#then act surprised and sad when disabled people die from preventable things

[hafwen]

I figured out one of the problems with one of my prescriptions is that the doctor wrote a 90 day one instead of a a 30 day. I called my doctor and had them send it into cvs to it filled. Then the pharmacist called to yell at me for not fixing some billing code in my health insurance which is weird because she told me I couldn’t do that and she had to tell corporate and then it would take 5 business days.

[gdreamzseternal]

I’d like to thank

@myradfemblog for finding an extremely old porn blog of mine. I forgot it existed and it actually makes me sick to see that I was role playing such sick disgusting trauma that I went through thinking it would help when it made me so much worse. Thank you for abusing me over something I repeatedly asked you to give me the link to because I wasn’t going to go through your slander about me to find it.

I want to also say thanks because you pointing that out and me seeing that made me cry both from being triggered and realizing how far I’ve come. That I am extremely kink critical now. When I used to be heavily into it. That I don’t whore myself out anymore because “sex work makes me strong”. God I used to genuinely believe that. Makes me sick. I was so so sick. I was still victimizing myself back then...

But now.. I am a survivor.

Everyone advocated for and ignored the dangers of extreme methods of “beat the child into submission”. (Looking at you old people) It’s so sad cause I still see it now. The way a person who I had a normal discussion with suddenly gets to violently abuse me and degrade me just because they didn’t like what I had to say. Sounds like abusive parents. Everything’s cool til it’s not.

My dad beat my ass cause at 9 years old because I looked him in the eyes and told him to stop drinking cause he was being mean. Telling the truth got me abused. Look at that what a surprise.

Humans communicate differently than other creatures on the planet. Does that mean the other creatures don’t communicate? No. That just means they do things different. They don’t need vaccines because they were meant to survive and live here. If humans didn’t have their science we would all be dead! We are in a race with the planet to see who can kill who first. Will we kill the planet (which kills us too idiots) or will the planet eradicate us via disease and natural disasters and heal itself and start over (we still dead). Or do we chill on our population and help the earth heal by bein more considerate of our surroundings. Yeah none of you like me because I say it how it is without thinking about how it will affect any of you. So that means you get to abuse me. I’m not hurting anyone by simply sharing my views. Yet I am being hurt for speaking my views. I’m not actively slitting the throats of disabled people. I’m not saying we have to round up the retards that already exist and just shoot them. They should just be left in their natural form. Yeah give artificial limbs out cause that’s science but giving a nasty fat fuck a wheel chair cause boohoo they can’t loose weight? Nah true waste of resources. I’m saying we use the science that is our only advantage to prevent that from ever happening again.

All I’m doing is talking on MY BLOG. & I get death threats and told I should be raped by my father all over again. Simply for sharing my feelings on what will 1000000% save the greater good. It doesn’t even have to be permanent. Imagine if every grown man had to get a vasectomy for the next 20 years til all the excited potential parents get throughly processed to see if they are psychologically, psychically, financially and home stable to have children. Then there is a massive database of all the adorable kids waiting to find homes and they get to meet and have a 30 day period where THE CHILD decides if they like their new potential parents. Every couple/person wanting to adopt can adopt up to 2 kids and the kids get a say too.

Humans are not special and I don’t care if you disagree with me. Yet for some reason we literally act like gods gift (complete pun intended) That think who fucking cares what we do to everything around us including ourselves because this is OUR EARTH. We can do what WE WANT. Blah blah blah. Then the WHITE MEN put control on EVERYONE. Then slowly we colored folk said fuck you and made our own lives cause who gives a flying fuck about someone’s skin color except for white people. Then the humans just started literally takin over. Who cares if a bunch of birds nests lived in this tree? I want my new condo that I spend 2-3 months a year in right fucking here so the homes of those birds don’t matter. Let’s massively hunt these animals into extinction for our pleasure. (Okay Hitlers)

We are selfish

I wasn’t raised like you. I wasn’t raised by anyone but my own fucking brain. I never had any positive influences but the voices in my head. We see the world for what it is and not the false reality im creating for myself. I won’t even say ‘most’ if you were raised right because even today in 2019 the system and adults hide the abuse and damage that is really happening. Clearly this whole system isn’t working.

I was raised that literally everything in the whole world was both good and bad. So I learned to be objective and unbiased. Your feelings are what get you killed. Ask any dead kid who didn’t speak up about their abusive parents. And any bleeding out gangbanger who got felt offended by a color and killed someone over it. Someone who felt the desire to get high cause they have no self control and killed some to get $$. But it wasn’t them because even though they felt the need to do the drugs it wasn’t their fault.

So why are we going to keep adding more and more children to the solution when we don’t even know what to do with the poor innocent souls that we have now? We just pretend it’s not that big a deal and keep adding feul (the kids) to the fire (the shitty system). CLEARLY you all know there’s a problem and nothing any of you are doing is working.

So when do we take extreme measures? When do we ACTUALLY make a change. We have nuclear bombs hell ANY bomb and those are okay “when absolutely necessary” but allowing people to have kids they can’t afford, can’t raise, got raped into them, got one night standed with, can’t handle. A BOMB AFFECTS HUMANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT NEGATIVELY. Humans getting neutered (since that’s what you call it for other creatures) will effect the world positively. The bombs are okay though? We can MASS destroy life but we can’t mass PREVENT it from having to be destroyed or emotionally ruined in the first place? Not forever just til we get our shit together.

The abominations and retards. That’s EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE that’s why no one likes when you mention it. They are like the endless elephant in the room. I will die by the quote, “A few bad apples ruins the whole barrel”. We think that it’s perfectly okay to keep adding bad genes to our makeup while simultaneously praying we live forever. It’s so tiresomely contradicting.

