Search results

Right, I think we should have a talk about this and the threads about Ukraine are not the right place for it. What comes up in all such debates, repeatedly, is a set of arguments which could be summarized as follows (I'll be as objective as I can): Now, what I want to do in this thread is...

House rules: 1) Maintain common sense; 2) Argue in good faith; 3) No Kremlin propaganda; 4) Be civil. Issues to be discussed: a) Will Russia invade? b) Will the election in May take place? c) Will the West get its act together, finally? c) Is there a light at the end of the tunnel, or is the...

... for discussing the latest development in what is probably the biggest and most serious crisis between Russia and the West, as well as one of the major upheavals in a post-Soviet country since 1989. Stay on topic!

Okay, those of you interested in a bit less trollsome discussion about the events in Ukraine, please come here. Let's discuss what has happened, why, and what is going to happen next. No debate about "fascism" and especially ANY MENTION OF POLAND except in the context of recent events is...

So I read a recent article on BBC. Am I understanding it correctly that we're approaching what many have suspected before, i.e. that some of the typically "European" physical traits such as fair skin (and generally lower levels of pigmentation, incl. hair and eyes), sometimes stockier and...

A repost from off-topic Altered Maps thread. what are these images showing? It's from the Medieval America site. The author is (was) trying to make a 'believable' world in which technology regressed back to the Middle Ages and America is a mish-mash of feudal kingdoms, nomadic steppe...

I've been hearing about a huge corruption scandal touching the top echelons of Erdogan's party and government, and that Erdogan fights it by sacking police chiefs and blabbering about international conspiracy to smear his party. I don't really understand what's going on, but it doesn't look...

An op-ed from NY Times. Basically, the gist of it is that Putin compensates for endemic corruption and chronic mismanagement of Russian domestic affairs with his foreign policy adventures. Meanwhile, Russia is not getting anywhere. It's stagnating at best and now utterly dependent on energy...

I assume mostly everybody has read Orwell's famous Nineteen Eighty-Four. When I read it for the first time in the late 1990s, it left me pretty depressed and I was asking myself - is there a way out of that dystopia? The author clearly wants to drive home the message that there isn't. You get...

One of my trademark simple questions for which there probably isn't any simply answer. Nationalism is an ideology responsible for more conflict, suffering, misery, and death than any other except perhaps religion (in that regard, the two can be considered forms of the same underlying problem)...

I am not joking or trolling this forum with this question. I am asking it, because the more I read about how the USSR operated in international politics, and what Stalin views concerning matters of diplomacy and power relations were, it seems to me that Stalin was rather a totalitarian...

We've had many threads devolving into debating just this question, so let's have it here, WITH A POLL (yay!). I of course draw inspiration from the votes in the British parliament, which in a surprisingly non-puppet like fashion voted against British participation in a military action against...

Pretty much like the media sometimes mark the "tax freedom" day, i.e. the hypothetical end of the part of year you "work for the state" (calculated from the percentage of your income the government collects on taxes), today we mark the "Earth Overshoot Day". What does it mean? Well, it...

Hi. I am writing a paper on PC and I could use new inputs. Therefore, I'd like to ask you if you could kindly name any "Politically Correct" terms or phrases which you've encountered in following countries: the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia/NZ. I won't define PC here, because...

BBC reports: Besides further illustrating what a clown Erdogan is, there is a question to be asked here: - can an ideology, or a political/philosophical position (in this case, that Jews should have a homeland in the Near East; or that Islam is a dangerous religious belief) be considered a...

Do these people even realize what a sick joke they are? :shake: Also, who still believes Pakistan is an ally of the West, hands up! It seems the Pakistani government is actively trying to incite anti-Western hatred, even going so far as giving people free time to take part in "peaceful...

Not now, but potentially. It seems to me present day East/Southeast Asia is in many ways similar to pre-WW1 Europe in terms of rabid nationalism existing side by side with rapidly increasing economic interdependence. China sends ships in islands row (BBC) Asia's defence spending grows amid...

No thread about it? CFC is really slipping. (NY times article and video summary) Basically, about 10% of the world's population experienced life without electricity. Will this be a more common occurrence in the future when the energy crisis hits developing countries with its full force?

This chap doesn't think so (not surprising for a hardline Jewish settler in the West Bank). What's more interesting about his argument is that he favours a continuation of the status quo (= "occupation" in the anti-Israeli dictionary) and claims that pretty much everybody in the region has...

I am talking about the suicide attack in Bulgaria, of course. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18897772 7 people, one of them being the Bulgarian bus driver, were killed, scores were injured. I believe this is one of the first such attacks in the EU territory. According to Israeli...