pap

This is the 3rd thread you've started lately on the subject of Islamic extremes/extremists. What's the matter? Didn't get the result you wanted on the other two?

Is this the Shaun of the Dead crew? I know Nick Frost has a role in it, but Attack the Block was written and directed by Joe Cornish ( of Adam and Joe fame ). Did a very good job on the budget, and is now on the radar of quite a few producers as a result.

Why do you keep going on about Muslims, TDD? Do you want to be one?

I have massively mixed feelings about today. I know that a Brighton win helps our cause (and my bet) quite significantly, but equally, I'd like to see Poyet's boys get hammered.

Of drinking along Bevois Valley, yes.

All the people who have been arrested are local. Link Was actually drinking along Bevois Valley on Saturday night too.

This reminds me of the Father Ted episode, and specifically, Craggy Island's controversial showing of the Passion of St Tibulus. One of the patrons leaves when she discovers that the film is subtitled. So your first alternative is to watch a dubbed version. Far worse, imo. You lose half the performance of the actors, plus the suspension of disbelief takes a serious hammering when the English words don't sync with the foreign lip movements. The only other option is to not watch foreign language films. I know it can be a pain in the arse to watch a movie with subtitles. It pretty much demands your complete attention ( you can't multi-task with an iPad, etc ). However, in a time where Hollywood is becoming increasingly risk-averse ( something like 96% of movies released in the last two years were remakes or adaptations ), foreign language films offer a genuine alternative. It'd be a shame to miss out on that for want of a bit of reading.

Brilliant movie back from the days when directors were perfectly happy to do uncomfortable. The date scene at the porn theater was pure genius, giving us a real indication of how far Travis was from mainstream sensibilities. Difficult to watch, though.

Watched Pandorum yesterday. The collective masses on IMDB rate it as 6.8 overall, but I'd give it a 9. The premise involves a two members of a flight team being woken up from hyper-sleep on a long-range spacecraft to address a problem with the ship. In this movie, hypersleep tends to give people short-term amnesia, so our characters are almost as in the dark as we are about their present mission in the early parts of the film. It's a very good narrative device, which keeps you guessing for most of the film (although due to my sci-fi plot detection matrix, I did cotton on to one thing early on). Given that the nature of the film is a mystery, don't really want to spoil it by revealing more - but its a very cool film with a pretty awesome ending. It has my nerd seal of approval.

Ah, the jealous words of a dry fuking fannie!

Not really that nervous. I expect us to achieve promotion, but it is not the end of the world if we miss out. Weirdly enough, the journey we've made over the last 7 years has provided me with a bit of perspective!

What is actually funnier is the way that increased literacy in adult populations has led to a more literal take on the Bible amongst many. Don't think that too many priests would have pushed the literal side of things, but literalism ( the notion that everything in the Bible is the infallible word of God ) is a relatively new phenomenon. 1920s, apparently.

Dinosaurs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrZcztxRquo

That's just the thing though, dune. Curtailing civil liberties makes us less free as a society. I plainly don't speak for everyone, but I would rather die tomorrow defending my beliefs than spending the rest of my life hiding from them. Perhaps that's my recent interest in genealogy talking - the realisation that I am just one part in a long running chain of people stretching back to the dawn of time and stretching on who knows where. With that mindset, you could almost ask what you could possibly achieve in the small window we perceive as everything. I honestly think the best we can do is be ourselves, make a case for what we believe in and let history be the judge. Look at how we perceive the denizens of the Weimar Republic, the pre-cursor to one of the most violent and oppressive regimes the planet has ever seen. We look back and wonder "how did this ever come to pass?". Well, it happened bit by bit - imagined enemies, disproportionate responses, hidden agendas and the repeated message that the "State was right". I look at how we've conducted ourselves in the past decade, and am shocked at the apparent similarities. Civil liberties taken down one at a time and people acquiescing through fear. The correct response to 9/11 would have been to conduct a cultural war, to enumerate the best of the West, to trumpet our record on equality and human rights, to condemn states that didn't hold those values up and to continuously act in ways that reflect the general decent morality that makes up the feelings of inhabitants of Western democracies. I fully accept that after 9/11, greater security would have been something to strive for; yet I look at the costs of waging two wars and wonder whether that money would have been better invested in preventative measures, such as bunging more money to the security services or the general defence infrastructure budget. I then wonder how much security we'd actually need if we could just resolve some problems for good. In the early '90s and the end of the Cold War, it genuinely felt like we had done that. How little we knew. A mere decade after, we're doing exactly the same things we used to criticise our enemies for and we have a new, more nebulous enemy. The weird thing is, this new enemy has demonstrably far less destructive capability than our former foes, yet we've shipped civil liberties left, right and centre to try to defeat them.

That would be fair enough, if we had actually taken all measures. We're cutting corners for convenience and leaving a lot of the actual solutions off the table. We of all people should know that you can't kill a terrorist organisation to death.