If you can all make such a fucking effort for these retard abominations that you breed. Then you can STOP breeding COMPLETELY until you give the kids homes that need them. Those kids will be more likely to become doctors getting adopted out to good homes. Then if they get left to rot in a shitty system while they walk in a grocery store with their mean foster mom and see a happy young couple PREGNANT with their first child when they could have adopted him. If you choose to give birth instead of adopting then you might as well walk up to a kid in a foster/group home and tell them they are garbage and ain’t ever going anywhere.

I still haven’t had my question answered... why does ANY HUMAN ON THIS ENTIRE PLANET need to breed when there are already so many homeless children?

So what is it are we going to stop breeding and adopt all the kids out to good homes that have been more throughly evaluated than a simple background check and having enough beds and money?

Are we going to keep creating a whole brand new system for the retards when the perfectly able children who would flourish with good parents system is still completely fucked?

Giving whole TV shows to literal human abominations for entertainment. Or humans that are forced to overbreed or sickly do it “for religious reasons”. You get to see how much their disability/struggles makes their life so hard but they are so ~brave and strong~ because society would rather force conjoined twins to spend their lives together or die trying to separate because human euthanasia is wrong until a human kills another human???????

Where does that make sense.

We are going to keep worrying more about the dysfunctional, malfunctioned, rejects of our society before the regular ones? We are going to keep following fake gods we have no proof of so that we don’t have to accept the realities of human nature.

Are we going to not do anything and ignore all the clear issues and keep adding more kids?

The same can be said about the immigrant shit in America. We have so many problems we don’t need anymore people and this place is fucked why would you wanna come here anyway? (I digress on this)

Are we going to keep throwing children out like trash in hopes that someone else will raise the busted nut you let fester in your womb?

Like out of those which one of these which one is the best option? Because all but one are things we are already doing and it isn’t working.

So hate me for being unbiased. But as my therapist (yes I discuss this with BOTH my Ts to make sure I am not delusional) put it. I am not looking at it for the benefit of humans. I’m looking at the benefit of the earth as a whole. I don’t want humans to all die off. But if it’s what it has to take in order for this planet to survive then so be it. There are so many other species, creatures, life on this Planet.

To put it simply you’re all simpleminded.

There is no god because Humans seem to think they are god. & we can breed, have our technology, have our vaccines. But as long as we are still over breeding and not adequately using our resources....

The Human Rights we are fighting for will not matter if there is nothing for the humans to live on.

This Earth is our home and there are too many of us right now. Too many of us doing too many wrong things.

Focus on the Human Wrongs then there will be no need for Human Rights because they will realize they are all just another species on this glorious and beautiful earth.

I know none of you were take anything from this.

You all were taught one way or you think one way and that is it there can’t be any other way and anyone else who thinks differently than that is wrong but at the end of the day my ideas are what will save humanity your ideas are what will destroy it. Your safe space will be irrelevant if you have no where to put it.

A human’s need to add feeling and emotion to everything is our biggest flaw.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk Typing Podcast

[tjkiahgb]

Episode Recap: 2.25, “The Cake That Takes the Cake”

We find Andi and Bex looking at rings to start the episode. I know money is probably tight, I know the proposal is unconventional, I know they’re shopping for Bowie, but why are they looking through the kind of rings you’d get out of the vending machines you put quarters into at the grocery store?

(Also, why is Bex wearing more rings than an 18th century pirate?)

I’m surprised these rings aren’t stored in plastic acorn capsules.

Andi finds a yin yang ring and they realize the message it sends about the universe and everything is the perfect one, even though the ring itself looks like it fell out of a Cracker Jack box.

They celebrate by screaming wildly in the middle of a jewelry store.

Meanwhile, Cyrus and Buffy hang out at the outside basketball courts on a snowy, freezing cold Summer Winter Spring morning.

(Why is that school bus parked in somebody’s driveway?)

Sorry to call out an actor here, but um... Sofia is not good at basketball. Like, at all. In fairness to her, she wasn’t cast to be a basketball player. She’s a very good actor. That’s her strength. Well, also dance. She’s also a good dancer. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, basketball is not her forte. (Luke is better, but not great either. When you watch the one-on-one later, pay attention to how almost any time someone looks remotely fluid performing a basketball related action, you don’t see their face. It’s... noticeable.)

I say all this just as a fan of basketball who’s having a difficult time watching this scene. Anyway, I’m not really blaming her as much as the director. They’ve done a pretty good job this season of making her look good on the court, but this long, uncut shot of her dribbling and awkwardly pulling up to shoot was a poor choice.

Cyrus tries to pump Buffy up, especially because there’s a basketball game on Friday and Cyrus wants Buffy to rejoin the team. Buffy won’t though.

Cyrus thinks it’s because of TJ. He tries to explain that TJ’s a completely different person. He even got a “C” on a math test.

(It was what now?)

Cyrus says he was like a puppy. Buffy, undeterred, says he’s still a puppy she doesn’t want to play with.

Listen, Buffy’s feelings of anger towards TJ aside, “I don’t want to play with that puppy” is an inherently false statement like “I don’t need oxygen to live,” or “I’m perfectly fine with being set on fire,” or “Oh, you don’t have Coke? That’s great! Pepsi was my first choice!”

Andi and Bex walk together just a couple hundred yards from where Cyrus and Buffy are.

Same bus, same house.

