ScottSA

Do you? Why?What exactly do you have against such things as old women forced to beg on streetcorners, pollution running rampant, and enforced chastity belts on women? It more or less describes the average Islamic nation. Do you hate Islam? Shame on you!

I love the jaunt into post-modern feminist "theory." It has never failed to make me chuckle since it was spawned in the early 90s. Oh, and lightbulbs are womb-shaped, invented by Thomasina Edidaughter to spread warmth and light over the world...What utter hogwash.

The problem with liberals is that they think there's an answer to everything, and worse, that the answer has a resolution along their way of thinking. The even worse problem with liberals is that while on the one hand claiming conservatives are intransigent, they doggishly insist that their own world view is the only right one. The world view of peace-as-an-end-in-itself is simply not shared by the palestinians, or for that matter most of the rest of the world, so any concessions made are not seen as 'working toward' peace, they are seen as a retreat and taken full advantage of by the palestinians. The problem is not that Israel is too nasty to them; the problem is that Israel didn't thrash them more thoroughly in the first place and send them packing to Jordan. That is working within the paradigm they understand. The vast majority of what liberals think of "enlightened" liberal views are really no more than ethnocentric conceits and bigotries dressed up as universal reality.

I hope the TO police have enough police on hand to watch over the angry protests by Muslim moderates at this kind of treatment of a fellow westerner. After all, Islam is a religion of peace, not oppression, right?

Just wait till we sneakily get a majority. Say hello to soldiers in the streets, churches doors you'll be herded into, gallows for swarthy immigrants in every town, destitute old ladies begging in abject misery on every street corner. Clouds of angry billowing conservative CO2 pumping into the pristine liberal air, oncoming global inferno welcomed with open arms by the fiendish Nazi hellspawn in Centre Block. Women's gains wiped out in a flash, herded like beasts into kitchens across the land, abortion gone, chastity belts forced around the unwilling pudenda of women. Uncaring corporate cultists cooking up schemes to make your lives a living hell, because that's the conservative way. Woe be upon you, for we are coming!

Your ham-handed attempts at reverse psychology are about as lame as they can possibly be. What's even sadder is that you probably imagine you're being clever, lurking behind a bush, ready to leap out and holler "racist" at the first poor bugger who is dumb enough to wander through this inept cow patch and accidentally step on a dung plop. You'll probably imagine that you're clever when you expound triumphantly that things really work in reverse (no they don't, actually, but whatever). I'll tell you a secret. I often hire English speaking Indian writers to do the grunt work for ebooks and technical work, and then polish them up and submit them to North American and European clients for a significant markup. Today, for example, I paid an invoice for $350 USD, and turned around and collected a fee of $4178 USD for the same work after 4 hours proofing work. My usual technical writer, also in India, has a superlative grasp of technical aspects of IT that I don't even pretend to understand, and a damned near flawless command of English, yet I pay him no more than a quarter of what I make for the work he mostly does. The funny thing is that everyone is happy...he makes more from me than most people in India, I make a good living with not too much work, and my client is happy because he buys the services of a highly reputable communications company and gets the very best product he can get. I have the highest respect for my writers. I don't frankly care what race they are or what nation they live in. I'll eventually be visiting each and every one in whatever nook and cranny of the world they happen to be. But if they come here, I'm sure as hell not going to feel guilty about paying them less or not giving them a boost to where I am, because this country is my country, not their's, and they ought to expect no more help from me than I would expect from them if I decided to set up shop in their country. (Mind you, if this BC land bubble doesn't pop soon, I'm gonna be looking for a cottage outside Putanagar fairly damned soon). I actually have spent years in some of those countries, and I know damned well that crawling and cringing to foreign immigrants ain't on the front burner agenda in any of them. So you see Posit, some of us don't just sit around in a farmhouse basement embellishing our life situations and pontificating about how nasty it is to live in a land where folks won't "share" everything with foreign immigrants. Some of us actually live and work in the international arena where interaction is a daily occurrence.

