians into localised, short term solutions is greatly reduced

I think if the calculations were made the EU institutions have litterally increased the wealth of EU citizens by hundreds of billions if not more over the decades (the free EU market greatly reduced costs for everything and complications for companies, the euro has saved many companies from the fickle nature of the currency markets that in the past could easily push healthy companies into bankruptcy if they happened to have too much of their business in the wrong nation), all the while costing only a fraction of the EU members GDP

1,209

(9 replies, posted in General)

you can find out about smartysgame on his website

1,210

(40 replies, posted in Politics)

why so obsessed with sources? go do a google search yourself you lazy slob! it's not like he's forcing you to read the thread

1,211

(18 replies, posted in Politics)

there is only so much money to go around, so naturally there will be people embelleshing their reports in order to get more grants; this is "normal" economic behaviour; that is why peer review and stuff is so important, you may fool some people some of the time, but you'll get caught eventually

1,212

(27 replies, posted in Politics)

eh now more perverts will stake out schools

1,213

(7 replies, posted in Politics)

there is no cocaine problem... the only question is who is the one snorting those 10,000 lines a day...

PS I am of course totally opposed to drug use but if you're not you should always make sure it is cut up meticulously to avoid nosebleeds

1,214

(20 replies, posted in Politics)

...in your opinion tongue

1,215

(13 replies, posted in Politics)

you need to take into account how politics work

you have a generation of politicians negotiating a treaty with medium to long term objectives that allows them to do nothing and pass the buck to somewhere along the line of a few election cycles who should then feel obligated to take the most painful decisions because their predecessors put their signature on a piece of paper

the problem with this plan is that it sucks, yes, but the politician where the buck stops will have to at least take face saving measures so the end result will tend to be a small but measurable improvement compared to when the treaty had never been signed

1,216

(5 replies, posted in Politics)

every little thing she does is magic

1,217

(20 replies, posted in Politics)

the problem is not so much rejecting objective truth as a whole, but rather to expunge it from the political/ethical/... arena

you should be quite fond of it since your statements in the past indicate that you consider what is moral to be that which is efficient

"The point I would like to make, however, is that the people that sit in the European Parliament are not democratically elected, in any meaningful way, by the European people and most of them are only there for thsemsleves.  All of them have their snouts in the trough, and most of them have their two front trotters in as well."

the european parliament is directly elected by the populations of each member state - the fact that you can't vote for say as an Englishman for say a candidate in spain is normal for any type of federation 

the "democratic deficit" is due to other matters, which were being adressed by the new treaty

"how is 1 culture more valid then another?<
I think he lookes at it from his own biased point of view"

a cultures "validity" essentially means that the underlying premises to their world views are true or not; culture is a collection of reasonments which can be either rational and testable or (irrational, untestable) beliefs; now you cannot disprove whether marrying an unvirgin is a bad thing or not; but it is testable whether someone has had sex or not so if your culture background tells you to look at your woman's hymen to tell if she is a virgin or not, then this is not valid reasoning; if your culture leads you to reject testable truths as untruths or vice versa, then there is something off big_smile

if you say that one culture cannot be more valid than another, you are essentially whitteling down the notion of culture into untestable beliefs; I don't think it is the case, wrong but testable reasonments lead to irrational beliefs and irrational beliefs can lead to wrong but testable reasonments

now I'm not very knowledgeable of this sort of antropologic mumbo jumbo, but the above is what I believe tongue

there is of course a difference between validity of a culture and superiority between different cultures (I do believer that it is possible for a culture to be inferior), but that is for a different topic

of course I have thoughts

matters such as this treaty are not to be decided by popular vote; you don't ask the general population to perform brain surgery, so why should you allow the general population allow a direct vote in matters they do not fully comprehend; + these kind of votes are about everything from the cracks in teh pavement on buddy mcwho's street corner to paddy mccash's misgivings about the irish governments and about anything else but the treaty, which people don't understand anyway nor do they even want to understand

I'm not saying the general population shouldn't have a vote of course, but voting through democratically elected representatives are much more sensible

those are my thoughts

"and their culture is just as valid as yours"

is it?

1,222

(18 replies, posted in Politics)

not true u could put ballons yn teh ayr and sypersonyc ayrplanes would fli agaynst them

--> community

please keep politics free from this type of spam, if it's not insulting or obnoxious it has no place in politics

1,224

(56 replies, posted in Politics)

""pro-Taleban militant group in Pakistan" does't really equal Pakistani miltary forces..."

doesn't it? tongue

1,225

(33 replies, posted in General)

and more importantly, you guys know drinking makes it harder for you chimychanga to rise up to the occassion? although that does tend to keep it out of trouble