Master Bates

Richard Bacon who currently pollutes the airwaves on Radio 5. He manages to make even his most mediocre and insignificant guests appear like giants of humanity by comparison.

I always piss standing up. I find it quite difficult to sit on our sink.

It's now 75 years since a British man won one of the four Grand Slam tennis titles. That was Fred Perry at the US Open back in 1936 when most of us were still coming to terms with the Abdication Crisis. Come on Britain, with a bit of effort we can easily make it 100 years without a win. So take heart Murray and think of your glorious predecessors, Mark Cox, Roger Taylor, Buster Mottram, John Lloyd, Jeremy Bates, Miles McClaggan, Tim Henman, Greg Rusedski and Alex Bogdanovich. Let them be a perpetual example to you.

Great stuff. Nothing better than a slice of kitchen sink drama.

Quite right. The BBC are absolute lying wankers. I wouldn't put anything past them in their efforts to mislead people. I've just watched a Newsnight feature about the grooming of underage girls for sex by groups of predatory paedophiles, occasioned by a particularly unpleasant case in Derby. Never once did anyone mention that these gangs are almost always Muslims of Pakistani origin. Fucking BBC again. Putting Kelvin McKenzie on now and again is the least of our worries. The whole corporation is rotten from top to bottom.

Galloway's a cunt. I suspect he'd like nothing more than to see full blown Sharia Law in this country, with floggings, amputations, beheadings, the works. Anyway, he can fuck off.

For me it has to be Albert Watkins versus Harvey Jones in the school playground in about 1981. A titanic struggle between probably the two hardest kids in the Second Year at the time and one that the school had eagerly anticipated. I can't quite remember now whether Watkins won on points or the teachers intervened to break it up before a winner could be established. But it was a tremendous bout nonetheless.

I agree with you Stu that religion can be called brainwashing. But I think I would prefer to call the religious tutoring of very young children as indoctrination. It can be religious or political or social. I can't help feeling it must be better to allow children to grow into adolescents and develop their own beliefs based on their own experiences. But of all the ideologies I observe in the world today, the one whose indoctrination is most pernicious in my opinion is Islam. And if you get called a racist for saying so, that is a sign of your accuser's intellectual infirmity.

Stu Monty I didn't have you particularly in mind when I mentioned the left's love affair with Islam. You can probably tell from the details by my username that I am a newcomer to this forum and so I haven't had time to acquaint myself with your no doubt respectable views on things in general. I think I can detect though that you are a person with whom reasonable discussion is possible without deteriorating into a slanging match. You ought to take a little more time though to inform yourself about Islam. It does not present itself only as a religion for private individuals. It does also represent itself as a complete system of political, social and economic governance. But I do fail to see why either agreement or disagreement with Islam's claims on behalf of itself should be described as racist, as they have been done in this thread, though not by yourself I hasten to add.

So Magic Sponge, just tell me straight then. Is it racist to disapprove of Islam's doctrines, or is it just ''frightfully close'' to being racist? And what about Christianity, Scientology, Mormonism, Communism. Conservatism? Could disapproval of their doctrines be characterised as racist or frightfully close to racist too?

I didn't tar all Muslims with the same brush Magic Sponge. In fact I never once mentioned the word ''Muslims'' in the post you refer to. Most Muslims are probably decent people and they are not Muslims through choice. They are Muslims because their parents were Muslims and their parents' parents were Muslims etc and this brainwashing has gone on down the generations. You can regard Islam as ''one of the world's great religions'' if you want to. I prefer to think of it as a cult which indoctrinates its adherents from birth and actively promotes behaviour which all sane people ought to reprehend.

There isn't really a lot of point in arguing with dyed-in-the-wool lefties about Islam. Basically these people have always staked their entire intellectual existences on the premise that there is nothing remotely as bad as Western democratic capitalism. Nothing at all in their eyes, we are as evil and corrupt as it is possible to be. That's why so many used to be die hard communists and Stalinists until all the communist countries realised they were bankrupt and couldn't go on and wanted to become democratic capitalists (or at least capitalists) instead. For a brief moment in the 1990s this dispossessed left hitched its star to the green movement, but they quickly realised that telling us to grow our own food, live by candle light and cycle not drive to work wasn't going to sell any tickets, particularly when they weren't going to follow those standards themselves. The along came Islam. Something you would have thought every self-respecting leftie would have run a mile from. It's got everything they claim to oppose. Capital and corporal punishment, dominance of an unelected clerisy, gender inequality and segregation, honour killings, rape within marriage, apartheid between believers and unbelievers, terrorism, jihad, you name it. They should run a mile. But the left embraces Islam, clasps it to its bosom. And why? Because it's not Western democratic capitalism, that's why. It's not the thing they've been taught to hate above all else.

I wouldn't describe myself as particularly homophobic Numero Nueve, but since your first reaction on reading my post about the inadvisability of voting Labour was to think of a penis, I just assumed you were that way inclined. Had the boot been on the other foot, I would have called you a complete cunt. No hard feelings though.

I'm a complete cock am I? Bit like the ones you take up your arse then.

The most important thing to remember is this. Never ever vote Labour. Those lying treacherous wankers won't just shaft you, they'll shaft your children and grandchildren too if you let them, as a programme currently being broadcast on Channel 4 is eloquently explaining.

It's just that troublesome tiny majority again. But don't forget, the overwhelming minority are really moderate and peace-loving. Honestly.

Not enough attention has been paid, in my opinion, to the effect which market forces will have on all this. The example was given of Salford University as being an institution from which no-one should graduate with a debt of £27K. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Salford Uni decided to impose the highest fees it could on its students. The effect should be that prospective students will be perceive the value of the degrees which Salford offers as being incommensurate with the fees it charges and decide to apply elsewhere, or nowhere at all and enter work at an earlier age. If places like Salford charge ridiculous fees for courses of dubious worth, surely they will soon find themselves going out of business because they cannot attract enough fee-paying students. In actual fact, what the country probably needs is fewer universities with fewer students studying at them, although the political class dares not admit this truth out loud at the moment.

I was a student back in the 80s. In those days, ''Neighbours'' was the soap du jour. Can't remember now what Kylie's character was called.

''Bring it on'' says a twat. One of those student cunts chucked a fire extinguisher off the roof of an 8-storey building. Could have killed anyone. That turd needs to be banged up for a few years. And make the rest of the wankers pay over the odds for their Mickey Mouse degrees. Today's events have convinced me that my taxes shouldn't go anywhere near them.

Who shot JR?

<<a log book>> That's an excellent suggestion, but no doubt someone will be along in a minute to pooh pooh the idea.

Predators (2010). Gritty and realistic kitchen-sink drama and well worth watching, although it lacks the subtle method-acting skills which Arnold Schwarzenegger brought to the 1980s original.

<<Don't dare tell me how to do my job.>> Well to be fair, you have started this thread by saying you are at a loss to know how to deal with the situation. It's small scale pilferage and the police simply won't even consider looking at it so you can either deal with the situation yourself or accept the small losses these customers will cause you. If, of course, they are actually stealing from you, which I don't think you've established definitively yet. Keep a very close eye on them in future and ban them if you catch them in flagrante delicto.

I just hope this guy gets a very stiff punishment.

An excellent decision by the election court. And it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy than Phil Woolas. Maybe now attention can be turned to the widespread misuse and fraudulent submission of postal votes in constituencies which habitually elect Labour MPs.