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I sure do. We had a thread here about "mercenaries" (cant remember its title) a few months back. I was conscripted and said no, and had some negative consenquences because of it. Although not very serious. It is possible.

You are right. They were victims themselves. Just like the soldiers who fight in Irak today are in some sense poor souls, that may pay with their lives for something they probably don't believe in. But at the same time, without these farmhands, the whole thing would not have happened. In fact...

The european war was hardly the only war ever fought. It is difficult to see why you keep on ignoring this context. It is easy to use selective quotes. The substantive issues about colonialism remain.

No, I am not agreeing with this. I am not trying to establish this equivalence. I am trying to argue that poppy-wearing is a pretty bad whitewash of history, and that if one comemorates one's dead soldiers, one should not forget why they were fought, and what they did. As I said before I...

I do think that this was a prelude to the attack on the USSR. I do believe that if Stalin or somebody like him had not been in power, that attack would not have happened. I also do believe that Stalin would have attacked Germany in the mid or late 1940s even if Germany had been a totally...

I disapprove of the term "Game" in this context. It is not a game, it was serious. I am not claiming that "Germany's purely defensive reaction", I am claiming that a very real fear of stalinist Soviet Union played a major role in the creation of the european WWII. I very much agree that...

I agree with this. As I said, I disapprove of Nazi policies. But I find it difficult not to see how their judgement came about that Stalin was a grave threat that needed to be fought. Rational is maybe a very bad choice of words. I find your "limited options" better. I disapprove how the war...

That worked really well for preventing WWI ...

Given the resurgence of the live band and the importance of concerts (a consequence of the structural changes in the music business), might we not see the reappearance of black bands?

You did not answer my question. Why? I very much do see the rationale for UK and US involvement in these wars. I'm not saying this is all irrational. On the contrary, it was all totally rational, but it was a prisoner's dilemma kind of situation, where each actor acted rationally, leading to a...

It is my impression that street violence has been declining for a while now on average. But there are always conflicting reports.

Whoops indeed. I'm sorry. Corrected.!

No I am saying that I find it difficult to see what to do against the stalinist threat other than going on the attack first. If Hitler and all NSDAP members had committed suicide in 1937, and a democratic quacker/ghandian government had succeeded them, the Stalinist threat had still been there...

I said Anglo-Saxon, not white. I don't think poppy-wearers explicitly see themselves that way. It's more implicit in the position they take, maybe often against their will. And the UK -- qua empire -- was for all practical purposes a tyranny too. Why is that so hard to acknowledge? The US had...

How do you know that kids carry guns as a matter of course now? Do you do stop and search? I'm genuinely interested. I think it is possible that a certain kind of youth is more violent than they would have been 20 years ago. But I am not sure.

I dont think that at all. At that time the situation was already too screwed. I do think that the Nazi's foreign policy is a fairly predicatble response to the (1) the large number of german deaths in WWI, (2) allied colonialism and, most urgently (3) the soviet union's expected attack attack...

What kind of argument is this? Others were just as bad, so whatever we do is OK? Quaker communities and other pacifists were opposed to colonial wars. So alternatives existed. In any case, one cannot escape one's time. While I am totally disapproving of the current Irak war, I am nevertheless...

Me and my mates all got knifes when we were 16. We felt well hard. It's just part of male coming-of-age: you are still living at home, wanking all day, and being asked by mum to do the dishes, but with your mates, you are pimp daddy with lots of cash, bitches and fast cars. We were taught by...

Isn't it the case that less authoritarian education generally leads to less violent children? I doubt that children these days are more violent than say 100 years ago, when smacking was still commonplace. I'm sure this has been thoroughly investigated.

I know. So what? The part of the population that was allowed to vote did generally so for parties that accepted the Empire, hence the voting population voted for Anglo-Saxon supremacy. This misses the point in several dimensions. As I said before, there were other options: the UK as the...