shurlock

Monetarise Think this is a good idea by the club - provided its rolled out ambitiously and it goes beyond cookie-cutter training with a bit of corporate branding, then monetising it shouldn't be a problem. Know from experience that American middle-class families will happily stump up good money for activities like these. Of course, whether the success of the Academy -critical to the brand- has more to do with the initial identification of talent and the pathways to the first team than the training itself -that is, aspects unrelated to the value proposition we're pitching is another debate.

But it still smacks of self-absorption - the reference point is ultimately Schneiderlin, not Southampton. Now imagine if Schneiderlin had joined Liverpool, do you think the narrative would have been anything other than Lallana "Schneiderlin's current team-mate at Liverpool"? The French media couldn't give a toss about Southampton.

The ferocious Chapel Koppites are the Crown Jewels

As I said, there's a difference -in general, it's much easier to take things into the home end (didnt the smoke bomb come from the Itchen North). Whether somebody could strap a ton of explosives to themselves or even bring in a grenade, to use your example, without detection, who knows - at some point, you disappear down a rabbit hole of conjecture. What is clear is that I) moderate profiling would probably make a big difference (if it doesn't happen already) - St Mary's is far less ethnically diverse than other grounds (by definition, your average, smoke-bomb carrying lad wouldnt dream of bringing a grenade into the ground, so the analogy doesn't quite work) and II) the area around the ground is probably more vulnerable than inside the ground.

Actually think security is pretty decent, though there's a difference between international fixtures and league games, whether you go in the home end (where only bags are checked) or the away end (where I'm still searched 90% of the time). My worry is less inside the stadium than in the walk-up -everything from the Northam car park to Wembley Way. Visibility and monitoring tend to be lower; but the area is still densely packed. That's what I thought initially happened on Friday - dare I say it, things might have been a lot worse had this indeed been the case.

Robots!

Not sure what purpose Muslims vs Christians comparisons serve. It is a fools errand, though a few simpletons on here seem up for the task. If anyone even wanted to isolate the independent role of religion, they would have to control for the vast range of historical, geopolitical and socioeconomic factors that might equally account for fundamentalism and violence in parts of the Muslim world. Good luck with that...

Corrected for you.

There is this (which is utterly baffling): https://www.rt.com/news/181076-isis-islam-militans-france/ Albeit it was conducted in July 2014, though by then ISIS were far from shrinking violets, responsible for some truly barbaric acts. All of which to say is that survey questions need to be framed very carefully since terms such as 'sympathy' have a huge penumbra of uncertainty around them and can be interpreted in very different ways.

And, it was a 'Muslim' country that ran one of history's more successful experiments in religious pluralism under the Ottoman millet system. But I defer to the more learned experts on Islamic theology and history on here.

Thought this was a decent read -as well as shining light on the cultural and ideological attractions of jihadism. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/15/terrorists-isis

The article is apparently wrong -it should read "including" not "excluding". The £71m figures includes the one-hit for onerous and cancelled contracts. http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/news/article/20151009-southampton-financial-results-2014-15-2735534.aspx (see also the Solent interview with Gareth Rogers http://redsloscf.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/i-transcribed-adam-blackmores-8-october.html) Don't believe everything you read unless its on the OS....

That's a dubious chart - thought you would have checked your facts or at least, provided some context before posting. To be clear, that doesn't just refer to player wages but total group wages (everyone from the CEO to the tea lady) -other things being equal, this shouldn't matter if clubs have similarly structured organisations (though perhaps some clubs spend disproportionately more on their Academy or scouting etc). Still it's important to be precise. Where the graph is positively misleading is that it includes one-off exceptional costs (~£8m) -presumably the Osvaldo hit ("the cost of onerous and cancelled contracts from historical player trading") that will have artificially inflated the picture for this year which may lead some -like you- to make dubious extrapolations. Poor job, Mr Wrong.

