Verbal

No one disgraced a war record more than that racist thug.

Smith has already found his most useful role - as compost. Go on, risk having your mind unwound from 1956. You know you want to...

Okay one last try. Dune, go away and read just one book. Just one, that's all I'm asking. Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang (yes, I know - he's not white) answers all your points (if that's the word) in '23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism'. Then let's talk.

Because, despite offering their services for free for all this time, they were told to reapply for their jobs. And they haven't resigned as such - just not taken up the tempting offer. ...is my understanding.

Not wound up at all - just amazed that someone would, of their own volition, wallow in such a pit of despond and ignorance. Was just trying to be helpful, but I guess that anyone who takes the view that history is whatever that racist idiot Smith says it is, is shining a rather too revealing light on themselves. I'll move on...

Back too quick. Now read!!

I'm not sure you're worth the trouble. But here are a few hints. Get to grips with the differences between social democracy and socialism, and their respective histories in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. You may even discover how European social democracy was actually a bulwark against East European state socialism. Then try looking at Labour's slide from syndicalist socialism to 'New Labour' social democracy, and how its obsession with 'targets' and control has nothing to do with socialism, but with a futile desire to bring the neoliberal agenda of market forces into public services. Let me know when you're back. Your homework should take approximately eight years.

Is there any chance - any chance at all - that you could raise your level of political sophistication above the average seven year old? You throw big words around without any hint of an understanding as to what they mean, and then draw playground connections between them. You'd do well to do a bit of reading around the subject.

Certainly. However, as Baj has made clear, only Full Members are permitted to apply. So please forward your bank sort code and account number to me by PM so that £5 can be deducted.

Could be. Or they imagine they are the entrepreneurial beating heart of the country, when in fact their business is doing a paper round or some such.

Common sense prevails.

I have an ology, and what you say is false. Kind of. The debate with the deniers reminds me a lot of the debate in the US in the seventies and eighties over car emissions. When progressive states like California proposed tighter emissions standards, US car companies lines up to block any and every move. In Europe and Japan, by contrast, engine technology was given a substantial push, and emissions were cut without compromising performance. Consequently, American car companies produced ever more uncompetitive gas guzzlers, which found fewer and fewer export markets, and were swept aside by the subsequent and inevitable fad for imports in the US. This all played out in 2008, when virtually every US car manufacturer was all but bankrupt. Oil companies are doing the same thing. Instead of investing more than token amounts into diversifying into green fuels, they pump funds into the climate denial 'science'. What's happening now is that internet entrepreneurs and others, having seen the future, are investing heavily in green. And after all, why wouldn't they? The best of green technologies, if successful, also cut costs. (Ask Wal-Mart why it's gone green. It's economics, stupid, not moral flag waving.) The oil companies will eventually go the same way that the US car companies did - unless they wake up. Maybe what happened to BP will be a wake-up call. So: you wouldn't have to subtract from your list, but add to it, as new cost-cutting, green technologies come along. Some will be entirely new; some will render existing power generation (like coal) greener.

Can I un-nominate you? Eleven to go.

True, of course. But have you said that to avoid the red button?

More hysterical conspiracy guff regurgitated for the hopelessly gullible. There IS a dispute about whether Gallo or a French scientist first identified the HIV virus. And it's been demonstrated by scientific analysis that Gallo's first sample must to some extent have originated in the French lab. Therefore credit for the discovery is now shared between the two. This means, however, that the virus was out there well before Gallo came along. Gallo did not 'create' AIDS.

Ah, okay. Well, I think my broader point still stands.

It's a little worrying that things may change because of a vocal but unpleasant-seeming minority. I can't speak for anyone else, but the moderation on here seems broadly fine (It's a difficult balancing act; always will be.) The one nuisance mod was removed ages ago. If what happens next is driven by the harpings-on of posters like 1976 baby, or whatever his name is, we're heading for the buffers. I hope that's not the case.

Ah good, thanks. I wouldn't have wanted that piece of tasteless nonsense to have been easily lost.

No it isn't. So is anyone going to say what's really going on? The impression is that StL, for one, has left unhappily - and he was never one to really seem ruffled by the abuse that appears from time to time on here.

And now it's gone! http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/02/1010-richard-curtis-climate-change Shame. Was a work of art (for those who didn't see it.)

Yes, when there's someone in mind.

No, it just applies in special cases, as outlined above. If you were a reading man, I might recommend The Imp of the Perverse, by Edgar Allan Poe.

Absolutely correct, yes. That would be the logical conclusion.

There is a theory - only a theory, mind - that those who are strongest in their condemnation of a particular practice are themselves subject to the very urges they condemn. The most recent evidence was the American, ferociously anti-gay TV evangelist who turned out to be...guess what? Just saying.

Oh trousers, where to start?