magekillr

All you did was say that you believe in non-violence and believe that examples are irrelevant. In fact, they are quite relevant, as that just might happen. You gave no reason for believing what you do. Why would I need a reason? How obvious is it that I do not condone violence to be pressed with violent "solutions". No, it's called logical reasoning. How so? If somebody's robbing me - and it's happened - there are a variety of techniques, schema's, what have you, that, through the application of your human reason, you can use to understand being robbed with compassion. I know this is all probably way over your head - people who think in terms of shooting intruders to their homes being a really hot idea tend to sneer at the mention of compassion as connected to political or legal discourse. Somebody jacks my bike, I can either go 'That's a shame. What a miserable life that person must be leading, and how much better off I am. Poor bastard obviously needed that bike more than I did, even if just to get more drugs. What a damn shame.' or I can choose to get afflicted, to slay, to lash out, to brood on my victimization, etc. etc.

7 on your quiz...kinda bad quiz though. The one I posted is a little better: http://www.politicalcompass.org/

I addressed that earlier. It was my second post here.

People use objects and possessions as definitions of their personalities (corporations used a lot of Freudian theories to develop ways to market the changing of a buy-what-you-need into a buy-what-you-want culture) therefore they really don't have a "use", as they see it, for introspection. As a result, there's not much under all of the materialistic "personality"... so in cases where there is no access to possessions, or the means to possessions, they are more willing to let the animalistic urges control them into doing naughty, naughty things. Not only that, but we are also raised from a very early age to assign some sort of value, usually arbitrary, to everything we see. with this mindset, it's easier to have 'conditional compassion' where it becomes a cost/profit evaluation of who we are willing to be compassionate towards. And, after all, is killing to keep a possession that much different than killing to take one?

How could you defend your family with a sword? Someone with a handgun is threatening to shoot you, you throw it at them? You believe different than us, apparently. The typical American would not be able to stand their spouse being attacked, whereas it appears you're not sure whether you'd care or not. I personally would fight with anything if I or my family/friends were under attack - and have. I completely believe in self-defence personally, and it appears that the Supreme Court does as well. EDIT: That's quite a bad graph, Sniper. I can't really distinguish the words or lines. Yes, that's it. Boil down a complex argument to a single frame of interpretation you can understand within your existing paradigm, without allowing any of the substance of the argument to interface with your consciousness in any way, then heap scorn on this 'handle' on the argument with that single sentence and declare victory! The Michael Giliberto tactic. How can you not see the criminal, at the very least IN PART, as a victim of society? wtf? do you think that some people are just born evil? I would also add that people find it hard to understand others when they don't make any attempts to understand themselves. Their strengths, their weaknesses, etc. It makes for a sore lack of those four letter words "Empathy" and "Compassion". A lot of it has to do with that "Us Vs. Them" mentality that America has...

Legitimate self-defense? In principle I believe in complete non-violence. If somebody attacked my spouse, would I be able to stand it? I don't know. But I think that until we at least aspire to such courage our society will not really improve. I also think that example is bandied around because it's emotion-provoking but not actually particularly relevant. The statistics on this one speak for themselves vis-a-vis guns - you could probably protect your people better, and with less risk to your family, with a sword.

There goes the [bleep]ing neighbourhood. Thanks, SC. God, I can't BELIEVE the savagery of the American populace - it's grotesque how people want to enshrine their right to be afraid, their desire to bully, to harm, to 'even the scales' with firearms, masking these insecurities under a pathetic ward of 'protecting my family/self/business/home'. What on earth gives you a right to ownership which supercedes another person's right to be alive? This attachment-to-everything is insane. If you have to do that to protect your property I'd say that you don't own it, it owns you. My problem is with the assumption of a person's moral supremacy on one's 'own' property, when protecting one's 'own' tribe. If ethics can't supersede the importance of the petty, tiny fiefdoms into which we carve the world for ourselves, how likely are you to really be able to be happy in a prison you build to keep yourself in and the world out? I mean, really it's a question of how you deal with ethical affronts to your own psychological make up. Do you lash out? Do you plot revenge? Do you endeavour to understand? I understand that the delineation of public and private space is monolithic in the western mind, but that doesn't make it the only way to view space or the right way to view space.

