Ginger_Warrior

Hey, Bolton's title to lose by the looks of things.

He angers the West because the West know often they're in the wrong, even if he's not necessarily right by contrast. But anyway, I thought this section was interesting from Russell Brand (of all people! Or perhaps not given his history of youth delinquency): Coming from a poor working class area myself--though no rioting was reported in Preston--the last paragraph is a picture I find painfully familiar in the people I grew up with and sat alongside at school. Disenfranchisement, and no way to correct it by your own volition.

It is possible for two people aged 16 to bring up a baby. It might not be the cleverest thing to do but it's not exactly treason either.

What do you mean 'enemies'? They're not political opponents, they're criminals. Of course I support the principle of free speech in a democratic society, but free speech is not and never was designed to be ubiquitous. It is designed so that in a democracy, the electorate has the opportunity to seek out and express contradictory points of view to the government, in order to prevent the state from becoming a 'dictatorship by election'. It was not designed to facilitate the organising of criminal activity. I'd hazard a guess that the US has shut down communcation between seperate terrorist cells in the interest's of national security to stop them from planning an attack. You're not seriously suggesting that because they infringed upon 'free speech' in order to achieve this, that they were wrong to do so, are you? As said, whatever grievances they have, they can express in the same way the rest of us do. I don't see how that viewpoint is tantamount to opposing free speech.

If they were expressing their anti-government grievances over BBM, I wouldn't have any problem with it. However, they were systematically organising criminal activity which in the end has cost the UK economy millions of pounds in repair and insurance costs, has made many families homeless and destroyed whole livelihoods. This isn't about Twitter and the Arab Spring vs Egypt, because this isn't about what they've said, it's about what they've done, and what they did was use BBM to hijack a peaceful protest about a young man's death, and organise a mass razing of working class homes in Tottenham. They're criminals, they're not political activists, and they don't deserve to have their rights protected because of free speech. When they get out of jail, they're more than welcome to express their grievances in the same way the rest of us do: by voting and by activism, but not criminality.

Opinions should always be portrayed as facts, and backed up with an argument instead of stats. If you don't believe in your own opinion, no one else will. They're talking nonsense if they think otherwise (but this is General Discussion we're talking about).

The golden rule is that when your 'rights' as a criminal infringe on the rights of innocent civilians, the police have the right to prioritise the latter over the former. I really don't see the problem with that, and I don't see what makes free speech so special it deserves its own special clause. For a hypothetical example, a gang leader would not be allowed to communicate with members whilst in jail. Is that a denial of free speech? Yes. Is it in the public's interest? Absolutely. Of course, this is all a red herring argument since it's very hard to stop people communicating through technology these days anyway. But if the police had reason to believe criminal activity was being organised through BBM, and failed to do anything about it, I'd be more annoyed about why my taxpayers' money is going to them to do literally nothing just so 'free speech' is preserved for people who couldn't give a damn about other people's rights.

And of citizens' rights to live in security without fear of a riot coming to burn their house down for no apparent reason other than the heck of it... surely you don't think an amendment to free speech that isn't even present in our constitution should supercede police attempts to stop criminality when it's clearly being organised through BBM? Organising criminal activity is not tantamount to free speech.

Not hugely impressed with Cameron. He claims to want parents taking more responsibility for what happened, but if he wants this, he needs to get the government to proactively do something about it, something similar in principle to SureStart. How can we increase our foreign aid budget by billions and be left with a PM who doesn't want to do anything except wave imaginary wands because there's apparently no money? I agree that parenting needs to improve and the aspirations of children should not be that they'll end up the same way as their unemployed/impoverished parents, but as a taxpayer, I say the needs of *my* society come before the needs of any other.

Good advice. Well tonight appears to be relatively quiet. Now comes the awkward questions: We've stopped them (almost), what do we do with them, and how do we stop this happening again?

Some rumours that trouble kicked off in Preston, but they were completely false. I was at the PNE vs Crewe match providing first aid cover and the paramedics were on standby in case anything kicked off in the town centre. They stayed at their posts the whole match, weren't needed. It is politically embarrassing for Cameron, especially given this was happening for days before enough manpower was sent down to London to maintain a relatively quiet night. But it does also give some credence to his 'broken society'. I don't believe that the whole of the UK's (especially the impoverished bits of it) social problems can be so easily summed up in a catch phrase, but isn't Miliband talking on 5live this morning about the causes of the rioting--lack of ambition/opportunity, poor parenting standards--the same thing?

