Verbal

Certainly not - and for one very good reason. The Taliban did not exist during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Mullah Omar's first assembly of forces (all fifty of them) took place in 1991 in Kandahar, two years after the Russians withdrew, and they didn't win their battle until 1994. Don't fall for the line that the fault in Afghanistan's horrific mess belonged entirely with the Americans. The Americans were only a relatively small part of the picture. The Russian invasion unleashed forces that tore the country apart, and most of them were the result of interference by three regional powers, Iran, India and Pakistan. That's aside from the Russians themselves, of course, who get conveniently forgotten, and Saudi Arabia, who were financing Bin Laden himself (as a Saudi intelligence employee originally) but, much more importantly, General Zia's drive the "Islamise" Pakistan - effectively transplant Wahhabi religious ideology into national institutions like education, the army and even the cricket team (!) etc. The Pakistani counterintelligence service ISI, who basically ran rings around the Americans and continue, mostly, to do so, gave financial and materiel support to the Taliban, but that was well after the Russians had left. This support helped catapult the Taliban from a tiny, mostly irrelevant group into military conquerers of the country. The people they defeated were actually those who the Americans had given most financial support to, including the West-sympathising Ahmad Shah Masood, whom Bin Laden had murdered the day before 9/11. Nothing is quite as it seems in South Asia and the Middle East, and it certainly doesn't conform to cliched meme of West = historic evil therefore we should do nothing in Syria.

It is, but mostly - almost entirely - because it is a war WITHIN Islam. Which is why the majority of the victims of the war, by far, are other Muslims. And it's not just Sunni vs Shia, nor even Wahhabi vs Sunni moderates - but historically violent Salafists vs the whole of the rest of the religion. The goal, as I've said, is the claiming of Mecca for Salafists and their bands of mainstream-Islam-hating, women-loathing, West-deriding lunatics. Which is why the idea of negotiating with the Salafists - IS, Al Shabaab, Boko Haram, etc - is desperately, hopelessly missing the point. How do you negotiate with someone who doesn't want anything from you? Sad though this may be for our sense of self-importance, the West is a sideshow, an irrelevance, nothing more than a locale for 'spectaculars' in recruitment drives and popularity contests among those susceptible to the message of death cultism. Western victims of Salafist violence are victims because the West is, in the eyes of the Salafists, pathetic and weak. They are victims because the West is easy prey. Offering to 'negotiate', as SOG proposes, would be interpreted as yet another sign of inbred Western weakness. Offering to negotiate will get your head lopped off - so if those are one of the terms anyone wants to go to the negotiating table with, fine. Be it on your own detachable head.

The modern source of the present conflict is the 1979 invasion by Islamist extremists of the Grand Mosque at Mecca and their ejection by French special forces. Bin Laden, and his tutor Abdullah Azzam, specifically reacted violently to the sacrilege of Western boots on holy ground with the beginnings of what became Al Qaeda. Their goal was always to depose the 'corrupt' Saudi regime, retake of Mecca for their particular brand of death cultism and restore what it euphemistically called 'Muslim lands'. Everything else was secondary. Bin Laden was always clear that the West was merely a sideshow - attacking it was a useful means of attracting new recruits. And ideologically it was relatively cost-free because of the underlying virulence of anti-Western sentiment in the West itself. IS, with its roots in hyper-violent elements of the ousted Sunni-Iraqi military in alliance with the lunatic Abu Musab Zarqawi, is doing just the same. For one of Bin Laden's 'spectaculars' like 9/11 or the Cole or the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, read Paris yesterday, or Zarqawi's video-recorded beheading of Nick Berg in 2004 (the sickening 'models' for Emwazi, and in turn modelled on Khaled Sheikh Mohamed's video-recorded beheading of Daniel Pearl in 2002). So placing Bush and Blair in the dock is fine, but don't suggest it's the beginning of the story.

You remind me of Harry Ellis from Die Hard. I have a spare stab vest and hard hat that I'm happy to lend you to see if you can avoid his fate. By the way, negotiation has already been tried. Out of desperate necessity, James Foley sought to negotiate a reasoned solution to the hostage-taking, and tried especially to get on the IS wavelength. For his troubles, he was severely tortured for months and then beheaded by the now thankfully deceased Emwazi.

