(hint: Call of Duty and Activision both need to die)

Most of the Call of Duty games I played have either russians (the modern warfare series) or germans (the WWII series) as main enemies with "browns" actually being a minor part of them.

Granted. No matter which way you look at it, however, the modern games do still present a very troubling glorification of the killing of people from other countries. You do make a good point, though - it's not just CoD. We have the Battlefield series for filling in the "murder the brown people" quota.

(Nazis, though, I really don't care about. )

What about slaughtering Islamist reactionaries?

I'm wondering why you jump to that and not something like Spec Ops: the Line where your character slaughters an entire battalion of US infantry as its main opponent (complete with your enemies shouting in English etc).  Shooters aren't all about taking down foreign devils.

Open-ended question.  I've always loved Handel's English language version, but there's an absurd number versions out there. 

Someone sit the Vice President down with Spec Ops: The Line, and have him report back.  You're still a good man, Mr. Vice President!  

EDIT: And now I won't sleep tonight thanks to my memories of that damn game.    "The horror, the horror" indeed. 

I care at least a little, so I guess that I could care less.  However, unlike some of these pet peeves, this is one that I'm guilty of on occasion when I'm speaking lazily.

It's struck me recently that the music I listen to now contains more Handel than not-Handel.

Also, "Hail, Hail, Judea Happy Land" is a ridiculous earworm. 

I address anybody I don't know except small children as sir and/or ma'am, so yes.

This. 

Matthew.  I don't see how any non-Christian could pick John, and Matthew is better-written than the other two Synoptics.

This is all a gross oversimplification for space.

Liberalism has its earliest philosophic roots with thinkers like John Locke and his Enlightenment heirs who believed that mankind had an unlimited set of rights from birth in the state of nature and surrendered certain rights to live in society (the social contact) and that governments only had the legitimate ability to restrict rights that infringed upon others (my "right" to murder you infringes on your right to live).  Philosophers like Rousseau elaborated on Locke's social contract and propounded a doctrine that government should be based on consent of the governed rather than divine right.  This dovetailed nicely with the lessons of England's 1688 "Glorious Revolution," a rejection of Stuart Absolutism, which culminated in the English Bill of Rights.  (This is a very positive view of these events, which were actually far more complicated and ambiguous, but I'm skimming).  Enlightenment projects like Cesare Beccaria's campaign to ban torture dovetailed nicely with this viewpoint.  Radical attempts by thinkers like Mary Woolstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges to lay claim to the liberal intellectual tradition in favor of equality for women met sharp ends (literally in Olympe de Gouges' case).  Against this doctrine, Edmund Burke would lay down his theory that rather than illusory fundamental rights, people should look towards their privileges granted in a murky medieval past and attempt to revive ancient privileges rather than destroy the order of society around them: Burke's reaction to the French Revolution was the founding of intellectual conservatism.

In the late 18th century, the followers of Adam Smith rejected the Mercantilist economic dogma that had dominated the 18th century.  Smith rejected the idea that there was a finite amount of wealth in the world and that economics was a zero-sum game of trying to amass the most gold bullion into your own treasury in favor of the idea that trade and mutual competitive advantage could leave both parties richer.  Smith's free-trade economic dogma, refined by David Ricardo in the early 19th century, merged with the political ideas of the Social Contract Theory to form the Classical Liberalism package: free markets and free men.  Jeremy Bentham and James and John Stuart Mill furthered the intellectual side of Liberalism into a new doctrine called "Philosophic Radicalism" which merged Liberalism's tenets with Bentham's moral philosophy of Utilitarianism, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.  Philosophic Radicalism, at its worst, embraced a Malthusian disregard and contempt for the poor (Social Darwinism) and the notion that any recreational activity for the poor should be balanced with pain to encourage hard work in that group.  All the same, Mill advocated for religious tolerance and extension of political rights and female emancipation.

