On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 21:34:24 -0700
Nobody wrote:
Anyone "of colour" will confirm the reality of life. And no, no,

Yes , its all nasty white people against poor people "of colour" (whatever
the **** that means - if I get a tan am I a person of colour?). I suppose
it must have been evil whites who forced Idi Amin to expell all indians from
uganda so we could give them asylum in the UK. For example. I could give
you a dozen others if you're interested in reality rather than the orthodox
right-on view of the world.

B2003

On 2011\08\26 20:51, Arthur Figgis wrote:

I suspect most of the Mail and Guardian journalists could switch papers
and re-slant their stories to suit the different audience with ease.

Melanie Phillips did just such a switch, although switching from left to
right with increasing age is probably normal, as Churchill suggested.

On Sat, 27 Aug 2011 17:03:47 +0100
Basil Jet wrote:
On 2011\08\26 20:51, Arthur Figgis wrote:

I suspect most of the Mail and Guardian journalists could switch papers
and re-slant their stories to suit the different audience with ease.

Melanie Phillips did just such a switch, although switching from left to
right with increasing age is probably normal, as Churchill suggested.

Not surprising really. The older you get the more you see how the world
really works and gain a better understanding of human nature and peoples real
motivations. Idealism rarely survives a long term encounter with life.

B2003

On 2011\08\27 17:27, d wrote:
On Sat, 27 Aug 2011 17:03:47 +0100
Basil wrote:
On 2011\08\26 20:51, Arthur Figgis wrote:

I suspect most of the Mail and Guardian journalists could switch papers
and re-slant their stories to suit the different audience with ease.

Melanie Phillips did just such a switch, although switching from left to
right with increasing age is probably normal, as Churchill suggested.

Not surprising really. The older you get the more you see how the world
really works and gain a better understanding of human nature and peoples real
motivations. Idealism rarely survives a long term encounter with life.

I think it has more to do with the fact that old'uns tend to have, while
young'uns tend to have not. Smash the system loses its appeal as soon as
you become the system.

Once upon a time, d wrote:
On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:56:50 +0100
The Real Doctor wrote:
On 26/08/11 11:01, d wrote:
On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 02:31:19 -0700 (PDT)
wrote:
But, why, I ask was the guys horrible death worse because he was
homosexual? Would you or I not have felt the blows just as much?

For some people it seems that suffering for what you are is a worse
fate than
suffering for what you have. Presumably because you can change the latter
but not the former. Personally I think its a just a convenient soapbox for
self styled activists (ie people who make a lot of noise) who get
off on self
righteous indignation to jump up and down and bang their drum.

If Mr Shepherd had been killed by a couple of thugs who didn't like him,
or his clothes, that would have been dreadful but individual. By killing
him for what he was, they were also threatening other gay men, and it's
that threat which merited further punishment.

So if they'd killed him because they didn't like say his blue shirt then
they were threatening everyone who wore blue shirts? Do me a fscking favour.

Not so long ago a young woman was savagely beaten to death by a mob in a
park in Lancashire, entirely because of what she was wearing - she was a
Goth. The SOPHIE campaign was the result. Attacks on people for their
dress sense are not unknown, and an attack on someone who identifies
themselves as belonging to any given group does put others of the same
group in fear.

Suppose a serial killer started to kill people, and it was eventually
proven that the only common link between the murders was that all the
victims had been active posters on uk.railway. Wouldn't you find that a
little bit alarming, assuming you'd not yet been one of the victims and
the killer was still at large? I certainly would.

--
- The Iron Jelloid

Charles Ellson wrote

a Union that has State Churches, to wit the Episcopalians in England
and Northern Ireland, and the Presbyterians in Scotland.

There is no state church in Scotland and the Church of Ireland was
disestablished in 1869.

What's your reasoning here ?

The Church of Scotland is just as "by law established" as the Church of
England if more independent inasmuch as they won't let parliament mess
with their doctrine.

--
Mike D

Once upon a time, 1506 wrote:

Moreover terrorism is an act of war which demands a swift, firm,
military response. Describing it as a crime and involving the courts
is a big mistake. IMHO we have spent the past ten years being far too
soft in this regard.

