As far as my political persuasion; I am a moderate and mostly voted for Democrats until the War on terror.

Does this mean you will start hating Bush like you hated Clinton after you voted for him ?

I never hated Clinton.

Rather admired the "blowj*b isn't sex" defence!

Got to say that this impressed me as well!

I never hated Clinton.

Rather admired the "blowj*b isn't sex" defence!

Got to say that this impressed me as well!

Yeah, but as the most powerful man in the free world (at the time), couldn't he have found someone better looking than Monica to "not having meaningful relations" with ?

If I was him, all my interns would be Paris Hilton/Hillary Duff/Nicole Ritchie/Tara Reid clones

(I may not have "meaningful relations" with them, but I'd sure be going through a lot of cigars !)

Yes, it was impressing that he couldn't even had any affairs with anyone good looking. Maybe even beautifull airhead-models have standards; "don't date politicians".

Yeah, but as the most powerful man in the free world (at the time), couldn't he have found someone better looking than Monica to "not having meaningful relations" with ?

If I was him, all my interns would be Paris Hilton/Hillary Duff/Nicole Ritchie/Tara Reid clones

I certainly agree with this, but even in Thailand, plenty of guys will just stick it into anything!

Please show me where I have supported Butterflys posts.

Can we have a bet and you be banned if you fail?

Ps. Don't forget to answer what you cut away. Did you vote for Al Gore? Ds.

Still waiting for a reply.

Please show me where I have supported Butterflys posts.

Can we have a bet and you be banned if you fail?

Ps. Don't forget to answer what you cut away. Did you vote for Al Gore? Ds.

Still waiting for a reply.

Boon Me>> No thanks for teaching you about the world outside the US? Now you have learnt that nazis (and other extremist political groups) have the right to demonstrate in several western countries.

Boon Mee has spent quite a bit of time living in other countries as well as learning new languages, studying other cultures, reading about the world and constantly improving himself while working full time.

His detractors have no leg to stand on there.

No leg to stand on? I suggest you read the thread before you start protecting him with your life.

My post still stands since I posted something he apperently didn't know.

(And you know, he isn't the only one that knows several languages. Or are working full time. Or spending time abroad. So, what exactly is your point?)

I was just too lazy to look through your Bin Ladin enabling posts, but this just one where you supported Butterfly, and zzap's positions. There are many more.

Face it, if you are 'right-wing" it is in the same way that Benedict Arnold was an "American".

Happy Now?

The riots continue in France.

Labour Unions have joined the unrest by going on strike.

Don't these people have better things to do ?

Head of Sorbonne points, laughs

The president of the world-renowned Sorbonne University has branded French students protesting about the country's new employment law "ignorant and stupid".

"I'm very angry about the demagogy, the ignorance and the stupidity of the young and of the French," said Dr. Pitte, 56, a geography professor who has taught at Oxford and Cambridge and holds the Légion d'honneur"

Get a job...

Head of Sorbonne points, laughs

The president of the world-renowned Sorbonne University has branded French students protesting about the country's new employment law "ignorant and stupid".

"I'm very angry about the demagogy, the ignorance and the stupidity of the young and of the French," said Dr. Pitte, 56, a geography professor who has taught at Oxford and Cambridge and holds the Légion d'honneur"

Get a job...

Well, judging by the latest news and pictures, the professor isn't far off the mark.

Watching those people attack other protestors and using the riots as an excuse to cause destruction to property doesn't sound like the actions of smart, informed people.

The initial protests, led by students from the Sorbonne, were peaceful. However, the addition of the hooligan element has led to mindless destruction and violence.

The sad part is, no one will learn a lesson from this (in France, except for maybe the riot police).

No doubt that within a few months of this riot ending, they will find a new reason to start another protest, which will again degenerate into a riot.

Have just read the whole thread (minus the loony left, loony right <deleted>) and nobody has really explained the need for this new legislation.

In a modern economy, labour is a commodity just like everything else. Businesses go through cycles. When they are busy they need more labour than when they are not.

The labour laws in France are so draconian on the side of the employee that it has stifled hiring.

No firm wants to hire someone that they are unable to let go at a future date (whether for incompetence, or, because they are no longer needed.