In most of Europe, Liberalism aped its British form, arguing for free trade and lassiez faire capitalism and against the privileges of the traditional aristocracy.  It had great appeal among the rising bourgeois orders and its promise of extended political rights appealed somewhat to the masses, but the rise of Social Democratic parties in the late 19th century came mostly at the expense of Liberalism's support among the working classes, and Conservatives also rapidly adapted to mass politics and did not suffer nearly as much from the increasing democratization of politics as Liberalism's (and Socialism's) partisans had assumed.

In the USA, Liberalism originally mostly shared that definition.  The word was associated with abolitionists and free traders alike (movements like the Free Soil Party, with its claims of Free Trade, Free Land, and Free Soil being as Liberal as a platform could get).  In the post-Civil War era, as the GOP embraced Protectionism, the Democratic Party, despite being opposed to many other tenets of Liberalism, fully embraced Free Trade and became associated with Liberalism as a result.  When Woodrow Wilson was elected president, he was a self-proclaimed liberal who was a firm believer in free trade, but was also a believer in massive government reform projects including the foundation of a central banking system.  Franklin Roosevelt took the word liberal with him when he assumed the Presidency, and it's under his administration, that greatly increased the size of the Federal government, that made it what it is today in the USA.  Liberalism became a light form of social democracy in the USA as a result of the "liberal" Roosevelt being a light social democrat and leaving such a huge imprint on American politics.

In Europe, the aftermath of World War I and the subsequent Depression had left lassiez faire economics and the liberal political order both borderline discredited, as solutions relying more on planned economies and dictatorial fiat became more and more attractive.  Even in Britain, the Liberal Party nearly died in the 1920s as its nature of being "Conservatives but anti-tariff" simply wasn't enough to maintain broad popular support outside of a few minor demographics.  Until the 1980s (when it was reborn as neo-liberalism), the lassiez-faire liberal idea in Europe made way in the democratic ideological scene for social democracy on the left and a heavily government-oriented Christian Democratic/Gaullist ideal on the right.

In the USA, the turmoil of the 1960s on race and the war in Vietnam left the traditional liberal political class, with their faith in the government's ability to solve any economic or social problem, seriously discredited.  Many in the liberal government class like Daniel Patrick Moynihan embraced the social ideals of conservatism without losing their faith in government as a major transformative actor and agent for their ideals: they would be the pioneers of "neoconservatism" (a word that's since been majorly trashed...Moynihan wouldn't embrace that label today if he were still alive).

Neoliberalism, arising in both Europe and the USA, was a reaction to the Keynesian consensus and argued that the most deregulated and unfettered global economy would be the most productive one.  Following the collapse of the USSR, neoliberal economists had disastrous spells as advisers in several Eastern Bloc countries, overseeing the firesale divestment of those states' huge public sectors and the creation of bandit billionaires all over the former Communist Bloc.

Off Topic really isn't all that cluttered to begin with.

101 Probations would be a good pun if we used probations as the name of our punishment system here.  As is, I can't think of a good pun that works with infraction.

Either 1 or 2, depending on which one the person I'm talking to is using.

...This could easily be a 10-15 page essay.

It was done for political reasons, and to make his wife happy. Constantine was a pragmatist. That all is my impression anyway. Somewhere I read, that he really didn't convert. He just made it clear that Christians were now part of the establishment.

More importantly, Constantine's mother Helena was a deeply pious Christian.

Constantine didn't officially convert to Christianity until his deathbed.  The traditional story (take it with a grain of salt) is that he didn't feel that a Christian ruler could sentence people to death and he needed to keep on with the capital punishment so he waited until after he'd ever have to execute anyone again before converting.  The biggest objection to that story is that very few other Christian rulers ever felt that their religion conflicted with the death penalty (including Constantine's sons, who were Christians who had no compunction about execution).

Either way, whether Constantine himself became Christian or not, he put Christianity on the same level as all the other faiths and in fact gave it a heavily-favored status that, over the next few decades, would leave it utterly dominant, and eventually strong enough that at the end of the 4th century Theodosius was able to ban the pagan faiths.

