ScottSA

Some might say the same of organized religion. Not if they understood the meaning of hubris.

"excellent discrimmination" is disrimmination that is in our favour, "loathsome discrimmination" is when it is not. This discrimination simply makes sense.

It's not really something to prove or disprove. You're right...during colonial times counter-insurgency was much more effective than it is today, and you're probably right about the tactics needed to crush the resistance in Iraq. The trouble is that it won't happen yet. The west hasn't been hurt enough. Reality only begins to intrude after there is a bloody nose and a pool of blood on the ground. It took years and millions of deaths before the west was able to bring itself to commit Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, events that would have been unthinkable in 1939 or 1940. Here's another good take on the situation: http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message.htm

If it makes you feel any better....Canada wasn't too welcoming of Irish, Poles, Ukranians and Italians in their time either..... ....times change Times haven't changed. Canada's citizens still aren't to welcoming of immigrants. xenophobic. Unfortunately not xenophobic enough.

I'd be quite content if only Islam were kept at arm's length. When I see every other Christian pulpit in the land howling for the blood and heads of this or that group, and self-proclaimed crusaders self-detonating in crowds, I'll begin to worry about Christianity. Until then, I'll celebrate the fact that Judeo-Christian values, and not the values of some 6th century psychopath, built this society.

The other side is perfectly free to publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals as well. What I mean is do you have a better way for scientists to share their findings/data other than peer-reviewed journals. If so, please share. How about peer reviewed scientific journals that have re-introduced the concept of science instead of politics? But seriously, I don't think the issue is process so much as it is credibility. There is a tendency to think that once peer reviewed, science somehow gains the status of fact, and that simply isn't true. Especially with something like this. Even the hard science is often overlooked, as in the case of Mann's hockey stick. It was a pure fabrication, and yet the peer review process didn't catch it.

How very turgidly Canadian to scoff at the US. How very naive to see the US as unfree.

Suggesting that parents ought not teach children religion has two profound effects as I see it. first, it is taking away the rights of parents to raise their children and second, it is a fairly transparent attempt to enforce secularism. My daughter goes to a Catholic school. I send her there because the education is better, but also because the Catholic Church has not, yet at least, succumbed to relativism. There is still a good and bad in her classroom and that to me is very important. But next week I'm taking her to a Buddhist service...not because I'm Buddhist...but because I was exposed to every religion when I was young too, and I think its a great idea. I am convinced there is a God, and certain there is an afterlife, but i don't presume to have met Him, so I don't know who, if anyone, has a claim to the TRVTH. I suspect it doesn't matter anyway when all is said and done. But I would never take her to an atheistic 'service' if such existed, because I don't want her exposed to the foolish unidimensional closedmindedness and humanist conceit of atheism. Even if atheism is right, the hubris is too stifling.

The letter seems to ignore the key issue that there are discrimminatory benefits offered based upon marital status. It is irrelevant that there are other benefits such as Supplementary Death Benefit which are not discrimminatory. And what excellent discrimination it is.

Yeah, really. If I post something similar about Scotsmen and sheep, will someone laugh instead of pontificating about "racism" and "bigotry?" Christ, I don't even think most Muslims take themselves as seriously as a good many folks here...

Even class analysis has been superceded by modern mathematics."Class" amounts to membership in a cartel. As John Nash (and John von Neumann) rigourously observed, cartels are inherently unstable. The idea that millions or billions of people would respect a social class cartel defies what we know of individual human behaviour. ---- There is ample opportunity to criticize modern economic theory or to point out the sheer waste of resources in this world. There is much to be radical about. If you want to take on the fat cats, change the world and make it more just, you have many miles to go. It's just that Karl Marx (and Leftists of his ilk) don't offer the right map at all. I'm not familiar with Nash or von Neumann, but it doesn't matter if they have modified the thesis...Marx still gets credit for the seminal paradigmatic shift he started with class analysis. Again, I'm talking about his theoretical and analytic contributions to academia; not the havoc praxis has wreaked from one end of the globe to the other.

Class analysis as an academic pursuit will be an enduring legacy of Marx. That and about a billion premature deaths are what he left us.

As would I. I am suggesting that the best way to stay alive is to avoid doing such unpopular things as killing thousands of Palestinians (or Lebanese). Hey, I have a novel fucking idea! Why don't the 1000s of Lebanese and Palestinians stop killing Jews? I suppose the Palestinians are starting to get the idea, now that they're busy killing each other instead, and the Hezbollah boys are still climbing out from the rubble of their last great victory over the Zionist entity, and if you watch the score closely you'll notice that whenever they stop killing Israelis, for whatever reason, the deathcount of Palestinians by Jews seems to go down too. Amazing, I think.

Someone should tell the Israelis that when the other side is fighting a war based on propaganda, and they kill many more Palestinians than vice versa, that they are only inspiring more hatred and propaganda, and making themselves less safe. Obviously everything I wrote just got ignored lol. And what a stupid thing to say, frankly. What should they do, make sure they kill only as many Palestinians as there are Israelis killed? Would that make this "game" a bit fairer in your eyes? I swear, some of you lefties need some firsthand exposure to war...it's not a game of tennis...the object is to win, not volley a ball back and forth.

This is like quoting Churchill saying something like "Hitler is a monster because he wants to kill Jews..." and doing a bit of fancy editing to produce Churchill says he wants to "kill Jews!"

