Disappointingly, David Hume failed to win Radio 4’s Greatest Philosopher poll. Although the man he lost to – Karl Marx – was a political and economic theorist rather than a philosopher, which makes Hume the real winner…

SIAW, despite its flaws, neatly skewers the idiots who think this is a Terrible Thing because Marxists killed a bunch of people. In short: no they didn’t. Murderous peasant bastards clad in a thin shroud of Marxist rhetoric but with precisely 0 genuinely Marxist policies killed a bunch of people.

Stephen Pollard is a cunt. Peter Marshall is a good man.

Oh, and speaking of appalling authoritarian ex-left-wing journalists, this is hilarious.

Why isn’t Karl Rove in jail yet? Despicable bastard.

"[Al Qaeda] are well-financed. Look at their websites." – Tony Blair. Similarly, SBBS is actually a sinister multimillion dollar organisation dedicated to overthrowing civilisation as we know it.

Overall, though, his speech isn’t too bad – he doesn’t lie, and he doesn’t say anything slanderous against Muslims in general. He does, however, miss one of the most important points in the whole struggle.

As Blair says, Al Qaeda (even to the extent that it exists as an organisation rather than an ideology, which is rather limited) cannot be negotiated with. Even individual Al Qaeda-ites will generally not be negotiable-with. So we shouldn’t try and appease them.

However, this ignores the fact that people *become* Al Qaeda-ites not out of random insanity or a love of Blowing Shit Up, but because they feel the West (or the local, insufficiently-Islamist government in Islamic countries) has done appalling and terrible things to the Muslim people. They believe that a proper Taliban-esque government free of Western interference would be the only way to end this injustice.

They’re wrong, in that a Taliban-esque government would make life much more rubbish for most Muslims than it currently is. However, they’re right that the West and the corrupt and brutal leaders we’ve backed in the Muslim world have indeed done appalling and terrible things to many Muslim people over the last 50 years (and are continuing to do so).

Al Qaeda is not a movement for remedying injustice. However, perceived injustice is what attracts young Muslim men to become Al Qaeda-ites. And if young Muslim men were no longer attracted to become Al Qaeda-ites, the terrorist threat would disappear…

Robin is very angry that George W Bush’s electioneering may have fucked up an intelligence operation that would otherwise have caught last week’s London bombers before they struck.

Me, I’m not even *capable* of getting angry at GWB anymore. With 100,000 needless deaths under his belt, what’s another 50?

From Chicken Yogurt: "A television advert. You round up 50-odd celebrities, sportsmen and women, the whole nine yards – a spread to appeal to the knuckle draggers on the Right and the wankers with their hard-ons for the virgins. Each celebrity says the name of one of those killed last week. At the end of the advert, a simple caption, black on white: ‘If you think Muslims did this, you’re a prick’."

In other news, there’s finally a sensible reason to be annoyed with the French.

Solidarity processions are sorted, which is good news. Vigil today; free festival Saturday. Be there.

I’m sort-of-on-holiday this week, hence low postage. Meanwhile, Phil says all one could ever need to say about The Terrorists in a general sense. In a more specific sense, it appears that the terrorists are dead, and that their suicide/murder ratio is fucking rubbish. Which is good to know, and is a nice antidote to the maniacal ‘Muslims will surely top us all’ ranting coming out of certain right-wing quarters before and since 7/7.

Incidentally, the BBC (unlike SBBS) has a duty to be an impartial broadcasting organisation. Its house style is to avoid referring to armed insurgent groups using the loaded ‘terrorist’ word, irrespective of their location; this is its offically stated position, and only one that a crazyloon could claim was mistaken. Why create problems for yourself drawing the line between terrorists and non-terrorists, when words like ‘gunman’ and ‘bomber’ suffice for both groups?

This means that it’s the BBC’s *duty* to refer to the cunts who carried out last week’s attacks as bombers – otherwise it’s guilty of allowing its concern for British lives in particular to distort its editorial values. And people who complain about this are silly.

(there’s another good piece of BBC-ness here)

"Some question whether [the UK’s] emphasis on monitoring [possible terrorists], as opposed to the preemptive disruption often favored by the FBI in the United States, has left the country vulnerable." – WaPo editorial.

Yes. These people are called ‘cunts’. Except when they they suggest it while rescuers are still digging bodies out of the Underground, in which case they’re called ‘sick, sick graverobbing cunts; fuck them’.

Can you imagine a British paper – even the Indy – having the poor taste to write the day after some putative attack on the US something like, "some people think that abolishing the rule of law and sending brown persons to secret prison camps without trial on the basis of no evidence made the USA a country that’s already surrendered to the terrorists’ ideals, and therefore thoroughly deserved its punishment"? If so, you’ve been reading too much Biased BBC…

Liberal media? My arse.

If everyone who doesn’t find this Sun editorial vile had been killed on Thursday (and only them), I’d have been broadly in favour of the attacks.

No, not really. But it takes a level of evil almost on a par with that of the killers to write something so twisted and appalling the following day.

If you think that "the Government must act without delay, round up this enemy in our midst and lock them in internment camps. Our safety must not play second fiddle to their supposed ‘rights’", then fuck you. I don’t hope you die, but you sure as hell don’t deserve to live.