El Pibe

or spain....or brazil ;)

or in the case of a couple of games 'defence with no counter attacks'. Was this the chamionship where the old truism about no easy games actually came true.

well, it was the team that won three championships back to back. If that doesn't qualify, I'm not quite sure what you would accept.

"There were no great teams at a great World Cup" Discuss Pretty much. Actually there was a great team at the world cup, it's just they played badly and looked, for want of a better desdcription, knackered!!! (spain of course) Fantastic world cup, even quarters onwards, the entertainment value drained away but there were still some fascinating encounters. And of course noone will EVER forget *that* game.

Can you imagine the geordie one?!?!

or you just get your language version ;) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa290365(v=vs.71).aspx

get somebody to wrap them up in your own language I guess. or you probably quite quickly pick those commonly used terms up is more likely.

silly but made me chuckle.

very cool, got to get me a jumper out of this stuff!! http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/blackest-is-the-new-black-scientists-have-developed-a-material-so-dark-that-you-cant-see-it-9602504.html

That's not the main problem, the main problem is that things are so fucked up that bullshit like this can be framed this way. Caring about life is like soo left wing, so naive. We coooool right wingers, sorry, free thinkers, just care about antithesising guardianista windmills in, you know, a tilting fashion.

and sometime smacks of something altogether more sinister....... Care to elaborate? Were Russian partisans responsible for the reprisal hangings of civilians? No it was the hanging guys. Were Vietnamese soldiers fighting us imperialism responsible for the million dead thanks to blanket bombing of Vietnam (and all the other fuzzy wuzzies)? Nope, the bombing guys.

Redacted ;)

It was just the friend if Hamas thing Steveo, you know I still luv ya

Wot keef said. . In the guise of maxxi obviously.

In the short term i can't see anything changing at all. Over the next century or two much will change, the concept of the State itself is already shifting, so it could simply be a moot point once citizenship itself is a privatised concept. Then population pressures, climate change, once oil runs out noone will give a shit about the middle east anyway. This arab-israeli conflict will just be another footnote. Doesn't help anyone cowering in Gaza or a Tel Aviv bomb shelter today mind.... Maybe a real US-Iranian detente, I think this could change the backdrop considerably thinking about it.

"Nor should anyone else on here quite frankly." Why not, the solutions are blindingly obvious, getting anyone to embrace those solutions is indeed a whole n'other ballgame. 1) remove stupid preconditions to talks 2) Get the two sides to both accept genuine compromise 3) Remove military sponsorship from the big supporting states who are still fighting a proxy war, absolutely no more weapons from either of them. This won't stop the people who hate each other from shooting each other with little weapons, again as we've seen in n ireland, but the odd murder a matter for the police has to be prefreable to bombs and rockets doens't. Now if you can just make that happen ;)

"This is a holy way(sic)" I really don't think it is. Sure, there are nutters on one side who think it's all their land by divine right and nutters on the other taking advantage of bollocks like jihad and matyrdom, but there is huge historical precedent for peaceful coexistence in the area. It's about land, and water, and power and money and self determination and politics, the usual stuff that people hit each other over the head over. The religion just makes the fringes more intransigent and gives everyone a neat us and them.

true theyre not exact comparisons, but then an end to disenfranchisement was the primary goal. Back to dignity isn't it, a political say so where you live, equal access to jobs without institutionalised discrimination. Also the long game for unification may or may not occur (i suggest tah it'll happen within 50 years) but the IRA realised that a military enforcement of it was a no go. I still think that a one state solution is really the only way forward, but whatever the 'jewish' characterisitc of that state would be it would really have to offer genuine equality for all to function. I've often half joked that it's best hope would be to join the EU ;)

On your first point otta, I've a friend here who used to be a hardcore brit hater. Sang the rebel songs with fervour, wept about Bobby Sands. But he's a bright chap, reads history voraciously and had an epiphany when he realised that had the tables been turnbed the Irish would of course have abused power just as much as the British. That it's power that brutalises, not ethnicity. So he shed all that bullshit he used to carry with him, the hatred, the judgmentalism based purely on who someone is, the sins of the fathers type stuff. He even thinks, that when Blair's not around (well anywhere but northern Ireland), that we're a force for good in this world. I long for the day when we can say the same about Israel, I genuinely do. This isn't about blame or black and white, it's about how does the one with the power get to a point where it's not acting like a cunt the whole time!

