Lighthouse

Friday night, at home to a team from the midlands, on a potentially wet autumn evening. What’s the worst that can happen?

7 points from those three games is a decent enough return. Take nothing for granted in this league, Burnley just spanked a pretty good Brentford team.

Speak for yourself, I won’t complain about thumping the Aussies inside 12 overs. I was going to go to the Windies game last weekend but they were only selling tickets in pairs for some reason. That game was an anticlimax.

That’ll do pig.

It’s slutty nun time.

We’d never win anything again. All our kids are too fat to achieve at sports, we need imports, especially in tennis and cricket.

No

He hasn’t made any kind of public stand, quite the opposite. All this is based around him remaining neutral when others were making a gesture.

The player Mario Lemina thinks he is.

When Turkish and MLG agree it’s bull plop then you know it must be.

Though that was a decent watch overall. A shame to go out but it was a good game.

I was only sporadically watching in between other stuff but he did seem to have a decent enough game. Hopefully a gold sticker for the scouts if that’s the start of a trajectory.

I don’t think the first part needs any explanation, nobody of any compassion or sense would argue bullying is a good thing. The BIB though is complete conjecture; the human brain is a phenomenally complex organ, one which we have only a basic understanding of, so to say that we as entities must be something more than brain functions, when we don’t fully understand what they are, is bogus. The difference it makes is when you start trying to impose your belief on other people. If it’s to someone else’s detriment that they don’t believe in something, it creates an issue. If you want to dress and present yourselves in a way which represents a particularly style of gender, that’s no problem to anyone else. If a 60 year old Jimmy Saville-a-like says he identifies as a woman and should therefore be allowed in the ladies changing rooms, naked, next to your 12 year old daughter and her friends then you have a problem to address. In that example, you’ve got three basic choices; - Agree that she is a real woman and let her carry on, which you then have to explain to the parents of those 12 year olds. - Tell her trans women are not real women and can’t use the women’s changing room, which is obviously going to cause offence. - Tell him/her, "ah but no, you’re clearly not a REAL trans person, you’re just abusing the system to watch 12 year old girls getting changed," which is clearly an enormous minefield of some third party deciding which trans people are real, based on little other than anecdotal evidence of them saying how they feel. Saying, "what difference does it make if they’ve got female body parts," does nothing to address this issue. This isn’t an argument where you can take a ‘live and let live’ attitude like abortion or gay marriage. It requires somebody to be told something they don’t want to hear, whatever your view on the subject. In short, there is no view you can hold on this debate which won’t offend someone.

Would you say the 40% attempted suicide rate (supposing those surveys are accurate) is down to some sort of mental health issue or would you say purely/largely down to bullying?

They aren’t comparable. Being gay isn’t being disillusioned in any way with your own body. You can be gay and be perfectly physically healthy and content with yourself and your own body. You don’t require surgery in order to be able to accept what you are. I reiterate that we are not born into a body. Consciousness is just one of the functions of one of our organs, I.e. the brain. I’m not overthinking it, that is what we quite literally are. The body is not a vehicle, which you enter into a brief journey with in your voyager through life. It is you. I guess we will have to disagree on that but your position requires some degree of cognitive dissonance. If you haven’t already, watch the Dolphin episode of South Park.

I’d empathise but I wouldn’t ‘understand’ as you put it because it’s unequivocally not true. You may feel that you would be happy living as the opposite gender but you aren’t ‘born into a body’. You are that bag of meat you see in the mirror, it was never given to you, you weren’t infused spiritually as an embryo. This is what’s perhaps most alarming about the whole issue, making life changing choices based on falsehoods. If you chose to ‘transition’ you’re not correcting some great admin error in the cosmos.

I hear that phrase a lot and cannot accept it as being valid. You aren’t ‘born into’ a body, wrong or otherwise, they aren’t assigned at birth. People are not some gender assigned spirit, floating around in the ether, waiting for their chance to be born into a human body. You don’t HAVE a body, you ARE a body.

Is he referring to Boris Johnson at the end there? If he is then good grief that’s a desperately tenuous connection. Still, I agree with him. Ole in!

What on Earth makes you think that?

Just as a side note on suicide, it’s a much more complex issue than it appears on the surface and even what the individuals involved may say. Saying we need to change society because of the appallingly high suicide rate among trans people is too simplistic a take on it. For example if a man kills himself and leaves a note saying, "I’m doing this because of my b*tch ex-wife," it doesn’t then follow that it was her fault and that she drove him to it. If anything it says more about his state of mind and irrational behaviour which had lead up to that point. I don’t think it simply comes down to bullying. Obviously that doesn’t help but there are monstrously violent prisons and even some schools which don’t even come close to the same suicide rate (up to 40% has been reported) as trans people. You can’t just gloss over that issue by simply saying, "oh if people weren’t mean to her, she’d still be alive and happy."

You could literally use that argument to justify dropping any good player we’ve ever had. KWP was 4th choice at a Europa League club when Spurs sold him. If he thinks he should be untouchable at Saints he has a serious attitude problem, which I seriously doubt. Both of them, and Perraud, will see plenty of football this season. After all the comments following January’s transfer window, I never thought having quality options in both fullback spots would be seen as ‘a shame’.

We offered Ings what was reasonable. In fact I’d go so far as to say generous, for a frequently injured 29 year old, who’d just scored 12 goals. If we’d caved in and offered him something whopping, every other player we ever tried to sign from now on would be demanding something proportionate to that. I honestly don’t get this kind of criticism. After January everyone was bemoaning our total lack of respectable cover at fullback. We go out and sign someone who is not only ‘cover’ but the best RB we’ve had at the club for decades - For £5m - and people complain. I’m astonished. I honestly think if we’d signed another Pied or Martina for the same money, people would be more satisfied, because then he’d just be ‘cover’. Because he’s actually good enough to put KWP on the bench, people are genuinely annoyed that we’ve wasted £5m on someone too good. I’m baffled.

City are unbelievably good. A pleasure to watch.

I thought we set up well and had a decent game plan. Those glaring misses by Redmond, Walcott and then Liv hitting the post, coupled with Bednarek having his standard lapse for the equaliser were the difference between a draw and comfortable win. Four points from two games isn’t the most upsetting return we’ve ever had.

No, we were pants.