The present situation of overly protective employment legislation is indeed a hang-over from previous leftist governments. France's social protection has now become unaffordable and must change. They can elect to do this by introducing legislation to encourage employment, or, do nothing and watch the whole system implode.

Germany is going through the same process with the same public resentment. Although change is slower than the government and business leaders would want, things are changing. They know that their present system is unaffordable. As the world's biggest exporter with high wages, they know that they have to stay competitive.

At least Germany is having some small success. France has elected to close it's eyes and hope the problem will just go away.

The new law will encourage firms to hire people. France has an unemployment rate of 10% and in the under 25's it is 20% or so. Something must be done to get these people who are ready, able and willing to work.

My guess is that all the protesters have jobs already and are protecting their existing jobs at the expence of the unemployed.

What's inside a French student's mind?

Looks like somebody tried to find out. No great loss however. Even before getting it bashed in, he couldn't use his head.

Please show me where I have supported Butterflys posts.

Can we have a bet and you be banned if you fail?

Ps. Don't forget to answer what you cut away. Did you vote for Al Gore? Ds.

Still waiting for a reply.

Boon Me>> No thanks for teaching you about the world outside the US? Now you have learnt that nazis (and other extremist political groups) have the right to demonstrate in several western countries.

Boon Mee has spent quite a bit of time living in other countries as well as learning new languages, studying other cultures, reading about the world and constantly improving himself while working full time.

His detractors have no leg to stand on there.

No leg to stand on? I suggest you read the thread before you start protecting him with your life.

My post still stands since I posted something he apperently didn't know.

(And you know, he isn't the only one that knows several languages. Or are working full time. Or spending time abroad. So, what exactly is your point?)

I was just too lazy to look through your Bin Ladin enabling posts, but this just one where you supported Butterfly, and zzap's positions. There are many more.

Face it, if you are 'right-wing" it is in the same way that Benedict Arnold was an "American".

Happy Now?

I know you are too lazy to read through, if you did you would notice that that post didn't support butterfly or zzap. I'm guessing your not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Still waiting for a reply if you voted for Al Gore.

Ps. I'm so happy that you know more about what parties I voted for then me. Or alas, you don't. How about you post about things you know? Like the size of the organ of the katoy you usually date? Ds.

Please show me where I have supported Butterflys posts.

Can we have a bet and you be banned if you fail?

Ps. Don't forget to answer what you cut away. Did you vote for Al Gore? Ds.

Still waiting for a reply.

Boon Me>> No thanks for teaching you about the world outside the US? Now you have learnt that nazis (and other extremist political groups) have the right to demonstrate in several western countries.

Boon Mee has spent quite a bit of time living in other countries as well as learning new languages, studying other cultures, reading about the world and constantly improving himself while working full time.

His detractors have no leg to stand on there.

No leg to stand on? I suggest you read the thread before you start protecting him with your life.

My post still stands since I posted something he apperently didn't know.

(And you know, he isn't the only one that knows several languages. Or are working full time. Or spending time abroad. So, what exactly is your point?)

I was just too lazy to look through your Bin Ladin enabling posts, but this just one where you supported Butterfly, and zzap's positions. There are many more.

Face it, if you are 'right-wing" it is in the same way that Benedict Arnold was an "American".

Happy Now?

I know you are too lazy to read through, if you did you would notice that that post didn't support butterfly or zzap.

I read the posts.

BULLSH*T!

Jeez, blame Kerry for starting an uncontrollable fad.

I would like to thank Ulysses G. for proving to everyone just how full of shit he is.

He makes outrages claims he never can prove - mostly because they are never true. Wonderfull.

Ps. You have yet to answer if you voted for Al Gore Ds.

Jeez, blame Kerry for starting an uncontrollable fad.

Aww shucks !

Blame me ? I can't take the credit for it !

I saw those "text generators" in various posts on here a long time ago. I just resurrected some of them (and found some new ones).

I also found a pic of Boon Mee and Ulysses G. out "bonding" together:

I would like to thank Ulysses G. for proving to everyone just how full of shit he is.

What I proved is that TAWP is not just a liar, but one who won't even bother to change his lies once they've been exposed.

Not worth replying to this Butterfly clone.

I'm guessing you are confusing yourself.

