CA is where it´s at! I was living in FL back then - we f* up everything

On the other hand, it´s not all THAT bad. I was JUST reading about the Russians proposing a bill to treat criticism of the Russian government as treason. At least we can talk about how "bad" we have it.

Who says I was defending anything? I was agreeing in my post with the perception that people have a tendency to only look at one side of a debate while ignoring or failing to accept as valid arguments that speak for the other side. And the point I was making is the our perceptions are never the whole truth because we don´t have access to the whole truth and because what we know is manipulated by our governments and the media. We´re all wise when we look back at history and events, but we don´t have that luxury when we´re involved in them. As an example, I voted for Bush in 2000 - one of the things I regret, however at that time I had no idea that war was to come. I also had no idea that Al Qaeda exists. Call it ignorance or being naive, I don´t care. But my decision to vote for Bush was obviously not based on being fully informed and definitely I wasn´t (and I am still not) politically saavy enough to have been able to predict the possibility of a war. I voted against Bush the second time around, and lost. I´m not afraid to admit that there are things I don´t know or don´t understand and that I was wrong in some of my decision making. And I resent when people assume to have the monopoly on truth (only trouble comes out of that).

As far as democracy. Maybe I´m cynical, but to me it´s an illusion that people on the top feed us, the peanuts. The power is in the hands of "haves" - we´re "have-nots" - and as long as we buy into what they tell us, they´re happy. Maybe it´s de jure democracy, de facto plutocracy or oligarchy - one of those fancy words. As you could see in your own country - Blair decided to join the Coalition AGAINST the popular opinion. So forgive me if I keep thinking that the opinions of individual citizens are not all that important to those on top.

I also provided you with an example of how to find info on people who oppose the war - as you asked in one of the posts - if you didn´t want it, why did you ask for it?

1) I don´t know of any "rights" for invading Iraq, like I made clear in several posts of mine I have been against the war in Iraq from the beginning. What I was saying is that my opinion is based on my perception and it may not be based on compelte information. And so is your, you don´t have access to intelligence and the same information that your Prime Minister would, so I don´t think you´re as informed about it as you´d like to think you are.

2) The number refers to the number of "hits" not people. It would indeed be disgusting if it was just people. If you look at polls, the opinions have been split more or less down the middle, so that brings the numbers up to 150 million of people who don´t agree with the decision to go to war. I´m not going to ask you how many people are against the war in YOUR population, I don´t care and I don´t think it matters. I think everybody should be against killing other people and in any case your opinon or mine does not matter to the person who´s going to send the troops over.

I agree with you - people refuse to look at both (or more than 2) sides of the story. It´s not all black or white. The politicians are playing their games and killing people in the meantime, and us peanuts, are on the bottom arguing about who has the bigger body count (as if any number of deaths were acceptable!) and who´s right or wrong, and the truth is we can´t do shit about it. We can get angry and offend each other, which only feeds that politicians´ games. We are a mass to be manipulated by our governments and I don´t care how intelligent you are, what your perception is, but it´s just part of the bigger picture, and it can never be a complete picture at that as we don´t have access to all the information and we´re influenced by media and other, not necessarily, accurate sources of information. I think we´re all right and wrong in some aspects. I have been against the war from the start based on what my perception of it is, but despite that I´m allowing the possibility that there might have been intelligence and information I wouldn´t have access to that would have made the decision to go to war more understandable.

And TheAenigma, since you want to know who was against the war. Why don´t you google anti-Iraq war protests (over 260 thousand hits) or Americans against war in Iraq (over 400 thousand hits).  

Thank you both

So it looks like it is interchangeable with ara sýra then?

Thanks for the link too LÝR, I bookmarked it

Could someone please tell me what "ara ara" means? I can guess the general meaning from the expression "ara ara güneþlý" in a weather report, but I´d like to know what it means exactly. In the dictionary there are many explanations for ara, and multiple expressions with ara, however none for "ara ara".

Thank you.

Thank you so much   I love your explanations and examples, they make a lot of sense to me. You´ve been very helpful in answering my questions, I think I´ll need to put you down on my Christmas list

Thank you for the response , I´m sure I´ll be able to draw back on it once I start learning the -miþ tense.

For now, I;m more interested in the expression verb+dik+posessive ending+için and how to apply it to different tenses.

gidersem is conditional in the aorist tense (-r present tense) git(d)-er-se-m 

gitsem is just verb stem + conditional ending (in one of the books I´m using it was referred to as conditional base)

Passive voice is formed by adding - il (or -l or -in) so for gitmek passive voice is gidilmek.

It is not necessarily so that in English "were" + any other verb is passive - actually in the example you gave, "were" is an auxillary verb to an active verb - in English the verb "to be" + past participle forms the passive voice - so theoretically your example in passive voice would be "were come" but that´s incorrect either because "come" is an intransitive verb and does not have a passive voice.

I hope I didn´t confuse you with this post - I just meant to clarify things a bit.

I have some questions about using the following construction: fiil + dik + iyelik eki + için.

In the book I´m using, the following example was given in terms of explanation:

Hastayým. Okula gidemiyorum. = Hasta olduðum için okula gidemiyorum.

I´m assuming it means that because of being sick I can´t go to school.

My questions is, how to use this structure to talk about things that happened in the past? Using the above example, how would one say: "I couldn´t go to school yesterday because I was sick." Would it be: "Dün hasta olduðum için okula gidemedim."? What about in the future tense? "Yarýn hasta olduðum için okula gidemeyeceðim"? Is that correct? Will the first part of the sentence change? Or is that something else altogether?

Could someone provide some more examples of sentences with this structure?

Thank you.