Huguenot

It's 6pm here SteveO. I don't have an anti-women's issues agenda TM. RosieH has a very clear narrative within which women are victims of men, and her conviction is that anyone who challenges that narrative with either observations or opinions that run counter to it must by definition be a woman hater. Her assault is based on crimes which I have not committed. It's an insult to everyone's intelligence to suggest that she isn't trying to sustain a clear connection between me and deviant behaviour by consistently using sexual metaphors and references to children. Not only is that an almost criminal smear, but couching it as an apology whilst repeating the insult is despicable. You know that too TM, so please, save your disingenuous critique of her prose for someone else.

It's clear she intended a sexual analogy in order to sustain the insult, Ted. She's not stupid. She is quite off her head though. She's fabricated an entire women hating personality for me and is pursuing this attack based solely on what's in her imagination.

Are you asking people how to do it, or telling people they can do it? Google is your friend: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000705.htm

silverfox, one of the things that most people believe that the government should have done more of to prevent the current debilitating UK economic crisis is regulation. The problem with regulation on a national level is that it can create either an unfair advantage or disadvantage at the international level leading to reckless behaviour - and the people that pay the price, as you have discovered, is the little man. The UK adheres to international regulation because it makes sense, not because it's Johny Foreigner interfering.

"He has such a hard-on for his women's-issues-are-bullshit agenda that he considers even twelve year old girls fair game" "I just wanted to make it TRIPLY clear I wasn't calling H a paedophile" RosieH, You have lost it haven't you? Who else thinks 12 year old girls are fair game for hard-ons but paedophiles? Read that, and read it AGAIN. What is wrong with you? You are behaving in an extraordinary way, and tossing around insults and abuse with reckless disregard for either truth or for the basic rights of other people not to be abused by you. You need to stop this now. All I did was make perfectly reasonable observations that celebrated existing social commentary, but it seems you have elevated this into a make believe world where I have become a vehicle for every hang up and diseased conviction you have against the male gender. Stop it. You need to understand that just because there are 10 opinions out there, and I offer an additional perspective it is not saying that I disagree with everything or anything that has already been said. Clearly in your fucked up world view it does. I can understand that Jah in his polarised tabloid world view thinks that there is only one approach to any problem and only one perspective. He's been coached in it for years, and relativistic approaches like mine drive him nuts. That doesn't make me a troll, or the object for your issues and anxieties. Leave me alone, and be grown up enough even if just for a minute to recognise that your behaviour and smears are shocking.

Why are you posting this? Who cares? Is TM Scottish and this is the first salvo for independence?

Seems to be quite a lot of simplistic single issue stuff there about food and sustainability in isolation. It rather smacks of year zero campaigns to get us all back in teepees that fails to recognise that food is part of a global exchange of products and services that are mutually interdependent. Nothing about 'protest' that's apparent. However, these food enthusiasts would be well placed to remember that the greatest protest in the food revolution is unlikely to be the campaigners themselves, but more likely to be those large proportions of society that don't take kindly to being told what to do or eat by well-to-do middle class liberal do-gooders on a poverty tourism trip.

I'm sorry you don't follow my arguments Jah, but I can assure you that I never set out to wind anyone up. I can get embroiled in tit for tat digs as a follow up, but that's another issue entirely. In this case RosieH was name checked because I knew she would jump down my throat for referencing a well known feminist who believed that gender issues were far more complex than simply 'women good, men bad'. In the end I was right, although I failed to predict the ridiculous ball of fury that would culminate in me being compared with a paedophile for pointing out the impact that physical changes have on women's perceptions of their own maturity, and hence their choice of boyfriends. To imagine or propose that this means that I wish to exploit or cause violence upon women, or even that I believe that women are not victims of violence is to make an enormous leap of unpleasant and vindictive fabrication that I was shocked to hear if from RosieH and unimpressed by your own playground follow up.

So you're seriously asking people to come along and watch a bit of anarchist propaganda on the World Bank, an organisation that few of the attendees know anything about, and then have a discussion on whether it's right or wrong? I had you wrong Lulastic, I thought you were well meaning but disorganised, now I'm thinking you're a charlatan. As I've said, I'm not a Haterzzz (whatever that is), but if you want a 'free' discussion about the World Bank then you'll be putting both sides of the equation. Since this event is called the Protest Cafe, you've clearly aleady decided that the output should be protest - hardly evidence of an open mind?

