Like sticking your fingers in your ears and saying you can’t hear.

Oh, I’m sure I’ll get around to worrying about it eventually. It’ll just have to get in line and be patient, because first I’ve got to worry about heart disease, cancer, traffic accidents, murder by someone I know (feel free to make a snarky comment regarding provocation and my personality at this point), suicide, diabetes (with my family history, anyway), and all the other much more likely ways I could snuff it. (A thought that’s almost welcome after being at work all day in this heat, really.)

I think I’m right in saying – though maybe I’m too tired to think up decent keywords, because Google is not playing nice – that hanging around friends, family, lovers and acquaintances is complacent, and in denial about the people who’re most likely to kill or harm us. And yet we keep doing it.

The number certainly isn’t zero – but Peter’s ‘slideshow’ was constructed to imply that nearly half a million UK citizens supported (or at least condoned) the 7/7 bombings (I emphasise this point: not Islamist terrorism in general but the London attacks in particular). If you believe that without demanding much more reliable (and much more recent) evidence, you haven’t so much sided with cuckoos and ostriches as with blind hawks who are so devoted to their trainers that they unquestionably follow even the most deranged orders.

I’m not going to interpose alternative figures because at present there are no statistically reliable snapshots of post-7/7 British Muslim opinion. I’m sure there will be, and probably sooner rather than later, but until then the only sensible answer to your question is "whenever such polls are taken and reliable figures compiled".

And that’s why it’s crucially important that anyone citing existing polling data should make it absolutely clear when the poll was taken and in what circumstances. I don’t have any problem with people citing that ICM poll per se, provided they make those qualifications clear – which is why I don’t have the same problem with page 41 of this week’s Economist.

Do you dispute, for example, the police suggestion of 200 really dangerous people ? Or are you arguing that they are making that figure up ?

Why would anyone dispute this – and how is it remotely relevant to the main argument? No-one’s denying that there are 200 really dangerous people (at least) currently at large – but what I’m challenging is the implication that they’re being actively or tacitly supported by a nearly half a million British citizens.

(This claim may of course be entirely correct, but it’s such an inflammatory one to make in the current climate – references to fires and crowded theatres spring to mind – that the onus is firmly on the person making it to back it up with rock-solid evidence. So where is it?)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4689363.stm

Are you disputing that many more people than zero hate us ? Cos that is the issue. Not footling about with 1 being greater than zero.

Do you dispute, for example, the police suggestion of 200 really dangerous people ? Or are you arguing that they are making that figure up ? Sounds to me like you are in denial.

Like sticking your fingers in your ears and saying you can’t hear.

Like sticking your fingers in your ears and saying you can’t hear.

Of course this is trite, but it is a demonstration of the sort of sloppy thinking that can simply assert that ‘many more people’ than zero ‘hate us’. Which is rather funny, as it leads you into a badly thought out attack on a straw man – noone has argued that zero people ‘hate us’, but even responding to this tailor-made statement you manage to make an ass of yourself.

So try Phillip Pullman or Lemony Snicket, and drink the tea. (Of course it’s juvenile. It’s a children’s book. Plus, it gets kids reading and really excited about what they’re reading, which is good enough for me.)

But it is a week too late to make out that zero people HERE NOW hate us.

Yes, that would be the bit of my comment where I said anyone who thinks nobody hates them is flattering themselves. Which would kind of imply that I don’t think the figure is zero.

It is banal and blind to ignore the threat inside Britain right now.

And it’s stupid and unpleasant to live in fear and knee-jerk conviction that one’s neighbours are probably trying to kill one, when actually, the chances of that happening are pretty remote. Given a choice between the two, gimme banal and blind. At least you get a good night’s sleep and don’t have to look at random people funny.

Your reference to 1 being infinitely greater than zero is trite, but par for the course for your level of argument. I said WELL ABOVE. Not GREATER THAN. There is is a clear mathematical distinction between the comparative terms.

What does this mean? No one would argue it ‘zero’ people hate ‘us’. But well above zero? Well, one is well above zero, being an infinite number of times greater in size.