Season’s almost over. Sort of sad the last time the GHC shared the same room was when Buffy and Cyrus walked by in the background of Andi and Jonah’s date planning at Cloud 10, and their last interaction was 15 seconds of looking at each other while Jonah and Walker talked at the art show. Andi and Bex should’ve stopped by the court to say “Hi” at least.

But they didn’t. They’ve got their own thing to do. They’re planning the proposal for tonight. Andi is upset they’ve already used the “hide the ring in a pizza box” plan. They decide to hide the ring in a cake instead. Feels like someone should tell them you can propose without hiding rings in food. In fact, most proposals aren’t “hiding rings in food” based.

Andi decides they should drop in on Bowie at Red Rooster and invite him to dinner, real low-key and casual. It’s such a simple plan. All they have to do is not act like a dentist just pumped them full of nitrous oxide. There’s no way it can fail.

Welp. Maybe they should’ve just texted him? Bowie thinks they’re up to something but isn’t a detective, so he’s unable to piece together anything more than that.

Later, Andi and Bex put together the cake. They stuff the ring inside.

Not a fan of this at all. The pizza plan had the ring safely in a holder on top of the pizza. This is a big hazard! The only thing preventing tragedy is an easily movable toothpick. You want a surefire way to ruin a proposal? Have the guy you’re proposing to choke to death on a little chunk of metal. You are playing with fire here.

Still, they’re happy with their plan. Until they turn around and see they’ve made a huge mess.

One bigger than you might think possible for making just one little cake. And why are there sprinkles everywhere? There are no sprinkles on the cake! What were they even doing in there?!

This has become such a mess, they decide they can’t continue to make food here. They’ll use Celia’s kitchen (and her dining room and her dishes) instead and leave this mess to animated forest animals to clean up.

Bex, if you leave this mess sitting out for the rest of the day, the only animals that are going to show up to take care of it are ants. Do you want ants? Because that’s how you get ants.

Cyrus and Buffy show up at the gym. Cyrus excuses himself to grab something out of his locker, which should be Buffy’s first clue that something is up. There’s no way Cyrus has anything important in his gym locker.

TJ shows up. Buffy says, “Well, well, if it isn’t Jock-iavelli” thinking she’s gonna catch TJ off-guard, but TJ knows who Machiavelli is because he has a numbers-related learning disability, not a lack of intelligence.

Buffy really walked into that one.

TJ tells her he got a two-game suspension for Buffy doing his homework. That makes Buffy feel better. It also feels like something he could’ve mentioned to soften the blow back in that scene that shall not be mentioned. If he was suspended from the team with Buffy, that certainly makes the outcome of that scene look more like a careless mistake on his part than a Jockiavellian chess move. It’s two months later and the writing of that scene still bothers me with how incoherent and discordant it is. But, really, though, who even cares anymore? (I mean, besides me. I do. But I’m not well. So...)

TJ’s back on the team and wants to know why Buffy isn’t coming back. He tries to goad her into playing when Cyrus shows up too soon and blows his and TJ’s plan by asking if they’re going to do a one-on-one match or something.

Buffy figures out their game but still grabs her gym clothes to get ready. She doesn’t turn down a challenge, even a sloppily executed one.

Yeah. You gotta at least do a dry run. Use Trash Can Buffy. She’s hasn’t been talked to in weeks and is probably very lonely.

Speaking of very lonely, Bex visits Celia, but only to trick her into leaving her house. Bex has gotten Celia a suite for the night with room service and spa treatment (all charged to Ham, of course).

Sort of feels like: you know Celia’s having a tough time, and you know she loves Bowie, why not let her stay and be a part of this? I get if it’s going to be intimate, but Andi’s going to be there. It’s already two generations of Mack women. What’s one more? She’s close family. It’s not like you’re inviting Gus.

Celia heads off to her one night vacation and Bex sneaks Andi into the house via the backdoor. Andi has supplies for dinner and a newfound appreciation for pots.

Pots. Is there anything they can’t do?

Back at the gym, TJ and Buffy start their one-on-one. Cyrus keeps score. Former bitter enemies! A competitive one-on-one! Friendships on the line!

What will happen?! The drama is starting to heat up and then we cut to--

ASPARAGUS!

SALAD!

A CHEEEEEESE PLAAAAAAATEEEEEE!!!

Can you feel the excitement?! Is it pumping through your veins like so much red hot blood?!

Bex takes a chicken out of the oven!

Andi shucks corn!

Fasten your safety harness! You must be this tall to ride and women who are pregnant or thinking of ever becoming pregnant should get back. If you have a heart condition, you’d better look away! You. Will. Die!

I’m sorry. I know I’m going in way too hard on this scene. It’s still Andi’s show and her story still has to be at the forefront. But this episode was killing me.

I know everything before the big scene at the end with Bowie -- the ring picking, the planning, the cake baking, the food preparing -- is all in service of setting it up. But the dramatic stakes in these scenes are almost nil. It’s just like, a bunch of happy montage stuff. Which I normally don’t have a problem with on this show -- it’s usually cute and peppy -- but when you compare it to the actual interesting stuff that’s going on at this exact moment in the gym? The two scenes are so many dramatic miles apart that you can’t stand at one and see the other. It’s somewhere beyond the horizon.

And it’s especially irritating when you’re cutting away from the gym in the middle of the drama to this fluff. It’s giving me whiplash.

Anyway, Andi asks Bex how much corn she should shuck and Bex says to shuck ‘em all and let God sort them out.

Then Bex just starts listing food they have sitting on the counter in plain sight for all to see.

