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Maybe it's just me, but I really couldn't care less about the Olympics.

PALACE LOGIC

How does a lie intrude on privacy? Surely the idea that Phil has prostate cancer only 'intrudes' if true? Is the royal complaint a Homer Simpson moment?

watching fanatical nationalists in rehearsed mechanistic performances isn't spectacular but creepy.

the financial sector is effectively insolvent [debts bigger than capitalisation], the Fed says it will run out of money in Jan and funds are forced into liquidations in the commodity market . Technically from a chart point of view the next three months are critical. The charts show a once in many generation bear drop is possible if this current rally does not make new highs. This would be followed by a 6 month explosion to the upside all timed in with a new president.

As for the govt and their stamp duty they should learn from yoda. 'Do or do not- there is no try'. By their stupid words creating uncertainty they have driven another stake into the economy.A good chancellor is someone who can keep their trap shut.

RUBBERY SOUP HARD TO SWALLOW. (Confucius)

I cannot help feeling that the underlying ethos of HONOURABLE ENDEAVOUR, originally embodied in the Olympics and redolent of the ancient Greek ethos, more generally, is precisely that which has been purged from British society, ending in the soulless promotion and pursuit of money, material possessions, physical appearance and fame, as illuminated by Oliver James' writings.

The birds nest is a perfect emblem of our plight - WE ARE ALL IN THE SOUP.

On the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ website there is "Quangos set up to improve the fortunes of the English regions have been branded a costly and ineffectual waste of money by a pressure group".

How about enlarging on that - does the public pay vast amounts of money via quangos so that politicians can insulate themselves against blame?

On the Olympics how about a psychologist?
Does the ceremony tell us about the Chinese government - like Kremlin watching.

My first pass on the Fallon interview is its very interesting.

As you analyse the opening ceremony, may be you should gather together a small panel - half from the usual Newsnight review pool of pundits, and 2 representatives of our 2012 committee - what can they learn from the opening ceremony?

From years in the media business, often involved with sound for launches (corporate or otherwise) I am aware of one very important fact.

While the organising committee are believing that the "cultural message" is the most important aspect of their event, the production companies who are actually doing the work and writing the scripts, are only thinking of their Portfolios.

How cultural is that?

WATCHING AND LISTENING WITH ...

"The antifascist custodians of the Buchenwald site found the piles of corpses US troops had photographed during the camp's liberation too small for illustrating the crimes committed there -- especially since pictures of even larger piles had been taken in Auschwitz. And so they just glued the images of two corpse piles together in order to intensify the horror."



Watching the very animated Simon Sebag Montefiore (who, as a Jewish 'award-winning and critically acclaimed author of bestselling books' (his website) clearly must be taken very seriously given all the prizes he's won) give us his views on Solzhenitsyn and his lamentable disillusionment with 'democracy' last night left me wondering why there's still been so little mention of Solzhenitsyn's last, non-fictional two-volume work and why so many of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s guest presenters and reporters feel the need to dramatise whatever they have to say (is it an essential part of their training)?

But then, looking at the Spiegel article, perhaps it's inevitable, it goes with the territory so to speak? I mean, without all the hyperbole, spin, exaggeration and lots and lots of Blue Peter excitement, the viewers might get the wrong idea, start thinking critically, or just not get it at all. So should we be grateful that people like Simon Montefiore are available to keep us all on message, ensuring that we don't forget that people like Stalin, Hitler and Mao were which we most certainly don't want around here (or in Iraq, Iran, N Korea etc), now do we viewers?

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

What about today's Russian invasion of South Ossetia?

The holocaust existed. I am distantly related to somebody who was in a death camp. People close to the family were amongst the first in there. There are thousands of testimonies, dozens of trials. There is plenty of research into Mengele and his work on twins. I once even saw his school report. There have been confessions. There are mountains of films and supporting evidence.

When somebody describes Hitler as nasty but is associated with BNP posters I question their integrity. The BNP were filmed showing "leading BNP officials singing racist songs and giving a Nazi salute". That and holocaust denial does not chime quite right with genuine democrats.

A MORE CRITICAL LOOK

thegangofone (#10) I suggest you take each one of the beliefs which you are currently convinced to be true and look for refuting evidence. If any of them stand up to this, you may be left with some beliefs worth holding on to. Make a start with Eli Wiesel perhaps.

If you won't, or don't do this, at least consider the possibility that either you're prejudiced, or that you've been a victim (along with many others) of sophisticated political propaganda. The allied de-nazification programme after WWII was very thorough. Stalin's and Morgenthau's plans (which were not unrelated, see Dexter White) were to have been even more draconian. Be sure to read what Truman said in his diaries and the questions which Irving (who is indeed a denier and a bit of a fan of Nazi Germany as Lipstad said he is, so he lost the libel case he brought against her) would like

What members of the BNP allegedly get up to (and you make it sound rather silly/self-destructive) has almost nothing to do with this. What I am drawing attention to is how the electorate's political opinion is shaped via the media, and how it's biased in favour of free-market liberal-democracy aka anarcho-capitalism/'Trotskyism'.

