modz comments

Maybe a good start would be to stop using the euphemism "comfort women" and start calling them what they were -- rape victims.

This guy isn't fit to hold office and should be asked to resign

@Dissillusioned "Graffiti is graffiti and art is art! They are not the same thing"

What makes anything art is context, (not skill/talent etc.). Someone else mentioned Tracy Emin's bed, but it applies to any artwork in a any genre in any era.

The question of Graffiti or Art misses the point because the two concepts aren't mutually exclusive - it can be both or it can be neither depending on the context.

From 12% in Turkey, support for sharia as official national law stood at 56% in Tunisia, 71% in Nigeria, 72% in Indonesia, 74% in Egypt and 99% in Afghanistan.

I'd be interested to these stats alongside the average level of education or literacy of those very countries.

"'The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land' - Margaret Thatcher, 1987 (http://ind.pn/fLcyxZ)

or from this article in the Telegraph

"David Cameron made another break with his party's past yesterday when he declared that Margaret Thatcher had been wrong to describe Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as terrorists during the struggle against apartheid in the 1980s." (http://bit.ly/5b8oqN)

Sorry Madverts, perhaps Is should have left the actual quotation marks off, but its not splitting hairs as such when she is on record as categorizing the ANC as a terrorist organization that its logical extension was that Mandela, as the ANC leader, was as well.

@Jimizo Her association with Pinochet is well documented, they were great friends in his later life and she claimed the the ex dictators incarceration was "callus and unjust" -- this is of someone, who seized power in a military coup of a democratically elected government, and under whom between 10 and 20 000 people were killed or disappeared. (http://bit.ly/147M0Jm)

Thatcher was also the only European leader to support the Ivory trade and gave her support to the butchers in the Khmer Rouge (http://bit.ly/X4dYlq)

Clearly the woman had no conscious. or sense of human decency/empathy.

According to the independent

Why is America so uptight about nudity while so much violence is presented without question? Violence is normalized and nudity is demonized. It's Bizzarre and really an important question - especially these days.

I would say gun control is quite a bit more important than the mental health question. Further, this sudden focus on mental health seems nothing more than an attempt at deflection by the pro-gun side.

I think gun control and rhetoric around mental health are indicative of the same thing. Mentally healthy societies do not obsess to violence, or live in constant fear. The same cultural resistance to or suspicion of something like a public health care system as a kind of "socialist" conspiracy to usurp their individual rights originates from the same psychological place as this idea that people should have a "right" to own an assault rifle to protect themselves, their private property, etc.

Yes, less gun ownership is a part of the solution. But it's not really about guns or the second amendment. It's about a culture that looks to violence as a default solution to conflict. It's about a culture of fear and narcissism that has replaced its sense of empathy and community with self-entitlement and looking out for #1. Its a collective psychosis. If Americans can have this deeper discussion amongst themselves and attend to this wider cultural malaise, nobody will even want a gun.

Gun control will not work unless there is a commitment to wider social responsibility. This idea is antithetical to the American ideal. The US is a country of individualists who bristle at the thought of wider public responsibility to social well being; the debate around access to public healthcare is just one example. America is also a country founded on and obsessed by violence; from the genocide of the North American Indian onward. Violence is ubiquitous in the media - the average kid has witnessed in excess of 8000 murders on tv by the time they reach adolescence; and violence is what drives their foreign policy, the US has had in excess of 50 armed conflicts since the end of WWII in a perverse obsession to empire and hegemonic control.

So I don't have much hope that the US can get on top of the senseless bloodshed. Guns and violence as conflict resolution are too entrenched culturally, its symptomatic of a greater cultural malaise. But if they could have this discussion with themselves; there is more then enough evidence that less guns = less gun crime. Just yesterday the BBC ran a story on Australia's crack down on gun ownership following a mass shooting in Port Arthur, 16 years ago. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20765259

The government responded by banning rapid fire weapons and making it mandatory to register all guns. They also offered a gun buy back program in which they collected close to 700 000 guns. In the 18 years prior to this, there were 13 mass shootings; in the 16 years since there has been 0 (zero)