Ginger_Warrior

Well said. People like to compare England & Wales and the USA in this debate. It's not the fact guns are completely outlawed here that makes the difference (they're not) - it's the fact it is culturally unacceptable to carry weapons on your person here, and if you have a problem with someone, you deal with it using words.

Nonetheless, he didn't post, and he could have very well done so considering he has two charity threads.

I assure you the role is very well deserved. He's done some fantastic things for the site while on the Crew. :

Well, people like Shadowfax and Bubsa, their positive contributions to OT outweigh the things they said that got them them banned. But people like Jb and TheChamp, have not contributed one positive to Tipit, and should be banned, regular trolls, they are. I disagree completely. If what they did was so bad that they were permanently banned (as opposed to a temporary ban), then they shouldn't allowed back. It's as simple as. Even Bubsa himself recognised that his contributions to the forums shouldn't make him an exceptional case. I've actually checked his profile. It says he's logged on since the forum rollback, but he hasn't posted anything. Full respect to the guy for taking responsibility for his actions. The fact is you cannot ban someone for making threads you aren't personally interested in. For two reasons: A) You can just *shock* avoid the thread; and B) If we did, Tip.It would become a community of about 1,000 active users with the same, or similar, personalities. That doesn't make for a vibrant healthy and diverse community at all. It just increases hostility towards those who are different. I don't actually mind the more shallow, chitty-chatty threads. If half of this board is going to become full of political threads where flaming is naturally higher, your average person seriously isn't going to be interested. As for grammar and spelling, all it requires is a polite notice in a reply to ask them to improve or at least put it through some sort of spell-checker, not backseat moderating, flames, petty insults and requests for such people to be banned.

Put that into context, for the love of sanity. In a country of 300,000,000, that really isn't high at all. There were around 8,000 murders using guns in 2005. Put that into context. Drugs cannot be used as a weapon to threaten or intimidate others, not unless the victim has already got themselves into trouble. The idea of comparing deaths due to drugs, and deaths due to guns is completely laughable since the causation and culture surrounding them both is different. When I can attack someone using a packet of weed, you may have a point. This argument is irrelevant anyway, as snipersas decided to quote us that pointless statistic, without actually giving any evidence that this number wouldn't rise if drugs were made legal. He merely told us people die from illegal activities. Strangely enough, this has been the case since time immemorial. This doesn't subtract the need to protect people from a potentially lethal weapon; even if said weapon could defend the victim, the attacker shouldn't have the freedom to walk around with a gun in his hand. All I'm seeing from pro-gun rights supporters here is a common ignorance of how dangerous these weapons actually are, and a twisting of statistics while you hide under constitutions and 'basic human rights' which don't even exist. Why do you quote how many times a gun is used in self-defence (including incidents where guns aren't fired, or even where toy guns are used), and then quote how many times guns only kill people? Surely, it would make more sense to quote how many times a gun is used offensively or in a threatening manner, in which case, I am sure the number would rise far beyond 8,000.

Does 8pm Central Time suit everyone? If we're available let's just log on at the hour and we'll just battle whoever's online. I might be an exception though. I'll still have to challenge people to matches since that's like 2am GMT. I don't mind though - if most of the people playing on here find a time that happens to be unsuitable for me it's not fair if I hold everyone up.

I love hearing stories like this. It's good to hear you've come out of it well and you've found a hobbie you clearly enjoy. Those veggies look really well grown. I was expecting sort of second-rate standard but those just look like the ones you get from a supermarket! Nice work! :shock: Every plant I've ever tried growing has died. Our backyard is tiny (as in, literally big enough to fit a bikeshed and a washing line into), and is filled with concrete slabs. It's also in the middle of a cramped, terraced Victorian-style housing block, with our yards sectioned off by 6 feet high brick walls. No soil, no moisture, no light.

I reckon we should just... make a set time, and then whoever's online, we'll just play. I mean, keep the tourney because that's important, but it's better than people aimlessly posting on this board saying they're online when no one else is gonna be, and going off after 30 mins, and then another person doing the same thing in two hours' time. If we set a time, I'm happy for it to be about 11:00pm GMT, since that's about the afternoon for Americans which most of this site is made up of.

Put that into context, for the love of sanity. In a country of 300,000,000, that really isn't high at all.

^ It's exactly that backseat moderating (why don't you come out and admit you just don't like the guy?) and snobbery that's made OT such an unpleasant place to be in.

I was considering giving up my RS membership in exchange for FunOrb membership. The fact is, I'm a bit edgy with RS now. It's gotten to the stage where it's an adventure game, and a pretty bad one at that, instead of an actual RPG that requires more skill beyond simple patience. I love FunOrb. Arcanists is a bit hard for a newbie to get into though... I wish they'd offer some sort of advanced tutorial mode for us to develop some strategic sense. I don't have a clue what weapons to use in multiplayer matches. :?

Welcome to the year 2008 Oh well done. You read three words in my post and replied. Care to read the whole post and try again?

