Verbal

Cameron had better agree with his chief rival for crown of all bellends, Nicolas Sarkozy, who says he, not Cameron, was responsible for pushing through the no-fly deal. In any case, let's watch how this one unfolds. A no-fly zone makes sense, so goes the consensus, but it requires political judgement to stop it sliding into a rerun of the Iraq no-fly zone. And, so far, Cameron hasn't exactly excelled at that - as his and Johnny English Hague's bellended diplomats-with-guns misadventure proved two weeks ago. By 'certain posters' I take it you mean Sergei, who will be sweating bricks at the thought of all those bought-and-paid-for Saudi princes suddenly finding they have to fall in line with Arab solidarity and backing out of UK defence contracts, now that the Arab League have suddenly got cold feet. Or do you mean your spokesman-in-chief, dune? I wouldn't worry about him. His comically calamitous predictions about shares alone should tell you that whatever he says about Libya will always turn out to be the opposite of the truth. I can think of a few others you might have in mind, like VFTT or benjii, but I imagine you think they are just bit-part players, singing from the bellend party hymn sheet.

I see you have. Is that who you mean by 'not the sharpest?'

The original or the remake?

Quite the logician, aren't we? Your obsessions with Deppo's posts, reporting him and then crowing over getting him banned are, frankly, weird. I don't understand how you can get so worked up.

If so, they'd have misunderstood the meaning of 'no-fly zone'.

Oh look, you miss the point again!! I love the way you quote irrelevancies to try and prove your point. I realise this is incredibly subtle for you, and that there is little chance the following will get over the Hoover-dam scale of your limitations (economic and otherwise), but... Whatever the Iranians do or don't do is one thing. What is presently happening on the streets of Bahrain is quite another. The two will only collide if the stupidity continues, and both the regime and the protesters lose out. So once more: WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE THAT THE PROTESTERS ARE DOING THE IRANIANS' BIDDING?

If you were in Tehran during the Egyptian uprising, you'd have heard nightly reports from Government television and radio loudly proclaiming the wonders of the Egyptian revolution. It doesn't mean that the Iranians were behind the Egyptian protests. (Or would you make such a foolish claim? Perhaps I should wait and see...and laugh) It does mean that the Iranian regime thought they were playing a populist card - which in fact backfired. It stirred up the repressed remnants of the Green Revolution, and suddenly there were protesters bravely facing down the basiji thugs on the streets of Tehran) The CRAZY thing about the situation in Bahrain is that the absurd rulers are so limited in options and political intelligence that instead of acceding to demands for democratisation and quelling the demonstrations with genuine and much needed reform, they are creating a situation which is so polarised ANYTHING could happen. I wouldn't expect you, in your colonial, parasitic eerie, to understand this or any other of the byzantine subtleties of Middle Eastern politics for a second. That you blunder into such profoundly anti-democratic PR at the drop of a dirham is, depressingly no surprise. Maybe it'll be rials soon. Again, WHERE'S YOUR EVIDENCE?

Did you actually READ that report? It says nothing of the sort. It says: 'The Saudis say...' and goes on to say Iranian military intervention is unlikely.

First of all, by what twisted, bizarre thought process did you think i was defending the Iranian regime?! As for the rest, even your apparent experience of actually going there didn't cure you of thinking, at best, in stereotypes. If it suits your limitations to imagine this purely in tribal terms, I can see why hard evidence wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to you - and why you'd think it completely unnecessary. The equation, it seems, in your mind is simple enough: many (not all) on the streets in Bahrain are Shia; a Shia theocratic regime is barbaric; therefore the street demonstrators and their demands for democracy are in fact demanding Shia tyranny. George Orwell wrote about this painfully stupid logic decades ago. Again - and I'm losing count of the number of times I've asked you and your swivel-eyed mates - where's the EVIDENCE? The Shia community in Bahrain, as it is in many other countries (like Pakistan for example) is pretty diverse, and actually includes many of the more dynamic in the business community. (This is one of the reasons they are persecuted by Sunni fundamentalists who are partly playing a populist card). The demand for serious democratic reform is widespread in Bahrain and crosses the sectarian divide. The regime, which has persecuted the majority Shia community for decades, is effectively playing the boogey-man card in order to justify a fierce crackdown. All very predictable, and no one with an ounce of common sense would buy such self-serving crap. The only ones who do - what are surprise - are such people as parasitic ex-pats who suddenly see their comfy lives disrupted by these nasty people demanding a modicum of political freedom. So, once again, WHERE'S YOUR EVIDENCE?