I haven't read this, but I imagine it's talking about the Mann report and his hockey stick; one of the most embarrassing setbacks of the GW crowd. Given that the IPPC hung it's entire thesis on the hockey stick for its first few reports, I'd say it speaks to the credibility of the IPPC. Not that they are dishonest or anything...just not quite sure which way is up.

I think one of the dangers here is a misunderstanding of Islamic anti-semitism. In the shallow thinking of the west today, it simply means a hatred of Jewish people, as a sort of variation on "bigotry," or a dislike of Jews for no particular reason other than "ignorance," or "poverty," or some other shallow slogan. But it didn't always mean that, and that's not what it means to the Islamic mind today. The Islamic mind sees the Jew in much the same way Hitler did...in a substantively deeper and more comprehensive form of anti-semitism than we are used to or even able to grasp. Hitler didn't see the Jew as a merely pushy, rude, and grasping individual roughly defined by religion, he saw the Jew as a quasi-racial parasite; a disease within humanity. The cartoons of rodent-like kikes on posters in interwar Germany were not merely reflective of well orchestrated Goebbelian propaganda...they were a true reflection of a deepseated and widespread conviction that "Jewishness" was at the root of most of the world's problems. Hitler, for instance, blamed both Marxism AND capitalism (two sides of the same coin, as he saw it) on the Jew. He saw the Jew as a way of life, a genetic distortion of the pure, an evil in the midst of mankind. And that's what the Islamic mind sees when it thinks of the Jew. It's almost impossible for the modern western mind to grasp the depth and utter nihilism of this vision, and so in the case of Islam we ascribe it to either ignorance or worse yet to something the Jews must have done to deserve the hatred. And once having made the same mistake Chamberlain and his cabinet did with Hitler; that Hitler was justified in his demands; these same westerners look to Israel for the cause. After all, everyone is rational, right? So there must be a reason that fits our paradigm of rationalism for Islamic anti-semitism, right? Naturally, everyone looks to Palestine as the handy cause, and to Israel as the obvious culprit, entirely forgetting the fact that the situation in Palestine today resulted precisely because of the anti-semitism that preceded the situation everyone is so ready to blame for it! Israel didn't cause the warsaw ghetto or Russian pogroms or the slaughter, rape and enslavement of Jewish tribes by the alleged Prophet of Islam. Anti-Semitism did. Hatred of Jewishness and all things Jewish did. Islamic anti-semitism will not be satisfied until the last Jew is floating face down in the sea. I'm not being alarmist here; I'm simply repeating what is being trumpeted from every newspaper and mosque in the Middle East. It doesn't matter if every Palestinian in the world is given bejeweled palaces, unlimited riches and batches of burkaed virgins; none of that matters a whit while the Jew still lives. Hitler took away their money, their land and their citizenship, but that is hardly enough when one is dealing with a disease. Not only their lives, but their very genes have to be stamped out. Diseases must be eliminated root and branch, to borrow from Mao...and so it is with the Islamic mind. The only land for peace deal the Islamic mind will settle for is land denuded of the Jew and the peace of desecrated Jewish graveyards. As insane as that is, what's slightly more insane are the western apologists who blithely ignore the facts of the matter and blame the "Zionists" and "Israelis" for "murder," when the Israelis are doing everything humanly possible to fight humanely against an enemy who proudly fights as inhumanely as possible. So many on the left in this battle between modernity and Islam are making of themselves naive pawns for a comprehensively murderous cause.

Well, if stating the truth somehow makes me crazy in your view, so be it. I did note that you failed to include the passage where the man is to have orders barked at him by the woman. Can you cite the passage where man is to have orders barked at him by a woman? You will not be able to quote that passage, because it does not exist! Perhaps you might turn to one of the newer "freshly discovered" alternate gospel texts to find a loophole for Jesus. Alt Gospel 4:24 "Barkest orders thou at menfolk, for they laze about in the fields by day and fornicate with sheep in the night. Naggest thou him in the noontime, in the morn and yeah, in the afternoon. And at bedtime. Perchance at 3 am to boot. Invent ye the game named soccer and go forth as a soccer-slut. For sayeth the Lord, who lieth not." There, happy?

Clearly, I was disagreeing with her definition of the word. Sorry if the innuendo was lost on you. I'll try and be more literal in the future. It would help a lot. Figurative speaking tends to confuse everyone involved. Including, I suspect, you.

Why do I have to look for something you assert is fact. Why don't you show me exactly what you mean from an actual source. I'll leave it up to someone who's more interested in your education than I am. If you haven't seen a list of them yet, it's probably because you're just not reading posts.

Welcome back Poly. I see you've moved up from attacks on Bush to attacks on God Himself. Good luck!

I suppose I wouldn't have a problem with it then. Who am I to say that two people cannot draw up a contact... Your *god* (the men that wrote your bible, as there really is no god) already condones incest and polygamy... and if you want to get it on with your dead wife -- go ahead. I will be cremated so no one gets my remains! As far as "pre-contractual cannabalsim" -- what does that have to do with marriage??? Or do I sign a pre-contractual agreement with that side of beef I am going to purchase? Pffffft. This discussion is obviously well over your head.

Link? Check your IPPC links son.

He is free to make an assessment. However, he is not an expert in the science of climate change as he himself admits. Most of the folks involved in this debate but nonetheless billed as "experts" are not.

Sooooooooo witty. Did Scott Feschuk provide you with that line? Well, asking a psychic would likely be more profitable than asking the IPCC, who revises their predictions every chance it gets, in between inflating the alleged authorship of their reports.