When the radiation poisoning is so minimal that it doesn't affect the health, then yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. How am I being self-centered around American humans when Americans are paling in comparison to Canada, France, and Germany (soon, if not already, Japan) to their nuclear power use? Why not allow Canada to sell plots of land far up north? Canada recycles a lot of its waste, and digs big holes up north, throws it in, and leaves it alone. Bastardized way of saying it, but it's basically what they do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield This absorbs all of the radiation that could possibly leak out of the containments made of concrete (or as I said, future materials which are taking off...) No chances of earth quakes, water can't seep into masses of bedrock of that capacity, and Canada receives some funds to invest in other alternative energies or other thing to help their citizens. This doesn't solve the energy crisis, but Nuclear Power is going to have to be pressed until we find better alternatives...

As far as the problems of disposal go, I completely understand what you're saying. I would suggest that we build up more non-combustion space planes and, breaking at least one international treaty, throw the used fuel into the sun. But that's just me being bat[cabbage] insane and I'm not exactly fond of violating treaties. The more reasonable thing to say is this: just as we can build isotopes and [Caution: Jagex Rule Violation]tics that take hundreds of millenia to degrade, we can build wildly better storage materials than concrete. I think our next generation of high-performance materials--synthetic ceramics, buckyball plastics, and fluid cesium--would be strong, flexible, and tight enough to protect any hypothetical Yucca Mountain from earthquake and water erosion. If you just dropped a brick of uranium into an aquifer, that in itself wouldn't do anything. First, water is a way to CONTAIN radiation. H2O is unique in that it doesn't become radioactive the neutrinos emitted by nuclear fuel. Second, uranium is a big, heavy metal, and it won't turn into a radioactive kool-aid just by splashing it with water. That said, if there's a bunch of junk floating in the water, it can get irradiated. If that junk is put into the drinking water without a filter (an incredibly stupid move, by the way), then someone could swallow some radioactive bark or whatever. But you know what? That's not that bad, either. Ingestion is much, much better than inhalation or injection.Unless you're machining (cutting down, grinding) uranium or plutonium without a mask, you have nothing to worry about. How much would need to get into an aquifer to kill everyone drinking from it? I'd say that no amount can do that. Even if you dump several tons of powderized high-enrichment urnanium, most of the people who drink that water would pass it out of their system before they increased their risk for cancer enough to notice...

Medically or recreational? Recreational, medical is already legal there. Nevada and Colorado are two other states, however, theirs keep getting rejected by like 60-40 margins.

What are you talking about? I'd end up on the news to try and begin change from the group up by talking to state politicians rather than national ones? Well maybe I would, but not for the reasons you're implying. I'm saying no state, at the moment would be crazy enough to legalize the stuff. There just that big problem of all the people that want to smoke the stuff move into that state. Which leads to the need of more public housing, police officers, any kind of building really. That city would have higher levels of poverty, homeless people, the list goes on. You can't just have one state. I said nothing of the sort as far as legalizing. I said decriminalizing and medicinal. Medical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Map- ... a-laws.png Decriminalized for illicit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Map- ... -laws2.svg No state is crazy enough huh? Even if you want to talk about full blown legalization, Alaska is getting close. It's been getting shot down by mid-50s and early 60's votes...so +5-10 more votes for legalization and it'll be legal there.

What are you talking about? I'd end up on the news to try and begin change from the group up by talking to state politicians rather than national ones? Well maybe I would, but not for the reasons you're implying. I'm saying you need to broaden the scope of larger ideas in general rather than tackling this as one issue and one issue alone. It won't get you anywhere. You're forgetting who owns this country: corporations.