The Iranian navy docking in Lattakia (a place I know rather well) has nothing to do with the popular uprising in Bahrain. Again, for the xxth time, where's your evidence that the democratic street protestors in Bahrain are the work of al Qeada, the Iranians or any other monster the Arab tyrants say are behind it? Of course, the Iranians are meddling in southern Iraq and southern Lebanon in particular, but to discredit the street protestors in Bahrain by drawing inferences based on nothing more than a convenient conspiracy theory is simply dishonest - to say the very least.

Again, where's the EVIDENCE? Conspiracy theories are all very well (actually they're not - they're the product of febrile minds with nothing better to do), but they don't have any necessary connection with reality.

I'm sure all your conclusions make perfect sense to you. My 'total scorn', as you put it, is that DP is peddling the official line on the Bahrain protestors. Anyone who'd been there and got underneath the skin of the country would know that the shia have been dumped on for decades. But what's going on there ISN'T merely an inter-sectarian battle - it's the same issue as elsewhere in the Arab world. Decades of corrupt tyranny are coming, hopefully, to an end. Of course, the tyrants themselves want you to believe that the Iranians, al Qaeda, etc., are motivating it all. It is self-serving nonsense, which DP retails here as 'fact'. Read Bexy's post for a more compelling, first-hand insight into the nature of the struggle there.

Probably not, Nick. I'd have thought this kind of thinking went out, literally, with the ark.

More on the gathering and unprecedented nuclear disaster in Japan, the eminent Japanese-American theoretical physicist Michio Kaku is now calling for the 'Chernobyl option' to be enacted immediately - encasing the runaway reactors in a sand and concrete sarcophagus. http://news.yahoo.com/video/tech-15749651/24532243

Again, this slips by the point. Where's the evidence that the street protestors in Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi, Tunisia and Yemen are al Qaeda/the Iranians/Smersh in disguise. It's what the corrupt plutocrats peddle and is a notorious lie. What's your defence? Apparently because the Iranians had their hooks in Basra (which they certainly did), you opt for non-sequitur argument that therefore they MUST, just HAVE TO BE, behind the protests in Bahrain. What's your evidence? Really - I'd love to know.

When you and the odd little friend you seem to have recruited into the King Abdullah Fan Club have finished, why don't you put some evidence on your hysterical little theory? From Mubarak to Abdullah and Gaddafi, it's been the staple PR lie peddled to the West by every self-serving tyrant facing unrest from a citizenry demanding democratic rights, that they are defending the West's 'real' interests by breaking the heads of the street protestors. Equating popular demands for equal rights with a triumph for al Qaeda, the Iranians, or any other boogey man that happens to be at hand, is, at best, dishonest.

Oh you're right. You're carefully argued rebuttal demonstrates beyond doubt that the Saudi rulers, far from being sponsors of violently Islamist cults, are in fact Ipanema Beach liberals.

Your gross distortions of the situation in Saudi have nothing, I suppose, to do with self interest. And you are pushing the orthodox Saudi line about the threat from the Iranians coming from the Shia, who are constantly having their heads broken by the regimes in Saudi and Bahrain. It's all a self-serving, utterly corrupt argument. It comes to something when official Saudi propaganda gets punted out on random English football forums as if it were gospel (no pun intended) truth.