Like who?

I don't know what point you're making - your post seems to make no sense, and then ends up invoking Godwin's Law. Always a bad sign. But just to be on the safe side (you never know), let me say for the third time that bin Laden should have been brought to trial. It was not a 'tragedy' that he wasn't - a preemptive miscarriage of justice, a crime, a regret, a missed opportunity, or any other similarly appropriate descriptions of bin Laden's killing. But it was not a 'tragedy'. To borrow from the vernacular of the Corbynistas themselves, you may want to be an apologist for a Trotsky-lite virus, but I don't.

Arguing for what Corbyn 'meant' is not an excuse for you to come along and give a feeble excuse for his being a celebrant of terrorist violence. My point is he used the language of equivalence - specifically 'tragedy' - to equate the deaths of hundreds and thousands on the one hand and the fact that one man did not get a fair trial on the other. If Corbyn had wanted to argue for the 'meaning' that you claim, he would not have drawn that 'tragic' equivalence. As I say, there are plenty of others, including many 'mainstream' political figures, who've complained that bin Laden should have been prosecuted. Their 'meaning' is clear. So frankly, is Corbyn's. I notice today that Corbyn is outed for yet more cosying up to terrorists with his oversight of magazine articles praising the Brighton bombings. There is a sickening argument advanced by Corbynistas that his long-standing demand for a united Ireland commands respect for 'consistency' and 'principles'. There are plenty of others who've long supported a united Ireland too, but on the back of a democratic mandate, not down the barrel of a gun. That Corbyn celebrates IRA commemorative days with an organisation that not only committed terrorist atrocities but also acted as chief gangster among the nationalist community, with 'kneecappings', 'punishment beatings' and violent extortion rackets, tells you everything about Corbyn's 'meaning'.

What is it that you don't understand? It is absolutely NOT a 'tragedy' that bin Laden didn't get a trial. It is regrettable, it was mistaken on the Americans' part, it was wrong. All of those and more, no doubt. But I repeat, since you seem to have read my post without taking in the meaning of it: to call it a 'tragedy' - and in so doing drawing an equivalence with the other REAL tragedies - is cultist weirdness at its bizarre worst.

You're welcome, Lou, although I think you're confusing me with some deceased person whose initial is F. The book does indeed skewer the knee-jerk political positions now revived by the Corbyn cultists, who seem weirdly convinced that their politics is 'new' (everyone calls their politics 'new' - how the hell else did we end up with 'New Labour'!). Their recent rants of outrage over criticisms of Corbyn's comments about the 'tragedy' of bin Laden's death also bear out Cohen's critique. It's sadly pathetic to listen to Corbynista complaints about his comments 'being taken out of context', when the real offence is contained in precisely context he actually used. Namely, his idea that: 3,000 murdered in 9/11 = 'tragedy' The countless thousands dead in Afghanistan and Iraq = 'tragedy' The death of one man who's admitted killing thousands = 'tragedy'. The equivalence is astonishing, and it's entirely characteristic of the knee-jerk, brainless stuff that Corbyn comes out with and gets applauded for by his fawning admirers. Yes, it would have been far better to bring bin Laden to trial (although even then, Corbynistas would complain about victors' justice). But to use the exact same word to account for bin Laden's death as for the hundreds of thousands of others in the US, Iraq and Afghanistan is utterly repulsive.

In my view, Watson is unfit for public office. As more details emerge about the quality of 'evidence' against Brittan, Heath and Proctor, I suspect Watson's role in some of this (as well as Exaro's) will emerge as one of the worst political scandals of recent years.

You believe wrong. http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/euro-ruling-to-protect-reputation-of-deceased/5039894.article And given the aggressive way the MacAlpine family's lawyers have pursued every little comment repeating what is an established libel, I'd advise an edit. Just to give you an estimate, Sally Bercow said something rather more 'innocent' than you ('Why is MacAlpine trending') and ended up with a bill a long way north of £100,000.

