Lighthouse

By anybody credible who was reporting on the story at the time. Any perhaps next time you can be a bit less rude and not blow your fuse over an imaginary scenario you’ve made up. This wasn’t some £12m deal where we’ve quibbled over his petrol allowance and Leeds have come in and pinched him from under our nose. Had he been interested, it would have taken a fee nearly double our transfer record to get it done.

TBF he's hardly going to slag off his own player in public, especially with so few decent options to choose from. It'd be like telling your own son, "TBH Jimmy your art work is sh*te and I wouldn't stick it to the fridge door in a mortuary."

This has been explained by many people many times. He isn't coming here, he never was and any interest shown by us and Leeds was speculative hope, rather than expectation.

Well you keep saying, I'm just curious as to what exactly it is you're refering to. Wait, I thought that was the one thing they had actually gained from all this? A small amount of farmland in the area around Mariupol? The carpet bombing of Dresden was an inevitable consequence of war, doesn't mean you can just strug it off. Quite definitively not true. The west hasn't lost a single soldier or piece of amrour in this conflict, only the hand me downs we've donated to Ukraine. Russia's infrastructure will suffer horribly from the sanctions, they build almost nothing modern and hi-tech themselves. Russian people are being dragged from their civilian lives, given a barely adequate (non-winter) uniform and thrown into the meat grinder. My view is that they haven't achieved anything of any help or relevance whatsoever to Russia. Aside from a bunch of hot air and bravado about their Russian Empire fantasy, they've got nothing to show for everything they've lost.

I havent' claimed Ukraine is cruising to an easy victory or that western economies are getting off Scott-free but none of that answers the question; what's the one area Russia is struggling in?

Which is this, "one area," you speak of? I can’t decide whether you’re talking about: Soldiers dead and wounded Long term effect of economic sanctions Terrible international PR Territorial losses Huge numbers of military hardware lost or captured Massive financial cost of keeping the war going The rest of Europe basically quitting your main exports, hydrocarbons, cold turkey. Russian weapons proving hugely inferior to NATO ones on the battlefield. An already stagnant economy now shrinking and dropping behind the likes of Spain and Australia on the world stage. Even the latest Russian planes and tanks not being deployed reliably or in sufficient numbers to make much difference. Their so called ally, China, basically taking them to the cleaners for my natural resources they need. Political unrest from and within several disputed and breakaway regions. Mass exodus of younger, more educated people within more realistic ambitions than Putin’s Russian empire fantasy. But I guess these are all small trivialities when you can make Ukrainians, some of the toughest b*stards on the planet, put on an extra jumper for a few weeks.

Having checked, this is the fifth time, in both cups, since 2011.

For about the fifth time in the last ten years… 🙄

City vs Chelsea 😆

I never thought I'd click on a thread about gays and find Tim and Turks openly talking about their experiences out cruising.

Mental game this.

Christ, even for this place it’s getting a bit much now. Everyone have a chamomile and go to bed.

Weirdly, if Germany had lost that and been stuck on zero, I’d still have bet on them going through.

Christ, we look like a non-league team who’ve drawn Chelsea in the Cup.

Erm… no. By most credible accounts he had no intention of coming to us or Leeds, even when we offered to blow our own transfer record out of the water with a £30m plus bid.

No, I’ll say it again slowly. It’s gay rights for gay Qataris, in Qatar. Gay Qataris have the same right to their own beliefs as Islamic fundamentalist Qataris, that’s the issue here.

Qatar.

Just pointing out the irony. "Let’s just agree to differ," is literally the exact thing that people have been campaigning for the right to say in the Middle East. The fact that you think you have the right to say that in an argument on the internet but Muslims don’t when they’re being executed for their sexuality is absurd. Never mind.

No, that’s not allowed. You live in my country and a big beardy sky man says you have to live your life according to everything I say.

I'm not saying these are your beliefs. I'm saying that you're pretending to not really know whether the Qataris are wrong or not and using phrases like, "it's different to our perception of the right way." It's not different it's wrong and I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would think this is somehow ambiguous. The only differences are: 1. The Qataris claim a big beardy man in the sky is telling them they should be doing this. 2. It's always been the case. Which is a terrible justification for their beliefs on both counts. "We kill gays because Allah says so and it's always been the case," is about as dreadful an argument as I've ever heard. I'll say it one last time because I'm bored with it now. THEY are the ones saying that everybody should live by their beliefs. I am not telling anyone to live by anything. If a Qatari wants to wear a hijab, not eat pork, not drink alcohol and pray to Allah 462 times per day that's absolutely fine. If he's gay and thinks its a sin so marries a wife and lives a misserable life of denial trying to pray the gay away, also fine it's his life. And yet when we pulled out of Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands fled, many more were dragged out into the street and executed and millions now live in fear. We didn't try to impose any way of life there, we removed the opressors. The problem is that it's one of the most dreadfully corrupt countries in the world and when the coalition pulled out the government and the armed forced collapsed without a fight and were overrun. Sure, there are plenty of fundamentalist Taliban supporters but as we saw, there are also a huge number who didn't want to live like that.

You agonisingly close to the right answer there, you just need to tweak it slightly.

It's not desparate at all. I get that people don't like virtue signalling, neither do I, but this kind of faux-pragmatism is just plain weird. For sane adults to sit here and basically say, "state sanctioned execution of homosexuals, who's to say if that's right or wrong," as if it's some sort of quirky, local mannersim is just ridiculous. It's very obviously wrong. You're arguing that is fine to kill innocent people based on your own personal beliefs, you do realise this? If you think you can explain to a teenage lesbian who's about to be beheaded that her death is nothing like Jews in a gas chamber then I don't know what to say.

You’re all clinging to this erroneous idea of, ‘their way’. ‘Their way’ is the way of the ruling elites and not the way of the entire country. If you’re going to apply that logic then the Holocaust was absolutely fine. I know Godwin’s law is lazy but in this case it’s a perfect fit, the law of the land said don’t be Jewish, so what right did we have to go in there and liberate them? Should have respected their culture.

You are determined to turn this into us imposing our views on them when really it’s them imposing their views on others in their country. Not everyone in these countries wants to live in accordance with Sharia law, many of them are being oppressed. If you can’t understand this basic concept, I can’t help you.

No, the imposing of beliefs is what people are protesting against. We’re not trying to force all Arabs to have a big gay orgy, we just want them to leave the Arabs who are gay in peace.