They wonder if this is too much food. Andi remembers they made a cake, too. Bex says that’s right, they did make a cake! Do you remember when they made a cake? Do you remember that scene? I do. It was literally five minutes ago. It wasn’t even in a different act. It was this same one after the commercial break. But I’m so glad to be reminded. Thank you for reminding me. Let’s remember some more things. Remember when Andi was shucking corn and asked how many corns she should shuck and Bex said shuck ‘em all? That was good times. I hope this scene continues for several more minutes as we just remember those moments. Maybe Bex can list the foods she sees near her one more time.

Terri Minsky, if you read this, I’m sorry. I’m just joking around.

But you do make me crazy sometimes.

We head back to the gym where several basketballs bounce across the floor like Old West tumbleweeds.

It’s also kind of a weird thing to happen in a gym with only three people in it. Who knocked over the basketball cart?

TJ and Buffy trade baskets back and forth. Cyrus is fading but still keeps score.

It feels like this puts TJ at a disadvantage, because of his dyscalculia. This is blatant math privilege.

Buffy finally beats TJ to the rim and puts in a layup to win their battle. Buffy celebrates and the crazed fan in attendance storms the court.

Cyrus and Buffy hug. TJ and Buffy congratulate each other on a good game. Cyrus says that means the plan worked. It’s been proven through science that TJ and Buffy can play together and thus, Buffy needs to rejoin the basketball team.

But Buffy says she’s still not going to. But she’s not going to quit basketball. She’s starting a girls’ team instead. Cyrus and TJ give her props for having an even better-er plan than their plan.

At Celia’s, Bex and Andi anxiously await Bowie’s arrival. He finally shows up, but he says he’s brought a surprise with him.

And that surprise is, a group of vagrants?

Or it’s just Bowie’s band. Or maybe... both?

The band showed up out of the blue and they’re staying for dinner. So. That’s neat. What a neat little thing for them to do without asking ahead of time.

Andi and Bex decide they’re still going to go through with the proposal, though.

TJ, Cyrus, and Buffy walk together out of school. Cyrus thinks they can all be friends now. TJ thinks so, too. But Buffy is not so sure because she hasn’t done anything horrible to TJ like he’s done to her.

She thinks she’s forgiven him but friendship might still be out of reach. Maybe, she says, if TJ delivered the best apology ever. Cyrus asks him to give a shot. TJ takes a deep breath and...

Wait. Let’s stop a second here.

We’ve talked a lot about the acting on the show this season, especially as far as the kids go. There have been several really touching, deep moments that they’ve handled with excellence.

But nothing. Nothing! Compares to what happens here.

If you came to me before this episode and told me that TJ was going to deliver his end-of-redemption-arc apology to Buffy via a super-sincere, basketball-themed rap, I would’ve shouted “No!” and I probably would’ve taken a swing at you. And that’s knowing full well it wasn’t your fault. It’s not even with intent to hurt you. It would just be my body reacting to that stimulus with some kind of violent impulse I couldn’t control. Lashing out at that specific moment because it would be the only way I could think of to express myself.

But here’s the thing. The fact that I not only didn’t cringe so hard that I burst into flames while watching this, but that I actually thought it worked and I really liked it as a moment? Give Luke all the awards for pulling that off. Give him an Emmy. Give him a Tony, too. Give him the whole damn EGOT and throw in a People’s Choice Award and a Nobel Prize in Physics with it.

So, Luke/TJ/DJ Fruity Mixitup launches into this crazy rap and it’s so... freakin’... sweet. He’s not making a joke about it or anything. It’s heartfelt and honest. This is like publicly apologizing to a trash can to the tenth power. I still can’t believe this is happened.

Terri Minsky, I forgive you for all the food montages.

Also, I know there’s been some talk about Cyrus making him do this, but there’s no way that entire thing was freestyle. Some is. He obviously had to incorporate the new information about the girls basketball team. But the rest? I mean, I’ll argue all day that TJ isn’t dumb, but I don’t think he’s some rap prodigy. He absolutely knew coming in that he was going to apologize to Buffy today. It was part of the plan. And if he didn’t spend a couple of hours writing out the majority of that rap, he at least took the time to sit down and outline it. You don’t just drop a Liam Neeson reference out of nowhere.

Buffy accepts the apology. Maybe they can be friends.

TJ heads off, but not before looking back.

Which is interesting to us as an audience, because we understand the significance. But in the show, only Jonah and Amber do. Cyrus and Buffy don’t.

So you’d imagine the conversation would go like:

Buffy: Is he looking back here? What does he want?

Cyrus: I don’t know. (shouting) What?

TJ: (shouting) Huh?!

Cyrus: What- do you need something?

TJ: What?

Cyrus: Did you forget something?

TJ: No. I’m just looking back!

Cyrus: Why?

TJ: It means something! It has significance!

Cyrus: Huh?!

TJ: Forget it! We’ll solve this in season three!

Cyrus: (waving) Ok! Bye!

...and scene.

Back at Celia’s, this odd, odd dinner party is in full swing. Bowie and the only guy in the band who talks exchange stories from the road when Celia shows up to bust the party.

Celia’s upset until Bex explains they’re going to propose to Bowie. And then Celia is not so upset anymore.

Back at the dinner table, they prepare the cake. Before they can get to the ring, though, the only guy in the band who talks speaks up. He has something to say first, to Bowie. See, the band came here especially to see Bowie. Then the band member gets on one knee.

Terri Minsky, you monster! For making the gayest moment in this episode occur between Bowie and his band’s drummer, you are once again on the bad list!

Even Celia’s like, this is some gay stuff going on here.

The band member says the band has booked their first international tour and they need him back. Bowie is honored but thinks about Andi. The band member asks him to come for just six months, but Bowie can’t.

