Verbal

It used to be said that you couldn't tell the difference between Blair's and Bush's view of the world. Now it's impossible to distinguish Corbyn's and Trump's tepid mollifying of Putin and the criminal gang running his rogue state. http://time.com/5207310/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-arms-race/

You may have got this all wrong Shylock. JJ could be a closet remoaner, celebrating what all the commentators are calling Brexit In Name Only (BINO). The real Jihadists are screaming and hurling faeces - or is that fish? - into the Thames outside Parliament. As mature grown-ups with an intelligent argument are wont to do.

That hole Jezza keeps digging is getting awfully big. Now he's saying it's vital Russia is sent a sample of the nerve agent as soon as possible so that they can say 'categorically' whether it was them or not. You can imagine the conversation in Kremlin Towers: 'Whoopsie, that death chemical really was ours after all! Sorry, Brits!!' I bet May can't believe her luck.

Yes, May scored a cheap political point. She revealed to Corbyn only secret-level information made available to all privy councillors, rather than top-secret information made available to foreign leaders. She did this to lead Corbyn into the most obvious of traps - make the case look less convincing so that he would launch a self-immolating virtue signal about lack of evidence that it was the Russian state and that we should all just get along and talk to one another. It was an act of the lowest politics on May's part; like Brexit, she played an issue of huge national importance for political positioning within her own party. That Corbyn fell for it hook, line and sinker speaks volumes about his hopeless inadequacy as a political leader.

Indeed - very good. But there's surely some mistake. The link says it was made by the BBC, but aren't they just a British version of Russia Today, and therefore incapable of anything like the well researched and well resourced journalism on display here?

While Corbynistas, spoonfed ******** by the Canary and Squawkbox, debate the incredibly important issue of whether Newsnight crushed the blacks on their idol's hat, here's an excellent interview by Newsnight's Emily Maitlis, with some truly alarming implications.

It's just the Corbynista scream teens - a really silly attempt at distraction. If they were even halfway sensible, they'd be defending Corbyn's essentially sensible argument that it probably was the Russian state but that we should wait for the hard and confirmed evidence. Corbyn himself screwed it up by offering other theories - eg the Russian mafia. But his cretinous acolytes have outdone him by 'putting their money' (although that apparently means no money at all) on, to them, the most credible scenario of all, that British intelligence services carried out a chemical warfare attack on its own soil against its own assets and threatening the lives of its own citizens. Classic 'false flag' bull****, swallowed whole by gullible fools.

Link to the chemist... https://twitter.com/deadlyvices/status/974171484787822592

It's sadly part of the Orwellian bull**** deployed by conspiracy theorists that they pretend that by citing other conspiracy theorists they are somehow above the 'sheeple'. Give it up, it'll damage your health. If you think I get my news authoritatively from the Mail and Telegraph then you must be new to this place. Murray, however, is not an 'alternative' news source. Here he is getting his clock cleaned by an actual chemist. If you're serious about 'alternatives' I suggest you read this carefully, because the 'alternative' in this case is an actual chemist, who knows slightly more than your average 'alternative' Joe. Why am I supposed to have a view about Annie Machon. I don't even know who she is. So let's stick to the topic. Here's my tempting offer on the bet. I'll bet you £500 you're wrong about the poisoning being carried by by our own intelligence services. If I'm right you only have to pay me £250. What could be fairer? And what could be a better test of a conspiracy loon's convictions?

I'll take that bet. How much are you proposing? And Craig 'false flag 'straw man' Murray? Christ, some people are gullible.

You do know they lost more at the hands of their own leader than Hitler, right?

If you don't like that, you'll like this even less. https://twitter.com/EmporersNewC/status/971368475422789633

Is this the first ever meta whoosh? Aside from the fact that 'Bert' wouldn't have been born during the second world war, didn't you get any inkling at all that the piece was satirising gormless Brexiteers who drone on about the war and the Germans as if Nazism only really came to an end with the referendum result?

Jumping gefilte fish - he's back! Calling Shylock to the Lounge...

Not forgetting May's 'red lines', most of which have been driven by the jihadists but not all (free movement, for example). This is what jihadists don't comprehend when they bleat about the EU trying the 'bully' May in the negotiations. The red lines themselves determine very precisely what deals with the EU are possible, and they are vanishingly small outside of a Canada-type FTA, which is barely worth the paper it's written on. The delusion is in refusing to accept this. But May will eventually run into the wall of reality, and that's only a few months off now.

