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Listed below are comments made by iwinter between Thursday, 1st October 2009 and Monday, 16th November 2009.

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The anonymous bullies 1:16pm on 16 Nov 2009 Talk about making a fuss where there isn't one to be made- sit down and think about this for a moment Rory- how many victims online are also not using their real name?

What name people use online is irrelevant because even if they use a real sounding name it might not be their real name regardless.

It's not anonymity that makes people say things they wouldn't otherwise, it's the fact they're physically distanced from the person they speak to. Real name or not doesn't matter, pseudonyms online stem back from the call signs of the CB radio days and that sort of thing, they certainly don't exist for the purpose of bullying.

But now there's a bigger problem arising in the US, we're seeing courts rule that the identity of anonymous people online should be unmasked for making criticisms of others even when the others are political figures and the criticisms are perfectly fair and justified. We're seeing a situation where people are being sued for trying to out the truth about people who truly are corrupt or dangerous. Effectively, the courts are being used to stifle political dissent.

The right to anonymity is far more important than any unsupported perceived view that it's used for bullying. Ultimately, bullying attacks are small fry compared to the reasons people would seek to unmask the anonymous.
The party of the poor 10:53am on 10 Nov 2009 Unfortunately the Tories are a party full of contradictions.

They whinge about European control but ironically due to living in a safe seat area and us having a first past the post system whilst the EU elections are PR I actually have more of a vote about how our country is run whilst we're under European law than I do under our own system of Democracy. If Cameron pulls back from the EU he's actually taking away my vote because my UK vote is meaningless whilst my European one is not. This wouldn't be a problem if the UK switched to proportional representation or at least a hybrid system, but as the Tories are dead set against this it's clear why Cameron wants to pull back from the EU- not because they want to give more power to British people as they claim, but because they want more personal power for themselves at the expense of taking more power away from the voters whose vote counts via the EU. So on one hand Cameron talks about bringing more power to British people by pulling power back from the EU, and on the other he keeps power out of the hands of many citizens by supporting first past the post. He is a hypocrit of the highest order, he tells you he's giving you something with one hand, whilst taking more away with the other.

All that said though, at least their domestic policy is far better than Labour's even if their foreign policy is an abysmal joke.
All's fair in the climate blame game 1:40pm on 06 Nov 2009 Are poor, undeveloped nations really free from blame as they claim?

One issue is that many African governments do not deal with corrupt companies dumping western waste on their land because they want the money. If they simply charged more or refused to take it or even recycled it they'd have a leg to stand on. Do you think people in the UK, the US and so on would accept there being a sudden increase in rubbish tips across the country because Africa was holding us to account for our waste rather than offering to take a bit of cash to dump it on their land?

The first hurdle is to bring accountability for waste as the cost of disposal of TVs, Fridges and so on aren't factored into the cost of buying these items to start with. Africa has as much blame in refusing to push for proper disposal and recycling of waste as anyone.

The fact is, no one is free from blame. There's no point giving these countries part of our GDP when they themselves aren't innocent as they make out.
So, the Czech was not in the post 3:09pm on 03 Nov 2009 I'd be all for a referendum if I had any faith in the general public's ability to vote based on the pros and cons of the treaty, rather than the xenophobic, borderline racist attitude that plagues all walks of British society today.

This is effectively the issue Ireland had in that everyone just assumed "foreigners = bad" the first time round. It took massive amounts of campaigning for people to realise that well, maybe foreigners aren't all that bad after all. Once the public in Ireland understood the issues at hand, they were able to make a more informed choice.

I'm not sure why people are whining about not getting an EU referendum and how this is undemocratic when we have an even bigger issue back home here in Britain in that due to the first past the post system we keep getting governments that receive effective 100% of power due to the whip system and a majority in the commons despite only getting around 35% to 40% of the vote. Whilst we keep getting parties holding 100% of power against the will of 60% to 65% of the population we've got much bigger problems home here. In the 2005 election for example 19 million people's vote simply did not count due to safe seats, how can we possibly whine about the democratic values of a referendum on the EU when 19 million of our voters didn't actually have a real effective vote?

The idea Britain is a democracy is a joke, at best we're a dictatorship where an organised minority is able to impose a leader on the majority with more disjoint political views with the only thing sepearating us from most other dictatorships is that there is at least a limit on the power and length of time said dictators like Blair, Brown and soon Cameron can hold their grip on power.

Britain needs rid of first past the post before we even begin to worry about a referendum on the EU- if we did that then a referendum on the EU could've come naturally anyway.
East and west still divided? 1:38pm on 30 Oct 2009 @ ManInAShed

These people are labelled as far right because of their overriding fascist viewpoint and fascism absolutely is far right.

The Nazi's may have been called National Socialists but again their overriding philosophy was fascism.

You're also wrong to label some of the ideologies you do as left wing, it's simply not that clear cut, see here regarding authoritarianism to understand why it's often labelled as right wing for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism#Right_and_left

No one is smearing right of centre politics by use of far-right, on the contrary the real worry is people who are far right trying to label themselves as centre-right and by supporting that you are supporting the far right. People who do have far right views should have the courage of their convictions and admit that, rather than try and pretend their views are more moderate when they're not.

