Verbal

Not at all. Conspiracy fantasists have always been around - and they've been common as muck since the Enlightenment (ironic, no?). They spring up like ugly weeds all the time. My point is that governments, particularly oppressive ones, have no interest in suppressing them because they are massive diversions from the oppression itself. Look at who governments actually do go after. Not the inconsequential and gullible fools who drone on and on about some memetic fantasy of theirs. They go after Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, Glenn Greenwald and (in his previous incarnation) Paul Greengrass. Why? Because they uncover real government conspiracies, cover-ups and atrocities. They embarrass secretive security and surveillance agencies, and they reveal the colossal extent to which political oversight of these agencies is absent. If you think about it in terms of footprints - rather like a carbon footprint - these investigative journalists and whistleblowers leave huge imprints on the body politik and public opinion. Fantasists like our pet conspiracist, by contrast, leave the collective footprint of Tinkerbell - and, as I hope you know, fairies don't exist. This isn't to say that fantasists have no effect. They do. They corrode and distract from serious journalism and investigation. So when cretins go on about newspapers and the 'Zionist-controlled mass media' pouring millions into a smear campaign against UKIP for example, it's a lie that obscures a much more important truth. It was a newspaper (Guardian, NY Times) not a conspiracy theorist that reported Snowden. It was a newspaper (Telegraph) not a conspiracy theorist that reported the Westminster expenses scandals (plural) It was a newspaper (Guardian) not a conspiracy theorist that reported the Trafigura scandal It was a news magazine (New Yorker) not a conspiracy theorist that uncovered the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal It was a news magazine (Ash Shiraa) not a conspiracy theorist that uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal And so on and endlessly on. And yet, for all the tons of information brought to the public realm just by Wikileaks and Snowden, how many of these cretinous conspiracy theories were confirmed by these and other revelations? Not a one. Nada. Which is more than a little embarrassing, don't you think? Conspiracy fantasists are accidental patsies - useful idiots to regimes who want to keep things quiet. The regimes didn't create them - but they're manna from heaven to oppressors everywhere.

Quoted for hilarity. It seems our resident conspiracy extremist couldn't resist. Research is what researchers do. They go out into the wide oxygenated world and find things out, talk to people first hand, do experiments to test ideas, etc. The obsessive compulsive activity indulged in by conspiracy fantasists never goes further than the boundaries of a computer screen, and consists almost entirely (as in our remarkably unoriginal, gullible friend) of the incoherent fragments of regurgitated mush. It is not and never will be 'research'. Here are the considered views on the absurd claims of the 9/11 of a proper researcher and perhaps America's most famous radical activist, Noam Chomsky. In other words, conspiracy fantasists are doing the job of oppressive governments for them, and are left alone and free to make up irrelevant garbage because it suits the powerful to do so.

There's a good reason BNP are 'banned' from UKIP - you can only tell them apart by their dress codes. Look, if you want to join the 'broad church' of UKIP just be in no doubt you're in the same pews as hordes of racist scumbags. Don't take that as gospel from me - look at the comments by former UKIP members who've left in disgust.

You accuse others of hysteria and yet launch into a swivel-eyed hysterical rant just because it's really hard to tell the BNP and UKIP apart? And the hook-line-and-sinker guff about the evil media? Well done for swallowing a party line even the UKIP apparatchiks don't actually believe. Repeating the discredited nonsense about The Times? Yet another example of your peddling party propaganda mindlessly. Please, if you have to vote for the BNP in blazers and find yourself under the same political roof as a cretinous bunch of racists, xenophobes and homophobes, at least give the impression of thinking for yourself.

Spot the difference between UKIP and the BNP. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/quiz/2014/may/19/quiz-bnp-ukip-quotes-who-said-what

Oh how lovely. An internet threat. Is there anything you don't do on the internet? So what's next? A visit from some bent-nosed, trilby-wearing cartoon-character gangster scarily mumbling: 'I'm besties with pap'? And you frightened off two posters with a PM, you say...? Yeah right. Good god, you're an odd one even on a fantasist scale of 10 to 11.

Highlighted for hilarity. All that schmoozing with the roughest toughest gangsters has clearly gone to your head.

You know full well he didn't say that he'd paid up front. Please don't drift back to your absurd point - stretching the definition of that word - that the debt isn't in some way real.

Rinsed and hung out to dry. Hopefully that'll signal the beginning of the end of the holier-than-thou hypocrite and his little band of scumbag racists, homophobes, Islamophobes and everything-phobes.

You'd only want the thread title changed if you were lamentably gullible enough to believe UKIP's party line when defending the indefensible - that they're being ganged up on by those horrid, nasty, conspiring media people. UKIP's spinners don't believe it themselves. In the face of the sheer volume of UKIP clowns being exposed, it's all that pathetic lot have by way of a defence. Which isn't much, to put it mildly. But all they can hope is that someone - anyone - is dumb enough to buy it. In that at least, they're right - there'll always be someone.

