Verbal

Any links to someone saying the British economy would 'implode' if we didn't join the Euro? I'd really like to see them. As I recall, the debate was more about what was then called a 'two-speed' Europe, and it was more about differing rates of political integration rather than any idea that the wheels would fall off the economy. Besides, even mainstream opinion among what are now called remainers was that joining the Euro was a bad idea - including Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, whose 'tests' for joining were designed not to be met. As for the idea that not joining the Euro is on a par with the economic impact of Brexit that's already being felt - well, Lord Pony has a word for that.

Actually, it's more than perception. In the days after the referendum the Bank of England cut interest rates to the lowest they've been since the 1700s, and reintroduced quantitative easing. Both these measures had the effect of flooding the economy with cash, which was soaked up with the credit binge which has now got out of control. sustained property prices at ludicrous levels; and the crashing pound temporarily boosted share prices of companies with big overseas interests. Basically, therefore, the economy has been held aloft by a series of asset bubbles. Look at the real economy beyond those bubbles, at corporate investment and productivity, and the picture is getting ever grimmer. The economy is going down like the Titanic - imperceptibly slowly at first, but edging towards a dive to the sea floor.

Well I'm not sure there's a cigarette paper's difference between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Batman - possibly she's a disciple of his? Anyway, they both make the same category error of believing that foundational texts are of the essence of religious actions, when in fact religions are basically (a) what people who call themselves devotees say they are, and (b) what people (see Batman, Ali, passim) who oppose them say they are. Ali-Batman is also wrong to suggest that what distinguishes Christianity from Islam is a separation of religion and state because the majority of very many different strains of Islam do just that. So if Ali-Batman wishes to revise their (note: gender-non-specific) essentialist errors, I'd be...amazed.

So which bits of Islam do you blame. And which bits are ok with you?

Who needs the humourless homunculus? Conspiracy theories abound around Trump, the arch conspiracy theorist. The one being bandied around most strongly at the moment is that the bombing of the Syrian airfield was in respite to a 'false flag' event - that the chemical attack on civilians in Idlib was a hoax. This piece traces the lineage of the hoax claim, originating with a pro-Assad site in Syria, and then retransmitted by far-right sites like InfoWars. It has also swept up a few ludicrous dimwits among the stop-the-war, Corbynist cult. https://medium.com/dfrlab/how-the-alt-right-brought-syriahoax-to-america-47745118d1c9

As usual, you can't see through the veneer of lies.

I think I may have. Soz. It's so hard to find any unused insults for the Brexit cult that one is drawn to double-negative compliments, because, as all Remoaners know, the cultists' heads will topple over trying to work it out.

Gawdon Bennet! Gawd luv us! Someone point this Cockney Geezer in the direction of some slang words other than pony, pony, pony! The attempt to sound like Bert, the Bobbins from Poppins, is starting to do my crust of bread in.

100,000 jobs to disappear in the City. Who cares? They were just remoaners anyway. And anyway, why did no one warn of this? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/04/uk-jobs-merkel-juncker-euro-clearing-eu-manfred-weber-brexit

Got a link to show that she's done this? Or is it all cooked up in your head for you to have tantrum with yourself?

Just to bring home what utter numbnuts Brexiteers are, the Telegraph is actually talking this up, saying that even in its 'diminished' state, the Royal Navy could 'cripple' Spain in any war. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/02/britains-navy-far-weaker-falklands-could-still-cripple-spain/ Incredible.

Calm down and stop being such a plotz.

If you want to stop Remainers calling Brexiteers malignantly stupid, it might be an idea to stop handing them the ammunition.

Then you have to read my post - and the link to Professor Curtice's work - more carefully. Those figures relate ONLY to those voters to voted Labour in the 2015 election. The colossal fallacy in arguments about Labour heartlands voting leave is the false assumption that these heartlands don't have any voters other than Labour ones. Even Corbyn - well, also Corbyn - has been guilty of making this error in concluding that some sort of accommodation has to be made to a non-existent majority of Labour voters in the north who voted Leave. The fact is - they didn't.

Nope. By the lowest estimate, 63% of Labour voters in 2015 voted Remain. Lord Ashcroft put the percentage as a little higher than 70%. Broken down by region, 2015 Labour voters also voted Remain: 57% in the north, 60% in the midlands, 67% in the south, 74% in London, 64% in Wales, and 66% in Scotland. In Labour-held seats alone, 63% voted Remain. In Labour-held seats in the north and the midlands, the 'Labour heartlands', 57% of Labour voters voted Remain. http://ukandeu.ac.uk/is-labours-brexit-dilemma-being-misunderstood/?platform=hootsuite

Once a kipper always a kipper. You're a kosher kipper about to be living in the sunny uplands of kipperland, which looks like this... YouGov polled Brexiteers to find out what they most wanted. Top 5: bringing back the death penalty, bringing back dark blue passports, bringing back pounds and ounces, bringing back corporal punishment in schools, and bringing back incandescent lightbulbs. Basically, bringing back the 1950s.

If you're Palestinian, you'd be better off in Lebanon...or Israel. The camps in Amman are desperate. If you're Bedouin-Jordanian, you may have my camel.