THE WHOLE DENIAL THING

Nicely stated Jaded Jean. With the passage of time, and the fog of post-war adjustments, truth is hard to establish. However, every day we witness the Great Lie phenomenon in the Climate Change arena and in Dawkins' attempt to negate God.
Dawkins and all his followers, are surely God Deniers? Pretty serious stuff; yet they have no proof that God is not. And Al Gore is a Medieval Warm Period Denier, for which he got half a Nobel Prize. There is a lot of sloppy thinking about; perhaps we could have a war on it?
JOIN THE WAR ON SLOPPY THINKING!

Join the what now?

Electrical string in space? The oral testimony of extermination camp victims part of sophisticated political propaganda?

I don't know which makes me laugh harder; I suppose I'm just prejudiced that way.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

FORENSIC EVIDENCE, PROPAGANDA AND SHOW TRIALS

DrKF77 (#13) "The oral testimony of extermination camp victims part of sophisticated political propaganda?"

Surely victims didn't survive to provide oral testimonies and surely one should critically ask how any internees allegedly witnessing such alleged attrocities were ever allowed to survive by the (allegeded very thorough and efficient) perpetrators? Furthermore, why, when Eastern camps were about to be liberated by the Soviets, did so many, (including Anne Frank), go West with their (allegedly genocidal) captives rather than stay to be liberated by the Soviets, and is it indeed the case that in at least some of the Western camps they ended up in, communists separated the young from the older and briefed them? Who provided the most damning and dramatic evidence at the IMT and why was so much of it not used and thought to be propaganda by the Western allies?

Why, at the IMT, didn't the usual rules of evidence apply?

Finally, why does none of this matter? It would in any triial today surely?

DENIAL, LAUGHTER AND PROPAGANDA

Barrie (#12) And whilst Russia and Georgia employ in an effort to win international hearts and minds, highly educated minds can't believe that they've been pumped full of propaganda or are prone to sloppy thinking. After all, half the population has a degree these days. Either we've had an unprecedented evolutionary spurt over the past couple of decades
despite the dysgenic, differential fertility data and below replacement TFR or.....

That's Tony's (and Maggie's) backers' anarchistic legacy/gift. Gone is 'elitism' except for the nepotistic few favoured by the SI (see the PPP in Pakistan for an excellent illustration of this). The playing field's been levelled. Everyone's equal.

2+2=5.

EUCLIDIAN GEOMETRY: NOTHING BUT A JEWISH CONSPIRACY?


When millions of Jews, Soviet POWs, mentally ill and handicapped people, Roma, homosexuals, Freemasons, political prisoners and religious dissenters were systematically executed, many millions of those in extermination camps, even the survivors of those camps are victims. They have spoken, borne witness to the horrors of the camps, and have given this testimony in various ways and to various sources.

Since the evidence of the extermination camps and extermination policy are evident to all but the wilfully blind, holocaust denial must rest, instead, upon atempting to imply the falsity of those events by reference to marginalia, to incomplete or ambiguous parts of the historical narrative.

To suggest that those who aknowledge the Holocaust simply have not (or are not able) to make rational, informed decisions is the last refuge of the intellectual scoundrel. 'False consciousness' and 'hegemony' again, eh jadedjean?

Applying critical thinking of the sort you espouse to the factual matter of the Holocaust is not at all the (eminently admirable) attempt to usurp dogma and convention, or a reinterpretation of facts in a new schema of thought; it is nothing less than the simple denial of historical fact.

Electrical string in space (which your fellow contrarian has attempted to foist upon us - but upon which theory you remain curiously silent) is perhaps more plausible.

: TAKE TWO

DrKF77 (#17) Rather than leaping to argument, look instead at the current population numbers compared to 1933, not to all the rhetoric: a) the 'victim' numbers have kept changing (falling) ove rthe years and that's official, and b) the demographics haven't changed enough ove rthe last 70 years or so as the alleged major victim group has a below replacement level TFR like the rest of Europeans. Do you not see a likely connection? Then there's the Russian silence on all this given that the Soviets were the liberators (not that one would normally class the Palestinian president's 1982 Moscow PhD and subsequent book, or the 'silence').

That's not to say that many people didn't die in WWII. No doubt people have died in South Osiettia too. The question one must ask is why one is ever sure of what one believes and why one resorts to rhetoric rather than logic and empirical evidence when allegedly established facts are taken as premises but subsequently refuted.

As to your last paragraph, please look up logical fallacies and non sequitur, as this might help you better appreciate the merits of waging war against sloppy thinking (and writing) as Barie suggests. Surely never a bad thing for anyone?

Extermination camps had an empirical existence; all the rest is diversionary froth.