People seem to be talking past each other, as per. IS doesn't understand costs and benefits as typically defined in international relations, except in a short-term, tactical sense. As such, it is virtually impossible to negotiate with it. Nonetheless, it does matter how the West behaves in terms of fueling injustice and encouraging recruitment. It is a treacherously delicate balancing act, dealing with an enemy that is utterly implacable, on the one hand while minimising the risks of playing into its propaganda hands through an indiscriminate response, on the other.

Going to be Aubameyang and Toure - it will be a result if he gets third.

Its relevant because France’s experience with its former colonies -Algeria in particular- is far more traumatic than anything the UK went through in its process of decolonisation, thank f**k. That trauma –and that’s what it is, if you anything about France- has festered for years, creating mutual animosity and significant barriers to integration today. Nearly 1.5m Algerian Muslims died in the conflict, including the 1961 Paris massacre on French soil; and when the war ended, France effectively turned its back on Algerian-Muslim loyalists – those who escaped reprisals in Algeria -forced swallowing of French military medals, followed by mass graves was the order of the day- they were flat-out denied rights in France -many were initially interned; and then moved into deprived housing estates that have made Bradford look like a multicultural nirvana. Various French governments, labouring under their own Republican conceits and amour propre, have been in a schizophrenic relationship with French Algerians ever since. Never mind, that France’s messy exit from Algeria, if not ongoing meddling left a decades-long vacuum that has been variously filled by nationalists and fundamentalists when the country hasn’t been in civil war. So yeh it is all relevant but only here, it seems, are you challenged because of you’ve read too much –and the other side cant be a***d to.

Now you actually know about it, perhaps you can read up. Here's a start: http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2015/01/16-algerian-legacy-past-france-laurence

Guess you don't know much about the Algerian War which almost provoked a civil war in France and has created simmering tensions ever since. Alistair Horne's book is a good place to start.

The heavy North African contingent gives the Muslim population in France a very different feel than the one in the UK. Talk of Muslims, in the abstract, probably obscures rather than illuminates things.

Someone who's had their attention drawn to watching for mistakes sounds like an ideal suspect for confirmation bias.

Maybe he got him confused with Akpom.

And that's exactly how biases work...

Celebrate the dead? Who feeds you this **** Jeff - next you'll be claiming he was spitting on the graves of the dead. If you think reading Wilfred Owen's futility -a restrained, plaintive, naturalistic poem- is grandstanding, then generations of school children in this country have obviously been brainwashed. Dare I say it, children younger than you have had no moral or intellectual difficulty of reconciling respect for the dead with a sense that war is often futile.

That may well be the case - but should there be a change in leadership before the next election, I can't see the transition being smooth or painless. The only way new support is going to appreciate the constraints and realities of practical politics, IMO, is at the ballot box; to forego that opportunity, if Corbyn is pushed, will only make more myths and martyrs. Of course, Corbyn may step down; but then the Labour Party will face a fantastically difficult but not impossible job of explaining its volte-face in the face of charges of opportunism and incoherence. Perhaps, the best case scenario is that Corbyn makes it to the election all while generating some interesting policy ideas (e.g. the FT, of all news outlets, has applauded Corbyn for some of his initial thinking on public investment). Even if the rest of his platform is unpalatable, those ideas partly tie the hands of Labour successors and force them to cooperate -rather than seek counter-revolution.

Of course, its not pointless. The scale and manner of any defeat will very much determine where the Labour Party goes next. A small defeat could mean that some of Corbyn's policies and proposals are reflected in future thinking; a large defeat gives the next leader the legitimacy to scrap the lot. Of course, it also matters that the diagnosis is correct - why its important that Corbyn's ideas get a fair hearing and rise and fall on their (non) merits, not sabotaged or distorted by personal attacks etc. If the wrong lessons are learned, it could be the difference between the Labour party successfully realigning itself with the public and base on the one hand -and overshooting on the other. That's not good for any competitive democracy.