But then Andi and Bex tell him he can, so Bowie says he’ll think about it.

Andi and Bex break off to talk. They want him to go on the tour. Bex says for that to happen though, she can’t propose, because if she does, he won’t leave. Andi says propose and tell him it’s ok to go. As long as he’s locked down, it’s all good. Celia shows up and says don’t let him go in the first place. The argument continues. Bex says they can’t propose if one of them doesn’t want to, but Andi says that’s a new rule and not allowed.

Oh, right. This is why you don’t do joint proposals.

They want to cut the cake out in the dining room. Andi and Bex tell Celia the ring is in the cake and she, rightly, points out that that’s a worse choking hazard than the toothpick she pulled out of it.

They go running out to the dining room and Bex does the only thing she can think of: shoves her hands deep into the cake.

Then Andi joins in. And so does Bowie.

Celia warns the band members that none of these three have washed their hands, as if those guys don’t look like they eat most of their meals off the floor of the tour van.

After thoroughly destroying the cake, Bowie comes across the ring.

He wants to know what it is, and Andi and Bex respond as only Macks under pressure can: with a lot of “Um”s.

We cut to black and that’s that for season 2.

Whew. What a ride. And now begins another long, cold hiatus.

Hey, if you’ve read any of my recaps this season, thank you so much. I’ve got a few more things planned for the near-term following this, but pretty shortly I’m going to take something of a hiatus, too, to do other stuff with my life until season three. I’ll pop in and out, but I probably won’t be doing too much writing, so if you want to discuss some of what’s happened, send your asks in soon. Feel free to send silly asks, too, but fair warning, I’m aiming to just do some analysis type posts related to season 2 for now, while it’s still relevant and fresh in our minds. I’m not ignoring you, but silly asks will probably be put off until season 3.

Otherwise, see you guys on the other side.

[itsnelkabelka]

Speech: How Global Britain is helping to win the struggle against Islamist terror

When in the course of a prolonged and vicious struggle you eventually record a success, then it is essential – with due humility and caution – to celebrate that success. So I draw your attention once again to the defeat of Daesh in Raqqa, and the victory of the 74-member coalition – in which the UK played a proud part.

It was 3 years ago that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stood forth in the pulpit of Mosul’s biggest mosque and vowed to “conquer Rome” and “own the world”. At one stage his domain had 10 million inhabitants, suffering under what may be remembered as one of the most depraved regimes in history.

They picked on the innocent. They hurled gays from rooftops. They enslaved women and children. They used the town square to crucify and behead anyone who dared oppose moral codes that I would call mediaeval if that were not an insult to the comparative civility of the Middle Ages.

And when they made their last stand in the football stadium in Raqqa, it may not surprise you that they fully lived down to expectations. They did not fight like lions, or die wrapped in their sinister black flag. They put up their hands and allowed themselves to be driven away in white buses.

And it is a pleasing irony that in the end they were out-shot, out-fought and out-generalled by a force that contained significant numbers of female Kurdish soldiers, the very women whose freedom they regarded as a Western abomination, and most of the fighters who inflicted this defeat were Sunni Muslims – the very people who Daesh purported to represent.

We should hail the fall of Raqqa and Mosul; because 96% of the so-called ‘caliphate’ is now gone, along with their pompous pretensions to statehood. Al-Baghdadi is a fugitive.

We have helped to disable the machine that drew in recruits from across the world, from Luton to Mindanao. They no longer have the land for training camps or a tortured population to plunder and tax.

We should offer ourselves this limited congratulation: that we have prevented a terrorist group from controlling territory in the Middle East.

And yet we know that we have not destroyed Daesh: not in Iraq, not yet in Syria, and certainly not across the world. We may have temporarily smashed the machine but we know the components are invisibly reassembling themselves.

They are even now seeking each other out in countries where governance is weak. They are there in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, northern Nigeria; indeed for 5 months of this year the Islamic State (so-called) in the Philippines occupied Marawi City until they were driven out.

They are capable of operating even in places where government is comparatively stable, as they have tried to do in Tunisia and Egypt. A hundred of the foreign fighters in Syria came from Malaysia.

And of course we see their impact here in western Europe, in the concrete and steel chicanes that have been installed around our public buildings, in the endless boustrophedon queues at airports, in the recent attacks in Manchester and London.

We know that they are simultaneously moving up and down on the ladder of technological ambition. They are working on new bombs of all kinds, and new ways of eluding detection. They are enlisting everyday objects as terrorist weapons.

And I am sad to say that it has become all too commonplace to read that somewhere on our continent, someone chooses to announce that God is great while launching an attack on passers-by. In this country, MI5 and Counter-Terrorism Policing are now running well over 500 live operations – a third more than last year.

So now is the moment to draw confidence from our success against Daesh; and to consider how we are going to prosecute the struggle.

To answer that question – how do we win – we need to understand first who, or rather what, we are fighting. Because even if we were to capture every single Daesh fighter, even if all the jihadis in the world were either imprisoned or vaporized in drone strikes, we would still have failed to defeat the enemy.

This is neither a war against a conventional Westphalian state, nor do these terrorists have any remotely negotiable objectives. It is a struggle not against a religion but an idea, a perverse ideology.

So it may be more useful to switch metaphors. Perhaps we should think of a fight not against a military opponent but against a disease or psychosis – even though that metaphor is itself imperfect. The notion of a disease or contagion fails to do justice to the moral agency of the terrorists.

They have decided to take this path; they and they alone are responsible for their crimes. Perhaps we can say that as with every other form of criminal behaviour, we have to look at the social and emotional factors that combine to make people dedicate themselves to such comprehensive nihilism.

