Absolutely. You see new films make it into the IMDB top 250 list. They then slowly slip down until they disappear altogether.

Case in point, The Dark Knight Rises is currently at 37.

You telling me that only 36 better films have ever been made than that piece of shit? There were probably 36 better films made last month.

I dunno, I mean your actual atoms change throughout your life so how would this be different?

I think as long as I saw other people coming out seemingly unaffected I'd be happy to use it.

If I am anything I'm probably some kind of currently existing pattern of firing neurons. If they teleport that then they teleport me.

What's your position on sleeping? An extreme version of your argument might suggest that we do all we can to avoid falling asleep. How do you know the you that wakes up was the you that fell asleep? Certainly if I am my consciousness, do I not die everytime I become unconscious? I never remember what I was thinking when I fell asleep at the point of waking.

Yes we drink a lot more than America. There's a breakdown by countries here.

No need to feel sorry for us. We may have an established church but the only reason we have it is because disestablishing it would take up a lot of time in parliament and there are always other things more pressing. It really doesn't breach our human rights trust me.

The census results are misleading. I know from speaking to friends and family that people identify themselves on the form as 'Christian' purely because they think that's what white British people are.

There is a debate over her about the wording of the question and it is likely to be changed as no one actually believes that only 25% of people are not religious.

To put it in context for you it is believed that only 10% of the UK population attend some sort of church. The figure in the USA is 43%.

For a politician to invoke God would be seen as deeply weird over here. The opposite seems to be the case in the USA where you almost have to say you believe to get elected. Tony Blair's (who is a true believer, an oddity in British politics) press officer famously stated that 'we don't do God' to make sure that Tony never said anything about his beliefs.

Again with the monarchy, the main reason we have it is that we have always had it. Getting rid of it comes up every now and then but there is no real enthusiasm for republicanism. The monarchy have no power so what's the point in worrying about it? They also mean we don't have to have an elected head of state which saves us a lot of time over worrying which self serving charlatan we should have.

I mean if we had a vote to scrap the monarchy I'd probably vote in favour but meh I'm really not fussed.

If you want to feel sorry for someone feel sorry for yourself. I'd be particularly upset about plea bargaining. I mean you took our justice system, the best in the world, and then ruined it. People pleading guilty when they're not to escape long sentences in your barbaric prisons. You also lock up more people than anywhere else in the world.

We drink a lot more than Americans.

A lot of people would have had a few drinks before they got around to filling in the census form.

The way I see it, every country has the right to try and get nuclear weapons, but we have the right to stop them if we feel it is in out interests.

The only rules in warfare are decided by having a war. International law is just a fig leaf.

That guy let his wife die by refusing 'Western' medicine.

Used it himself though when he needed it.

Creepy egomaniac if you ask me. You ever ask people to wash your feet?

18% of world's emissions, 5% of world's population.

You really think the U.S has already done its bit?

Why are all of your cars so big? Couldn't you start there?

Not disagreeing with what you say but the point is that I see no evidence that people are brighter than they were 100 years ago yet the IQ scores have increased.

Someone said it might be because schools are better now. I was saying that I don't think they are.

Sure cities have been sacked throughout history but I said 'We lost out moral authority'. That 'We' represents the post enlightenment Judeo-Christian tradition based English speaking civilisation that I consider myself to be part of.

Sure plenty of terrible things have been done but officially sanctioned murder of civilians was never considered acceptable until the Allied bombing of Germany. Before then, if it happened it was considered shameful as it should be. Since then it has become almost to be acceptable, certainly you think it is.

It isn't acceptable and I'm sorry you think it is.

Also if we are at war as you claim, who exactly are we at war with, what is the aim and how will we know if we've won? Surely if you are happy to bomb small children you must be pretty certain you know why you are doing it?

I wasn't necessarily talking about the people who wrote the texts, I was talking about the content of those texts that make it clear that people haven't changed much.

I mean read the Bible and although the characters in it are unsurprisingly ignorant, they don't sound less intelligent.

Anyway the point about the Flynn effect is that it applies across the scale so the brightest people in the past would have scored more lowly even though they clearly were as intelligent as the brightest people around today. It would seem odd therefore to use the same effect to argue that the rest of the poeple have got more intelligent.

I don't really buy the idea that our education system is any better than what people had in the past anyway. Better classroom discipline and a greater incentive to study probably meant that schools were actually better in the past.

Even where there were no schools people still mostly learnt to read and write. Literacy rates have not changed much in the last 100 years in England.

Can't speak for Americans as I'm English but we are certainly not getting smarter.

Why would we be getting smarter anyway? It's pretty obvious from reading old Greek or Roman texts that people are pretty much the same now as they've always been. Shakespeare shows that nothing much has changed in England for over 400 years.

I thought the common explanation was that people are more used to thinking 'abstractly' in Western cultures. That's why people from outside the West still score more lowly even today.

I guess only you know for sure what point you were trying to make.

To me your argument seems to be that killing children is just one of those things you have to do security and that the real question is whether the drone attacks are creating more trouble than they stop.

Killing civilians is just wrong. If you can't discriminate between genuine targets and civilians you shouldn't do anything. Collateral damage is unacceptable outside of a genuine battlefield.

Our ancestors would never have accepted the things we see as routine today. We lost our moral authority when we started bombing civilians in Germany in response to the Nazis. It's time to get it back by stopping this bombing.

Obviously the murder of a 14 year old child is wrong.

So is the use of drones to kill civilians.

It's not complicated.

Using drones to kill a terrorist as equivalent to bombing an apartment block to kill a fugitive.

They get away with it because of bullshit propaganda and the pussy media. When was the last time you saw the results of these drone bombings on kids being shown on the TV? You think the families are going to grow up to love the West?

So you live in an Afghan village. You've not been to school, know nothing about America, don't have a television or access to any media.

The Taliban come along and stay in your village for the night. You can't do much about it as they are all armed and you don't want them to kill your family.

You are now 'housing' terrorists and fair game for a bomb fired by someone sat in a room with a joystick who's been raised to believe the same bullshit propaganda that cayenne8 glibly trots out here.

You wouldn't be so blasé about killing children if you had a decent media that showed you the results.

Just because we've been in the 'game' for a while doesn't make it right.

As a Brit who's proud of our fight against the Nazis, I still see the bombing policy we undertook as a massive mistake, not some kind of precedent we can trot out when we want to go around killing innocent people.

The issue is not whether 'drone children killing is less in our interest than more established methods of children killing' , it's what's wrong with a society that drops bombs on civilians without a thought.