This sorry attempt to take the moral authority to favour war away from anyone but the actual members of the combat arm is just inane, for lack of a less respectful word. You seem to think that it's perfectly fine to have an opinion against the war if one is willing to slack off and avoid service because it will be a "real drag," but morally wrong for someone who thinks there's a need for war to have an opinion, unless s/he is willing to join the forces. That's crazy. Either you're not putting your thoughts across very well, or you're totally befuddled. The CAF is not engaged in a total war, like WW II, where the economy, social life, and virtually every national effort is directed toward winning the war. We don't need, or want, every able bodied individual to sign up, because that would destroy the economy that supports the forces. Herds of gung ho infantry isn't going to help. We are in a limited war, and that demands certain people...mostly strong men...who are willing to fight. That's the 'job' aspect of the war. The political aspect of democracy allows that everyone have an opinion on the war, which explains why the gestapo is not at your door suggesting that you start supporting the war post haste. But the fact that the gestapo is not at your door certainly doesn't mean that your opinion is more morally fit than those who do support the war yet are not in the combat arm.

I don't know how I'd "feel," but I'd wonder first why he usurped my position without the keys to the vault; and second, why a company specializing in English language business communication is run by someone who can't speak English.

I think you might be a tad out of touch with what Canadians want.

Anthropology...the road to riches! Especially if one believes in spontaneous generation of life in the Americas! Mendel, look out.

This kind of post does more to undermine the credibility of the poster than anything anyone else can say.

Coffee provided the evidence you claimed not to be able to find. What's your problem? There's all sorts of disagreement with virtually every aspect of the GW thesis, from it's causes and solutions to its very existence. If you're not interested in finding that out, fine. Retreat to the "overwhelming consensus" myth you folks are so enamoured of, but it'll be harder and harder to hide there as time goes on and more and more real science starts burying the Gorean hyperbole.

You do if your parent's farm has oil wells. But you're as full of crap with this nonsense as you are with your other claims, including that of being an officer.

And he lives on his parent's farm

Yup. Saw a herd o' pigs flap by yesterday, until they were lost in the clouds...

Well, you see, part of understanding is recognizing and preparing for possible change. I, for example, have savings. Not only in various financial instruments, but I've made a practice of buying ounces of silver, and occasionally gold, everytime I have a few extra dollars...and by now I have bucketloads of the stuff. Even if everything collapsed, I still have the hard value of a universal currency. That's being prepared, so no, I won't likely end up where you are, even if there's a major collapse. Following your logic, the best way to prepare for a war is to blow up the parlour with a hand grtenade and learn to live in it thereafter in anticipation of more bombs to come. My way would be to leave the parlour alone and build a bomb shelter. I think my way of preparing is better than yours.