SHIFTING LINES AND MIAs

DrKF77 (#19) "Extermination camps had an empirical existence; all the rest is diversionary froth."

or "Extermination camps hadn't an empirical existence; all the rest is diversionary froth."

The question is how does one decide? Does one decide on the basis of who writes (or spends the most on resourcing the writing and publishing of) the most persuasive rhetoric or does one decide on the basis of forensic evidence? Not being located as DPs (Displaced Persons) is not the same as having been exterminated, especially given the Iron Curtain/end to free-migration and agreed (between the Western and Eastern allies) repatriation to their original countries (most of the alleged target population came from behind Soviet lines once the borders of Poland etc were changed after the war). The largest group of original deportees were obviously the most salient post-war group of DPs (the vast majority of the alleged victims having come from Poland, consequered Eastern Territories, and other Warsaw Pact countries). France etc got off quite lightly (although many from these European countries died from disease atthe end of the war, largely due to allied bombing etc). The implications don't require a lot of thought once this is spelled out, or does it?

The reason why W.V.O Quine advised the next generation not to go into law was that historical, like scientific, truth is not established by law (a point Justice Gray also made not too long ago too).

All the talk of the Holocaust didn't really take off until the 1970s when Israel (USA) and the Arab states (USSR) were at war. Perhaps this bears some thought whilst watching broadcasts on what's happening in the Caucasus given current regional alliances?

I've made my choice between the two options you present: extermination camps had an empirical existence.

For the avoidance of any possible doubt, which do you afirm?

BIASING THE ELECTORATE

DrKF77 (#21) The issue here is not WHAT you or I believe to be true, but whether what we each believe to be true is reasonable - are our repsective beliefs refutable/testable? is most effective when its recipients either don't, won't or can't (perhaps through dysgenics) rationally question its .

I suggest that any European laws or derivative politically correct social pressures which demonstrably deter rational, critical, thinking/discussion about any subject should make allegedly 'free' people highly suspicious that there is, a de facto political agenda operating, and that this agenda amounts to socio-political propaganda directed at a naive post-war electorate not to vote for parties which might run command, i.e. centrally planned, democratically-centralist or 'authoritarian' ('national-socialists'/'fascist') economies. The result: de-regulation and anarcho-capitalism. Look at the hard time Old Labour had. New Labour is more like New Militant (anarchistic, ultimately good for the free-market as it twarted Old Labour by playing to Josephism-Thatcherism).

If one looks to what liberal-democracies currently vilify as regimes oppressing their people and committing Human Rights violations, it's an extended 'axis of evil' (the Shanghai Group) when one looks at those wielding their vetoes in the UNSC). These are governments which liberal-democracies media are clearly biased against. They are command-economies.

Historically, the use of the holocaust is but one salient example of how an electorate is kept on message. I have no doubt that many people died (and wen missing) in Europe both during and shortly after WWII, but one has to look critically into how they died (or went missing), why they died (or went missing), who ultimately was responsible for those deaths (and displacements), and who was blamed. They are not the same.

Oh so *that's* the issue is it, jadedjean?

And here was me thinking I'd asked a fairly simple question, based quite firmly on our preceding discussion.

I'm not massively keen to discuss what is, to my mind, essentially a *change* of issue, since it rather suggests to me that you will change the issue when you don't like the question.

Like a politician.

ON SHOOTING THE MESSENGER

DrKF77 (#13) You've clearly confused your own failure (until now), to grasp what the relevant issue was, with what you thought the issue was. This is a classic intenSional (logical) error of propositional attitude which blights rational discussion on this, and many similar issues.

Your refusal to take on board what has been a clearly stated and oft repeated thesis thoughout, which has used this controversial historical example primarily for illustrative purposes, on the grounds that you can, allegedly, and done so on grounds tha you can a priori predict (in fact, it's inductive, which is intensional) is further illustrative, I suggest, of the solipsistic, nefariously rhetorical, sloppy thinking, which Barrie has drawn attention to, and which is a rather sad, possibly dysgenic, sign of our times.

Trouble stating clearly what you think?

I wonder why?

MULES AND WATER

DrKF77 (#25) In that case, I suggest you better familiarize yourself with the differences between the intensional vs extensional and why folk psychological idioms of propositional attitude aren't the business of rational investigation and discourse, but of nefarious rhetoricians, spin doctors, and propagandists.

DrKF77

I think it is likely that JJ does not believe the camps existed. But if so that would be only JJ's opinion and as such is unimportant. Opinion is not truth. What IS important is the evidence and that we all should examine it for ourselves and not simply accept the popular angle. That goes for so many things in this world of spin and propaganda. Politicians of all colours lie to establish their own agenda. We must not let them pull the wool over our eyes, question EVERYTHING. Not just the evidence but also the motives of those involved.

But it is a simple question to which you yourself provided two possible answers.

I'll let you have the last word if you like - it seems clear you are not prepared to answer the question, and I grow tired of your evasions.