I appreciate the inadequacies of the phrase “Islamist terrorism”. If I could think of a better one I would use it. But we need to understand exactly why this type of terrorism has become associated with Islam in a way that 1.5 billion Muslims find both insulting and infuriating.

It is a very ancient idea, and common to virtually all religions – including Christianity – that any kind of worldly setback (military defeat, political humiliation, even economic decline) must be the mark of some divine disfavour. For thousands of years human beings have postulated that the correct response must be to propitiate the Gods or God by some act of piety.

(Think of Agamemnon: he wanted a more favourable wind for his ships at Aulis. He believed he was being punished for a transgression. So he did what he thought was the obvious thing. He killed his daughter.) It is this same sort of expiatory thought pattern that persuades people to engage in movements that could be broadly described as puritan or fundamentalist.

In the last 150 years we have seen how a small number of Islamic thinkers have responded to what they see as the humiliations of the Muslim world. And this same logic applies to the individual as he or she is radicalized. Because of course the world is full of people who feel that they are not successful, or not powerful, or not in control of their lives.

And then suddenly – in a mosque, or in a prison, or increasingly online – someone hands them what seems to be this emotional universal spanner. They are told that all their disappointments are caused by their own refusal to adopt a jihadist ideology.

And they are told that if only they will turn to this extreme and violent theology then all their troubles will be gone and their lives turned upside down. And suddenly the world around them that had previously seemed to be alienating and intimidating now seems itself to be contemptible and corrupt; and deserving of reform by the application of their holy rage.

The process is not only very fast – Islamist jihadism has been compared in its addictive power to crack cocaine. It is also very hard to reverse.

And so we need to stop the spread of this malady. We need to confront it and wipe it out in all the ungoverned spaces where it breeds: in the Middle East and north Africa, in the foul rag and bone shops of the internet, in our own country, where it exploits the very freedoms of our liberal democracy, and in the wildest and least governed space of all, the human heart.

There are interlocking ecosystems of terror, domestic and international, contaminating each other online. We can stop both cogs turning. We can greatly reduce the threat. Yes, we can win.

But we need to understand not just whom we mean by the enemy. We need to understand who we are. Who are ‘we’ who are going to win?

There is an unedifying narcissism in the whole use of this first person plural, because I am afraid that all too often the term ‘we’ is taken to mean the West: it means the so-called advanced liberal democracies of Europe and America – and if that is all we mean by ‘we’ then the cause is hopeless.

Look at the death tolls from suicide bombs that now rate barely a paragraph in our papers, in Iraq or Somalia. Who are the principal victims of this global disease?

It is not Westerners, in spite of the recent increase in terrorist attacks. The number of global terrorist victims has risen from 3,361 in the year 2000 to 25,673 in 2016; and the overwhelming majority of those victims, 98%, were innocent Muslims living in Muslim countries.

Since October, we have witnessed 2 of the deadliest terrorist attacks in modern history – in Mogadishu and Sinai – and of the 823 who died virtually all were Muslims; in Sinai the target of the atrocity was a mosque filled with Friday worshippers. The tragedy of their families was identical to the tragedy of the bereaved families in Manchester or London – and the perpetrator was the same enemy that we face in Britain.

But if we are going to win, then we need to scrap the idea that Western foreign policy is somehow the principal cause of the problem. It is a fallacy that is at once glib, egotistical and which simply feeds the narrative of the jihadis.

Yes it is true that we have made horrendous mistakes – even when our intentions have been broadly good.

Sir John Chilcot concluded: “The Iraq of 2009, when British troops withdrew, certainly did not meet the UK’s objectives as described in January 2003. It fell far short of strategic success.” That must be a competitor for understatement of the century.

In removing Saddam Hussein, without any clear programme for succession, we not only helped to cause chaos. We sent a troubling signal around the Muslim world.

Saddam was a monster, a mass murderer, but he nonetheless stood at the apex of the Iraqi political system and in toppling him with a flip of our fingers, we seemed to suggest a contempt for national political institutions in the Middle East and North Africa. In the last 15 years we have learned the hard way that these institutions – no matter how flawed – are more easily destroyed than rebuilt.

And so I am with the consensus that the war in Iraq – certainly in the absence of a clear plan – was a mistake.

But that war did not create the Islamist terrorist threat: far from it. It is almost as if people have forgotten that the 9/11 massacre – in which 3,000 died at the hands of Osama bin Laden – came before the Iraq war, not after it.

And to assert, as people often do, that the terrorism we see on the streets of Britain and America is some kind of punishment for adventurism and folly in the Middle East is to ignore that these so-called punishments are visited on peoples – Swedes, Belgians, Finns, or the Japanese hostages murdered by Daesh – with no such history in the region.

There is no consistency or no logic in this bashing of the West. We must not play their game. The truth is that, if anything, the Western powers have been bit players in a kaleidoscopic struggle between dynasties and sects and tribes and interests in which, over the last 30 years, Islamist extremism – and in many cases terrorism – has been manipulated in order to serve some political end. Actually, the end is always broadly the same. It is the survival or strengthening of the regime.

But there are several distinct types of manipulation. There is simple appeasement, by which some governments – at least in the past – have condoned the financial support of highly dubious mosques or madrasas and turned a blind eye to preaching of hate or violence to buy the domestic support, for instance, of a conservative and reactionary clerisy.

Next there is the ingenious device of the false alternative, by which regimes will artfully contrive a choice, which they present to their own people and to the rest of the world. You either accept me, they say, with all my blemishes – cruel secret police, terrible human rights record – or else the Islamists will take over and we are back to the Middle Ages.