Yet another mealy-mouthed denial by a media-literate but unthinking Corbynista spokesman of the single inescapable fact that the British public voted for the Conservatives not despite of austerity but because of it. It is amazing how the search for scapegoats for this non-computable fact ends up with such (humourless) screeching. Like most people who voted Labour in May, I accept that the party lost the argument on the idea that moving leftwards was a magic wand to winning a general election. The Corbynistas not only don't accept that, they don't even recognise that it happened.

Thank you for posting this, trousers. I suggest the pitch-fork wielders and reptilian (!) conspiracy theorists go back over the thread to check how ludicrous they've been. The hounding of Brittan in particular has been disgusting, egged on by a troll who's now deputy leader of what used to be the Labour party.

You rang? Actually, your solution is no solution at all. Your charity-giving decision, after your faintly odd imagined windfall from a tax cut, will be in two parts: the amount you give; and the charities you give it to. Regarding the first, you seem to have decided that there is a fairly fixed proportion of your income that you're prepared to give up, whether to taxation or donation. There is no evidence in the real world that this happens. It's far more likely that you'll trouser (sorry) the windfall. But even if you didn't, you and you alone will decide who to give your donation to. From your posting history, my guesses are a cat euthanasia club and the Tory Party (some charity). The problem is that your idiosyncratic choices, scaled up, are unlikely to produce any meaningful benefit in terms of the public good. And the richer are you are, and therefore the more you give (on your model, not mine), the more you are able to define and distort the notion of the public good. As buctootim says, and as America demonstrates, the rich get no charity kicks from socialised medicine, so don't contribute to it. They get it from prestige projects like Presidential libraries, name-after-me university buildings, and presumably in your case, killing cats. The solution is to have a democratic process for arriving at the public good. AKA elections. That way, the 1% don't get to decide what's good for the 99% (or simply ignore them) - the 99% have some say in it too. Sounds fair, right? Right, so pay up, cat killer.

Indeed, Lou. Good read - especially the argument that Saints' youth pipeline is still working well, despite competition for places from players bought in.

Despite the Corbynistas' fantasy that Blair was a unique 'Tory-lite' (in the current cretinous parlance), he was actually the last in a long line of centre-left politicians who have had to fight off the entryists and cultists to keep Labour electable. Denis Healey was part of that (and damaged his career fighting a war of attrition against the Corbynistas of the 80s, the Militant Tendency), but so was John Smith (elected to party leadership with a much larger 'mandate than Corbyn), and before them, Harold Wilson, Hugh Gaitskell, and Clement Attlee. The only electoral disasters for Labour have been the geriatric triumvirate, George Lansbury, Michael Foot and the ineffable Jeremy Corbyn.

Especially if your wife is Dalek, which I assume to be the case.

You're forgetting that the Corbyn cultists are convinced they don't need the "mainstream media". They'll change the electorate's mind in 140 characters.

Finally, some progress. Well played.

Hmm. It's early in the game so we should probably let that go. But moves that defy the laws of physics are generally frowned upon. Tooting Bec.

Would it be easier for you if we switched from Tudor Court Rules to Trumpington Variations?

You do realise that on your own logic you should top yourself - to save the Earth, like.

This thread has become like a game of Mornington Crescent for racist dipsticks. The game is: who can say the most outrageous, thoughtless, hate-filled thing and pass it off as considered thought suitable for the wasp-chewing wiseacres on here. So as you're the advocate of yet more death and pestilence for people, I declare you the winner. It's been a tough fight though, because the other pack hunters in the dipstick club - SM, WG, SiP - have given you a good run for your money. Well done!

Could you check this again with your buddies at Stormfront? Because that arrow suggests that everyone is going in one direction. So how come there are over four million Syrian refugees - registered refugees, that is - in the combined territories of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and parts of ISIS-free (usually Kurdish) Iraq? These are the countries that are facing the brunt of the refugee crisis, not Germany or Austria, and certainly not the UK. I'd suggest the UNHCR is a rather better source for tracking the movements of refugees than whichever genius had a little smirk on while drawing that piece of nonsense. http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php

Let's get this done in the right order. You go first. You were the one who claimed - I quote - "there are no white working class people left in London." What's your statistical evidence for this? Let's deal in hard facts rather than in feral emotions about how uncomfortable you might be in the presence of non-white faces. And let's get this out of the way fast so that we can return to the topic of the present crisis.