Equating the Shia-led but not exclusively Shia uprising in Bahrain with Iranians overrunning Saudi is the WORST kind of conspiratorial nonsense. It's the line of argument spouted by the truly awful Saudis - exporters not only of oil but of of terror on an industrial scale - and their corrupt regime to hoodwink the West into thinking the brutal suppression of the uprising in Bahrain is okay. Of course, this also suits your interests perfectly.

Do you still believe this - after three major explosions in reactor buildings in four days? And the American coverage I've seen doesn't say anything like what you're suggesting. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16contain.html?_r=1&hp

It's not that I'm being 'wise' - I'm just trying to make sense of your ever so slightly stream-of-consciousness diatribe. Merely repeating your peeve about 'lip gloss' and make-up artists is supposed to be evidence that news crews are clogging up the roads and getting in the way of rescuers? Who are these 'right idiots' on the World Service? Honestly, it seems to me that you have taken the canvas of a huge tragedy and decided to paint your own face all over it. Beyond your piffling and imagined slights on you as a viewer, there really is a much bigger story here.

Points 1 to 4 are just listed facts. They convey the awfulness of the event, certainly, but I'm not sure what point you're making with them. Why am I being 'UK centric'? I have never proposed the idiotic idea that only British crews are there. Are you slipping back to your 'there are so many they MUST be disrupting the relief work' supposition? If so, what's the evidence? You have to distinguish between the way news is reported and the way editors package it. The best reports can be given the crassest wrap-arounds. But the tsunami aftermath is a rolling news story by definition. I haven't leapt to defend the 'dear old Brit stuff'. I have got clearer reporting from the New York Times than many of the British newspapers. The BBC News website, though, is hard to beat. Having just watched Channel Four News and ITV News, the threat of 'nuclear meltdown' was NOT reported in the way you say it was. You seem to be making this up to have a bit of a peeve. Both reported that a Chernobyl-scale meltdown was extremely unlikely, and used independent expert voices to express this. How is this 'slanted'? Please find an example of the 'we're doomed' agenda. I can't find it anywhere except your favoured Daily Mail. Just my opinion, but some of the best reporting on the tragedy was done tonight by C4 News, and by Alex Thompson and John Snow in particular. Both eschewed the annoying 'I've been there and now I'll tell you about it live' approach. Their reports were considered, beautifully written and moving.

If you're saying there is good and bad reporting, then no **** sherlock - although I am at a loss to understand how you think the google images added much beyond some pretty basic information about the scale of the disaster. You seem though to have simply changed tack in your argument, moving away from unsubstantiated claims about news crews using up valuable resources. And what on earth does your last sentence mean? I detect in that a typical ex-pat reaction I heard too depressingly often in Indonesia under the failing Suharto regime. They too were fearful of uprisings - fearful because they threatened their comfortable, parasitic and hugely exploitative existence. If this is not the case, how exactly does Rupert Murdoch demand that the tsunami is reported substantially differently to, say, Channel Four News? If, as you say, news journalists only report this story according to the strict limits laid down by their 'publisher', give me one good, concrete example in the reporting of the tsunami. Really - I'm interested to know exactly what you mean.

I doubt Deppo has gone quietly. There's a phenomenon known as post-mortem screaming, which probably explains a few posts still to come.

I wonder how this epic tragedy has been turned, in classic Saintsweb fashion, into a rant about biased or obstructive news crews - all based on supposition and clearly considerable lack of knowledge of how news crews operate. With the death of an Al Jazeera crew in Libya and the disappearance of the remarkable Guardian journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, it's clear journalists don't take the easy option when reporting tragedy. Most also recognise that news is a means of mobilising support - which is why many authorities go to extra lengths to allow international crews access. This is one of those 'bigger picture' arguments - whatever perceived grumble you may have (from your La-Z-boy recliner in Dubai?), you have to allow for the distinct probability that news coverage mobilises help. Even a technologically advanced country like Japan needs the world to focus on its pressing problems, in the face of a recovery and reconstruction effort that is only surpassed by that needed after the second world war. Oh, and it's one L in Pulitzer, and the prize is only open to Americans.