the village idiot

I understand the sentiment Mull, but closing off the country and turning a blind eye to the rest of the world is almost certainly going to be more damaging to the lives of your grandchildren in the long run.

We need to develop better screening methods, and nobody is saying let all asylum seekers in. It is important to remember that the vast majority of desperate people are trying to get away from extremists themselves.

Then don't bloomin' say it Mull.

Onetooth beat me to it Mull.

I can argue with it.

Excellent! If you're looking for full drumming commitment though, you cant beat this guy!

For goodness sake Matelot. You're speaking just like the far left that you so despise. I'm not judging their race, I'm judging the practice of cutting off girls' clitorises If you think this is racism, or you think this judgement is wrong you are very sick in the head.

You've spectacularly missed the point. If you are not concerned about this it is you that are the barbarian. I am probably one of the least patriotic people you are ever likely to meet. I have zero desire to promote colonialism. I do not think we should go back to the 19th century. I think we should help disperse 21st century reasoned and compassionate ideas to people who are locked into bad ideologies.

This is where I totally disagree with you, and the issue I personally have with a lot of your posts. Your compassion for the human race only extends to the borders of Europe. You are rightly outraged if children are caused to suffer in the UK, but seem nonplussed about children who suffer outside of Europe. Your view seems to be that we should protect those lucky enough to be born in a certain geographical region and not bother about the rest. I can't wrap my head around ths way of thinking, and I think others struggle too. Hence the oposition to most of your posts. It was pure chance that you were not born as a girl in Somalia about to have your clitoris cut off. Try to put yourself in other people's shoes from time to time.

This is exactly the way we need to be talking about this. It's about bad ideas, not bad sets of people. We were very lucky to have been born in the West at the time that we were. It is wrong to feel superior about this. We were just lucky. If we had been born to a poor family in Pakistan it is very likely that we would be Koran thumping Muslims with little or no opportunity to 'better' ourselves or our nation. If we had stuck rigidly to the teachings of the old testament instead of embracing science and reason we would be as stuck in the brutal past as much of the Middle East is now. We need to focus on reducing the commitment to demonstrably bad ideas wherever they occur. This is no easy task, but it's the only thing that can work long term, giving as many people as possible to opportunity to reach their potentials.

Just a little, fairly irrelevant correction. The Buddha wasn't a deity. He was just a bloke interested in the workings of his own mind.

In the years 800 to 1100 the intellectual capital of the world was Baghdad. The West were complete morons in comparison. The Islamic world went to pot when an influential philosopher convinced the majority of the population that Mathmatics were the work of the Devil and that seeking scientific knowledge was an affront to God. There's nothing like death threats to make you pack away your test tubes. Ideas are powerful and the Islamic world has not recovered since. We were lucky in the West. We took the ideas from the Middle East and ran with them, dragging a very reluctant Christianity along with us. If the Islamic world had continued to study nature rather than supernature they would be leagues ahead of us by now and we would be asking why all the best inventions are coming out of the Middle East.

Agreed. It's a very similar issue with upland sheep farming. Vast tracts of land grazed back to biodiversity deserts by sheep to support one sheep farmer. The even more depressing fact is that it is not even profitable. In the main it is a loss making exercise, made viable by EU grants. Completely bonkers. Compounded by the fact that this grazing causes hugely expensive flooding damage further down the valleys that would be alliviated by letting the hillsides rewild. I blame countryfile.

If you know full well that you have an extremely loose grasp of a scientific concept, you can save a lot of future embarassment by keeping your head down.

Very nice! You could make se7enthdevil the mother of all bowling balls.

No. Apparently he's got a phlegm related issue.

Sounds like he ought to go and see a doctor!

Chaps?

OK. I think it's reasonably clear that you are suggesting that a child should never be given the option to choose. If this is the case, I think it is an absolutely terrible idea.

It's not 100% clear from your post Mull. Are you saying that never giving a child choices is a mistake made by many adults, or that it is a mistake to ever let a child have a choice?

Ah! Understood.

Being both Irish and pissed, they probably forgot to load the ammo.

I think it's important to take on board that we have to do something. Our current system is simply not going to work once the number of available jobs is dramatically decreased. Like it or not, the system will have to change. Automation will create high levels of extra wealth for the few that are fortunate enough to be in a position to impliment it, whilst simultaneously removing the option to work standard jobs from millions of people. If we don't find a way to spread the wealth created by these new technologies, and keep roofs over people's heads we are in deep doo doo. You can leave moral ethics off the table if you like and view something akin to UBI as a necessity for maintaining a society in which it is at all desirable for an individual (however wealthy) to live. Yes, some people who are genuinely lazy will get their basic needs met for free, but this will be a relatively insignificant price to pay when you consider the alternatives of sticking with a system not fit for a coming new reality.

Come on people, you're much cleverer than this.

Getting back into the fascinating free will debate here will cause too much of a distraction. Very happy to discuss it in the free will thread. In short, the confusion here arises from looking at free will from a different depth of focus. Taking a 'stepped back' view of the decision making process gives the strong illusion of free will. When you zoom in to look at the mechanics of any decision at the point it is made, you find that a person could not possibly have acted any differently from the way that they did in any given moment. This fact, by extension dissolves the notion of free will. This has important implications for the way we structure society and the motivations behind punishment. It is an extremely unintuitive concept which takes a lot more explaining than I want to do here. The language one has to use to try to explain it also totally muddies the waters, but unfortunately there is no good way around this.