I wonder how vocal those advisory council members are, because a lot of them a dead.

1. The EEC ceased to exist in 1993. 2. Claiming the FN is equivalent to UKIP underscores my point. FN are vicious, vile racists. 3. "Rightly or wrongly"? Why pander to this crap?

Whoever we hire will need to be a caretaker. MP will be fired by Levy around November so we can have him back and Spurs can continue their policy of giving everyone a go.

I thought certain ethnic groups were a little under-represented in that video. And they basically announced the 1920 manifesto of the Nazi Party. Maybe the two are connected.

UKIP is a party that attracts racists in droves.

Thandi added: "Ukip is exploiting the stupidity of ignorant anti-immigrant voters for electoral gain. While the party deliberately attracts the racist vote, I refuse to be associated with them." In one - although it does surprise me that she didn't notice they were the BNP in blazers earlier.

Good god, you're crass - and clearly watching too much Russia Today. So your 'main issue' with the EU is its 'belligerence' in the fall of the Soviet empire and its fall out? What 'belligerence' is this exactly? And showing maps of the post-Soviet East is not an answer acceptable to anyone but a craven admirer of the FSB. You have no idea how national movements work and have worked in what was the East European Communist bloc. You have no idea how post-Communist regimes in Eastern Europe have been the ones to initiate political and economic alignment with the EU, in fear of what has always been a xenophobic Russian state, intent on crushing independent political movements and civil rights. You have no idea how Russia has used energy as a weapon to cow neighbouring states. And you clearly have no idea how Russia has manipulated pockets of Russian speakers in Ukraine and many other countries. How dare Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, abandon their place in the enlightened orbit of the Soviet Union! How dare they apply for EU membership! And how dare anyone suggest that they might do so of their own volition, rather than at the manipulative behest of the evil EU! Turning the EU into another one of your gullibly stupid conspiracy theories is beyond tiresome. I suppose you'll have us believe that Pussy Riot are part of a plot led by Baroness Ashton to overthrow the preening idiot Putin, whom you clearly adore. Weird.

This is a good question. Could the anti-EU, UKIP knee-jerkers please stop avoiding it?

It's not the case Minty. As usual our resident Icke-lite conspiracist grounds his assertions in his own ignorance. The questions are indeed preselected, but they are sought without editorial input from audience members. No one on the panel has any sight of the questions before recording. The answers are not subject to editing unless there is a technical problem. Generally speaking, the programme is recorded 'as live' - that is, it's recorded to broadcast length. It is not broadcast live partly because of fears that it will become a target for extremist interventions of the kind that our conspiracist no doubt approves. But it's not recorded far enough in advance of broadcast for the kind of manipulations he's predisposed to think happen. Inventing conspiracy theories about Question Time, of all things, is pathetic, and taking paranoia to a clinical level.

I wasn't mocking at all VW - merely pointing out that if the objection to halal is that it's brutal, you should see what goes on in abattoirs generally. So if you replace the word 'racist' with 'hypocrite', that's about right, right?

http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/CAMPAIGNS/slaughter/ALL/

What? You know we've progressed a bit beyond the days of town cryers, the pony express and flag signals. It's now possible to use something called the internet, social media, podcasts, media interviews, party political broadcasts, public meetings, etc, etc. There's no reason on earth for Farage to travel to Strasbourg to make his point about the EU. He can make it far more effectively, and to a far larger and more receptive audience, here. The likely appeal - and he has conspicuously failed to deny this - is that he enjoys the gravy train just as much as any other Euro freeloader, and that he especially loves the largesse of the receipt-free expenses racket.

You do realise that that little 'blame the media' episode has been discredited, if not laughed out of town. What is it, exactly, that leads people to demean themselves to such an extent that they retail some party apparatchik's mock-paranoia as if it were gospel?

UKIP are the BNP in blazers. Shame some of the more gullible and easily led on here buy into the UKIP mock-paranoia about the media 'fitting them up.' It's merely apeing the UKIP standard response. Farage is caight fiddling his expenses? Blame the media. Poster boys and girls meant to be typical voters and turn out to be party members? Blame the media. One racist after another falls out of the purple closet? Blame the media. Homophobic cretins come out of the UKIP woodwork? Blame the media. The problem with all of this is that while the 'media' is supposedly at fault for these 'smears' the allegations themselves are all nonetheless not actually denied. That anyone should buy the UKIP line, which is merely a cynical attempt to deflect criticsm without actually addressing it, and then peddle it as though it were true, is just simpering submissiveness.

I'm prepared to take a wild guess.