Sheaf Saint

Anybody know what the ticket sales have been like? It won't even let me through to the sales screen because I'm not currently eligible to buy one. And do you have to have a £30 membership to buy any away tickets this season?

And now we've gone full circle. Stockport's opponents this week, Cardiff, are captained today by Callum Chambers - an OG member of the 2014 defectors that this thread was dedicated to in the first place.

I just hope they don't sack him before we play them.

This is already the case where I work. Applications are blind sifted and scored, and if they achieve the benchmark they will be put forward to the interview stage. It's only at this point that recruiting managers get to see the applicant's personal details. Interview panels will then have at least one person from one of our minority group networks (having undergone all relevant training), to try and avoid any unconscious bias influencing the final outcome. It works. We have a diverse workforce with people from all kinds of backgrounds, and nobody who is unqualified or incapable ever gets appointed purely because of their ethnicity or other protected characteristic. Nobody is "stealing a white person's slot" as Kirk so crudely put it.

All of which is at odds with his public persona (see my previous post). Which might perhaps suggest that he didn't actually hold many of the views he famously expressed and was only voicing them to be deliberately provocative. Just a thought.

When speaking about Michelle Obama and a number of other prominent black women in US politics he said they "don't have the brain processing power to be successful on their own and needed to steal a white person's slot to be taken seriously". He tweeted that "Democrat women want to die alone". He openly told Taylor Swift (who, like her or not, is one of the world's most successful people) that she should reject feminism and submit to her husband. Generally his entire 'debating' style when it came to women was to talk louder and talk over them, and insist that his rigid Christian beliefs meant he knew better than them what was good for them. His disdain for any woman who wanted to be anything other than a good housewife was very clear and obvious. He may not have personally used the words 'gays should be stoned to death', the accusation of which Stephen King apologised for. But he did describe the bible passage that sentiment originates from as "God's perfect law".

Oof. I get up with a bit of insomnia and check my phone to find two more pages on this since I went to bed. I started typing out a lengthy reply, but just can't be arsed so I'm gonna summarise it like this... Is it wrong to hire an unqualified person into a particular role purely because they tick a diversity box? Yes. (I think we are all in agreement with that). Is it stupid and potentially racist to question whether a black airline pilot is actually qualified to fly a plane purely because of objections to the use of EDI principles in recruitment? Also yes. Some clearly believe that Kirk's original quote was just a clumsy choice of words used to make a perfectly valid point. I, however, disagree and am of the opinion that it is indicative of his inherent sense of bigotry, further examples of which are widespread in his speeches and podcasts.

I know, and I never claimed that's what he said. But what he did say was that he could look at a black pilot and believe that he/she might not actually be qualified and therefore hasn't passed the extremely rigorous testing process that all airline pilots must go through in order to obtain their licence. That's a special kind of stupid.

Oh I agree she's not a great pundit, and her playing the race card doesn't go down well with many people, it's true. But she is at least well spoken and I would still rather listen to her than Paul Merson or Wayne Rooney.

It doesn't make negative assumptions about people based on their ethnic background, as Kirk did in his podcast.

But the original quote demonstrates that he could look at someone and, based on the colour of their skin, question whether they are even qualified at all, not whether they were the most qualified person at the selection stage. At best, that's just extremely ignorant of how DEI practices work. At worst, it's outright racist.

I can think of plenty of white, male pundits worse than she is. It's odd that you would single her out as being particularly bad.

What qualifications do you need to be a football pundit?

The original quote from his podcast he was being challenged on was... “I'm sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified". Whichever way you look at it, that's racial profiling.

This is true, it has. But what it hasn't done, as Kirk was trying to make out, is actually place people in roles that they are not qualified or capable of doing purely because of their skin colour or religious background. What it has done is ensure that people from those minority groups are given the equal opportunity to demonstrate their capability at the selection stage that their socio-economic status might otherwise have prevented. So it's all very well CK saying that he just wants the best people for the job to be selected regardless of skin colour, and he's absolutely right that this should always be the right way to employ people. But no matter how much he tries to rationalise it, to say that he has to question whether or not a black pilot is actually qualified demonstrates a) a total misunderstanding of how DEI principles actually work and b) a very revealing tendency towards racial profiling.

There certainly does appear to be an inverse relationship between the extremity of a person's political leaning (whichever direction that may be) and their actual understanding of those they oppose.

I've seen your edit and hold my hands up to that, I was mis-remembering because I thought the officer(s) in the Floyd case were charged with Manslaughter, not murder. Even so, the Floyd case was used by BLM to highlight excessive police violence towards black minorities and it sparked widespread protests about police brutality and bias in the justice system (as black people are six times more likely to be killed by on-duty officers in the US than white people are). The majority of those protests were overall peaceful in nature, but many were also blighted by large numbers of people using them as an excuse for violent clashes with the police, and it's those ones that made all the headlines. Let's assume that the likely reason for Kirk's shooting turns out to be correct and the shooting was politically motivated by an unhinged individual. Who would any subsequent protests be aimed at? You can't protest against institutional injustice when we're talking about an individual acting on his own. And let's face it, the American right aren't going to go marching in the streets and starting riots to demand stronger gun control laws to ensure that it never happens again, are they. In Kirk's own words, these incidents are an unfortunate necessity to maintain the second amendment. So they would be protesting against the killing of a man they all agreed with by fundamentally disagreeing with him.

Because we still don't know who killed Kirk and why, so there is nothing for that public to direct their anger towards yet. Surely you can see that?

The second sentence sums it up nicely. The Floyd case wasn't murder as it wasn't pre-meditated. You seem to be unable or unwilling to acknowledge that distinction. It's obvious, given your posting history, that you are trying to compare the situations in order to show that the reaction from the right is more restrained than that of the left and thus give you the moral high ground. But the two scenarios are in no way alike.

George Floyd was an ordinary citizen, albeit with a lengthy criminal record, who was summarily executed by an over-zealous (at best) police officer. Charlie Kirk was a prominent conservative activist who was assassinated by an as yet unidentified gunman for as yet unknown reasons. How are the two situations even remotely comparable?

I've often wondered if it would be possible to change it so that if the 3rd place team finishes let's say at least 10 points ahead of the team in 4th then they should go up automatically, and the playoffs only become a thing if it's closer than that. It would make it fairer, but I expect the EFL wouldn't want to lose out on the money spinner of the playoffs so I doubt they would consider it.

Video of suspect fleeing the rooftop released... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/12/charlie-kirk-shooting-new-video-of-suspect-released-by-fbi-asamid-urgent-appeal-for-help-from-the-public

Plenty of rosehip around this time of year if not.

Sorry, what? Since when has being against fascism been considered far left? And have you considered the possibility that this 'evidence' could have been planted?

I don't know anything about the political opinions of the members of the Qatari security forces that were killed, and neither do you.