Rayvin

Mother of God is a good one. As for the Arsenal video, it's beyond shameful I do kind of like AFTV though. You get the feeling they're all taking themselves pretty seriously as well

Is this your new favourite expression

Here's where the knives will come out though...

The cringe of this. What a fuckwit...

Holy hell... US Diplomacy is fucking compelling viewing at the moment!

Yeah but you're arguing on two different philosophical understandings now. Adios believes there is no free will - with good logical basis IMO - and that what happened to Ranger is incontrovertible and couldn't have happened any other way. You believe there is free will, and that Ranger has failed to take his opportunities. So you can't argue the specific case any more; to make any progress you'd have to argue the fundamental understanding of whether or not free will exists. Deep huh?

Seems to be being driven by UKIP though...?

I've generally found that people are uncomfortable with the point because they like to feel they are in control of their own lives - so I've generally been told that 'we simply do' have free will, rather than had it demonstrated. But agreed, decent counter arguments are in short supply. I could go on at some length about this as I've thought about it in depth, but it'll just trigger eye-rolling from everyone else and I'm sure greater minds than ours have reflected on this already

I have concluded this also. You can extrapolate that point to cover 'everything' though, which in effect means there is no free will whatsoever, and that, arguably, everything is predetermined. Nice bit of philosophy

A compassionate point which has at the very least given me pause. Fish makes a solid follow up point as well though. At what point does the individual become responsible for his own life?

LGBT's aren't one of mine, sorry. There really is plenty for you all to run at without making stuff up

FFS fine, I'll shut up.

Given that Pandora's Box is open on Islamic Extremism (and I agree with you on why we are targetted), it does seem that the solution has to be pragmatic rather than perhaps balanced. While very very few of us ever will be killed by terrorism, it's an absolutely toxic issue in society that hurts everyone, including Muslims. The only 'strategy' I can see for dealing with it is to eliminate Islam through a battle of ideologies. But this involves just enduring the terrorism and hoping we can stop it pre-emptively. Maybe we can infect Islam with identity politics and have them turn on each other (as we have with other groups) but who knows. Either way, just tolerating it certainly won't be popular.

Just needs time though. Eventually people will have to conclude that they can't, based on the fact that they haven't.

Are you suggesting that the 4 reviewers collude with the author, whose name they don't know at the time of reviewing? They also don't know who each other are, and moreover know nothing about the project until I ask them. How could it be a conspiracy? You'd have to have literally every academic in the world connected to this. There are thousands of them per discipline these days, 10s of thousands in some.

For me the issue is whether or not any other club would have gone anywhere near that amount. It's all well and good saying it makes sense but if no one else would have paid more than half that, then they've overpaid.

Congrats to her mate! Tough job but I'd imagine very rewarding.

We publish across all areas so it will cover stuff in yours along with plenty unrelated to this. I assume the material is well researched and makes solid conclusions based on evidence provided, if the 4 independent reviewers (who are otherwise entirely unconnected to the project, and each other) inform me of this.

I don't actually make academic judgements, I just assign the manuscripts to other people and then harass them until they return the stuff So I don't know what they look at, but I do know that the process isn't an active conspiracy by academics. It can't be if a layman like me is involved in deciding who reviews what.

But I assign reviewers to manuscripts myself, based on the expertise in particular academic areas - I literally make these decisions myself. So unless I'm in on the conspiracy too, we're back to everyone just going along with each other because they're too stupid to actually work anything out.

They use peer review. I often send manuscripts to random academics across the world to have them judge it.

I think that's the same as what I was saying mind. Not quite as on the nose, but it's something that is perhaps just an extreme version of what many other people do. See also Brexit.

I'm not the one who said you were mentally ill. That was Renton (I think). I've not said anything to you aside from trying to understand why you think the way you do. I don't think you're mentally ill.

Yeah, they're talking as if it's a network they're dealing with. I think the big risk with a network is that if they get close to these people, desperation will kick in and we might see some more attacks flushed to the surface.

The real one for me that has no firm answer from Wolfy is why anyone would have gone to the bother of arranging all of this 'cover up'. He's said before that people don't deviate from the official line because they're afraid of stepping out of received wisdom, which is consistent with his overall view about his outlook versus everyone else's. Wolfy absolutely does believe that he is intellectually superior to most people, in that he can 'see the world for what it is'. The proof and evidence doesn't come into it, because to accept those, he would have to accept the possibility of other people's intellects outdoing his own. That'd be right, wouldn't it Wolfy? I say this not to bait you, it's literally because this simply must be true.