he said we're friends of Hamas, that was idiotic so the moniker was well earned. By swapping Hamas and likud around you achieve nothing. You're just saying one arsehole with power and willingness to use it is as bad as the the other one if the tables are turned, not helpful. I loathe Hamas, especially as what you describe is pretty much their aim. In 2006 Hezbollah decided to have a pop too, and Israel did disproportionate response there too. OK Israel lost the ground war, but it was a ill thought pointless, nothing incursion anyway. But the lebanese learnt the lesson and I'm sure it was civilian pressure that have stopped hezbollah's hand since; hard lesson learnt (albeit thanks to a war crime, but hey). Thing is the lebanese can come and go, they rule themselves (albeit in a weird dysfunctional balkanised country in danger of being sucked fully into Syria's civil war), they can make their own mistakes, they're not having their land nicked and have to be degraded daily. Given that in 66 years, and particularly in the last 13 things have only got worse for the Palestinians, and the only glimmer of hope from a peace is to be a non country within another country where they will be permanantly disenfranchised, then what do you suggest, especially given the constant cycle of anger due to the disporportianate killing of the populace on a regular basis. I also loathed the IRA but I always understood why they were at it, again, especially once the civil rights movement was met with bullets (do you remember the days when 13 deaths was considered outrageous and make a govenment look brutal?)

floor

"Anybody who thinks that reading history leads to a neat black-white approach where Israel is the oppressor and the Palestinians are the helpless victims needs to read it again, if possible without moving their lips at the same time." Ho ho, I see what you did there, clever. Of course tactics are only self-defeating if the person you are using them against is willing to be brutal. Bombs, mortars and murder ultimately worked quite nicely for the IRA, but then we didn't bomb catholic areas with 500lb bombs or invade the republic, kill tens of thousands and install a client buffer sate where torture and murder was the norm (mind you we'd already done that previously but I digress). The war of 1948 was one characterised by some pretty nasty ethnic cleansing. Assymetric tactics followed which ultimately failed. Hence why Arafat finally gave up, he realised that Israel were simply never going to budge. He thought Oslo was in good faith, and again in fairness may well have been but for the death of Rabin. The following road map I don't thin kever intended anything but a carve up. You can admire Israel for winning its wars that it needed to win, you can grudglingly admire them for the willingness to pursue brutally cycnical policies to ensure their safey and survival, but if you think they ain't oppressing and the palestinians (and lebanese) aint oppressed then your the one that needs help with reading.

weirdly i would have thought that now wsa a genuine window of opportunity to do something. For the first time in almost 70 years Israel is waaaayy down the list of priorities in pretty much all arab/persian countries. Leaders saying "ooh look over there a bad israeli penny" isn't fooling anyone any more. With the pressure off and the Palestinians' usual sponsors either suppressing their own, caught up in civil wars, fallinf to pieces or negotiating normalisation of relations with the US (of which pulling support for Hamas would be a very big and valuable negotiating chip, wouldn't that be a good time to talk?

Oh yeah, we're friends of Hamas, idiotic thing to say. Hamas rockets achieve nothing and i agree that they're utterly self-defeatring, they think it applies political pressure, but the Israeli population seem able to live with the status quo, even those that sympathise with the Palestinian cause. The world doesn't give a shit, at least not enough to pressure the US to pressure Israel to make genuine movement towards compromise. And of course Israeli demographics push it further and further away from any sort of settlement. The Israel of 25 years ago that wanted peace is now sidelined, the hawkish centre right absolutely dominates the middle-ground now and its only going to go further right. So given that doing nothing achieves nothing and setting off fireworks achieve nothing, i can see why you'd do the latter rather than bow down and accept your fate, though if I lived there i'd certainly be asking them to stop as its the civilians who suffer as usual. Of course Hamas will negotiate and would do a deal, they just want a better deal than the non-state lay-over-and-play-dead deal that Fatah signed up to; local power for Israels scraps from the table. A starting point might be one where your nose isn't daily and brutally rubbed into the the indignity, powerlessness and destitution of your existence.

it was 3 out of 5, sorry, still pretty mad.