Agents are blown with some regularity, dune. We end up pulling them out and using different assets. I've no doubt that there are intelligence assets out there who would not be easily replaced, but should we condone the slow erosion of due process and civil liberties because our intelligence agencies haven't got appropriate cover? Just after the 9/11 attacks, Western leaders were keen to stress that the atrocities would not change the way we live, yet immediately went about changing the way we live, trampling on human rights all the way and stealing tricks from the playbooks of dictatorial regimes. Detention without trial, torture, rendition, pre-emptive invasions and massively increased surveillance. How is that not changing the way we live, exactly? What moral authority do we have left when we've done all of the above and more? If you commit a crime, you have the right to a fair trial and if found guilty based on the evidence, you're punished. I think that's a fair enough system, worth supporting even if it isn't as convenient or expedient as other forms of retributive action.

You didn't get the wrong SWF, but I'd suggest you did leave the wrong response! Due process purely a socialist ideal, is it?

Irrespective of the crime's original locum, the fallout from that day has lasted over a decade and has involved many Western states, many of them giving up sons and daughters supposedly in pursuit of justice. 9/11 became an international concern the moment that the US pulled everyone else into their respective war efforts. To claim it's an internal matter when the fallout has involved so many is a bit simplistic, imo. Not only that, but it violates principles that we are supposed to hold, such as openness and transparency. People talk about this guy not getting a fair trial in a public US court. They're probably right. But I doubt that a closed military court with no publicity will guarantee justice either. What is especially amusing/disturbing is that the US went to great lengths to avoid calling captured Al-Qaeda operatives prisoners of war, largely so that they could ignore the Geneva convention. Seems weird that they are using a military court to prosecute a non-military defendant.

My view is that anyone suspected of crimes like this should be put up before the International Courts. Is there any good reason why this should not be?

Tongue slightly in cheek, but isn't there an important lesson that kids get out of corporal punishment? Such as "if you step too far over the line, you are likely to get a slap". That's a lesson for general life, isn't it? I wonder how people that are bereft of this valuable lesson fare in day-to-day situations. 'Did you hear about poor James? A local thug accosted him saying that he was going to "knock his f**king jaw off". James reasoned with the boy and explained that it was an anatomical improbability! How we laughed on the way to the maxilliofacial ward!"

Some good views on this, and I can sympathise with many of them. I think both of our kids have been slapped on a couple of occasions during their lives. Failure of imagination on our part? Possibly. But when a kid is screaming its head off for no good or discernible reason, or has just decided to be an unholy fecker for the day, there is little reasoning with them. It's rare, but it does happen. That's why I've got some sympathy with Turkish's view. Both our kids know that there are limits to what they can get away with, and that their parents become considerably less friendly when that happens. So I think it does establish a hard boundary, and speaking for myself, the fear of getting caned at school probably did keep me in line.

The Guardian is running a piece today which indicates that pupil behaviour has been worse since the end of caning. In terms of our own child-rearing, we've played the corporal punishment trick very rarely. The kids are at ages now where we'll probably never do it again. The practice was still lingering about when I was at Bassett Green, and every kid in the school knew it could be a consequence for bad behaviour. The trick was not getting caught for bad behaviour, and the easiest way to do that was not act like a teat. Nowadays, discipline is either detention, exclusion or punitive measures for the parents. I'd argue that detention and exclusion aren't much of a deterrent to a determined delinquent. Is the correlation between the abolition of corporal punishment and increasingly unruly kids linked? What about other factors, such as decreased family time and/or more time spent on anti-social activities? Are we perhaps guilty of putting our kids on a pedestal or treating them too much like friends? Or is it simply the case that we abolished corporal punishment without really having a good alternative? Interested in all views here, but especially interested in hearing from the teachers.

Yeah, they're a good job. Mine is literally our box room and also has assorted crap from around the house in it, so it's not ace for visitors - although the dog spends a lot of her time here. My least favourite time was when the dog did a "dirty protest". Laminate flooring, so no lasting mess. Still, an afternoon of bleaching and cleaning on my knees - while the dog looked on with an amused expression on her face.

As the only male in the house, I tend to get spoiled by the girls. For starters, I have a man cave, locally referred to as the Fortress of Solitude. I hide up here whenever they are watching reality shows and the like. It is equipped with numerous pieces of tech, 2 LED screens, 1 LCD screen and most importantly, a beer fridge. Most of my bloke stuff is geeky stuff.

Football has been almost synonymous with men since it started, and when I was growing up, the only girls who would join in with a game were the out-and-out tomboys. I think that's changing now, though. Not only are we getting more female teams, but girls are also being encouraged to play for school teams, etc. I know Turkish is having a bit of a laugh with the Dream Team references, but I think about 24 and its depiction of Dennis Haysbert as a black President. Haysbert claims that his role paved the way for general public acceptance of a black President - a view I share some sympathy with. Ultimately, the more women we see in football, the less weird it will become. The game tends to drag its heels on equality. There are still no gay footballers, apparently - and it was only 30 years ago that bananas were being hurled onto the terraces at black players.