An issue like this cannot be dealt with as a "single-issue". You need to revolutionize the whole way we, as a people, deal with governance in general. I mean it's great that this issue is so important to some people, and it should be important to all, but there are priorities that need to be in order. Look at the way we need to deal with energy costs: get rid of our need for oil. Until there is not a need for it, the costs will never go down. The same can be said about this...you need to reduce arrests and take away the amount of money brought in from throwing people in jail to get things done. Change happens from the ground up, not the top down. It's easier, and healthier, to broaden the scopes of people's eyes through a set of ideas and not one single issue. This will gain no traction until then. Furthermore, rather than going after the National Government (for Americans), why not hit your state governments? As states start decriminalizing (there's quite a few now, like 10 or so), others will follow. Set the standard, be the example...

It should be a given that the energy strategy of the future will be a combination of many clean resources. I say that alongside solar, wind, and hydrogen, nuclear deserves a slot There are four amazing advantages to nuclear power: efficiency, expense, safety, and security. Many reactors run on a low, and I mean looow, level of enrichment in its uranium: less than 20%. That means that it burns the very cheapest fuel. I know of reactors that after 30+ years they have only used one gram of Uranium. That's the amount of metal in a paperclip! And this isn't due to any hocus-pocus: light water reactors in general generate waste at a level some three to four orders of magnitude less than fossil fuels. New reactor designs, such as the two breeder reactors used in France, actually make more fuel as they run. Nuclear power is also incredibly safe. Unbelievably safe, really. Lots of people cite Chernobyl as the only evidence necessary to close the case on nuclear energy. The story of this Soviet-built nightmare has nothing to do with the American power industry. Condemning American plants based on Russian performance is like accusing Rocky of using steroids because we saw Draco get those shots (no Stalone jokes, please). The only American nuclear accident worth has been Three Mile Island, which vented steam and hydrogen into the air for a matter of seconds. The scientific community is in a consensus that the valve error in that plant had no, meaning 0%, negative impact on the community. That's because in any light water reactor--the American style of power plant--water is both the moderator and the coolant. That means that the reactor can't even run if it's not protected from meltdown: it's not physically possible. The threat that you saw on 24 doesn't even make sense in the real world: it's like threatening to break down a wall with a pair of scissors. And anyone who's worried about those ominous cooling towers should know that those only exist to cool down water. You may be surprised to know that living near a nuclear power plant gives you about 1/10th of the amount or radiation of living near a coal power plant (due to the uranium in coal) and about 1/1000th the amount of radiation of living in a brick house (due to the uranium in clay). I'll repeat that again, because it sounded vaguely important: a brick house is much more radioactive than a nuclear power plant. Finally, I'd like to tell you that I've looked into terrorist threats to a nuclear power plant. I'll tell you this: it's hopeless. Nuclear power plants have backup safety systems miles away from the plant, are mostly buried below the level of the water table (even more so in the case of breeder reactors), and are almost always very distant from population centers. No terrorist could fly a plane into any one building to knock out even one part of a plant. It would take at least half a dozen plane crashes to throw the whole plant onto backup systems. And any terrorist looking to steal uranium by smashing through yard after yard of steel-reinforced concrete and draining an entire water system to get to the fuel pile would be disappointed to get a hold of an extremely heavy brick of very hard silver metal. It would take them many years with very advanced, expensive machinery to get that metal into a form they could use in a bomb, dirty or nuclear. And beside that, radioactive material (like cesium) that poses a greater risk for dirty bombs can be found in hospitals and medical waste facilities. We know that terrorists have looked into attacking nuclear power plants because we found schematics and blueprints in Afghanistan. The terrorist leaders said they gave up on those plans because an attack is practically impossible. On the other hand, we also know that 99.8% of France's power comes safely and cheaply from its 59 nuclear reactors. Do we have to be beaten by France in yet another rubric?

