Verbal

You forgot to mention there's someone over there pretending to me. What a plank.

Jeez, have you managed to discover some hitherto unheard of animosity towards Greeks in Britain? Well done. Your second para is also nonsense. Seems the UKIP idiocracy is in the ascendancy again on here.

If it's OldNick on a national scale shouldn't you be adding: '...and they're bound to get away with it'?

Yesterday's Times was reporting a 4,000% increase in the sales of confederate flags on Amazon after the shooting of black churchgoers in Charleston. Aside from wondering whether this was a bulk buy from the fake Canuck, the intimate connection between gun enthusiasm and white supremacy has never been more clearly uncovered than after the events of the last few months. The second amendment is new effectively a white rights clause. It should be consigned to the dustbin, just as the 13th amendment (eventually) was - the one that declared that black saves counted for 3/5th of a human.

Architect of the Family Income Supplement: Sir Keith Joseph, in the 1970 Heath government following Thatcher's milk snatch.

It’s not immigration policy that’s at the root of this. It’s not the EU either. Nor is it even especially the British government. The overwhelming reason the migrants are running for the trucks is that there is a perception that the UK alone is a kind of over-protective welfare state, where universal provision puts a roof over everyone’s head regardless of nationality. The reality is lightly different, of course. However, the UK does have a welfare system that has come to benefit one welfare claimant above all: big business. Think of the Tesco business model: screw hard down on supplier costs, to the point where dairy farmers produce milk at a loss, and harder still on labour costs, to the point where their shop-workers qualify for income support, housing benefit, etc. Paying their staff such low wages, and forcing them to claim a state subsidy to live, means they work long hours in unpleasant jobs and are thanked by being demoralised and dehumanised in the process. In other words, the Tesco business model – as crap as it now looks after all the scandals – is predicated on massive rip-off of taxpayers. Even some of the brighter Tories, like Steve Hilton, now recognise this. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3136902/STEVE-HILTON-s-crazy-taxpayers-subsidise-supermarkets-pay-staff-pittance.html The problem is that our welfare system has been systematically distorted by large corporations to subsidise their extraordinary profits and vastly inflated executive pay – but most of all to pay their workers a substantial ‘top up’ for a decent living wage. This is also why we have become a low-wage/low productivity/low investment country, unlike France and Germany. Whenever harsher immigration controls are proposed, among the first to object are these same large UK/multinational companies, who see that such a move will drive labour costs up. As by far the biggest scroungers, the big corporations have their hooks into the British welfare state, and one by-product of that the benefits system for those on the fringes of employment – notably migrants – are startlingly attractive. What we’re seeing at Calais and elsewhere can only be addressed in the long term by driving the large corporations out of the British welfare state and rebalancing the benefits regime within a high-wage economy. When these benefits look essentially no different to anywhere else in northern Europe, the huge pressures at the borders will subside.

But always a steady stream of gross injustice committed by authorities against black men in particular - so plenty for the fake 'Canuck' to enjoy: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/23/fbi-evidence-single-hair-kirk-odom

No, that answer is not okay. It is the standard NRA response. Guns don't prevent violence - they just allow the 'good guys' to be violent back to the 'bad guys'. (By the NRA’s own definition, Roof would have been a good guy before killing members of the Emanuel church.) Look, you may not like what follows but I don't think I'm alone in thinking this. Many have wondered whether you're a troll or can possibly be serious. My view is it doesn't matter. If you're a troll, you've decided to include in your giggly entertainment the huge upsurge in reckless murders of black people by law officers and white supremacist loonies of black people. If you’re serious, you seem to revel in the deaths of black people at the hands of law officers, most of them wielding your fetishistic favourite, handguns. You've had especial fun over the fact that Walter Scott was shot dead by cops for running from his car, and that Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams were shot dead by cops for NOT running from their car. In both cases, you've said, it was the black victims’ own stupid fault that they got themselves killed. Therefore, either as a troll or as someone who imagines himself to be perfectly serious, you endorse the reckless killing of black people by cops and white supremacists. Not one word of the mildest criticism have you allowed to pass, or have you allowed yourself to utter. That, in my view, makes you a racist scumbag, regardless of your feeble denials. This may be just a small wing of a football forum, and you no doubt think it really doesn’t matter, but views like yours are nastily prevalent in the NRA, the KKK, the Tea Party and others. And I personally don’t want them even tangentially associated with this football club. So please take this in the spirit it’s intended: go to hell.

