Verbal

We seem to have accidentally discovered with this thread a new and quite precise psychological test for sociopathy.

Please, for the love of god, take the trouble read the jury's findings and stop repeating this garbage. You'll feel ashamed.

The Leave supporters certainly include an awful lot of right-wing golf bores. Some of them are on here and flirt with kippers. Of course there's a wide spectrum of support for Leave - it's just that the majority on here don't represent that diversity. They can barely get their buggies out of the sand traps. To paint the "Tory establishment" as pro-EU is equally lazy and incorrect. Insofar as you can define an establishment in the party, it's clearly split. How is Michael Gove or Boris Johnson or Chris Grayling or IDS not "establishment". Hopeless each and every one of them - but anti-establishment? Don't be ridiculous. The simple fact is we're having this referendum precisely to paper over the Tory party cracks on the EU that have persisted ever since 1992, when the party split right down the middle of Maastricht. The outcome of the referendum will determine who leads the Tory party in the short term. Boris is banking on it being him. He won't. He's popular in the country but universally loathed within the Tory party hierarchy. It could be Michael "let's all be like Albania" Gove, or even IDS (which would be hugely funny - the worst Tory leader of all time gets a second go). Whoever it is, we're all just vote fodder for a Tory party in a hell of a mess, yet uniquely facing no serious opposition whatsoever from a prolix, ineffectual Labour party leader. The party wounds over Europe therefore have all the room they need to fester, because regardless of who takes control of the Tory leadership, there's no risk at all of being unseated by a viable opposition. So Brexit won't only be a disaster because it'll be BHS writ nationally large; it'll be a disaster because we'll face a Tory party with a renewed vigour to smash the "red tape" that does things like protect our remaining employment rights, holiday entitlements and civil rights, as well as some sort of effective protection against rampaging multinationals like Google (patchy as the EU now is with the latter, what the hell is going to happen when Little England floats alone, or allied with Albania, against the big multinationals).

Come on, kipper T. Get round to answering ecuk's question. And how are you shaping up with your Brexiteer Great Leader's view that we should be like Albania. I can see a lot of kippers thinking Michael Gove's Albania is the ideal role model. You should push Albania harder in the referendum campaign. #Votewinner. I'm still predicting an easy Brexit win, by the way. Nailed on.

Hmm. I did take a quick look. I don't want to get into some pointless forum war, and it did seem obvious to me that that Dip Schitt, or whatever he's called, is a wind-up. No one would actually want to come off, as he does, as the love-child of David Icke and Alan Partridge. Would they? It's you, isn't it? On a less happy note, I see the conspire-planks (not nuts) have now converted their preening, self-righteous fury into crowd-funding the Portuguese cop's appeal against the McCanns. I am dumbfounded that people can work themselves into such a ludicrous froth about this, blotting out all common sense and humanity. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3556119/British-trolls-paid-50-000-help-Portuguese-policeman-fight-libel-suit-against-Madeleine-McCann-s-parents.html

You're very patient. I can't believe how epically ignorant the anti-McCann trolls are. Is it really possible to be a functional citizen without understanding these basic legal principles?

Why are you so afraid of answering ecuk's question? Saying the word 'Treasury' and 'credible' in the same sentence doesn't amount to a clear and detailed rebuttal of the Treasury's various models. You also completely omitted the LSE and the IMF analyses of the dire impact on the British economy. So once again, please provide a credible alternative analysis from an independent, reputable source that Brexit will have no negative impact on the British economy. Why not go for Michael Gove's ideal model - Albania? Shall we discuss Albania as the shining example for the Brexit Britain? Please confirm or deny that you think Albania is the way to go. As for my prediction about Corbyn losing, I'm also predicting a Brexit win in the referendum.

What doesn't he "get"? You're being asked where are the independent modelled analyses that support the Brexit claim that there will be no economic downside to leaving the EU. Quoting the useless bunch of dimwits in the Brexit campaign itself doesn't inspire confidence that you get anything at all. So come on, dig into that kipper network of yours and couch up a reputable alternative to the economic modelling of the impact of Brexit from the Treasury, the London School of Economics and the IMF. Then we'll know if you really "get it".