Or please explain how my post above defended butterfly.

Would this explain your sudden laps in being unable to read any posts correctly that wasn't made by Boon Me?

So you call me a liar without posting why or providing any proof. What is the word for those people?

Ps. You still haven't answered if you voted for Al Gore. Ds.

Or please explain how my post above defended butterfly.

You, Butterfly and zzap all were attacking Boon Mee together on that thread. You were supporting them. They were supporting you. The 3 amigos!

Now p*ss off Benedict!

I knew you where stupid, but this have to take the price.

If you have anything but the cum of Boon Me behind your eyes, you would see that he posted an incorrect statement and _I_ corrected him. How is _me_ posting a correction (and the follow-up posts after he tried to get away) anything but a support for _me_?

Or you mean that because they thought it was funny he made an obious error, I couldn't write in my own thread?

Please wipe the two-strings from under your nose and check who started the thread.

So, when can I get your excuse?

Ps. You voted for Al Gore? Otherwise you made an error in your previous post. Ds.

Ps2. Here is the thread, if your slippery fingers cannot direct the mouse to search for it again: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=61519 Ds.

Not to worry Ulysses G. - anyone who slags off Mother Teresa speaks with the monochromatic institutional voice of a leftist unhinged from reality.

Anybody want to actually discuss the original topic?

Absolutely!

Like how the failed programs to entitle the masses don't work?...

A good article from last weeks Economist magazine:-

France faces the future

Mar 30th 2006

From The Economist print edition

The country's politicians need to level with the French people on the need to embrace change

“THE French constitute the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation in Europe and the best qualified in turn to become an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror but never indifference.” Thus did a young Alexis de Tocqueville describe his motherland in the early 19th century. His words still carry a haunting truth. Over the past few years, as other western democracies have shuffled quietly along, France has by turns stunned, exasperated and bemused. This week's massive one-day protest, drawing 1m-3m people on to the streets, was no exception (see article). This particular stand-off, between the centre-right government of Dominique de Villepin and those protesting against his effort to inject a tiny bit of liberalism into France's rigid labour market, may be defused. The Constitutional Council was due to rule on the legality of the new law on March 30th. But the underlying difficulty will remain: the apparent incapacity of the French to adapt to a changing world.

On the face of it, France seems to be going through one of those convulsions that this nation born of revolution periodically requires in order to break with the past and to move forward. Certainly the students who kicked off the latest protests seemed to think they were re-enacting the events of May 1968 their parents sprang on Charles de Gaulle. They have borrowed its slogans (“Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!”) and hijacked its symbols (the Sorbonne university). In this sense, the revolt appears to be the natural sequel to last autumn's suburban riots, which prompted the government to impose a state of emergency. Then it was the jobless, ethnic underclass that rebelled against a system that excluded them.

Yet the striking feature of the latest protest movement is that this time the rebellious forces are on the side of conservatism. Unlike the rioting youths in the banlieues, the objective of the students and public-sector trade unions is to prevent change, and to keep France the way it is. Indeed, according to one astonishing poll, three-quarters of young French people today would like to become civil servants, and mostly because that would mean “a job for life”. Buried inside this chilling lack of ambition are one delusion and one crippling myth.

The delusion is that preserving France as it is, in some sort of formaldehyde solution, means preserving jobs for life. Students, as well as unqualified suburban youngsters, do not today face a choice between the new, less protected work contract and a lifelong perch in the bureaucracy. They, by and large, face a choice between already unprotected short-term work and no work at all. And the reason for this, which is also the reason for France's intractable mass unemployment of nearly 10%, is simple: those permanent life-time jobs are so protected, and hence so difficult to get rid of, that many employers are not creating them any more.

This delusion is accompanied by an equally pernicious myth: that France has more to fear from globalisation, widely held responsible for imposing the sort of insecurity enshrined in the new job contract, than it does to gain. It is true that the forces of global capitalism are not always benign, but nobody has yet found a better way of creating and spreading prosperity. In another startling poll, however, whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%. The French seem to be uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them the world's fifth richest country and generated so many first-rate French companies. This hostility appears to go deeper than resistance to painful reform, which is common to Italy and Germany too; or than a desire for a strong welfare state, which Scandinavian countries share; or even than a fondness for protectionism, which America periodically betrays.

