Verbal

Still losing millions by the week, which of course delivers short-term popularity in undercutting local rivals. The bellicose response to the TfL decision from Uber London shows also how the abusive corporate culture hasn't really changed since Kalanick was forced out. In reality, the way forward is simple: Uber have to comply with TfL's regulations and clean up their act on safety. It's not complicated and not expensive. But Uber prefers to do this by sounding like Malcolm Tucker on speed. How to win friends....

You must be new to thinking. Welcome. Just for starters, you might consider not jumping on a random generalisation based on who knows what, and using that to draw the false conclusion that an entire religion's culture (whatever the fu ck that might mean) can be written off as racist - all couched, as a wannabe would, in scumbag's suck-a-lemon tone.

Do we not do midfields any more?

And why is that, scumbag? I answered your question ages ago, as you well know. Again: I condemn the cry of racism when used to protect Asian rape gangs. I have also, at length, supported Andrew Norfolk's work on this (you wouldn't know who he is, but never mind) and given an account, based on first-hand knowledge of the geographic area concerned, as to why these rape gangs came to have the attitudes and behaviour that they do. All this stuff is on this thread, scumbag - just go and look for it. So - I'm off next week to the country concerned. Want to tag along? You'd love it. It's just your thing.

What is an 'islamic refugee, scumbag?

Our best defence against rampaging Jihadists is that they are spectacularly, Four Lions thick.

Looking on the bright side, at least you've made an effort to string an argument together. Unfortunately, you've made a complete mess of it. Read again the last sentence of mine you quoted. Here it is: Nor is the EU in the least bit interested in agreeing a 'bespoke' transition deal, nor in any kind of trade deal at all before the end of the year. Note the highlighted bit - the bit you entirely missed. (Reading to the end of sentences is generally a good idea if you want to capture their meaning.) So you've rather hopelessly constructed an argument based entirely on failing to read to the end of a sentence. I'm not saying the EU won't agree ever - just that it won't before the end of the year. You seem particularly clueless about what's going on, so here's a helpful précis. The EU negotiating team have made it a condition of any discussion of a trade deal that 'progress' be made on three key components of an exit deal: rights of citizenship, the Ireland 'hard border' problem (and it's implications for the Good Friday agreement), and the exit bill. On the first, the only progress has to so with EHIC. There was much trumpeting by Brexiteers about this. What they failed to point out is that the agreement so far on EHIC is a severely limited version of what we have now - it only applies to the snapshot of people found either side of the border on exit day. ALL the other questions to do with citizenship - much thornier than EHIC - have yet to get to a starting point of negotiation. With regard to the Irish border, the hopeless situation is that the UK government presented a ludicrous position paper which they themselves hurriedly withdrew. So no progress there. With regard to the exit bill, there is also no progress at all, and if anything the endless nitpicking, which occupied almost all the negotiating time in the last round, indicates that there's several months' work needed just to get this to an 'agree to disagree' point. So do I KNOW there won't be progress on a trade deal before the end of the year? Of course! The EU are saying it, and the British government are saying it (notably by Davis's call for 'flexibility' - i.e. 'let's talk trade stuff instead of all this really difficult exit stuff). Beyond that, the European parliament and each of the 27 member states have ALL to agree unanimously within the next six weeks that progress has been made. That is simply not going to happen. To your bizarre conclusion that it's not worth talking to the EU if they're not prepared to negotiate, this, as you now no doubt see, is based on an entirely false premise - it is literally the opposite of true. The EU has been ready to negotiate since day one. It has also had, from day one, an agreed position between member states on all the key issues. The UK government, on the other hand, is still negotiating with itself, and has proved spectacularly inept at producing an agreed position on pretty much anything. Just on the transition deal, what do you think the UK government's position is? Is it Fox's 'no single market; no customs union'? Or is it Hammond's bits of both? Or Davis's 'single market but no customs union? Or Boris's 'cake and eat it'? All different, all contradictory. As I've said repeatedly, true Brexit Jihadists should be very worried, and demand the government get its act together. It pleases remoaners like me no end that you have this ludicrous blind faith in the May regime delivering you to your promised land of milk and honey and x virgins.

I give up. Your cogent eloquence has persuaded me. Well done! I couldn't quite detect any measurable thought from you, though, on what precisely is wrong with the case for the May regime's reckless incompetence. You got any actual, you know, arguments? Yet another example of stunning stupidity is the 'magical thinking' involved in Davis's proposal for a 'frictionless' customs border between the two Irelands. Once the obvious was pointed out - that the technology doesn't exist, and that even if it did work that would still mean a hard border - the position paper was quietly taken out and shot. Still, you're convinced, so that's good. I can see that you have exactly no problem believing that a government that will take four years to fix Big Ben can tear down and rebuild the regulatory framework of the British economy and its relationship with the EU in a whole eighteen months. I agree, 'religion' isn't quite right. It is more an economic death cult.

