Opinions or debunks on this please...

[mickyv]

Thanks Faceless, could you also correct the typo in the Telegraph thread's title please, as it makes me feel very silly everything I see it !

[faceless]

sorted, but you should have been able to do that yourself just by clicking on edit?

[nekokate]

I've just seen a picture of Hari for the first time. He looks like a right smug owl from some Beatrix Potter netherworld.

[mickyv]

Sorry Faceless I'm not very PC Hi-Tec but I'm always learning.

Here's Hari in action for you Kate;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxmlaur5UsA

[faceless]

Hari's got the knives out again - does he really not have anything more important to do?

[nekokate]

Johann seems like more of an amateur blogger than a professional journalist. I'd have had much more respect for his article if he'd left out the first paragraph, which by any reckoning reads like a tired and cliched list of 'the usual insults'. I'd love to find someone who can give me a list of original reasons they don't like George, but no one seems to have the capability - it's always the Sadam slur, the voting record, the Soviet Union collapse... at least Johann managed to resist the Celebrity Big Brother temptation.

The slur on his voting record is utter bollocks, as well. It's always weasel-worded to almost-but-not-quite imply that he's hardly ever in Parliament, when in fact he's there almost every day. What they mean is he hardly ever votes on motions, which is actually fully understandable since, as George has explained himself, the vast majority of opportunities to vote are either on a motion by the current government, or an amendment of that motion by the shadow government, and since he considers both those parties incompetent, how could he possibly vote for either with a clear conscience?

Having said all that, I think I might sort of side with Yo!-Hann! on the Tibet issue. Yikes!

*EDITED TO ADD:
I've just realised that the pedophile assertion is also an inaccurate slur on George's character. He did not say that the boyfriend of Mehdi Kazhemi was a pedophile, he said that he believed that he was hanged, not for "being gay", rather for "sex crimes against young boys" under Iranian law.

If you think about it logically, that does not mean that George agrees with Iranian law, and therefore agrees that the supposed sex was pedophilia. If we were to discuss a hypothetical case where a man was hanged in Iran for, I don't know, assaulting Ahmadinejad... we would give the reason for his hanging as "assaulting Ahmadinejad". That would not mean that we agreed such a thing should be punishable by death, it would simply mean that we recognised such a thing was punishable by death under Iranian law.

I think George was possibly confusing the case with the previous case where two young men were hanged for allegedly having sex with a 13 year old boy when they themselves were much younger. Now that, under Iranian law, would be called a "sex crime", but acknowledgement of that fact would not mean that one de facto considered them pedophiles. In fact, I think it would be absurd to label a 15/16 year old a pedophile for having sex with a 13 year old - they are children themselves, and at 13 you are usually sexually mature anyway - it's nothing to do with pedophilia.

Johann is taking an indirect comment that has the capacity to be interpreted a certain (likely unintended) way and relaying it as though the interpretation is matter of fact.

[faceless]