[QUOTE="jfsebastianII"][QUOTE="biggest_loser"][QUOTE="spierdalaj666"]I'll get it only if the sport of running down tibetan protesters with tanks is included, jk :lol:ElectricNZ
lol, true. Who do they think they are trying to boycott the torch...
well, i wasn't going to say anything, but seeing as you ask...
i went to an anti-torch demo - who do i think i am? - someone who gives a **** about people having their country invaded and their citizens imprisoned, tortured (oh sorry, it's 'rendition' now isn't it?), forcibly sterilised and even executed
if Tibet had oil maybe other countries would've helped - oh, but China really DOES have WMDs, so maybe that wouldn't be so hot...
political broadcast over - let's talk games again - don't see the attraction with an olympic game of any sort myself - but then i'm with the crowd that think most sports games aren't up to much
The most contagious virus ever?
It's a disease of Western affluence. It may be the most contagious virus ever known. It sweeps suddenly through whole populations. It severely debilitates the rational mind. And yet it has undergone little study. The few medical researchers in the field know it as cardiosanguiniensis cunctatus optatus, or selective, delayed-onset, bleeding of the heart.
The most remarkable characteristic of this disease is that its apparent cause is not its true cause. Take, for example, the epidemic that has swept through the West in the last few weeks. The apparent cause is Chinese repression of Tibet. But the true cause is harder to define.
Part of it is simply exposure to the virus through the media. The media themselves are immune but they suffer from a mimic virus which exhibits all the external symptoms of bleeding from the heart – grave looks on newsreaders' faces, earnest editorial tones – but involves no actual bleeding. Nor, indeed, does it involve a heart, but rather a stoutly beating commercial nerve.
How exposure to the mimic virus spreads the virus proper through the general population is not yet understood. Current research suggests that the virus attaches itself to the bandwagonicus gene, the gene that dictates the human instinct for following the herd. At the same time the virus generates a warm sense of virtue in the host for championing an underdog.
That pleasant feeling may explain why the immune system does not attack the virus. The immune system simply does not recognise it as hostile to brain function. But brain function is severely affected. The virus causes the brain to simplify the world into good and bad. The host then sides with the good.
If we return for a moment to the disease's full clinical name, note the term cunctatus, meaning delayed-onset. The West has had plenty of time to feel sorry for Tibet. Even if we ignore the history of Chinese involvement with Tibet which goes back a thousand years or more (glossing over as we go the British military expedition to Tibet in 1904 when the brave Brits mowed down a thousand or more peaceable Tibetans with the newly invented machinegun), and if we concern ourselves only with current Chinese occupation (which began, I might add, with what was effectively an agreement between the Tibetans and the Chinese and which included a period when the Tibetans were covertly backed against the Chinese by the CIA), we have still had over 50 years to feel sorry for Tibet. For most of us that's our entire lives.
I am not arguing that the Tibetans do not have a case. Nor am I arguing that the Chinese rulers are nice. I am merely pointing out that Tibet has suddenly become everyone's cause du jour, after 18,000 similar jours when it was very few people's cause. That's how the virus works. It is sudden, arbitrary and selective.
It pays no attention, for example, to Xinjiang, another supposedly autonomous region of China in which the indigenous Uighurs regularly rise against their Chinese rulers and are brutally put down. This may be because the West finds it harder to bleed from the heart for Muslims than for Buddhists, just as the West is slow to save an endangered species of spider, but rushes to the cause of endangered furry mammals.
The virus is also fickle. Within a month or two Tibet will drop from the view of the herd and hearts will start bleeding instead for the Inuit Indians, perhaps, or the three- toed sloth. Neither the Inuits nor the sloths will profit.
The bleeding of the heart is harmless. But other symptoms of the virus are less appealing. The ugliest of these is hypocrisy. Those suffering from the virus often require others to act as consciences on their behalf. This is illustrated in the present epidemic by sufferers calling for New Zealand athletes to boycott the Olympics.
One has to feel sorry for the athletes. There they are, approaching the pinnacle of their brief careers in strange activities, when suddenly they are asked to give it all up by people who plan to give up nothing themselves. Moreover those same people have spent the last 20 years or more cheerfully trotting down to Farmers and Bunnings to snap up cheap Chinese underwear and cheap Chinese power tools, and are even now probably eyeing up a cheap Chinese widescreen high-definition plasma television on which to watch the Olympics, without ever giving a thought to the way they have been supporting a regime that the virus is now causing them to denounce from the pulpit of moral superiority and general ignorance. It's not a pretty sight. More research into this terrible contagion is urgently needed.
source: www.stuff.co.nz
very clever, but to avoid the 'bandwagon' accusations i still own a free tibet t-shirt in bought in 1999
secondly, even if that was not the case and everything i owned was made in China, it's better late than never and, rather than hide my own amoral/lazy attitude by criticising other people's motivations, i simply applaud anyone who's now taking action
all the pseudo-academic tosh you've posted above is just an excuse by the amoral and/or unemotional to explain the inaction which they know deep down is wrong but just can't be bothered to do anything about
PS apologies i know this is a gaming site, but again i'm simply responding to others
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