I know. I was offering a public service by informing the cult of that fact, and snuffing out any jihadist hope that Brexit might have other national imitators (paging Jihadi John). We're very much on our own. Or rather, if you take the entirety of Europe, with May's red lines we'd be with Russia, Belarus, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Armenia. All other European states are in the EU, want to be in the EU (a long list), participate so heavily in the EU that they're subject to the four freedoms, in the customs union or area, or, even though they're outside the EU, have the Euro as their currency. Such inglorious isolation and bad company may sit well with the character types most closely associated with voting for Brexit - male, white, southern, on a pension (ie majority Saintsweb jihadists) - because isolation is their thing (aside from the impending one-to-one with the grim reaper). But the rest of us will be wending our way back into the EU, thanks all the same.

Not under any 'impression' at all. I just find it depressingly predictable that anecdotes within families are some sort of evidence of anything, except possibly relatives wanting to shut up Brexit jihadist chatter by appearing to agree with it. But the context was certainly evidence versus what your mum/brother/aunt said. It always is with the cult. A couple of things about the Italian result. One, it's clearly driven by the refugee crisis - just a glance at the regional demographics and the north-south split tells you that. While in the UK the panic during the 2016 referendum was about the roughly 6000 Syrian refugees coming in, in Italy (and Greece, even more so), it was about the hundred of thousands. Two, I know this is going to make Brexit jihadists' heads explode, because it involves a complex thought - but Euroscepticism in Italy is different to here, and does not amount to any sort of unified call for withdrawal from the EU. It's also driven by a depressingly genuine undercurrent of fascism, in the birthplace of fascism.

How did I not see that coming? A sample of a handful of relatives - case closed! That obviously trumps opinion polls in BrexitWorld. The minute people try to counter evidence that conflicts with their worldview by invoking their wife or their cousins you know this is no longer a debate but a crazed rejection of the norms of rationality.

It's not usually worth responding to you as you merely exhibit the dual characteristics of a weird stalker - dishonesty and apoplectic rage. But I'll try this once. Your dishonesty is in your presumably conscious decision to repeatedly rip things out of context - you did it once by ignoring parts of individual sentences. Similarly you make claim for the poll being 'out of date' while ignoring that it was very much 'in date' given that I was responding to hypo's point about Hungary and the rise of the far right in the March 2017 elections. And since you're evidently more of an expert on statistical sampling than me - my training was in Bayesian stats - can you tell me what a minimum sample size is to get a statistically significant result? Or is it that you just won't accept any evidence that doesn't confirm your dishonest and apoplectic view of the world?

Be honest, you don't understand statistical sampling.

In which countries exactly is there a "growing number voicing their dissatisfaction with the EU"? Certainly not Hungary - where support for the EU has increased since the Brexit referendum. And certainly not Poland, where support for the EU has never been higher - nor France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain or Sweden. Even in Greece, where the EU has taken a battering, support for it rose from 27% to 33%. And in the UK, support has also risen to 54%. Clear majorities in ALL these countries backed remaining in the EU at precisely the time that the neo-fascists were making inroads in elections. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-support-increases-in-europe-continent-but-also-exit-referendum-support/ The jihadist fantasy of a collapsing EU making the UK's self-inflicted economic harm seem accidentally rational - rather like the endlessly repeated one that said the Euro is on the brink of collapse - is just that: a fantasy. The problem that the dimwitted jihadists have is that they see political crises within countries inside the EU as inevitably the result of the EU. On this complete non-sequitur do they build their fevered dreams.

I'm not surprised. It is a little odd how May's speech - the bit where she said she was telling the truth - couldn't find anything to say about how leaving would be better than staying. It reminds me of how the Brexit jihadists in her cabinet have gone, in eighteen months, from 'sunny uplands' to 'not Mad Max'. Still, the Brexit 'mandate' - more imagined than real - expires in March 2019, when 'getting on with it' will mean continuing inside the EU and trying to repair the damage already done to the British economy.

The unicorns still roam free in May's speech, but it's good she's a tad less cakeist by finally acknowledging that Brexit will damage the British economy.

By some miracle (stuck clocks?) your choice of Canada is a good one in relation to Corbyn, because St Jez's policies in the 2017 manifesto would have resulted in an economy with a public/private balance roughly on a par with the socialist republic of Canada. If Corbyn were able to deliver a mixed economy like Canada's, it would be a win for everyone. Sadly, Corbyn is also vastly incompetent, has a record of precisely zero legislative achievements in over 30 years as a parliamentarian, and his election would cause the kind of run on the pound that would rule out pretty much everything promised. But WTAF are you gibbering on about in claiming that Canada 'prioritises' 'equality of outcome over growth'? Care to take a look at how well the Canadian economy is doing? and what evidence do you have for such a claim? Any at all?

Do ALL the toys in your pram have ejector buttons?