You seem incapable of grasping even simple facts. Assault weapons, so long as they're semi-automatic, are NOT banned in the US. The legislation banning them, passed in 1994, expired in 2004. So you're a full decade and more out of date. Even that law prohibited only those weapons manufactured after the date of its congressional approval.

Obviously not. One's a general, the other a captain.

I've realised you're not replying to anything. You're just like a really bad, amateurish tagger, vandalising a thread which has otherwise raised and discussed some serious issues, simply because you don't know how else to behave. As for the title and subject of the thread, I notice Obama himself raised that very same question yesterday: what the hell is wrong with America that this happens FAR more frequently than anywhere else in the developed world? So let's put my theory to the test. Let's see if you are capable of a yes or no answer. Remember, the options are: Yes and No. Got it? Do you, or do you not, endorse the NRA's contention that the killings would have been avoided had the church paster armed his congregation, and that he was therefore at fault for being 'political' about gun control? Don't vandalise; give an intelligible response. For once.

I dare that Canadian dimwit to endorse this sentiment. That the real villain, in the NRA's eyes, is not the slack-jawed piece of **** who pulled the trigger, but the black pastor whom he murdered, who didn't want guns in his church. It is as deeply racist as the attack itself. The overwhelmingly white-dominated NRA is the latter-day Ku Klux Klan - spewing out a slight variant on the old message: those damned ignorant blacks brought this on themselves.

Watch and learn: it's very short but says it all about how deeply ingrained is anti-black sentiment in US culture. You won't, though, will you - you prefer to cling to a comfort blanket of profound ignorance. http://www.theguardian.com/media/video/2015/jun/19/jon-stewart-daily-show-charleston-shooting Interesting that there's not a word of condemnation from you about this. I suppose you approve of the fact that the family of a white supremacist gave him a .45 handgun for his 21st birthday. You clearly don't know much about weaponry, so keep this in mind: weapons such as this have one purpose and one purpose only: to kill people. And he got his heart's desire - to kill black people.

Your post is two sentences and one non-sequitur, Git. It is Fry's edgy oddness that people like and admire (not so much the more mainstream stuff about which you complain though, truth be told). I don't know how many times I have to say this: WE DON"T DO NICE.

Tragic and beyond despicable. It's been coming, unfortunately. The rightwing Republican and Tea Party political assaults on Obama have been driven above all by an unspoken rage at the fact that a black man occupies the White House. (Some of their acolytes have ventured far enough into the open to say: "It's not called the Black House, you know"). Violent racism by police, including several murders by gunfire, strangulation and other assaults has met with little to no legal resistance as Grand Jury after Grand Jury sits on their hands. And now the signals have gone wider: the black community are fair game for anyone with a gun and a deep-rooted (as it is in American 'white' culture) loathing of black people. The irony is that the major cities of America - and ones like Charleston - owe their character to black creativity. It's hard not to wander down any street in New York or New Orleans, for example, and not think of how their image has been defined by black musicians and artists, from the Jazz Age to now. And black churches throughout America have been the finishing schools for soul and R&B artists since the 50s. They are remarkable places - rather like the Muslim Sufi shrines of South Asia they are the gold standard of how to articulate religious belief with joy and artistry. Some irony, then, that the loosest cannons of white supremacy should now attack them. All aided and abetted by a safety-off/be-ready-to-fire political fanaticism.

Thanks. The best part of writing this guff is the priceless hurty reaction from emperor pap. He actually thinks I'm trying to bring him down or dissuade people from going over to the sweetness and light, such is his conspiro-mindset. He's not very - how shall I say - 'meta', is he... Sorry I forgot to insult you, by the way. Won't happen again.

