All the parties game the system. It's how politics in Thailand works. The new guy is just as, if not more, corrupt than the old one. The whole thing is a joke. Thaksin's replacement was removed after being convicted of a conflict of interest (he was moonlighting as a chef on a television cooking show â" that's so pathetic that words fail me).

The difference is that Thaksin's lot were voted in with a majority, and he'd more or less kept most of his campaign promises. Hell, he'd even completed a previous term, and his party had been voted an absolute majority (both almost unheard of there). That's not to say he wasn't bent. They're all bent. But it's better to have a bent leader who represents the will of the majority than a bent leader who doesn't and who is more or less installed as the result of a coup, eh?

The antics of the current government have set democracy in Thailand back 40 years. For that, they should hang.

He should have been honest and said: "Hi, I'm your new Prime Minister who was installed by the military and the middle classes, because the poor majority of our country finally got it into their stupid heads to get together and vote for a party that more or less represented their interests. This is not allowed. Democracy is not about having a government that gets the most votes, but about serving the interests of the middle class and wealthy."

It's the same old sad story.

This guy and his supporters deserve something more than a reply to a text message.

"So you believe a nation can (or even has to) continue using a centuries old constitution with disregard for the changes that happened during that time?"

Yeah. What worries me is why you think anyone who believes that is worth reasoning with.

Libertarianism is kind of like bizarro Scientology â" the Scientologists try to keep their ideas secret and threaten lawsuits to stop it being printed on internet forums, while the Libertarians won't shut up and spam every internet forum, poll and newspaper comment site with their lunacy â" Scientologists are wealthy, successful and often attractive Hollywood celebrities, Libertarians are poverty stricken, reclusive, pale residents of parents' basements, etc.

That just proves that no matter how much men and materiel you give a bunch of cowardly, ignorant, casualty-averse idiots, they won't win jack.

I mean, anyone.... anyone... could have gone down to a local public library and acquired a better understanding of the political and ethnic situation in Iraq and Afghanistan than the people in charge of the invasions had.

Right, so if the ship had been legally docked at the Port of Los Angeles and had been attacked and sunk there by the French Secret Service, killing a crew member, the US government and US citizens would not be angry about it because the ship's owners had been annoying the French government?

Yeah right. Pull the other one.

The French had every right to arrest the protesters in French territorial waters if they chose to do so. They had no right to commit a terrorist murder in New Zealand, a country which was supposedly an ally. I'm not the only one who wouldn't mind taking a shot or two at those responsible.

You might want to read a bit more about that one. The problem in that case was that the French decided that it would be a good idea to test nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, which mortally pissed off pretty much everyone who lived there. If it was so safe, why couldn't they test the blasted things in France. It wasn't just Greenpeace. The New Zealand government had sent ships to the test site to protest in previous years. Why stand by as some European nonces shit in our back yard?

European nuclear powers had a well-known history of contempt for people in the South Pacific. Britain, for example, tested nuclear weapons in Australia without bothering to inform the Aboriginals who lived near the test site that they should get out of the way. So you can guess that the French were not popular.

New Zealand was a supposed ally of France and there are thousands of New Zealanders buried in war cemeteries in France and Belgium, which is where they died helping defend France against invasion. So to have the French security forces commit a terrorist attack and murder on New Zealand soil just because they couldn't hack a rusty old boat sailing up and down near their nuclear test site was in my opinion a bit much.

The French officials responsible for this are lower than shit. If I had the chance, I would put a bullet in their heads. So would a lot of other people I know.

Philosophers realized this a long time ago. Much of what is called modern "analytic" philosophy is based on the idea you just expressed: that philosophical problems often arise through an inadequate grasp of logic or language.

Russell's book is also wildly outdated and heavily biased in favour of his own ideas. It's simply not possible to gain anything other than a superficial understanding of the subject from a book like that.

When people say they are interested in philosophy, they often mean different things, since it is such a diverse subject that is only unified by its tools and methods.

People who are interested in philosophy are better off approaching it through the questions that interest them. For example, are the theories of Quantum mechanics properly translatable into ordinary natural languages, or can they only be expressed in mathematical terms? If so, what consequences does this have for ordinary language?

Thinking about questions like that will carry you much further into the subject than reading "History of Philosophy for Dummies".