mockney piers

1) I think that was rather my point wasn't it. 2) really when did they invade? As a matter of fact weve also been at war with the US in 1812 who attempted to annex Canada, we did our best to aid the chaos of their civil war to keep our upstart ex colony off balance and have competed with them colonially in the Caribbean, China, Central and South America. WW2 was a tough sell by Roosevelt to the ameican public to fight with us against the Germans as sympathy for Britain was not great and in fact names of a Germanic origin made up the largest proportion of the boys fighting for the US believe it or not. In fact i don't recall anyone of any european nation funding bombing campaigns against British citizens or has that been conveniently forgotten? We aren't even vaguely hedging our bets with Europe, we've gone wholesale into a huge agreement where we hold mutual interest above that of self interest and that judicial paths will henceforth resolve all national struggles. Brilliant. Some are uncomfortable with how far we've gone but it would be a head in the sand xenophobic nutter who wouldn't admit that we are European, that our greatest trade is with Europe, that our closest cultural counterparts are European and that this one will last. The fact is the transatlantic alliance as liberal democracies with mutual economic interests and closely tied financial systems, will last and has much to go for it. It doesn't have to be either or. I'm not sure where you're going with this hedging nonsense though.

It's a genuine stained glass window, don't shoot the messenger.

Messrs Clarkson and Brendan with belly laughs, good work.

merely gentle ribbing, and that's NOT a euphemism!!!!

I guess we do Brendan, occasionally Zola Jesus - Sea Talk Love her voice, new album is stunning. http://www.nme.com/video/bcid/600582583001/search/NME

Wow women are defenceless or easy, are you trying to make friends? Atually I've met a couple of easy ones in my time but that's another story, my name is Jeremy Clarkson I'm here all night. But seriously he does have a point. They do both play up, I don't for a minute think Jeremy believes half of what he says, and seen hi. Pretty much admit it once. I do find both very funny truth be told but only Clarkson and his coterie, however idiotic, chummy and a bit irritating, have genuinely made me belly laugh.

Wow, both eclectic and bizarre!!

I believe the word is touch?.

boo

I was going to say ... the fan heater on, but hey.

Are you quoting Stewart lee again Sean? Clarksons harmless. Piers Morgan shames his name however, bird-eye-plucking is too good for him!!!!!!

Blimey, was just trying to say the Nazi slur is a cheap jibe. Sorry for the digression all, as you were. Actually if im going to be frank and digress again, i think people in this country are distrusting of religion full stop. I know I get a bit shocked when i hear a rational person say 'i'm going to church'. Maybe that's all my earlier point boils down to. Just like snorks 'apparently snorky' h'munca to suck me into a pointless debate ;) Still miss you though since you 'retired' from the forum.

You cant have it both ways shnuncs. Either we're talking about the criticism of the conservative ecumenical poicies of the head of an intrinsically conservative institution (name me another has lasted 1700 odd years) and his possible complicity in trying to hide it's dirt under the carpet,or we're having a pop at all of them. you claim it's the former and that I'm being irrelevant and then insult the intelligence of the the billion odd latter. In my experience most people take the catechisms with a pinch of salt. I've tried the whole 'your religion dictates this to you' approach in arguments, not least with missus mockney in my refusal to have our child baptised into it, but ultimately they all go "well that's not how i feel". I don't know if youve noticed but the Irish are pretty good at using contraception these days. You're worried about the subjugation of the billion odd people, look at the economic system that locks them into poverty and ignorance, forget the bloody pope. All grandma eggs to you though snorks!

Thanks moos, as ever the wise owl of the forum. I'm a bit lost as to exactly what Louisiana was responding to in my post. I was indeed referring to the anti-catholicism that's woven into the fabric of this country. We have this naive idea that stems from the glorious revolution that the civil war was about Roundhead Protestant good guys and cavalier catholic bad guys; total nonsense of course but good PR when a foreign prince was usurping thethronefrom the legitimate royal line. I guess there's also a dose of the nationalist feeling that anyone who has alliegance to Rome of any ilk is somehow disloyal to this country, it persists in a gentle yet accepting unease among many, again witness the TB conversion (he was a wrong'un all along with his papist agenda type comments when it happened). Everyone has a right to criticise rationally and I'm at a loss as to when I denied Louisiana that right. I was more referring to a pervasive air of knee jerk attacks, the Nazi slur, the Facebook groups and pointless protests. It seems to me that we've managed to make most prejudices in this society unnacceptable, yet anti-Catholicism is still ok it would seem to me. It's far more subtle and much less destructive than racism and homophobia, as Sean says no catholic feels he'll be punched or spat at, but I've witnessed many a snort of derision or a rolling of the eyes to colleagues or friends of mine in the office or pub, a snide joke about the Da Vinci Code, and I can just smell it on this thread too.