Because things are a bit more complicated than that. Deterrence theory is a subject that took decades for two industrialized countries to choreograph. Had one or both been unstable during those decades, things might have been very different. Nukes are both offensive and defensive. Originally, both the US and USSR saw the use of nukes as tactical...simply a bigger bomb...to be used on the battlefield as well as city killers. The US, for the reasons outlined above, later defined them as purely strategic...the "tripwire" approach envisioned in MAD...but continued to play with the notion of tactical use in ideas like the "escalation ladder." Meanwhile, the strategic value of deterrence incorporated first, second, and third strike capabilities on value targets to ensure that neither side would remain unscathed in a conflict. The object was to make the cost of conflict too high to contemplate. Whatever one might think of the morality, it worked. With Iran, it's a different thing. One of the side effects of nuclear deterence is that it supplies a nuclear deterrence umbrella under which conventional forces can operate. An invasion of a neighbour...say Iraq...by Iran, would be repulsed immediately by the US and surrounding neighbours. But what if Iran had nukes? Would everyone be so gung ho to repulse the invasion then, if Iran threatened to nuke another country if anyone interfered? Maybe, but now we're talking about a whole new level of uncertainty, and the chance for miscalculation significantly increases. Iran is not Russia. Whatever Marx cooked up as a worldview was the progeny of a shared European heritage, based on the same ideation of values. During the cold war, the US and USSR shared the same goals; goals as fundamental as the notion that peace is a good unto itself...an idea that seems self-evident to us, but an idea not shared across the globe, even today. Iran, and indeed much of the east, simply doesn't look at the world the way we do. That is especially true in the case of Islam, which sees the world through the filter of Islam. Freedom, to Islam, is not a good at all. In fact, freedom is a rejection of Islam. Life to Islam is a preparation for death, and death is something to be valued over life in much the same way that Shinto or Viking warriors celebrated their entrance into the hereafter. Peace to Islam is incidental, and only good under certain conditions. We once thought that way too, not so long ago, before we decided that we'd be better red than dead, and adopted that viewpoint in the face of all comers. All this is to say that with Iran, the dance fundamentally changes. It's not that Iran will be all about firing its nukes in every direction, but that it will be prone to miscalculation in the same way Hitler miscalculated over Poland. Europe has cringed repeatedly to all threats from the east, and a huge movement in the US is in favor of adopting cringing as a foreign policy as well, and Iran may well think that all it has to do is shove and the answer will be a retreat. It can be forgiven that mistake, given recent history. The fact that its values lie in a different direction makes it almost impossible to come to a working understanding. But there's one universal clincher to this argument. Deterrence works when both sides want stasis. Deterrence would not have worked had the early Comintern continued its programme of world revolution, because that isn't stasis. Iran does not want stasis. It has made that quite clear in various ways, including just saying it. Its actions are quite out of keeping with a maintainance of the status quo; supporting the "insurgents" in Iraq, supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon, and generally helping out every Jihadist movement around the world. If Iran gets nukes, one way or another they'll be used.

You gotta learn to stay away from the topic of international relations.

Yeah, as WD said...you don't seem to have much to back up this claim of intellectual superiority. You claim it's all too complicated to understand, yet most everyone else understands it just fine. You claim you remained intentionally uneducated so as to keep your mind unsullied by the propaganda of the Man, yet all you produced as a result of this careful shielding is atrocious spelling and grammar, and the same mumbling about the "gubmint" and some banking cabal, that people used to moan about in the 30s; at least the ones who had shielded themselves from education, like you. In effect, you got yourself into trouble and are now gnashing your teeth and spitting vituperation at everyone else because, doncha know, it's all their fault and not yours. Yet you have the gall to say this: "...the retards have taken over and all of society is about to pay the bill for their horrific ineptness." No, that's not quite right. Society is about to pay the bill for your ineptness. You're not going to starve to death unless you refuse to eat. You're not going to freeze to death unless you refuse a roof. You'll survive because you live in the west, in a society where all that "greed" has produced an ethic and the surplus to act on the ethic, instead of somewhere else, where they wouldn't help you even if they could. But you just keep snapping and snarling at the hand that feeds you...that horrible "bottom line survivalism" that will be paying your bills for the rest of your life, since you apparently have no intention of doing so yourself.

A scientist with a functioning primal brainstem would have seen the stark absence of a human agency in that warming period, so all the anthropomorphic feedback loops in the world don't mean nuttin' anyway.

If female, does she go? Nudge nudge, wink wink.

As far as I can tell, there is only one person hereabouts who blames the Jews, and she's either banned or at a 'gag-me-with-a-spoon' party. I really don't know where the old white elites fit in though, and isn't it a bit racist to blame whites? Or is that ok?

In the thirties this kind of blind distrust of the "gubmint" was laughed at a lot. It's still laughed at a lot.

I don't post numbers partly because I've taken a statistics class or two, and know all too well how pointless it is mustering numbers to back an argument. Anyone can construct an argument using statistics for either side of any argument. But mostly I don't use numbers because my problem with immigration has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with unquantifiable cultural and racial issues. I couldn't care less if every immigrant brought Frankincense, Myrrh, and bulging bags of Rolex wristwatches; in the long run they are not good for our society or culture. The fact that they may or may not be economically beneficial in the short term, and that is very debateable, is irrelevant to me. Unlike many, I don't hide behind euphemisms and side arguments in a silly argument to appear bovinely "tolerant."

Gosh, what an angry person you must be.