Aww... I miss all those things. Grown-up life just isn't fun. :(

In prehistoric times, it was not uncommon for a 13 year old girl to already have had a baby. With such a low life expectancy, poor diet, poor healthcare and primitive care at the birth, infant mortality rates were high. There really was no choice in the matter. Logically, this position hasn't changed. The continuation of our species is best ensured by women producing as many babies as possible, to the point where we reach our environmental capacity and excess population dies due to starvation. However, of course, we have developed morals and ethics since then, and enshrined those in law. Much as I agree that having sex with a 10 year old is totally abhorrent (then, I've been raised in the West and this is Western tradition - the degree to which I have thought out this particular dilemma for myself independently is questionable), the point I'm making is that logic and ethics seldom complement each other.

Wikipedia is fine as an information website. Once again, it's just people with no sense at all hearing a few exceptional stories and applying it to the whole thing. As for the topic: Get a job? Quickly?

If this is true, America would do well to vote for him.

I'm intrigued... what interaction would this be? I realise I'm going to end up probably in an argument over whether friendships and emotional attachments can develop without face-to-face interaction, but I really am not referring to that debate. The interaction people have with each other in RS, and the interaction people have in real life is fundamentally different. My friends in RS are not the same as my friends in real life - what the friendship is based on is completely different. In real life, it's about trust and the degree to which I can open up and be honest with my friend, in RuneScape it's more of a co-operation - two people sort of egging each other on (instead of talking about how they feel, or what they've been up to all day, how college/work is, or how their families are [etc.], as RL friends do). To a certain extent, the reason I play video games so much is to escape from people, not simply to plunge myself into a second, disconnected social life and compromise my own individual personal time. When people I don't know try talking to me in-game (in public chat, not HYT chat or private chat), I seldom like responding or trying to maintain a conversation. At times I even feel annoyed or anxious about responding. Why should I respond? I play RuneScape to emerge myself into a world completely disconnected from reality where the same limits in real life don't apply. If Jagex released a smaller version of RS which was totally solo-player, I'd play it.

Are they really psychotic? Think your answer carefully. The unfortunate fact of the matter is behind most violent attacks against youths there is always some story leading up to the incident. They're not attacks by psychopaths who have finally snapped, or necessarily the result of single parenting as the common myth may be. Keeping out of fights will almost always see you through childhood without any cause for concern. Hell, I went to the second-worst school in my city, and I never got involved in any attacks.

The police can go out with guns (they don't usually) over here. They do in France as well. I've no problems with a policeman having a gun - they are enforcing the law. Your average citizen, even with training, is not going to use a gun responsibly, or use an alternative method when one is open however, due to the inherent irrationality that surrounds any circumstance they would possibly need to use it in self-defence. I reiterate. We now have tasers, which disable a person long enough so the police CAN respond in time. Where is the need for a handgun now?

And there you have just hit on a basic reason why banning weapons is NOT acceptable. If people do not have the ability to defend themselves, then if anything from a tyrannical goverment to an invasion by a foreign power occurs, then people have no means of resisting that. Errr... what? Have you never heard of a Home Guard? Or even an Army, or a Navy? It's at least three times higher in the UK. (source) So? What relevance does that have to the point I was making? A gun is not necessary for the purpose of self-defence. A taser is just as effective, doesn't kill and cannot effectively be used as an offensive weapon. A constitutional right's existence is justified by its use in protecting a basic human right - the right to self defense. You have a right to self defence. This does not equate to a right to owning a gun. Since you're into making jibes at the UK's crime record, you might want to examine our laws of self defence in closer detail. I know... to think we actually feel taking weapons out of people's hands is a good idea. :roll: What's telling is that hardly anyone in England opposes this idea either. Frankly, your blasé attitude towards these 'harmless weapons' is an insult to the families of these dead people: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/engl ... 523317.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7522826.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/engl ... 518751.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/engl ... 512920.stm

That's not the reason I dislike this art at all. What emotion is being portrayed in this art that couldn't otherwise be achieved through a more conventional medium? This is simply to create a 'shock' value. Likewise, I shouldn't appreciate art simply because it doesn't follow traditional mediums. Art has to have a point. You yourself have admitted you can't understand the point in this art either.

Are you seriously telling me that violent crime is so ridiculously high in America that a gun is absolutely necessary for self-defence 2 million times a year?

It's pointless. I've no problem with her using her own menstrual fluids if that's what she's really into, I just find it evidence that she's obviously a bad artist if she needed to do this to convey what she was trying to express in her paintings. There is nothing special about this art except what it's made out of, and what it's made out of doesn't exactly have a point either. Unless this painting was supposed to get us to challenge our own views surrounding women having periods, it has achieved nothing.

Just another piece of 'modern art'... -.-

Uh oh. Get out the incinerators guys... we've got some donkeys to cull. I suppose by this logic, heterosexual couples who choose not to have children are also 'wrong'? In fact, how about a couple in which one or both members are sterile or incapable of having children?