I know why I hate OC so much. My father was a Teamster who tried to stand up to the Mafia when they infected his local. My life was threatened and I had to spend a week home from school, not allowed to open doors or curtains, answer the phone or stand next to windows.

And my father had to give in and that was a terrible thing for a daughter to see -- her father made into a slave, nothing close to a human being.

It ruined our whole family and it was the beginning of the end of him as a man.

You and I can never agree on this now. Because I hate OC so much, you're off limits for me now. You're radioactive in my mind, to be honest.

This has been an interesting discussion.

I had forgotten about the Teamsters episode. That's why I don't believe anything Litvinenko said. The Mafia is slavery. How can you believe a slave?

A lot of heat, zero light. Does either of you have a f***ing clue as to who actually killed Litvinenko ?

No? Didn't think so.

A lot of heat, zero light. Does either of you have a f***ing clue as to who actually killed Litvinenko ?

No? Didn't think so.

-- wmsberry

I know why I hate OC so much. My father was a Teamster who tried to stand up to the Mafia when they infected his local. My life was threatened and I had to spend a week home from school, not allowed to open doors or curtains, answer the phone or stand next to windows.

And my father had to give in and that was a terrible thing for a daughter to see -- her father made into a slave, nothing close to a human being.

It ruined our whole family and it was the beginning of the end of him as a man.

I'm sorry about that episode of your life, though it seems you had forgotten about it, even though it was so important.

You and I can never agree on this now. Because I hate OC so much, you're off limits for me now. You're radioactive in my mind, to be honest.

This has been an interesting discussion.

I had forgotten about the Teamsters episode. That's why I don't believe anything Litvinenko said. The Mafia is slavery. How can you believe a slave?

(1) What is "OC"?

(2) What did i say that was so objectionable that you're calling me "radioactive" and "off limits"? That i support civil rights?

You experienced one form of oppression, from the Mafia, and I experienced another, from the government. It doesn't make one any better than the other.

If you don't believe anything Litvinenko said, why believe anything Putin says? To me, they're all about equally credible, except Putin is a lot scarier because he acts under color of law -- he has the resources and authority of a country behind him.

(3) How can I believe a slave? Slaves are people too, you know.

(4) Being a teamster could be seen as slavery too. You're part of a union, you have little individual identity, the union makes decisions for you, etc.

You're over-dramatizing this discussion and I don't understand why.

Stewart Tendler, Michael Evans and Daniel McGrory

Intelligence services in Britain are convinced that the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko was authorised by the Russian Federal Security Service.

Security sources have told The Times that the FSB orchestrated a “highly sophisticated plot” and was likely to have used some of its former agents to carry out the operation on the streets of London.

“We know how the FSB operates abroad and, based on the circumstances behind the death of Mr Litvinenko, the FSB has to be the prime suspect,” a source said yesterday.

The involvement of a former FSB officer made it easier to lure Mr Litvinenko to meetings at various locations and to distance its bosses in the Kremlin from being directly implicated in the plot.

Intelligence officials say that only officials such as FSB agents would have been able to obtain sufficent amounts of polonium-210, the radioactive substance used to fatally poison Mr Litvinenko only weeks after he was given British citizenship.

MI5 and MI6 are working closely with Scotland Yard on the investigation. A senior police source told The Times yesterday that the method used to kill the 43-year-old dissident was intended to send a message to his friends and allies.

“It’s such a bad way to die, they must have known,” the source said. “The sheer organisation involved could only have been managed by professionals adept at operating internationally.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2487000,00.html

Now I can see why you support the Mafia concept of liberty.

I won't ever see Khodorkovsky as anything but a dangerous thug now. How sad that the American press can't check facts.

I've had The Night Watch on my reading pile for a few months. I suppose now is the perfect time to read it.

Your family was abused by the Mafia. But you're not your father, and not everyone in the mafia is a "murderous thug." As i said before, it's safe to assume that anyone who has any power in Russia has dirty hands, but some hands are dirtier than others. The world isn't just bright-line rules, like it seems you have for the mafia: everything and everyone even remotely related to the mafia is absolutely and completely bad. Things are more complicated than that.

Now, even though I lived under communism and my family was abused by it, and I fled, I am not stuck in a pathological reaction to communism and governmental authority, like it seems you are to the mafia. You said, "I bet you hate everything Marx-related and government authority" but you're just projecting your own automatic reaction to anything Mafia-related.

I managed to get over my family's history with communism to vote with the left and support many leftist policies, even though I have personally seen communism fail completely. I'm not a reactionary right-wing nutcase like many Russian immigrants tend to be because they can't think their way out of their own experiences. Not everything is an extreme.

Can you manage to get over your family's history and admit that sometimes, even organized crime can be more ethical/better than an authoritarian government? That's, i think, my main point. Is it possible, in your world view, that that could be the case?

Maybe some of Putin's measures have helped some people, but that doesn't make him above reproach. Maybe he was opposed to organized crime, and you don't like organized crime, but "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is too simple for the real world, with all its strange bedfellows and contradictions, don't you think?

Plus, I think it's quite silly to equate american labor-union-related Mafia to the Russian oil oligarchs. They have different goals, different modes of operations, live in very different social and legal environments. It would be equally silly for me to be opposed to the Communist party that runs the city of Bologna in Italy, for example. Yeah, i don't like communists, but I realize that the communists in Bologna are VERY DIFFERENT from the communists in Russia.