“Oh dear, here we go again. I am not a human being, I am white, black, yellow etc. Come on all you people out there who deperatly seek an identity.
You are not a rat, a fish, a monkey. You are a human being.
Indeed I treat my friends as fellow human beings. I do not type them by their race, ethnicity, gender etc”

[Desi Italiana gives a standing ovation]. This is probably one of the most lucid comments I’ve come across on PP. So much typecasting based on ethnicity and religion.

soru you’ve got a really good point in no. 60.

hardly as if a law against flag-burning is going to discourage anyone from burning flags. probably encourage people! re: the al-ghurabaa crew – surely a fuss could have been made re: the messages on the banners they carry around and their general hate messages.

It was that they were worried about starting a riot if they did intervene. According to the Telegraph of Feb 2nd

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/05/nflag05.xml

‘As the clamour for action grew, police sources said there were no arrests on Friday because of fears of a riot. A senior Scotland Yard officer said: “We have to take the overall nature of the protesters into account. If they are overheated and emotional we don’t go in.

‘“It’s like a risk assessment; you have to look at the crowd you are dealing with. If we went in to arrest one person with a banner the crowd would turn on us and people would get hurt.”

‘He said it was entirely possible that “key players” in the protests, some of whom were already known to police, could be pursued by prosecutors. ‘

So what’s changed since then? Or is he saying that the Met got it wrong in February and that either it wouldn’t have caused a riot had they made arrests or that it would have been worth risking a riot, anyway?

Yup!

As for the mixed race thing, yep we are not noticed….yet.;)

I was having this conversation with a good friend of mine about Tiger Woods and the whole “caucblacinasian” (a term he created himself) thing. My criticism of Tiger was that I believe that his attemtp to emphasize his Asian, Indian, Caucasian- ness was in order for him to de-ephamsize that he was black. For all those that can see him, he is a black man. He knows that. He just didnt want to be a black man, he wants to be all those others things and that says alot more about him than it does about those who identify him solely as being black.

30 years inside (or for that matter, a bullet to the head) could be said to solve the problem they represent. A few months or years doesn’t – it serves only to set someone on the path of violence. You can see that pattern repeatedly in Egyptian and Jordanian terorrists: they did a year or two in prison for non-violent offences, and came out with no contacts outside extremist groups, no potential career other than blowing stuff up.

So unless you are prepared to institute the death penalty, or full-life sentences, for this kind of activity, any such law is going to create a lot more problems than it solves.

I am amazed at the priests reaction to a murder in his church he could have gone to the police long before he did. If he was told about the murder during a confession it would be a different matter, but mass before murder. Priorities.

i think ‘tiger’ was the nickname for a vietnamese man who fought with woods’ father:

Born Eldrick Woods in Cypress, California, he was nicknamed “Tiger” after Vuong Dang Phong, a friend of his father’s.

Anas – no I didn’t. I developed the theory while reading the book. Great book I thought.

Anyway, Mahtal I’d agree that I’d prefer it if people saw the individual first.

That said, it is clear (or so it seems) that some population groups are – on average – better suited to certain sports. So north east Africans seem to do tremednously well at distance running. West Africans (and their American descedants) seem well suited to sprinting. Chinese and Malays seem well adapted to sports like badminton and table tennis requiring quick moves in a confined space. Turks and central asians seem well suited to weight lifting. Europeans seem to excel at swimming.

Of course these could to a certain extent be historical phenomena. There was a time when many renowned boxers were Jewish. You’d be hard pressed to find one now.

Anyway if there are genetic advantages for certain groups in certain sports it seems absurd to “congratulate” them on their chance good fortune, a product probably of pretty much random evolutionary events.