The most egregious recent exponent of this false alternative has been Bashar al-Asad. From the very beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011 Asad worked assiduously to sharpen the dilemma. He contributed to the very creation of Daesh. He let their leaders out of jail and bought their oil. Until this year, he usually avoided fighting Daesh, reserving his most ruthless aggression for the civilian population of Syria.

And after 6 years of this Morton’s fork, and 6 years of slaughter, we have to accept that the gambit appears to have paid off.

We have never been able to answer the question, ‘who should follow Asad’, because the prior challenge has been to get rid of Daesh, to defeat the Islamist terrorists. And yes, we celebrate the defeat of Daesh in Raqqa, but Asad has meanwhile recovered most of operational Syria.

That is how Islamist extremism has been for decades used as a tool for self-preservation. It’s either me or the maniacs, a regime will say: which do you prefer? And the world says, well, in that case I suppose we had better hold our noses and have you.

In some cases, let us be frank, this arrangement works better than in others. Some governments, without being necessarily democratic, are able to hold things together without too much repression. But sometimes the lid is jammed down so hard on the pressure cooker that the resentment builds, and a campaign for political freedom becomes indistinguishable from a campaign for Islamist control.

So we end up with a lose-lose situation. If you have a chaotic state, then you have a breeding-ground for terror. If you have a strong but repressive state, then you also have a potential breeding-ground for terror.

And last there is a method of manipulation that even more pernicious than the false alternative. I mean the concept of ‘forward defence’, whereby a government or its agents will covertly support terrorist groups abroad: either to weaken that government’s neighbours; or to diffuse any threat from those neighbours – real or imagined, or to export its own jihadi problem outside its borders.

Or, most destructively of all, the objective may be to engage in a regional campaign for influence by exploiting the weaknesses of states, and by promoting fanatical or semi-fanatical militias to force other states to respond.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of these conflicts, you cannot credibly argue that they are the fault of the West, let alone that they are now being driven by Western powers. On the contrary, you could argue much more persuasively that the problems we are seeing today have been exacerbated not so much by Western meddling as by our aloofness.

We called on Asad to go. We set the red lines of what we would accept in his treatment of the Syrian population. And then we did nothing about it. We willed the end, and failed to will the means – leaving the pitch wide open for Russia and Iran.

I am afraid that we must now adjust to reality, but we do not walk away. We must collectively re-insert ourselves in the process because it is Western cash that will eventually rebuild Syria, and that can only happen in the context of a political transition away from the Asad regime in which the Syrian people – including the 11 or 12 million who have fled – are allowed to vote on their future in UN-monitored elections.

We can and should do more to resolve the conflict in Yemen where a humanitarian catastrophe is looming, and where Saudi cities are now facing the terror of Houthi missile attacks.

We have the opportunity to bring together the factions in Libya, who should seize this moment to put aside their differences for the good of that country.

The UK has played an important part in uniting the world around the plan of the UN envoy, Ghassan Salame.

We need more engagement, not less, because if you look at events since 2013, when the British and the US decided not to intervene in Syria even after Asad had used chemical weapons, you could not say that we managed to insulate ourselves from the region.

On the contrary, Europe had a tumultuous and tragic flood of migration from Syria. We are still seeing huge flows via Libya and the tempo of domestic terrorism would appear if anything to have increased.

We cannot create some Maginot Line in the Mediterranean. We cannot just seal off the whole of the Middle East and North Africa and give them 50 years to sort themselves out.

The problems will only get worse, not just for the Muslim countries who are in the frontline of the struggle but for us in Western Europe.

Above all, we must not be afraid. The easiest way to lose a war on terror is to be terrified. We cannot afford to let them change the way we live our lives – no more than is strictly necessary. We should not minimize the threat we face. Neither should we exaggerate.

For whatever else it may be, Islamist terrorism is simply not an existential threat to Britain.

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It is a scourge, a disease, a malaise; but we can get on top of it, because for all its allegedly instant addictive power – there are in reality only a tiny, tiny minority of people who are going to be remotely vulnerable to its bombastic lunacies.

Anyone who actually went to Raqqa discovered that it was a hopeless and unsanitary dystopia. There proved to be a very limited market for that way of life.

We can defeat this scourge at home and abroad; we can stop both cogs turning at once.

We are working to get their videos down from the internet, and thanks to the efforts of both the Prime Minister and of Amber Rudd, we are beginning to see more co-operation from the internet companies, with hundreds of thousands of items removed.

We are going to continue the work of the Prevent programme, which is designed to spot vulnerable people and protect them from radicalization, and – despite its detractors – Prevent has had its share of success.

At the same time we in the UK, Global Britain, are helping to reverse the spread of the disease overseas, and in its most hideous and dangerous manifestations that will mean surgery. It will sometimes mean military action of the kind we have taken in the skies above Raqqa and Mosul, where the UK has been among the biggest contributors to a highly successful campaign of tactical air bombardment, second only to the US.

Contrary to some of the assertions you will have heard recently, I can tell you that every day around the world I can tell you that British serving men and women are putting their lives at risk to roll up terrorist networks, to expose what they are doing, to thwart them and bring them to justice.

And they are doing it not just on behalf of the British people, but for the sake of everyone. They are making good on what the Prime Minister has rightly called the unconditional commitment of the British people to the security of our European friends – not just in this continent but beyond. We have the best in the world – and they will be with our allies for the long term.

People should be immensely proud of the work of this country in the danger zones and the breeding grounds of terror. I have myself seen British forces training Nigerians to tackle the maniacs of Boko Haram. I have seen how we are helping the Libyans to tackle the people traffickers and gun-runners, and to stop the terrorists regaining a foothold in Sirte.