I'm not a hater Lulastic, what I'm trying to highlight is that you are calling for membership of an organisation with a commitment to undisclosed action from an unwritten agenda. Your views on the NHS show that there is clearly an 'intent' behind your leadership, and your views on the World Bank (an institution dedicated to poverty reduction) shows that you are poorly informed and prone to knee jerk reactions. I would simply prefer that your potential members bear that in mind before they sign up to your organisation out of the misguided view that you support duvets for bunny rabbits rather than anarcho-syndicalism.

No

I'd be interested to hear what the 'action' is that this group is dedicated to? Does it respect the democratic process or the rule of law? Where do the limits lie? Are you willing to target those that disagree with you outside their homes? Are you willing to humiliate their families and ransom their nieghbours' peace of mind? What about campaigns of harassment in the early hours? Are those on the cards? Or are you just letter-writers? Are you willing to make your group, with it's undisclosed agenda, the 'acceptable' public arm to a more sinister fifth column with different rules of engagement? Perhaps all this should be made clear before people start volunteering to align themselves with your 'party'?

What about people who protest against racial integration, will they be welcome too? Will you share your learning, experience and enthusiasm with them? What about those that protest against homosexuality, will you be offering support and resources? What about those who protest against climate science, saying it's all a conspiracy? What about those who protest against healthy school meals and push burgers through the fences? What about those who protest against the nanny state and want to roll back regulation and workers rights? Are they all welcome? If they're not all welcome, then you need to seriously consider your approach, as you're not really a 'protest' group at all, but in fact a special interest group with a secret agenda that's entering into the same deception and misrepresentation you will probably claim to detest.

Hmmm, a strange orphan italic tag is making this page go weird. Is that any better?

You can't talk about teenage girls dating older men without reference to their perceptions of their maturity, and you can't refer to their perceptions of maturity without talking about the moment when they cease to muck in with the boys and instead start flouncing around self-importantly. Germaine Greer believed that women were victims of their biology, and were conditioned into behaving certain ways because of it. I was hypothecating that young girls could get a distorted view of their maturity because of basic biology - and that this could drive them into inappropriate relationships within which they would, as Greer said, be taught to hate themselves. I tried to do it in a slightly humorous fashion, that's not mockery, but I can see how highly sensitised people may decide that it is. Taking the piss out of people isn't hatred, and making jokes about sex isn't a mask for evil thoughts. How you leap from there to misogyny I have no idea.

Ira Aldridge in Upper Norwood? John Logie Baird in Sydenham? There is a Holst one at a Girls School out west where he taught apparently.

Dear God RosieH, your peculiar conviction that you can't discuss menses without being dirty and criminal makes you sound like someone who needs therapy. Do you seriously think it's okay to call me a paedophile? You've lost the plot.

I signed up for SumofUs over some despicable corporate crime, but the protests came thick and fast. They were both intelligent and unintelligent, well researched and downright fabricated. I finally realised that these guys had no real interesting justice, honesty or society, they simply wanted to protest. Much of what they did was moronic. If you have sound intent, insight and alternatives I may well support your cause. If you just want to protest I'd think you're an idiot.

You may be right. That just makes it worse. It's a mess. An absolute mess.

*sighs* As I pointed out, it's Germaine Greer stylee. The fact that you don't recognise it is entirely down to the fact that you are lost within its consequences. ;-)

I'm against everything.

Ha ha, you've never come across teenage girls airly declaring that they are 'more mature' than boys of their age and wondered why this is? It's entirely down to menstruation. Boys don't have a 'coming of age' moment when they realise they can now procreate, and so don't reassess their existence in that context. You can dissemble on the subject as you wish, but the realisation that there may be a purpose to your body beyond immediate self gratification is a life changing moment.

I don't know about this situation, but I'm guessing that if the ECB instructed RBS to offload the customers, that's because otherwise they would not do so of their own volition. Consequently RBS could retain the customers by over pricing them. A large corporation paying lip service to regulation wouldn't surprise anyone, and the cost or time involved would be heavily justified.

Not to be picky EP, but if you want to use that post again, I'd avoid "... moralism, immorality... " as the latter is a subset of the former. It's an Unnecessary Word. That apart, I agree with both of you. Which is amazing, given my heretofore characterisation of EP as a conscientiously objecting pocket tyrant and Quids as a gunslinging small island working class neo conservative. I'll talk to my editor.

I was chatting with a young meeja lady in her late twenties who observed that she acquired all her 'news' through Facebook. A newspaper or TV site wasn't in the portfolio. These are the people who will be deciding the economic and political future of the nation if you put independence to a referendum. Considered insight, consequences, or whether it's a good or bad idea won't really come into the equation. I share with EP the view that Irish union is inevitable, but it'll only take place when it becomes an irrelevance.