You're bothered that much by people carrying signs? I think it says more about you than it does them.

Because these people don't have horrible, dangerous values. Right?

The UK Polling Report shows that back in 2006, 78pc of British Muslims polled believed that Kurt Westegaard--the Danish guy who drew pictures of Mohammed--should've been prosecuted, with 68pc thinking those who insult Islam should be prosecuted.

CBS News, also back in 2006, reported that 25pc of British Muslims supported the 7/7 bombers. And Pew has weighed in on the issue, showing that 24pc of British Muslims think suicide bombing is justified, with a further 15pc saying it is sometimes justified. Worryingly, this rises to 35pc and 19pc for Muslims aged 18-29. That's 54pc of 18-29yo Muslims who feel that suicide bombing is at least sometimes justified.

Civitas tell us that 33pc of Muslims believe apostates should be killed, and 28pc want Britain to be an Islamic state. And a different Pew study showed that just 7pc of Muslims in Britain think of themselves as British first, with 81pc explicitly thinking of themselves as Muslim first.

On the front of a good number of disposable lighters, there's a little switch you can use to control the intensity of the flame. Perhaps that little switch was pressed towards the wrong end.

Size of the flame doesn't change when you move the switch.

I've never seen a lighter with a flame that big while it's on max, anyway.

Never got why my friends get 50 different lighters, and why they need to be fancy.

i didn't buy this with the knowledge that it might singe my eyebrows

i just bought it and then WHOOOSH

Quote from: Meta Cognition on April 04, 2015, 12:15:06 PM

Various matriarchal societies around the world are testament to the sheer inefficiency of such an arrangement.

i don't know of any

The Mosuo tribe in China.

And the Khasi people of India, who live in such abject poverty that people go to visit them in order to marvel at the lack of waste.

So are they talking about Arabs or Asians? I remember you guys stopped referring to Arabs as Arabs a while back for some reason.

Asians.

Indian, Pakistani. . . Et cetera.

discuss why this is a good song

And it's true, we did miss the bigger picture: you decided from the outset that most claims against the war are of little concern.

No. No, I didn't. What I said to Challenger just then, and what I've been saying to you throughout this entire thread, is that the U.S. motivations for going into Iraq are something worth discussing and criticising, but they don't outweigh the positive consequences of the war. I'm not sat here thinking "Anything Kupo says is worthless".

Let me put it as simply as I can. The US motivations of the war exist within the sphere of general motivations for the war. And is connected to the general consequences of the war which in turn contains the consequences specifically for the US. My argument is that the negative content in the two US spheres doesn't outweigh the positive content of the spheres taken as a whole. Is that finally clear?

It's also really funny that you're accusing me of taking a narrow view, since most of your arguments against the Iraq War have been about the negative consequences for the US and the UK. You're going to have to forgive me if I actually care about the well-being of the Iraqis and the Kurds. Maybe you feel as if your cons hadn't been addressed, because I was too busy actually enunciating the pros that you wilfully misrepresented:

Let's not underplay these issues here. A much wanted war criminal was put on trial, the Kurdish and Shiite majority were rescued from the threat of renewed genocide from a State apparatus with a proven record of such intentions, people weren't fucking murdered for owning a satellite dish, the Mesopotamian Marshes have recovered, fresh oilfields were found and investments made, a federal state was established until Nouri al-Maliki fucked it up with his sectarianism,  the Kurds were provided their own semblance of self-government and Qaddafi likely wouldn't have handed over his stockpile which allowed us to trace the network and accomplish what is probably the biggest anti-proliferation victory to date.

And you want to compare this with Abu Ghraib and say it wasn't worth it? What the fuck are you smoking? You really want to try and balance something like 3,800 unfortunately and wrongly tortured prisoners with hundreds of thousands of murders, a lot of which with chemical weaponry?

Why are we to blame for the instability clearly exacerbated by fundamentalist militants and their delusionally theocratic and pornographic views of what the world should be like? You need to ask yourself what a post-Saddam Iraq would look like without a coalition present. The Sunni-Shia sectarianism that exploded because of al-Maliki's idiocy? Nothing to temper it. The Jihadists already there would've been active and without proper opposition, even if they weren't funded by Iran. And Iran, by the way, probably would've pushed its own interests harder for the Shi'a majority, maybe even with some involvement from Hezbollah. The Saudis, of course, would have their own vested interests in the Sunni minority--and of course Iraq being a keystone oil state. And then the Turks would be stroking their wet fundamentalist cunts over the prospects Kurdistan afforded them.

Before you acuse anyone of "partisan fuckery", you need to take a long, hard look in the goddamn mirror for either wilfully missing this, or being stupid enough to. Except where you've been explicitly incorrect, I've accepted your cons. Yes, Bush was a moron and a liar and Blair was his lap-dog. And of course you're going to think I've prejudged the arguments when you don't even seem to understand the pro arguments in the first place.

This is what it comes down to, you condensed three paragraphs of important information into:

-Saddam go bye-bye (but for some reason Iraq is the only time this will happen, because non-reasons)
-Look, we found a penny WMDs that did not fit the adminstration's narrative and were consequently covered up, thus denying troops necessary medical treatment
-Oh, and a slight majority the Iraqis feel good about the economy

So, pick your poison. Were you being prejudicially partisan, or just ignorant?

The three of you, really--any respect I had for you died with this thread.

I don't care, you arrogant fuck. If you're really going to let an argument about a war change your perception of a person, then that's your problem not ours. I may be strident, but at least I don't throw my toys out of the pram when I disagree with people.

The Coalition is not to blame for the current state of ISIS.

According to a Dutch firm, which reckons we could meet the world's agricultural needs in a space the size of Holland and with 10pc of current water usage.

A Dutch firm on the cutting edge of indoor agriculture estimates that producing food for the entire world could take place in a space far smaller than the area occupied by Holland, using just 10% of the water needed by traditional farms. The proposal is not without precedent – Japan already has one prototype urban farm that is 100 times more productive than farmers’ fields.

Noting that the vast majority of people will live in cities in the coming decades, PlantLab suggests a solution that involves using existing basements and purpose-built structures for our future food production. This means less energy, space, time and water than conventional methods.

Urban farming in controlled environments lets growers take full advantage of variables like custom lighting, using far-red LED lamps in this case that reduce moisture requirements for plants. Naturally, interior spaces are also free from the uncontrolled variables of weather and pests as well, increasingly reliability.

Automatic systems can optimize yields based on crop types, making indoor farms more effective than greenhouses and far more productive than fields. The ever-increasing efficiency and lowering costs of LEDs mean this method will only become more viable over time.

Vertical agro-factories when?

People who say shit like that are spewing pointless fucking platitudes and don't understand anything about geopolitics.

One rule, and one rule only, of international affairs: might makes right.

Given that meta is a fat fuck smoker, he likes mixing eating shit and smoking shit, hence smoking a twix.

I don't even like twix.

As much as I generally oppose corporal punishment--since it has no psychiatric support--I can't help but feel that a sharp slap across the face once or twice in your entire childhood can be effective at stopping certain kinds of behaviour.

Either way, the parents of the kid were in the wrong pretty much throughout that video.

I'll die, thanks. The point of my life is not to enable the new brand of fascism.