You’re confusing cause with correlation. That’s a cause. As for papsweb being a rival football forum, it isn’t. For a start, it doesn’t have an MLG. And no football forum can exist without an MLG. Nor does it have any true ITKs, or a dozen or so remora-like smartarses for each ITK, ready to tear them down. Or any Ottoman planks with a decade-old provincial fashion ‘sense’ and a limited vocab (ending in ‘pal’, mostly, like some baldy cult-member jive idolising the gods Willis/Statham). Or a gaggle of chocolate-box veterans with dinosaur-age football goggles, masquerading as tactical wiseacres. Or paranoid-android depressives seeing the downside of signing Messi. Without these, you have no football forum. And I visit here primarily to catch up on the Saints-related gossip and squabbles. (I only wander into the Lounge afterwards.) Looking for football information and chat over there means fighting your way clear of the subjects that really interest them – the longest running and leading thread seems to be about women’s breasts – to a thread all of five posts long started only yesterday about Juanmi. And who ‘broke’ the news of Juanmi’s potential signing? A cartoon bear. So they’re not a football site. Their USP is simple: it’s being NICE. And that’s weird. How can a site run by someone who has the temper of a toddler on a sugar crash be ‘nice’? The answer possibly is that underneath that keening niceness is fear. Pap’s cosa nostra of acquaintances are a scary bunch by his very own account. And his gangster pals hang around that site, presumably cowing everyone into an invisibility of niceness. It’s like the Stepford Community Forum: nice and polite, with an undertow of controlling menace. Even the nastiness is nice. Brian’s supposed nemesis, a Nippon nebbish, is actually fawningly in love with him. Odd. With the boy-scout-ish, keep-‘em-in-line badges and baubles, upvotes and downvotes, the specially invited, bulked-out ‘friends’ and the lathered mutual admiration, it’s all a tragi-comic charade, orchestrated by what comes off as a skeleton staff of a hotel straight out of The Shining. So to anyone tempted: stay here, because we do football, we don’t do nice, we’re not weird, and you won’t wake up with a horses head next to you if you offend admin. EDIT: Scratch that last point. And now we've been exiled to live among the muppets, this is my last word on the subject.

Yeah, that's what they want you to believe. Look, I can't say any more. They maintain constant peepers on this thread. You're on your own. Just remember: blue pill/red pill.

Shut it, git. We all know you've gone forum ac/dc.

To help you with your dilemma: Brum Boy's vanity project is a front for the fallen Ego's gangster pals. Be warned.

Damn, my poker face is better than I thought. A case of mild leg-pulling has turned into…DOWNVOTEGATE!! My last post and CB’s before it seem to have been elevated into a full-blown conspiracy over there, with a whole raft of unintended consequences that would fill an Ealing comedy. First, Ottery gets knifed on his way in the door at Pap Towers, accused of being CB or me. And some poor innocent forum member, too shy so far to post, is about to have their ‘Centurion Badge’ (Que? – do you get your own Legion when you register?) confiscated, with him or her summarily dispatched to the wilderness, falsely accused of being the evil downvoter. Then the finger is pointed briefly at a few other faceless newbies (actually unable to collect their faces at the point of entry, apparently), who are presumably forced into orange jumpsuits to await their fate. To make matters worse, and unknown to me (for why would I give two ****s?), emperor pap himself is on the road and away from his multiscreen controls. So he thinks, evidently, that a plot has been hatched to invade while the drawbridge is down, and has gone into full conspiro-mode, promising a large-scale downvoter witch hunt. The only voice of reason has come from dear old Brian, who has had to tell pap, et al. [note correct use of Latin abridgement], not to be so silly. It hasn’t worked. So I thought I’d own up. Sorry chaps – I didn’t mean to cause so much havoc. I wasn’t being serious. You can stop upturning the furniture and trashing the desks. There is no evil downvoter. I wish your forum well. And I promise not to even lurk there any more. (Although did I laugh? Yes I did, annoyingly.) CB Fry, on the other hand…

No, there's been a Sleeper Verbal there for longer than that. Not posted yet, but have downvoted a chosen few...often.

For the sake of fu ck I won't say a word. (I'm already there.)

Looking at it, they seem to have developed quite slowly since the papnishment. It seems more like a vanity project for Brum-boy Brian than anything else, and it's way too friendly and cliquey. They have no edge. I saw CB Fry posted over there under a light disguise and was effectively driven out after he embarrassed youknowho (a reminder of what usually happens with post-revolutionary forums). I know CB has gone a bit mainstream but without critical-snarky voices like his, plus the right-wing planks we have on here, it's never going to be that much fun.

So what are you suggesting? That we should let a few thousand men, women and children drown to set an example and send them a little message? And what would that message be? "Watching you drown is just our way of saying: **** off!"? Or would you prefer not to watch?