Sooooooooo, after all that I gather the vale is changing ownership? Hurrah is all i have to say, perhaps we should all celebrate with a ?1.50 (on Mondays) guest ale at a wetherspoons, they do a good range of decent ales served with out a smile and enjoyed in a motorway service station ambiance, but heh, it's ?1.50 and there's always the garden or street. Having said that the Balham one could be the most depressing place in England.

im not sure how the sony one works, but in ibook store and Amazon you can search for older books and they're usually free or get the Gutenburg project books (though they tend to be a bit rougher round the edges). And both have two top ten lists, paid and free, thats usually a good place to start.

word keef. I'm no lover of catholicism or religion in general, but that is just a cheap shot. There is something slightly worrying about anti-catholicism, which has an atavistcally deep-rooted nature in this country. The levels of ire it generates seems to be out of all proportion of the levels of bad it manages. I'd put the church today roughly on a par with, say BP and even its nastiness in the past didnt come close to the evils done by secular power, but from what you read from forums, blogs, press and literature (you should see the lunatic fringe hatchet job 'history' book my dad gave me to read, i fear he may have lost it too) you'd think people really were talking about the Nazi party.

ditto Brendan plus you can lend a book which you cant with all that nasty drm stuff on ebooks. I do however have iBook on the iPad and its a great backup, particularly on the plane the other day when i left my current papyrus book in my friends car in the way to the airport. Plus there are about a billion books for free from Winnie the Pooh, through pretty much all the classics, so have already ploughed through some Dickens, Conrad and Tolstoy for nowt, which is nice.

I've gone down to sainsburys and asked a few times and never been disappointed.

I'd say we're pretty comfortable as part of the alliance called the European Union. We have common interests and culture, visit each others countries in our hundreds of millions and are each others foremost trading partners. Plus avoiding European rivalry and conflagration is far and away our primary security issue. Our last two cost us an empire, all our money and a million and a half dead, all other security concerns pale into insignificance against this; let's not risk another huh? The transatlantic alliance was a hedge against the catastrophic failure of the European project as much as it was a safeguard against communism. With both of these gone I can see many reasons why we should remain close to them, culturally and in trade but i can't see that we've benefited a great deal strategically other than involvement in some expensive brush fire wars we couldnt afford and that it has helped us to have an inflated, misguided and ultimately expensive sense of our own importance in the scheme of things, money much better spending on our increasingly broken society rather than expensive floaty and flyey things as well as things that make REALLY big bangs that we'll never use and that someone else ultimately controls anyway. Taking that last one into account freakily the French have got it rather better than us, err taking Vietnam out of the equation, and Algeria and Rwanda and ... Ok strike that.

I can accept that, and if the justification for going into Iraq was 'because the US said so' then I wish all these so cAlled analysts, pundits and most of all politicians, would just bloody well say so. I doubt France or Germany's long term security is in any way impacted from not having done so mind, though i can fully see why Poland was so keen to get in with the US gang.

Oh MM. I completely and utterly fail to see what this country's long term security has anything to do with invading Iraq in any way shape or form, and have yet to hear a single decent justification (all of them post-rationalised of course) for this. Even long-term energy security which is morally unconscionable is dubious to say the least. I await with baited fingers. As for "Too many liberal Neville Chamberlains in ED, would sell the country's relationship with the US down the river and with it the long term security of the country" there is sooooooooo much wrong with this statement I wouldn't even know where to begin.

