Lighthouse

My recollection/understanding at the time was that anybody who could stump up the cash for the period of exclusivity was allowed to do so, they then had to prove their credentials to take it further. With regards to that, BT did nothing wrong, they just applied the rules.

Say whatever you like, they still managed to get relegated spending a lot more money than we have. Those are hardly jizzing my pants signings either, especially with their better players being past it and Maddy heading off to Spurs.

All you’ve done there is taken away the only factual definition of the word ‘woman’ and so are left with an empty shell of word. It sort of sounds plausible because the word comes with the comfort blanket of familiarity but really ‘woman’ has no definition at all in that context. To elaborate on that, let’s remove that familiarity and replace the words we know with made up words. I can say a ‘zoog’ is a person born with testicles, a ‘queb’ is a person born with ovaries and the difference between them is called ‘ziggle’. The definitions still hold water as those truths will always be true and a baby growing up with those words will understand exactly what they mean. I can see ‘ziggle’ on an application for, write ‘zoog’ and everyone is perfectly clear on what that implies. If, on the other hand, you say that someone can choose to identify as whatever ‘agori’ they choose, my chosen agori is a ‘bilto’ and a bilto is anyone who chooses to identify as a bilto, that’s all just meaningless gobbledygook. A salad of words with no actual definition, just words identifying as themselves. All of which just leads us back to Hitchens’ Razor and the short answer; you don’t actually have any argument.

The fact that his rebuttal is based on simple, year 9 biology is a poor reflection of your argument, not his. It also raises one of the most tedious and frustrating elements of this debate; the continuous and deliberately engineered ambiguity of words like ‘gender’ and ‘woman’. The same people will simultaneously argue that, "trans women are women - end of!" And then roll their eyes and say, "obviously gender identity is different from biological sex," a minute later. You can’t keep moving the goalposts any time someone shoots.

So you're basically allocating human rights based on prettiness. 'She' is a biological man, claiming to identify as a woman, which is literally no different to something I could go to the gym and do right now. You have arbitrarily decided that 'her' gender identity is valid (and mine presumably isn't) based on little more than hair length and cup size. If you want to have a boob job and wear dresses, crack on it's your body and your style choice. If a biological man finds the idea of being in a changing room with other biological men distressing, that's a serious mental health problem.

You're avoiding the point though. We've all used mixed changing rooms with individual cubicals, that's not always feasibe, especially when space is at a premium. When I was at school you were lucky to get your own clothes peg.

That's entirely the point though. When you start diverging away from proven scientific facts into subjective feelings about someone's own paradigm of gender, there're no lines or rules anymore. Someone who cut their wedding veg off and started taking estrogen 20 years ago is no more a woman, factually speaking, than I am sat here saying, "you know what, I feel a bit girly, I might gender identify as a woman for half an hour or so." You can argue the semantics of this until the cows come home but the stone wall between right and wrong ultimately comes down to this; nothing you believe supercedes a woman's consent. Esentially you're putting a woman in a position whereby she is forced to believe your own personal beliefs, because if she doesn't, she's being forced to strip naked in front of strange men.

Yes but they're plastic fans. We're supposed to be getting rid of them in the Championship.

The problem is, it has crossed the line to the point it is making a difference. In many peoples eyes, you are no longer allowed to acknowledge the fact that Sam Smith is a man. There are people who genuinely consider it a hate crime if you don’t refer to ‘them’ by ‘their’ pronouns. That’s without even getting into the much more serious issues of changing rooms, prisons and sports. If the rest of the world were able to completely ignore whatever you’re claiming to identify as, it’d be fine but we can’t.

Should help fill the power vacuum in the boardroom.

No, I completely agree. LGB rights used to be a fight for something fair and tangible that people could relate to, the best counter argument right wing conservatives could offer was some guff about, “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” Now though, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, there are people out there who literally believe gender is a mood you can be in and change every few hours. YouTubers like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh just need to share a video and say, “hey, look at what the alphabet people are doing this week.”

Won’t happen as a lot of people are determined to attach their beliefs to LGB rights in order to gain validity. As a stand alone argument, saying you identify by they/them pronouns is no different to some guy who plays online sci-fi telling everyone he wants to be addressed as ‘Darth’ Steve Pilkington. It’s just emotional blackmail.

Post crap to try and appear smart and garner attention. Said crap is easily disproven by others with minimal effort. Everybody thinks you are dense. Ask Steve Grant for a new account because nobody is taking you seriously. Everybody figures out it’s you again within a matter of hours. Insist you are an entirely new poster called Brett, from Camden. Return to step 1. It’s the ciiiiiiiiiiiiiircle….

Ake went for over £40m when Bournemouth got relegated, Sissoko over £30m at Newcastle. I think it'll probably be in the £20-25m for someone with Tino's record, if he does go, but bigger fees are entirely plausible. Especially since we are financially stable and our better players have fairly long contracts.

Why? None of that cash is going in the players pockets. It’ll influence who we can afford to bring in but if a player is already under contract here then nothing changes. Either someone meets our demands or he stays.

I don’t think they will have any bearing on each other at all. Tella and Alcaraz future will depend entirely on if they’re willing to stay and if someone is willing to stump up the asking price if not. Lavia, KWP and JWP are all going for a decent enough fee, we don’t need cash beyond that.

It’d be a weird move for him, at that age and coming back from a big injury. He needs a solid season of regular football, not watching Trippier from the stands four games out of five.

Decent start with the ball too, 140 odd still needed to avoid the follow on.

Our problem last year was nothing to do with age, the players were just crap. Moi is 28, Stu 31, McC 33, Che and AA both 26, Orsic 30 etc. and all of those were useless. Our best player was a 19 year old.

It was all a bit strange that. Tiss doesn’t seem like the type to be easily mislead by an absolute charlatan with nothing of substance to back up his claims, so you wonder how he got involved in all of this. Overall I think we’re very lucky that the eventual ML takeover wasn’t derailed completely by Pinnacle entering a period of exclusivity. They could very easily have looked at other options or lost interest completely, then who knows where we’d be now. With the benefit of hindsight and everything working out in the end, I guess this is another of those quirky little footnotes in Southampton’s history. He’ll be remembered along with the Ted Bates statue and Ali Dia as one of those WTF moments we still can’t quite believe really happened.

I think most eight year olds could have told you that sticking a Sega Megadrive controller in an old hot water cylinder, with an expressed desire of driving it to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, 500 miles out to sea, is a bad idea. I think most twelve year olds could tell you that a militia of alcoholic rapists, released from prison and lead by a belligerent Uruk Hai, leading an armed revolt against the government of Russian, was going to get somewhat messy. That fact that someone of Alexei’s cranial output considers either of these points to be ‘expertise’ doesn’t particularly surprise me.

So who’s your favourite, far right insurrection leader? The Shaman gets it for me, Prigozhin just didn’t put the effort into his outfits.

Clearly he didn’t drum up the support he expected from certain factions and felt that he couldn’t win. I’m not sure I really believe all charges against him were dropped. Dropped from a window in Minsk, perhaps.

Surely Putin won’t just let him go back to work as normal, like nothing happened.