Look I'm all for decriminalization and yes I think it's important, but right now we need priorities. Here's a thought: quit buying drugs on street corners, it's not rocket science. Yes drugs are illegal, yes that pisses me off, but the law's the law, and you'd better believe that if I choose to indulge, I will make every effort to lessen the risk that I'll be caught. Buying drugs in public, smoking drugs in public, carrying drugs on your person and in your car necessarily. If people would quit being stupid, they'd quit being arrested. If drug arrests would go down, perhaps there could be more of a push for decriminalization? So long as it's a money maker though, it's not likely to happen. I am taking a progressive approach here while many others seem to be more reactionary in tone. Many want to change drug laws because they affect people, whereas I would rather affect drug laws by lessening the opportunity to be prosecuted for drug crimes. Even if drugs are decriminalized, selling them on street corners will still be illegal, so why not stop buying and selling drugs on street corners? Furthermore, knowing the consequences and risk of such actions and yet still going about it in a risky fashion makes you stupid and somewhat deserving of certain consequences. (you as in everyone in general). I'm not writing off prohibition, nor denying it is a big issue. If you'll note my post is merely on the unbankability of those ideas with the current governmental/state schema, and how that's unlikely to change in the current ideological climate of the government, and so since we're mostly preaching to the converted when we talk of decriminalization why shouldn't we expend our energy, since we're talking to like-minded people anyway, in attempting to broaden their horizons vis-a-vis socialism, improving the structure of the government itself and the ways we relate to it, improving the very way we conduct our lives, the wisdom of compassion, etc., and how these broader currents of thought, if nurtured, would be more likely to bring about the decriminalization we'd all like to see than if we wasted out time lobbying for decriminalization as an 'issue' like any other? You frequently have to work on ideological change, as I see it, to really get anything done - especially on 'issues' so insanely polarizing as this. As I see it, the prohibition thing is the result of one of the greatest mind [bleep]s ever perpetrated in the history of thought. Undo all that mind [bleep]ing? The very IDEA of drugs in the collective and subjective unconscious of everyone, user or no, is fundamentally shaped by this mind [bleep], especially in the West. Undo that as a single-issue crusader, direction-less, mindless, zealous, blind? I say no thank you to that, sir. You seem to write as one fundamentally satisfied with our current systems of governance and our current social organization, while I cannot lay claim to that. There's that stigma, that dogma, that taboo on drugs. It needs to be dealt with in a progressive way, not reactionary. My 2 cents.

This is the bit I thought of when I first heard the news. It was added today too, so I guess others had my thoughts.

Why is everyone saying "Rest in Peace"? He would hate that [cabbage]. He's dead and gone. Miss him, remember him, but don't tell him to rest in peace or say that he's in a better place. Give the man the respect he would have wanted lol. Furthermore, we shouldn't bury him either. Remember, cemeteries and golf courses waste so much land in America ^_^

He and Bill Clinton were my heroes. George, I always wanted to see you live and I was never given the opportunity. I even said "Man I gotta see him before he dies...", and I never did :(. By far the best comedian who ever lived, who had no fear of prosecution from the FCC, who told it like it was, and who was always pissed off at Airport Security. I'll miss you sir, and thanks to you I always have a funny video or bit to play in response to anyone's comments anywhere. Well, I guess you'll know if there is a God now buddy ;)

Kashmir: Led Zeppelin. Not the first song I heard by them, but it's definitely what got me into them and eventually making them my favorite band.

The McBush reference was me... the stuff in the //......// was the article.

Can we stop talking about opening it up now? Onto Hydrogen: are you people nuts? Why would we use something as inefficient as hydrogen? hydrogen is always bonded to something, and breaking those bonds requires an enormous amount of energy. So until you suggest where to get hydrogen, we're stuck. I say we go to Nuclear and pure electric cars until solar and hydro and other areas are better. France has the right idea...

Really? The war cost 9 trillion dollars? The debt was like 6 trillion before he took office. But still he should have vetoed a few more things. Al Gore would have spent way more than that even if he didn't go to war which he might have and we probably would have had another terrorist attack. Nope. I never said the war cost 9 trillion, I just said we wouldn't be 9 trillion in debt. Don't try and twist my words into saying something I did not. Oh, and don't let that number continue to creep up to 6, it was 5.6-5.7. Well we have terrorist attacks on a regular basis over there with suicide bombers, and England had a terrorist attack after our occupation. Please, it's not helping our safety. Back on topic now :-w

Well for one thing, if Al Gore were President we wouldn't be in 9 trillion in debt from the war, and 4,000 people wouldn't be dead. :roll:

Sorry, Tim doesn't do that. He plays no favorites.

20 on August 19th.