The limits to change by stealth

A common feature unites France's underclass rioters and the rebellious students, as well as the election of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen into the run-off of the 2002 presidential election. This is the failure of the French political class over the past 20 years to tell it straight: to explain to the electorate what is at stake, why France needs to adapt, and why change need not bring only discomfort. This failure has bred a political culture of reform by stealth, in which change is carried out with one hand and blamed on outside forces—usually globalisation, the European Union or America—while soothing words about protecting the French way are issued on the other. After a while, the credibility gap tears such a system apart. The French voted for Mr Le Pen in part because they were fed up with the stale mainstream political class. The banlieues exploded because unemployed minorities were fed up hearing that they did not belong. The students and trade unions are in revolt because they do not trust the government to protect them.

Part of the blame for this lies squarely with President Jacques Chirac. He has presided for nearly 11 years, during which mass unemployment has never budged below 8%, France's wealth per person has been overtaken by both Britain's and Ireland's, and public debt has jumped from 55% of GDP to 66%. The liberal instincts he once betrayed as a reformist prime minister in the mid-1980s have long since evaporated. His support for the prime minister's new jobs contract has been tepid at best. His chief preoccupation seems to be to avoid shaking the conservative French consensus, and even that unambitious objective has been missed. It is a measure of how wasted his presidency has been that one of his own ministers, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a 2007 presidential hopeful, can today make speeches that deplore “two decades of immobility” and call for a “rupture” with the status quo.

But the president is not to blame alone. Nobody on the French left dares to challenge the prevailing paleo-socialist wisdom, and Ségolène Royal, the most popular of the would-be presidential candidates, was roundly derided for confessing faint admiration for Britain's Tony Blair. On the right, Mr de Villepin at least had the courage to try to counter the logic of job protection, but elsewhere has scarcely demonstrated an embrace of open markets. Perhaps the closest France has to a new-generation leader prepared to try to reconcile French public opinion with globalisation is Mr Sarkozy. This week he declared that France could no longer “maintain the illusory barrage of a so-called model that each day shows itself to no longer work, nor protect anything or anybody”. But even Mr Sarkozy has proved a hard-core national protectionist when it comes to special pleading by French industry. All the while, he and Mr de Villepin's obsessive rivalry over the succession continues to sap France's ability to get policy right.

History will judge France harshly if its political class fails to find the courage to help the country equip itself for the 21st century. More than that, France's turmoil has implications beyond its own borders. An uncertain France is an uncertain partner for its allies, both in Europe and beyond. Within the EU, having rejected its draft constitution last year, the French no longer seem to know what they want. They still seek to project their influence through Europe, but will have difficulty doing this while they are so consumed by internal strife at home, and while they still struggle to come to terms with Europe's internal market. Can countries like Ukraine or Belarus be blamed for wondering what Europe can offer them while France, a founder member, is so unsure itself? The worry is that the more that France struggles to define a role for itself in the world, the more it will in turn be tempted to fasten on its social model as its raison d'être, and so cling to a discredited creed.

The choice belongs to France. A bold effort at renewal that could unleash the best in the French? Or a stubborn defence of the existing order that will keep France a middling world power in economic decline? The latter would inspire neither admiration, nor terror, nor hatred, nor indifference, just pity.

What can you say?

France has been a pain in the ass to the English and Americans for an eternity

The referenced article points out a several major points France will have to deal with - for example : "...poll, however, whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%"

Good luck with their economy...

I think this statement is scary:-

"According to one astonishing poll, three-quarters of young French people today would like to become civil servants, and mostly because that would mean a job for life".

Wanting to be a public servant for all the wrong reasons.

What can you say?

France has been a pain in the ass to the English and Americans for an eternity

The referenced article points out a several major points France will have to deal with - for example : "...poll, however, whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%"

Good luck with their economy...

Well they have been a prick to the English for an eternity..they helped your lot fight the Brits.

Don't bother educating Boon Me.

He and Ulysses is beyond any help.

Boon Me>> Next your telling me that unless one is catholic, one is leftish? You are a sad character. A tribute to the sad people your worship.

Just when I'd thought we had got back on topic.....

You are all as bad as each other. I give up.