shurlock

According to Keown, Matt Phillips coming on is evidence that WBA are shutting up shop

Keown talks some s**t.

Tadic should be booked for that effort.

Pen?

By MP's standards, he's betting the farm with that sub.

Eric Back giving MP instructions - that'll get the headbangers going.

Lazy Bertrand to play Jrod on.

I thought the West Brom side that came to SMS two seasons ago was painful and negative, this one is even worse.

The supreme irony is that what little leverage May has stems not from the UK’s importance to the Beemer and Prosecco producers in the EU or the willingness to prepare for no-deal but from her abject weakness -and the concern that if she goes, the crazies will well and truly take over the asylum.

It won’t be long till Sam Harris dons a white robe and sets up a Waco-like compound such is his cult like following. My views of him are similar to many others who call him out as a charlatan. That holds not only for his stuff on religion but also utilitarianism and follows a pattern, going back to his dodgy PhD. As for his writing on Islam and terrorism, his reductionism is grotesque. I don’t deny that religious texts matter on some level, though, by the same token, I acknowledge that they are polysemous and open to interpretation - that’s even true of the Hadiths that are more prescriptive than the Qu’ran, as scholars like Jonathan Brown have detailed. More important, looking for single causes -whatever they are- to understand complex phenomena is, at best, flawed, at worst, dangerous and dogmatic. It marginalises the role of history and politics, culture and context, never mind individual incentives and agency, all the colour and contingency that define human activity. And yes Harris is a weasel. Harris says provocative and inflammatory things; yet when called out, Harris and his gullible band of groupies will self-righteously whine how he was taken out of context - for instance, how he was only conducting a thought experiment. He’ll then clarify what he really meant which is invariably banal and uncontroversial. Had his ‘real’ position been clear in the first place, he would have never attracted attention as he is fundamentally a mediocre thinker. To paraphrase something I heard: understanding the Qu’ran is a piece of pîss; Harris, on the other hand, is impenetrable, except, of course, if you’re an active YouTube or reddit user, a 20-something who happens to dislike Musos. Only they get our poor, misunderstood Sam.

More Antifa violence, I see. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/20/three-arrested-florida-shooting-speech-richard-spencer-white/ These lefties will never stop. Would you like to issue an apology or retraction? #onbothsides

Cortese has been out of football since 2014 and people are still getting triggered

Hypo’s slowly learning: he used to be a Sam Harris fanboy but has now tempered it with a bit of Maajid Nawaz. He is still prone to read utter crap like Peter Townsend but I sense he has room for growth.

Some coast through life, others just plod.

It’s a bit more complicated than that pal. It’s difficult to compare Puel with Koeman’s last season as he had different, namely inferior players at his disposal (losing Mane, Wanyama and Pelle, among other things). By contrast, Pellegrino basically inherited the same squad as Puel, making comparisons far more appropriate. If anything, Pellegrino has more quality to work with than Puel had, thanks to the additions of Lemina and Hoedt and the availability of VVD and Austin.

Test Forster at every available opportunity.

Getting triggered, Glasgow?

Not as far as I can tell - other than us taking the foot off the pedal as the season petered out. More or less the same group of players -no injuries of note- and the same inconsistencies -playing better away from home than at home.

Define a bad deal pal. We can only judge whether no deal is better than a bad deal if we have some baseline from which to make comparisons. We’ve had a few attempts at defining a bad deal: from paying the EU €400bn a year for market access to giving up Gibraltar. But these strawmen have less chance of seeing the light of day than Elvis waterskiing with the Loch Ness Monster. The argument made by remainers is that within the realistic choice set of possible deals, the consequences of a bad deal are unlikely to be worse than the consequences of no deal. As such, the threat of no deal is bluster and lacks credibility. I’m open minded on this - so again, define a bad deal and we can discuss whether a) it’s realistic and b) its consequences are worse than no deal. The real world isn’t like an episode of The Apprentice, little fella.

Top comeback pal. You really are a human sedative.

Good point.

Lost a good friend last year to cancer after a three year fight of going in and out of remission. The anniversary was the weekend of the league cup final which cast a long shadow. Very glad it's all behind you.

Bingo! There is also a major growth industry in dredging up Remainers who indicated how Brexit meant leaving the single market. Never mind that this formed part of the rhetoric of the Project Fear which the Jihadists endlessly claimed was pony and a pack of lies. As yet there’s no explanation why this particular aspect of project fear is given a free pass and enjoys the status of an unimpeachable truth. Per the link I sent:

Lord P will claim they were all cynically taken out of context. Among the cult, parsing these statements and deriving their true meaning is a Talmudic exercise best left to the experts. Lord P has no training in this area but hopes to do his badges at some point. He’s already read the Dummies guide to James McGrory’s film and watched the Brillo interview numerous times. All mandatory coursework. There is also a major growth industry in dredging up Remainers who indicated how Brexit meant leaving the single market. Never mind that this formed part of the rhetoric of the Project Fear which the Jihadists endlessly claimed was pony and a pack of lies. As yet there’s no explanation why this particular aspect of project fear is given a free pass and enjoys the status of an unimpeachable truth. Needless to say, there is no real interest in showing where in last June’s referendum question voters were asked about leaving the single market and the EEA option. Nor are we told how Brexit would deliver the exact same benefits as EU membership as leavers claimed. Perhaps these are such low-hanging fruit that they don’t require an answer, though those of questionable faith would certainly appreciate one. The more sober leavers, including those who had a worm’s eye view of Vote Leave, by contrast, acknowledge that the referendum result provides no such mandate to quit the single market. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/08/take-it-vote-leave-staffer-there-no-mandate-quit-single-market