Only your ignorance can lead you to this conclusion. He's actually right. The May regime is saying a transition deal is necessary and yet has failed to discuss it in any detail with the EU. Nor is the EU in the least bit interested in agreeing a 'bespoke' transition deal, nor in any kind of trade deal at all before the end of the year. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/09/leaked-memo-citys-brexit-envoy-reveals-sobering-analysis-eu/ You Brexit Jihad acolytes have been warned over and over again - May and the gang aren't behaving as serious negotiators, and are acting against your cult's interests out of sheer uselessness. The more rational Brexiteers are prepared to acknowledge this. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-tories-uk-pm-leader-hopeless-attack-lord-harris-a7937381.html

The immigration policy leak seems to have cause something less than a tsunami of comment. As ugly as it is, and as much as it tells us about May's profound xenophobia, it also reveals an ugly truth for those who want their Brexit rammed up them hard. And that is that this government is not serious. If it were true that there is going to be a cut-off in March 2019, we would have to have seen before now some huge investments in infrastructure to cope with post-Brexit. Under what counts for their plan, even the transition period dumps us out of single market and customs union membership. Therefore we should have seen before now massive investment in border infrastructure - masses of extra staff being recruited and trained, thousands of acres of land being compulsorily purchased to create customs waiting areas for freight, hundred of millions invested in customs halls and technology, the construction of a new fleet of customs patrol craft, a complete overhaul and massive investment in immigration staff and technology etc., etc. And that's just customs and immigration. How much of this is happening, a mere eighteen months before we crash out? Nothing, nada. As I've said many times before to the Jihadists, if you want your Brexit hard, you're going to be betrayed by this government. And pining for the 'no deal better than a bad deal' option won't help either - because it forgets that there are two possible outcomes of 'no deal': crashing out and, much more likely, bellyflopping back in. Hard remain here we come...

But it is 'some sort of right'. It's called a woman's right to choose, and it's enshrined in the UK by the 1967 Abortion Act and in the US by the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade judgment. Perhaps in the circumstances, and given Mogg's personal mission to over-populate the world, he should be advised to go f u c k himself.

A wit, yes.

0/10.

Because the dreamers are almost all Latino, and in any case, DACA meant they weren't in the US illegally - now (potentially) they are.

Any sane person would hope that a UK government of any political colour wouldn't 'walk away' from the world's largest economic area, which just happens to be on our doorstep. This is plainly false. Can you provide a link to where any Labour politician has said "whatever deal you propose we accept." (You're the one who's put it in quotes, so you presumably have evidence to back up the voices in your head that told you the quotes are real).

...is the answer to the question: How delusionally far do Brexit Jihadists have to go to prove that no deal is better than a bad deal?

Not bigoted, but a kind of reverse, perverse Utilitarianism - the idea that the benefit of the very few should be borne by the very many. You're willing to risk throwing the British economy of 65+ million people under a bus to keep UK citizenship for 35,000 Gibraltarians. Bizarre.

You really struggle with how journalism works, don't you. It's an opinion piece, written by a Brexiteer columnist, in a newspaper that urged its readers to vote remain. Try the news sections (clue: generally at the front of the paper) for the dawning reality of Brexit's sinking fortunes. By the way, Juncker has long been a target (TM BoJo), so this piece is really not very original. But it still seems to be so surprising to Brexit jihadists that the European Commission would act to protect the interests of its member states. How dare they.

Cheer up Captain.

Indeed. However, the first rule of Saintsweb Fight Club - you don't agree with ANYONE. There you go again, slip-sliding your argument. We weren't talking about US and SK battle manoeuvres (largely reactive, it seems to me, to war games being played by one of the two weird-haired lunatics in this saga). We were talking about sanctions and what you call 'force' (It's a stretch to say manoeuvres are force - force is when you actually invade something or land a missile on it). But worse than that, your post is saddled with that dreary, unthinking anti-Americanism so characteristic of Momentum-ish and stop-the-war cultists, which is actually a form of patronising racism. The assumption is that the actual supposed objects of American sanctions are merely victims, lacking all agency in the face of the almighty power of the West. Which means Saddam wasn't in any way responsible for the fate of hie people under international sanctions, just as Kim isn't now. Absolute twaddle. In the mid-90s I travelled the length of the border between Jordan and Iraq, right in the midst of sanctions - especially with embargoes on oil and medicines. All along that border, trucks were backing up and transferring goods and fuel onto Iraqi trucks. The cross-border trade was phenomenal, in a large area where the only sign of a border was the odd sign here and there saying you were in Iraq or Jordan. The sanctions were completely ineffective. The huge smuggling operations benefitted the Iraqi elites, both as financiers of the trade and beneficiaries. Saddam, however, wanted the sanctions to look effective, to keep this trade running smoothly. So he deliberately withheld supplies, creating devastating shortages, in public hospitals and in food markets in particular. In N Korea, the terrible food shortages which are presently turning into yet another catastrophic famine, are not the result of international sanctions but of widespread crop failures brought on partly by climate change, but more especially by a totalitarian oddball determined to drive his own people brutally into the dirt to embellish his power base. So drop the knee-jerk, flaccid anti-Americanisms, and, as I said before, be prepared to think. The world is just a tad more complex than you seem able to cope with.

As I've said before, your debating style is the same as hypo's, which is to constantly shift the ground when the bit you were standing on crumbles. I know you said 'and force'. My point was you lumped the two together, which is nonsensical. There are circumstances in which both may be necessary. But sanctions alone are a common instrument, used by the UN, among others, and also Russia. It's also characteristic of the flaccid thinking and gullibility that comes from proximity to Corbynista virtue signallers that you'd quote Putin as a source of wisdom on this. That would be the same 'let's talk' Putin who invaded Ukraine, who supplied the not-so-independent 'rebels' with rockets to down passenger planes, and who engages routinely in targeted assassinations of political opponents. Learn to think.

You said you thought the Russians got it "spot on" in claiming that sanctions are a road to nowhere. I'm saying the Chinese think otherwise, and have applied severe sanctions. Not hard to understand.

They would say that. Don't fall for the Putinbots. The Chinese - much closer allies to NK - disagree.

Pleasing to see a Brexiteer can't see the difference. All the better.

Good to see someone's been quietly working on the nails for Brexit's coffin. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/26/keir-starmer-no-constructive-ambiguity-brexit-cliff-edge-labour-will-avoid-transitional-deal Tick tock.