Quite so. Johnson (an American citizen at least until recently) is just following a pattern of behaviour among right-wing Republicans in the US , who can't quite bring themselves to say what they're actually thinking, but let it slip anyway: that they're apoplectic that a black man is inside the White House, and that his ethnicity/'heritage', rather than his politics, determines his reactions. It's nastily, creepily racist, and I'm not alone among Londoners who are embarrassed that Johnson has anything to do with running this city.

Never mind who's leading?! Many of those who are leading the Brexit campaign will be leading the country if the referendum, as seems likely, goes their way. No doubt a prominent role will be found for this nasty, dimwitted little prat - who believe it or not is actually the campaign director for the official Leave campaign. Funny how the Brexit leadership proclaim the return of sovereignty to Westminster as a primary objective, and yet treat Westminster with such withering contempt. Passive-aggressive and devious Brexit leaders like Cummings simply reveal that they are, above all, liars.

I do find it comical reading McCann-hunter posters, past and present, defining themselves as selfless seekers of truth. When they do it by posting three-hour-long videos by the arch 9/11 loon Rich Hall you know they're as cracked as he is. And the tenor of the attacks on the McCanns are so preeningly self-aggrandising it makes me think the conspiro-nuts have something of their own to hide.

The reason it's an assumption is because they are not part of the argument. Of course there's a rag-tag of others wanting to leave. But the leave campaign is overwhelmingly dominated and led by the far right, and the non-extremist tagalongs are just being exploited in a sectarian coup within the Tory party. It's the most undemocratic motive behind a democratic campaign.

Say hello to Vote Leave's campaign director, an offensive little turd who freely admits to lying his head off ("what's a few decimal points."). As the article suggests, not so much an idiot savant as an idiot complete. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/20/accuracy-is-for-snake-oil-pussies-vote-leaves-campaign-director-defies-mps The politics and ugly personality of those who dominate the Leave campaign make it pretty clear that behind the Referendum campaign itself is an attempted Tory factional putsch designed to install the far-right of the party in power.

And so the pitch-fork witch-hunters creep creepily back out of the woodwork.

This should settle all the arguments. http://newsthump.com/2016/02/23/leading-brexit-campaigners-coincidentally-a-shower-of-cnts/

I'm baffled by this too. Where is the "implication...that they have the power to stop EU nationals from entering and settling en masse"? It's surely a statement about controlling and monitoring borders in a way that works against things like terrorism. I don't know how true that it, but terrorist incidents in the UK in the last decade have been carried by by home-grown dimwits, not those racing back and forth across open, unmonitored borders.

Nope. You're confused. You said Turkey wasn't a Muslim country. It clearly is, more so than Pakistan by measure of population. What you mean is that it isn't an Islamic republic. It's an important distinction. When Jinnah founded Pakistan he rejected pressure from more militant voices (like the port Iqbal) to declare Pakistan an Islamic republic. He wanted a home for Muslims, within a state with separation of powers. He died before seeing that he lost the argument.

What does this mean exactly? 98% of the countrt is Muslim. That's a larger percentage than Pakistan, which is 96.4% Muslim.

Those Brexiteers are real comedians. Now it seems one Brexit sect is threatening to sue now that the other sect has been made official. Is this how they intend to negotiate all those treaties that will have to be agreed over the next decade or more to repair the damage from their economic vandalism?

I assume it'll happen when the swivel-eyed loons on the right understand that today's tax avoidance is tomorrow's tax evasion. Ever heard of IR35?

It seems Corbyn may have failed to declare his pension income, which, if true, would mean he's evaded tax. This focus, though, on individual politicians' tax is becoming ridiculous - a pointless competition in applying the easiest label of all, 'hypocrisy'. There's an over-fixation with all this, when the real issue is what the Panama Papers tell us about the precise ways in which the 1% hide many of their assets and income, and how governments should respond in closing down the secrecy that allows it to happen.

If the result stands, aren't Leicester now mathematically guaranteed a Champions' League place? Pretty incredible.