You didn't read carefully enough. Those sections of the left who espouse the idea, essentially, of 'kill us, we deserve it', which include you I think, are giving the Islamist murderers a free pass. The argument that the West - especially including the US, the UK and Israel - is 'reaping what it's sown' in attacks like 9/11, 7/7 and the Westminster Bridge murders is also inherently racist and Islamophobic, because it denies agency not just to those Islamists who carry out attacks, but to all Muslims. It's an argument corrupted by the lazy thought that Muslims are so enraged by the injustices meted out to them by the West that they are impelled to attack. It's utter crap. And this racist/Islamophobic subtext is depressingly mirrored in far-right responses. ISIS and Al Qaeda have historically carried out attacks in the West in order to polarise Muslims from non-Muslims in the West - to make them the objects of hate by the majority population. They do this quite explicitly to drive recruitment. Of course, gimps on the far right are brain-dribblingly doing exactly what ISIS wants them to do. - screaming their fury at innocent Muslims. One question, incidentally, which will determine the absurdity of your position: if you were an Arab, where would you rather be a citizen: in Israel or Syria? (Just to help you out with this one, over 94% of civilian casualties during the civil war have been inflicted by the Assad regime itself. And when I say 'casualties', keep in mind what a terrible euphemism that is for being blasted to hell by barrel bombs or being tortured to death in one of Assad's many political jails).

Is making false accusations your way of deflecting from the voice in your head going "I'm no racist but I am actually racist"?

This is exactly right in my view. The ideology that turned a petty criminal into a violent and manipulable jihadist can be found in numerous strains of Islam. Wahhabi Islam and its many variants in Salafism are the drivers of this, but it cannot be left there. While many on the liberal left makes a fuss when a woman in France or Germany is denied the right to wear a headscarf, it can't just be ignored that the countries containing the most dangerous fundamentalism are those demanding loudest, on threat of violence and persecution, that women cover their heads and show 'modesty'. A supposed triumph of choice here is oppression of women there. Similar sentiments and violence apply to gays and anyone who questions the theocratic pretensions in the dominant strains of Islam. The first victims of all this are those Muslims who are silenced, beaten, and murdered for defending the idea of a enlightenment in Islam. And this is where many on the left in the West and violent Islamism join forces: denouncing such figures as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other liberal reformers as 'Islamophobic'. This odd alliance share an anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israeli outlook. At least partly in consequence, fundamentalist Islam has been given a free pass. The probable rage with which Masood carried out his attack had something to do with a feeling of overwhelming self-righteousness, which told him that the oppression of his adopted religion was real and that any critique of it whatsoever was an attack on all Muslims. A lot of this sentiment comes from those who advocate ISIS-style violence. Some of it comes from those who ally themselves with such fundamentalists and stridently 'conservative' Muslims in the west, as if the latter were somehow the oppressed. They are not.

Actually this is evidence, on your own argument, of strong right-wing bias at the BBC. As The Guardian is one of only a handful of national papers that are left of centre, it's not surprising that they come out on top (only marginally ahead of The Times). Add the left-of-centre newspaper purchases (Guardian + Observer + Mirror +Sunday Mirror + People), you get 147,232. Add the centrist, centre-right and right-wing papers, you get 442,339. Hey presto, from the same figures as the ones you have, an overwhelming anti-left and centre-left readership. I expect you'll be on the phone to the Beeb to complain about such appalling bias.

The funniest thing about this argument is that it's unadulterated Trumpism. Trump is in the habit of quoting other people's nonsense and then saying it must be true because someone else said it. It's a lie based on a transparent dodge. You're doing the same if you complain about BBC bias against Brexit but can't list a single example of a programme you've seen that does that, without resorting to emergency googling of others' opinions, no matter how tainted they might be. So for the sixth time, what programme(s) have you seen that shows that BBC bias against Brexit?

Jeez, all this childish garbage just to wriggle away from a very simple question. For the fifth time, what particular BBC programme was it that you saw and resulted in your BBC-bias-against-Brexit meltdown? It's not a hard question. What's the answer?

1. The 'context' of your endorsement of a Jew hater was that you peddled a classic anti-Semitic meme about 'a' controlling Jew. 2. As Shylock (your own special choice of misnomer; I wonder why) has said, your googling a 'think tank' consisting of a PR man and an ex-Media Studies student does not constitute evidence of BBC bias. Nor does it explain your apoplexic rage. So what got to you? What BBC programme 'against' Brexit so blew your head off that you thought it a good idea to rip up the licence fee? By the way, if you want me to stop with the Yiddishisms, all you have to do is withdraw your endorsement of a Jew hater. Farshteyn?

This is far closer to the truth. The BBC newsroom includes staff members who kept tabs on the overall balance of views during the Brexit campaign, as they do during elections. The problem is that while the Remain campaign was articulated by politicians representing a political spectrum from centre-left to centre-right, the Leave campaign, even though it was championed by fairly centrist politicians, was agenda-set by far-Right politicians like Farage, Banks and Cummings. This meant that the BBC's application of balance gave a disproportionate amount of airtime to a right-wing cabal who in themselves command very little public support. Extremists were given the same weighting as the liberal centre spectrum, as if the two were somehow equivalent. So the blatherings of kosher kippers Tender and Duckhunter notwithstanding, the BBC's balance was precisely the problem. The BBC are aware of this weakness in the way they think about balance. And they've tried to address it before, when dealing with climate change (when atmospheric scientists were 'balanced' with climate-denial conspiracy theorists).