I'm unclear. Are these our intentions, our current policies or long term goals? 1. Totally agree, i think Iraq was not so much about safeguarding the Saudis, but ensuring there were US bases in the middle east should Saudi Arabia do an Iran so to speak. 2. I think we're in Afghanistan because we toppled the regime then didn't really think about what happened next. Islamism in Pakistan (i believe the islamics already have it) wasn't a significant problem until the Taliban fled into Pakistan and the Pakistani government joined the so called war on terror. I'm not sure how our presence in afghans tan can do much about preventing Pakistan from imploding other than the drip feed of predator dropped bombs keeping the Taliban leadership unsettled and disparate. 3. I think the idea was to create a client state, this has failed; though it is currently pliant and friendly but that could change quickly making the bases there untenable without a coup or splitting Iraq into 3 which may be an option should a future gov't head down that path. Containing Iran is poppycock. I don't think Iran has shown any signs of expansionist tendencies at all, the most it has done is to fund, train and arm paramilitaries in Lebanon and Palestine with an eye to their grasping power and having friendly regimes there eventually, a tactic the US is certainly most familiar with in examples ad nauseum. Containment is rhetoric that sells weapons as i believe I've already said on this thread. 4. Protecting? From what? Not from islamists, history has shown they will happily sell resources for profit when in power. So I'm guessing that you might be thinking that the ultimate goal was regime change in Iran, as they are cosying up to China who are equally keen to keep their wheels of industry and modernisation turning and are making moves in the oil and other resource rich countries the world over to ensure that they may be preferred to the US as a trading partner. Overall strategic geopolitical manoeuvres we are beginning to see manifest are between the US, China and a resurgent Russia. Europe so far is quiet and biding it's time with a transatlantic alliance but can't afford to be if spheres of influence and neo imperialism is to be the way of the 21st century. I of course naively believe we could achieve a world of multilateral cooperation, of interests subsumed to the truly greater good, and that scientific advances might allay the need for or all this grubby fighting for burning stuff. What an idiot!!!!

In a wider sense i actually agree with Huguenot. I think pretty much everyone in the world outside of the upper echelons of african oil kleptocracies and Saudi princes, agrees that our dependence on oil is a loser on every level. Very few of us do very much about it all though. That said, it's news to nobody is it, but the wind farm nimbys are awful hypocrites though aren't they. So back to the subject in hand, i really don't believe Iraq was a war for oil in the sense that Huguenot is making out. The oil fields may have been well off maximum capacity, but plenty was flowing and the majority was going to the US, so no problems there. Saddam was no longer a strategic threat to anyone, so no problems there then. As for the Zionism thing, i think there were a few senators mad enough to believe the nonsense enough to give it their support but to suggest it's what shaped policy is ludicrous. So in the end it was really just about putting into practice a new foreign policy theory about the use of US military superiority to actively shape the world in an image that is beneficial to them, and to court strategically important countries such as ex soviet republics with terrible human rights records and get an even more widespread net of airbases to attempt to effectively maintain US hegemony in the face of new (and old) strategic threats. In other words it was all about staying number one. It's what empires do, so in that sense the only people to blame were the US policy makers, or specifically the coterie who formulated the theories as rising stats on Reagan's staff and honed them out in the cold watching what they perceived to be the total failure of the application of power in the Clinton era. You can't even blame Joe American because it sure as hell wasn't stipulated in the election manifesto of 1999. We can blame Bush and Blair, because though the policies weren't theirs of the making, they surely were the executives of their respective countries and the buck stops there. It was sold to them as good vs evil and they lapped it as it fuelled their self-righteous missionary egos, Caligula springs to mind thinking about it, but that mig be a stretch too far. Blair was the worst though as in the uk where no one wanted the war, not even in his own government, though they were all far too cowardly and self-interested to say anything bar Robin Cook, and so long after it mattered, Clare Short. And of course they have reshaped the middle east, though I'm guessing that making Iran the premier strategic power in the area and putting an Iraqi government in place that will look towards Iran rather than the US, probably wasn't what they had in mind. That's the problem when your policy says "let's change the regime, show everyone how scary we are, and, err....get McDonalds and Starbucks in there, and err....the rest will follow". Whoops. should have asked those experts ...oh....wait.... Ooh and I'm always interested in what Quids has to say too.