You're going back too far, though, for a starting point for 'jihad' as an anti-Western tool. Wahhabism dates back to the 18th century, but that was an Islamic 'purification' movement confined to the then tiny bedouin communities and potentates of the Arabian peninsula. The Deobandi movement began after the 1857 uprising in India, but that was not so much an anti-Western revolt as a revolt by Sepoys against the use of pig oil in the lubrication of gun barrels. The idea of jihad as an anti-Western tool dates back only to the first world war and was invented by a German military officer called Max von Oppenheim. In order to try and provoke uprisings against the Arabian bits of the British empire, and to fire up soldiers among their wartime allies the Turks, Oppenheim orchestrated a strong connection between anti western warfare and more traditional idea about 'jihad'. He did this as a way of galvanising Muslim soldiers fighting not just occupiers but unbelievers. The pacts he sought with the Arabs and Turks were laced with the idea that the Germans were the true supporters and liberators of middle-Eastern Muslims, and that the British were intrinsically anti-Muslim. This pernicious idea was unfortunately perpetuated into the second world war, when the leader of the Palestinians and grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, sided with Hitler and sang the praises of the Nazis' attempts to exterminate the Jews. (Palestine at that time was under a UN mandate administered by the British.) There are, sadly, photographs of Hitler and Husseini enjoying friendly chats. Husseini's hard line fundamentalism led directly to the Palestinian rejection of a deal offered by David Ben-Gurion, which, when compared with anything that might have been offered today, was decidedly workable. By the time of the siege of Mecca in 1979, when Wahhabi extremist insurgents had to be dislodged from the holiest site in Islam by French paratroopers, the jihadist=anti-Westernism die was firmly cast. So as much as we love to locate anti-Western jihad in the frightening exotica of an alien, ancient civilisation, it has a lineage in this form that goes back to 20th century Germans.

There's definitely something wrong with you. You didn't ask about "Islamic immigration into Western Europe". You asked about Muslim culture. I gave an answer to that question. As for the contributions of immigrants, I already dealt with this in post 2148: To which your response was "still obsessed I see." Pathetic. So if there's anyone avoiding issues on here, it's you. And the reason you avoid them is clearly because you suffer from a particularly creepy form of racism.

This is no doubt going to teach you to suck eggs, but we're all standing on the shoulders of giants to be where we are - and in terms of the visual arts, a vital part of what we call western culture, some of those giants are Muslims. For example, Florentine Renaissance art was revolutionary because of its incorporation of two things: perspective and volume (the latter achieved through chiaroscuro lighting). Combined, they were revolutionary because they allowed the illusion of a 3-D image on a 2-D surface (the canvas). These principles were later refined in the paintings of the late-Renaissance Dutch master Vermeer (who according to many experts, including David Hockney, used a camera obscura to render perspective precisely), and they still apply today in literally everything you see at the cinema. Where did these ideas comes from? They began with the publication of the seven-volume 'Book of Optics' by the 11th century Arab scholar Alhazen. He was born in Basra, now in southern Iraq, and developed his mathematical idea during the Fatimid dynasty in Cairo (which of course you'll know all about). The book was translated into Italian - importantly, not Latin - just as the Renaissance was getting underway. His work in optics included the first mathematical formulation of how the camera obscura worked, and they still hold true today. Alhazen didn't spring from nowhere as a stand-alone genius. Much of his work draws on Euclidian geometry, and his cosmology was deeply influenced by Ptolemy. But as you know, the Ptolemaic system was supplanted by Copernicanism - yet the interesting thing is Alhazen had spotted many of the mathematical flaws with Ptolemy's picture of the universe long before Copernicus and Galileo. And you'll find Alhazen's influence in the work of the great European scientists Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibnitz and (I hardly need tell you) Robert Hooke. So the bigger picture is this: as this one case shows, the influence of Muslim scholarship on western culture and science was profound, but those same Muslim scholars were drawing on ideas, many of which originated in ancient Greece (Euclid and Aristotle, for example). Which means we arrive at the happy conclusion that classical Greco-Roman culture, Muslim-Arabic science, and western culture and science are all intimately inter-linked. So next time you go to the National Gallery or the Science Museum, fighting your way through all those nasty brown and black faces, face East and give a little prayer of thanks.