If people have far right views I disagree with them, but accept they are entitled to their opinion. What I don't accept is people with far right views trying to suggest their views are centre right with the aim of piggy backing those views onto the centre right to give the false impression those views are more commonly held than they are. The far right viewpoint is still a minority by far, and is in reality no more compatible with centre right viewpoint than the centre left is- yes the far right may be on the same side of the scale as centre right, but it's also no closer to centre right than centre left is.
Do you speak Race? 3:27pm on 23 Oct 2009 Mark, you hit on the issue most adeptly with the term "grown-up debate". The fact is, anyone capable of mature debate, no matter what their creed, colour or belief would not get offended at the use of terms such as "Afro-Carribean" instead of "African Carribean", or "Gay" instead of "Homosexual" or vice versa.

The fact is, to have mature debate on the issue we must put aside people who take offence for the sake of taking offence, those capable of mature debate realise that there was no offence intended behind Jack Straw's comment, and hence the fact he didn't phrase it exactly as the Lady in the audience would've liked is irrelevant as there are plenty of Afro-Carribeans who would prefer it the other way.

We have this issue where people that difficult, and that stubborn, don't seem to realise that in acting as they do, build barriers to mature, reasoned debate. Getting offended for the sake of getting offended does no one any favours as it suggests a lack of mutual respect. Mature debate commands that you ignore irrelevant quirks in favour of looking at the bigger picture, seeing what is actually being said, and take it in the context of the sentiment behind that- in both cases, Jack did nothing wrong, he said the right things and his sentiment was extremely fair, the only person at fault was the lady choosing to take offence where none needed to be taken, and in the process of that, playing into the hands of the very people that are the problem - the BNP.
British games: Small is beautiful? 5:30pm on 16 Oct 2009 Right now the British games development industry doesn't seem to be doing too bad. Most of the companies that have moved to or invested heavily in Canada are those studios guilty of creating mindless coder farms that don't support innovation.

This should not be a suprise though, as any company that is willing to move based on such tax breaks forcing it's staff to either lose their jobs, or leave their family behind is clearly not a developers oriented studio. When developers stop getting treated as such, and stop being given the freedom to be creative whilst also living healthy lives then such a company is not worth working for anyway.

What it really boils down to is this, every country is capable of having great developers in it's population, the question is what companies do to exploit that. If companies head abroad (the likes of EA) then some of those developers will get left behind, they'll either start their own studio, become independent, or join the companies that don't leave and look after their staff, companies that cater to and support innovation- companies like Lionhead.
Steve Jobs and Tinker Bell 12:47pm on 13 Oct 2009 They'll go well together - both sell overpriced products made in Chinese sweatshops and like to sick the lawyers on their customers and fans at every chance possible.
An embarrassment of cuts 11:13am on 06 Oct 2009 The only thing that can be taken away from JadedJean's comments really is that (s)he's capable of saying a lot without actually saying anything.

Other than that the only thing that's obvious is that (s)he has a distaste for liberal democracies and has a hint of fascism behind his/her point of view.

But then you look at the first comment, that of BankSlickerminustheR and click his name and see he's posted in the same threads as JadedJean and only the same threads, but also has a clearly fascist point of view in his posts also blended with a similar bit of conspiracy paranoia and something becomes more obvious. Of course more telling is that both accounts use exactly the same posting style at times, a posting style that is extremely obscure and unique enough to suggest identical people behind it.

JadedJean/BankSlickerminustheR are clearly the same people or at best, people colluding to try and manipulate people's opinion using similar tactics to Scientologists- using multiple puppets to put across the same opinion so that people feel the need to agree so that they're not isolated.

The moral of the story? Just ignore JadedJean/BankSlickerminustheR and any similar accounts in agreement with them, because they're just one fringe person. When someone feels the need to resort to such tactics to try and push their point across it tells us one thing without question - the point just isn't worth listening to in the first place and as there seems to be a strong hint of fascism to their posting, that seems to be very much the case here.
BAE: Can't pay, would like to pay 1:31pm on 01 Oct 2009 Yet more political correctness gone mad.

The fact is, if BAE weren't doing this, other nations abroad would. You only have to look at the massive, and I mean massive scale of corruption in Iraq over the last few years with Halliburton and co.

Someone's going to supply arms to countries that shouldn't have them regardless, better it's us and we take the money and taxes it generates to put back into solving the issue than have somewhere like Russia win the contract and put the cash into making the issue worse.

Crippling British business like this wont help anyone and will only harm us. It's a case of shooting ourselves in the foot. It's rather telling that more effort seems to be getting put into tackling fraud here than tackling the fraudulent cases of the MP expenses scandal, all of which were dropped. If the moral do-gooders want to tackle fraud, their own backyard would be the best place to start.

Blair allowed these contracts through because he understood the points I've made above- stopping the contracts would do far more harm both nationally and internationally than good.

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