Oh please, it's a tiny column from a newspaper (well, an image of a 'newspaper' anyway) that I don't even recognise. No one's seriously blamed video games for this. Trust OT to draw a tangent about video games or religion. :rolleyes:

Of all the grievances cited by the rioters I've not yet heard anyhing about universities... It does concern me though. I know it's bad enough for normal citizens but if you're an elderly person in a residiential home, or a vulnerable adult, I'd hate to think what kind of distress these events are having on them. I don't understand why the Army hasn't been called in. The protests are not political, they're not even about the shooting that happened last week. There's some rioters claiming it's because they're unemployed, so you solve that by burning several workplaces to the ground? This is plain civil anarchism and it should be treat as such. Not live ammo, but enough force to get the message across. Whatever the case, the Police are not coping.

When you get out of bed literally just after waking, and your vision is so blured that you walk with a heavy lean to one side. Almost fell down the stairs. ~Mr. G "I'm a little dizzy but hopefully I'll still be alive for my next post" Warrior

Same as the left.

Not in my town centre. No chance. You can smell the waste from some distance behind several walls after a Saturday night.

If idiocy is the extremity of stupidity, and stupidity is a lack of intelligence, how can two people of equal intelligence not possibly be equal in idiocy?

My face at 4:12 was not a pretty sight... :x Great vid anyway though.

Define 'plenty'. Point is, it just doesn't work for the majority of people. Either travel costs are too high, or it suffers from a lack of physical contact, or they might even get bored of RuneScape so the premise of the relationship falls apart. If you want a girlfriend, then you might just maybe find one on RuneScape. But let's not do this Internet thing of pretending only an ignorant minority of people do it the 'normal' way. The vast majority of people, including RS players, find their partners through real life connections.

I'm friends with plenty of girls on RuneScape (I do know they're actually girls). I've never once ever considered any of them as a potential girlfriend. Frankly, I don't think they'd be offended by that. How the hell would that even work?

A Wikipedian strictly speaking is anyone who makes an edit to any language version of the Wikipedia project, mostly commonly the English version. In reality, people edit Wikipedia for different reasonsto fight vandalism, to improve or create articles, to help organise files such as images and audio recordings, and much more. The only thing that's common amongst all Wikipedians is what they refer to as 'knowledge-sharing behaviour', so in that sense, it's much like the Crew work on here.

It's alright to get married early just so long as you're sure it's the right thing to do. Which clearly you aren't. I know they say 'Under their roof, their rules' but sooner or later you'll have to draw the line. I mean, you work, presumably for a wage, which is more than can be said for over a fifth of young people right now, so if I was your mum, I wouldn't complain too hard. Maybe staying in house does add a stress though, getting under people's feet and all that. When you see the same person doing the same thing everyday, it winds you up, believe me. Especially if that thing is an unproductive waste of time, like video games or something.

Uh-oh... :unsure:

My substitute for RS was Wikipedia. Same amount of work but at least somebody somewhere will read what I'm writing. Around 100 people a day read the article I'm currently working on. Only Wikipedia is much easier to go in to and pull out of as time demands, so it doesn't have that same life-ruining effect that RS does. I'm not suggesting you become a Wikipedian, just that you find something else that keeps you occupied and find something that gives you that personal gratification. Because once you've found that, you'll find RS becomes less of a "need", definitely.

Examples are irrelevent. On several occasions in this thread (and others) you've tarred the whole of Palestine with the same brush the international community tarnishes Hamas with. I could find plenty of examples where the Nazis supported the Vatican in pre-1939 Europe. Does it mean they were pro-religion? Most certainly not. But that's the single most common tactic you've used to justify Israel's actions against Palestinians. You're the one of the most blinded people I have ever met in my life. More than happy to use questionable techniques to justify your own point of view, and instantly dismissing anything that counters it as "propaganda" or else claiming it's insignificant in some other way. In a way it kind of saddens me, because this thread should've been about what happened in Norway, not what continues to happen around Israel.