But we cannot win until whole populations are immunized from the virus, until the Muslim world is no longer vulnerable to the cancer. That struggle will only be over when across that huge arc of territory, from south Asia to the Middle East, we have managed to end the political manipulation of extremism and terror, and end the baleful logic of the false alternative.

We – and by ‘we’ I mean not just we the West but the whole Muslim world who will be the winners when there is a powerful and visible third option: neither the tyranny and repression of undemocratic governments nor the chaos and backwardness of Islamist regimes, but the real and viable possibility of pluralist, generous and tolerant societies that allow space for free speech and independent non-governmental organisations.

We all understand the reasons why this third alternative has been so rare and so hard to achieve. There is no tradition of secular political parties in many Muslim countries, and often the biggest, most efficient and most politically savvy competitor for political space are the Islamists.

The most effective of all is the Muslim Brotherhood. We must be clear-eyed about this organization. It manifests itself in different ways in different places.

It cannot be denied that Muslim Brotherhood parties represent a body of public opinion, if not the overwhelming current: in some countries they hold seats in parliament; in Tunisia they were part of an elected government.

We in the UK have received representations from friendly governments in the Middle East that would like us to ban that organization. In 2015, after long consideration, the government decided that the Muslim Brotherhood did not meet the threshold for a proscribed group.

But it is plainly wrong that Islamists should exploit freedoms here in the UK – freedoms of speech and association – that their associates would repress overseas, and it is all too clear that some affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood are willing to turn a blind eye to terrorism.

It was disgraceful that when the Pope visited Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood should call him “the Pope of terrorism” and accuse the Egyptian security forces that were tasked with guarding him of being “Christian militias.” They have repeatedly sought to obscure the crimes of Daesh. Even when Daesh had claimed an attack on St Mark’s Cathedral in Alexandria, on Palm Sunday, a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman blamed the Sisi government.

Of course we should challenge Egypt’s government when its standards on human rights and the rule of law fall short of their own country’s constitution – and suppress the open society that Egypt needs in order to succeed – but that is no excuse for the kind of poisonous rhetoric we are seeing from the Muslim Brotherhood. They are exculpating the true culprits and encouraging terrorism by making wild claims about the Egyptian government.

That is among the reasons why this government is applying greater scrutiny to the Muslim Brotherhood: of their visa applications, of their charity work, and of their international links.

And if there is to be that third alternative, neither anti-democratic tyranny, nor Islamism, but pluralist and tolerant then we need to intensify our current work – the development aid programmes in which Britain, and DFID, leads the world.

We are helping by backing human rights groups and NGOs, and helping above all to change one of the most destructive imbalances, one of the greatest barriers to social and economic progress: the cultural and intellectual repression of women.

It is great news that women are finally going to be able to drive in Saudi Arabia – where they already comprise a majority of university students - and the world is willing on that brave programme of reform. But almost a third of Egyptian women cannot read. In Pakistan the adult female illiteracy rate is 60%.

And it is not just women who are being starved of intellectual sustenance. There is currently only one university in the Muslim world that makes the top 200.

Imagine the difference if those universities began to take off, in a spirit of real academic freedom. Imagine the growth in pride and confidence as those universities in Cairo, in Damascus, in Baghdad, in Tunis began to move up the world rankings, to take once again the positions of huge intellectual eminence that those cities occupied in the Middle Ages. Because in the end this is all about self-confidence and belief, not just in universities but in all national institutions.

One of my heroes is the 14th century Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldoun. He was a great historiographer and economist – he showed that low taxes mean high yields long before Arthur Laffer – he’s one of the founders of sociology.

He identified what is called ‘asabiyyah’, the cohesive loyalty to a group or tribe or sect or movement that propels a dynasty to power. And he showed how time and again that loyalty eventually breaks down, and the dynasty is swept away – usually by violence – in favour of another group.

That is why my friend the Secretary General of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, says that the problem of the Muslim world is that there is not enough nationalism.

Now nationalism is not a fashionable concept in some circles. But it can be immensely valuable. If people have a sense of loyalty and duty to their country, and to its institutions, then those institutions will endure and they will help to promote equity and fairness and respect in society because they command a devotion that goes beyond the narrow selfish imperatives of ‘asabiyyah’.

That is why Britain seeks everywhere to help countries to develop their own respected national institutions: an independent judiciary and army, proud national educational institutions, a national broadcaster and independent national journalists, and a legislature that protects the sovereignty of the people.

And more than anything else it needs people who can tell that national story, build a narrative of success that embraces everyone, brings people together Shia and Sunni in a project that transcends sect and tribe and class.

We are in need of a new school of leaders, women as well as men, and of course the UK can and is helping with our hundreds of Chevening and Commonwealth scholars every year. Never forget that of the current crop of kings queens, presidents and prime ministers, 1 in 7 was educated in this country. Our soft power brings together the development funds and expertise that can help produce the social, educational and political change that will immunize populations from Islamist terror.

And look at the reality of UK hard power: the second biggest defence budget in NATO, one of the few countries capable of deploying air power more than 7,000 miles overseas.

Look at the reality and we are not retreating from our role overseas. On the contrary we are learning what that retreat has cost us in the past. British foreign policy is not part of the problem; it is part of the solution.

And above all we will win when we understand that ‘we’ means not just us in the West but the hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who share the same hopes and dreams, who have the same anxieties and goals for their families as we do, all of us, who are equally engaged with the world and all its excitements and possibilities, who are equally determined to beat this plague.

We can beat it together. And we will.

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