How on earth do you take decisive military action against a terrorist
group? By their very nature they are covert, hidden in ordinary
populations. If decisive action was easy then the US wouldn't have
spent most of the last 10 years hunting Osama Bin Laden, they'd just
have bombed his headquarters. The problem was they didn't know where he
was, and bombing other countries at random tend to make the people doing
it unpopular.

Do you really think the correct British response to the terrorist
atrocities of the IRA would have been to start carpet-bombing Dublin? Or
killing every living thing in Northern Ireland with nuclear weapons,
just to be sure we got the terrorists? What about ones who lived in the
Republic, or should we have annihilated everyone there too?

"Retire to the mothership and nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to
be sure" doesn't really work unless you actually want to commit
genocide.

--
- The Iron Jelloid

Once upon a time, 1506 wrote:
On Aug 26, 5:03*am, The Real Doctor wrote:
On 26/08/11 12:44, 1506 wrote:

Before I do killfile you, Are you, or have you ever been a homosexual?

Why would that matter?

It would go some way to explaining the axe you are grinding.

You think only gay people are bothered about gay rights? In that case
you're mistaken, a great many heterosexual and asexual people also care
deeply about freedom, equality, and justice for all. You don't have to
be black to know that apartheid was evil, you don't have to be Christian
to know that having people thrown to lions or set on fire because they
worship a different god from you is evil, you don't have to be Jewish to
know that the Holocaust was evil[1], and you don't have to be gay to
realise that discriminating against people on the basis of their
sexuality is also evil.

People are people, and come in many different flavours. As long as
no-one is forcing themselves on others against their will, what does it
matter who they fall in love with, or marry, or set up home with?

[1] Note this is a legitimate point in this particular debate, therefore
Goodwin's law does not apply.

--
- The Iron Jelloid

Once upon a time, 1506 wrote:
On Aug 26, 5:26*am, The Real Doctor wrote:
On 26/08/11 13:15, 1506 wrote:

On Aug 26, 5:03 am, The Real *wrote:
On 26/08/11 12:44, 1506 wrote:

Before I do killfile you, Are you, or have you ever been a homosexual?

Why would that matter?

It would go some way to explaining the axe you are grinding.

Ah, you think that only gay people would care about gay people being
tortured to death. Well, that certainly fits with the rest of your
contributions to this thread.

Who is torturing bright and cheerful people to death?

Language changes. We've had to learn to put up with abominations like
burglarize and 'train station', so I'm afraid you'll have to accept that
"gay" stopped having "bright and cheerful" as its primary meaning almost
half a century ago. Check any major dictionary and you'll find the
homosexual (esp male homosexual) is now the main usage of the word in
the English language. Good manners also behoves us to refer to people
and groups of people as they prefer to be addressed, and most gay people
seem to prefer the word gay to the word homosexual, possibly because gay
is seen as encompassing the whole lifestyle, culture, and romantic side
of the gay experience, whereas homosexual is really a technical
definition of a particular set of sexual behaviour. A gay couple can
walk hand in hand without it meaning anything more than saying "I love
you" to each other. Doesn't have to be about sex.

--
- The Iron Jelloid

Once upon a time, Free Lunch wrote:
On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 05:43:50 -0700 (PDT), 1506 wrote
in misc.transport.urban-transit:

On Aug 26, 5:26*am, The Real Doctor wrote:
On 26/08/11 13:15, 1506 wrote:

On Aug 26, 5:03 am, The Real *wrote:
On 26/08/11 12:44, 1506 wrote:

Before I do killfile you, Are you, or have you ever been a homosexual?

Why would that matter?

It would go some way to explaining the axe you are grinding.

Ah, you think that only gay people would care about gay people being
tortured to death. Well, that certainly fits with the rest of your
contributions to this thread.

Who is torturing bright and cheerful people to death?

Europop singers?

Isn't that impossibly bright and cheerful people attempting to torture
the rest of us to death (or possibly insanity) through music?

--
- The Iron Jelloid