Persecution was a result of Christian refusal to participate in the imperial cult, about the equivalent of not saying the pledge of allegiance or not saluting the flag.  It's a sign of possibly treasonous of unpatriotic intent in the eyes of some (see how much crap the Jehovah's Witnesses get today).  The Romans, except under Diocletian, didn't go out of their way to attack Christians, but Christians ended up in trouble for ostentatiously refusing to sprinkle incense on the Altar of Victory and other cult activities that all patriotic Romans were expected to do.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I explicitly said "except under Diocletian."  Christians (and Manicheans, and other foreign-ish religions) were heavily persecuted in his reign even by modern standards.

Also, of course, I presume PPP polled people aged 18 to eternal....

That, and the fact that the average poster here is around 14 years old, so they're having trouble  believing that anyone might prefer Bach over Nirvana.  I understand how that is, I'd have probably a hard time believing it when I was 14.  Being 46, and hanging around mostly with a bunch of other 40-something folks, the result doesn't surprise me at all. 

Well, met me put it this way: I'm almost as far from 14 as from 46, and I came very close to going to graduate school in music composition, and in general was pretty deeply involved with the classical music world for a while in my youth, and still regularly go to concerts.  So I'm pretty sure I have a better handle on this particular corner of the music world than you, and trust me things would be VERY different if these numbers were within even an order of magnitude of being correct.

Contemporary composers are either writing film scores or are writing pieces to be read and not listened to that no one other than music grad students are familiar with, though.  In fairness to the poll, when people hear the term "classical" they aren't thinking of anything more recent than Wagner or Mahler or are, like Ernest said, thinking of things like John Williams scores that can still sell out concerts.  No one's claiming the public's lining up to hear Philip Glass or John Adams.

I've started hating people on my own side of the aisle more than the other side.

My problem with free will in a shorter form is that it presumes that the brain/seat of consciousness is "you" in a more real way than the rest of your body, which is a presupposition I can't sign onto.  I don't order my lungs to inhale or my heart to beat.  I don't order my hair to grow.  How am I in control here?

Even with matters of the brain, consider: my grandfather went totally senile before he passed.  He forgot practically everything and required round-the-clock caretakers.  How is he in control of his own fate?  Where does his free will come into play?

Nixon Rafsanjani, now more than ever.

I think Al's right in that it's the answer Americans "think" they're supposed to give and it's also the default answer of people that don't listen to music or have a strong opinion to begin with.

Those Americans are wrong, of course.  The default correct "respectable" American answer is Standards/Great American Songbook stuff because it's properly American and not European.  These people's fathers and mothers would know that that was the correct answer and would've looked down on the people claiming that they adore Beethoven while only knowing the opening measure of the Fourth Symphony.

Kill Bill.

A great writer.

If this is a reference to what I think it is, well done sir, that was a really good joke.

Predestination > Free Will, so Calvinism wins on that leg for me.

Why? Isnt life pointless if our fate is predestined?

Why does life need a point?

EDIT: In explanation, my thought process is a product of millions (billions) of pieces of information, memories, instincts, etc, and my thoughts are reactions to those stimuli.   I myself have shed millions of skin cells, dead hairs, nail clippings, etc. over the years that were once part of me and no longer are, and have cells in my body that weren't part of the original me that are now.  What am "I?"  I in my present form didn't even exist this morning when I clipped my nails.  How can "I" be said to be controlling my own fate when parts of me that didn't want that fate are sitting in a trash bin?

Predestination > Free Will, so Calvinism wins on that leg for me.  Not so much the others.

I'm really not sure why people care.  Cable and satellite radio are already beyond the FCC's reach, and who watches broadcast television or listens to terrestrial radio?

You know, I realized something recently, and forgive me for going a little off-topic.  I am struggling to think of any Brits who have made it big in the US (outside of Hollywood) who aren't massive assholes.

Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, Piers Morgan, Anna Wintour, Simon Cowell, Gordon Ramsay, etc.

Hugh Laurie...'s American persona is a massive asshole.  Point taken.