Tim3003

I think you miss my point. Yes life expectancy is increasing - in the poorer countries this is a triumph of modern medicines over disease, and provide...

Yes you're right, it is impossible to pick one point in time for the tipping point. (And anyway, we haven't even agreed the metric whose value we're w...

Yes, and what if mankind was a different species? I don't see much to be gained by going down these alleys of conjecture.

Yes, 'has been'. I'm talking about the next decades..

The past decade has shown that those elites are quite happy to rush headlong into the dire effects of climate change as long as they preserve their we...

I'm thinking of wars with possible global ramifications - ie involving superpowers. Local struggles and civil wars of course crop up regularly. But ho...

Indeed, but that doesn't mean it will never come to pass. My point is that the huge changes of the past 20 years may mean that tipping point has now b...

That is possible. The cyclical nature of politics has become quite clear - swing from left to right and back again as each new hope fails. The problem...

The real moot point, as Turing realized, is whether you can tell the difference between your man-made pot and the AI one. If you can't, the question i...

I think everyone realised that. Sunak was perhaps the only Tory with the guts to say so. 'Hubris' is the word I thought fitted Truss and her undergrad...

I expect Mordaunt to bow out - either short of 100 votes, or beaten say 2:1 by Sunak. She surely can't win and forcing a party members' vote would see...

I'd say Right-wing fanaticism rather than sabotage. But the Truss disaster illustrates the fallacy of the whole concept. The question is whether Brexi...

It's January 2025, and given that that would mean a campaign over Xmas it's unlikely. The December 2019 election was shoe-horned in because of the Bre...

Er.. isn't that the awful spectre of Borisenstein looming over the horizon?! Are the Tories really so desperate they'll bring back the man they threw ...

Imperative for the country, yes. But we can assume the Tory party will pursue self-interest first. The question therefore is whether there's anything ...

I thought Truss would be a disaster when she was winning the Tory members vote. But I never imagined she'd be quite such a huge disaster quite so quic...

When I saw Jacob Rees Mogg has a prominent ministry in the new Truss govt it dawned on me that we now have the true Brexiteers in power, and we're see...

All your replies seem to echo my observation that the system doesn't quite work...

As a Brit I may show some ignorance here, if so please forgive me! 1) How can the system work when the president cannot get his policies through Congr...

Suicide.

'Obligated'? If I see somene being mugged at knife-point I don't feel obligated to tackle the assailant and put myself at risk. I want to help of cour...

Your promotion of the term 'strategic interests' ignores the reasonableness or not of those interests. If Putin's idea of Russia's strategic interest ...

In what way is Russia's invasion of Ukraine relevant to World peace - other than negatively?! The veto allows Russia to put its 'strategic interest' (...

Globalisation has changed the world totally from 1945. If problems like global warming are to be tackled, it has to be by all in-sync, not on a countr...

I have to dispute most of your long-winded and cant-see-the-wood-for trees view: as someone else who has suffered with depression on and off for nearl...

I think NATO's response so far has been pathetic. Ukraine is not a member, but surely an ally, and a request from them for 100,000 NATO troops on Pola...

Cruelty as a term cant be applied to the world. It applies to an act: an act is cruel if it is needlessly and vindictively harmful. Cruelty is perpetr...

Since religion has historically had its greatest power among the illiterate and nowadays those who dont read literature to gain knowledge, it seems pr...

I think that for many people contentedness comes with age. As you experience more you realise your own limitations and adapt to live within them and s...

I think the centipede effect becomes a problem worth considering when it is caused by fear, and thus the action concerned is done self-consciously. Th...

I think there's a clear difference between a social convention (I think 'norm' is too strong a word here) for giving to charity, and the rules of law....

Compassion is what stops you letting your child stay outside in the cold or go without food although you yourself thus cant afford to eat. Without hel...

1)Really? Do we not all agree - or more to the point 'feel' that we have a responsibility to act in the face of poverty, mistreatment, disability - ie...

It's called 'compassion'; a well-known human emotion - maybe it's a sort of altruism, which evolutionary theory will tell you is a vital building bloc...

Well that's never going to work: define 'need'. Do you 'need' your mobile phone? I'd say 'no'. You might say 'yes'. All you 'need' is oxygen, food, wa...

Another facet of this problem that's only just occured to me: the shortening of attention-spans and growing inability to focus on tasks for more than ...

The problem with solutions like this is that the only people who'll read them are the likes of us who don't need to! Those who do, won't, just as they...

Surely there's no such thing as 'a random number'. Randomness is about a process of selecting a series of numbers, such that no single selection of a ...

Of course: if I toss a coin 10 times, and within those 10 there's a sequence of 3 heads, that doesnt make it non-random. Then if I repeat the 10 tosse...

Why does the limitation of freedom mean democracy is a sham? It's clear to the vast majority of voters that freedom cannot be unlimited - the majority...

I's some time since I read 1984, but wasn't Orwell pointing out the dangers of totalitarianism rather than specifically communism? If I look at Russia...

Information on its own is neither good nor bad. It becomes potentially destructive when it's based on distortions, simplifications and downright lies....

The problem with constitutions and Bills of Rights is: who's going to uphold them? How are they to be policed? And if social media companies transgres...

I think this is true. I've been reconsidering my initial question. Maybe it should be: is the Internet allowing democracy to destroy itself? The Inter...

A leader may be elected democratically, but once in - like Hitler, he can easily disempower those institutions by force, stopping them from calling ou...

But no dictator is going to allow those institutions to act fairly. He's going to install his own judges. Hence, they only survive under a democracy w...

A couple of points in response: 1) When I said 'can democracy survive?', I meant a system where electors decide on real fact-based issues who will lea...

It seems to me that the problem now is politicians lagging behind the views of the informed public. This is worst in totalitarian states where they ca...

No quick UK response to the EU's compromise attempts re the NI protocol... Presumably Frost daren't welcome it as it doesnt go all the way, but daren'...

It's interesting to me that Boris has actually come up with a believeable rationale for Brexit, and something of a vision - which I thought was well b...