Lighthouse

Another 1,800 deaths today. We’re really paying for that sh*t show in December.

Whether we want to sell him or not, it’s undoubtedly in our interests for him to sign a new contract first, so with that in mind we must have offered him a pretty decent deal. With regards to the second BIB, he had a shot with Liverpool but he was perennially injured or kept out of the team by superior players. He’ll get whatever offer is in the table, be it at Saints or otherwise but he isn’t entitled to anything.

He’s 29 in summer and has had one properly decent season. He’s an older, more injury prone Beattie and isn’t worth £80m. Don’t get me wrong, I love having him here and he’s a quality player but nowhere near £80m.

In any case, tens of millions of women voted for Trump after he said he could just walk up and grab them by the 🐈‍. I don’t think such a relatively inane statement is going to put many people off him. It’s like an audience with Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle, the more they offend, the more people turn up.

Probably very little. Many of them will not care about being abused, so long as a perceived strong leader is making promises they can believe.

Two of those aren’t exceptions as they haven’t turned down better offers elsewhere.

Nice to see such a calm, measured response to the situation. Top half of the league, one player gets linked with a move away and we’re already relegated. We will sell, reinvest and move on, same as we did with Lambert, Lallana and co.

I agree, I think and hope this is very much the crescendo.

That kind of ties in with the London lockdown a few weeks ago, when everyone packed onto the trains to flee the city. What a stupid policy that was.

The troubled genius of the meat processing industry, he once did 5 lambs in under a minute.

I’m going to make an optimistic prediction of sub 500 deaths on Friday 29th. Let’s see how well this post ages.

I saw another post somewhere (can't verify any source) which reckons 400 people per week die in care homes in Norway anyway. Obviously the causes of death should be rigorously checked in such circumstances but as more and more vaccines are delivered, more of these stories will emerge.

Unlikely, I didn't think he was great for Bolton.

I like when people say this about players who are quite blatantly not going to stay fit.

I'm indifferent. I quite like UA's stuff in general but they've had a couple of sh*t shows with getting stuff delivered on time and some of the quality.

Was it pitching in line?

Fair point Chez, if anyone's interested this video adds a bit of flesh to the way I view the situation. It's an older story but as relevant today as it ever was.

Makes you proud to be British.

Then we’ll agree to disagree. Highlighting the issues is only of any use if good and open minded people were unaware or misinformed in the first place. There are cases for it; Greg Clarke being a good example of somebody trying to do the right thing but clearly lacking a little enlightenment. Simply stating, ‘black lives matter’ isn’t imparting any knowledge on society.

Good grief, it's like Where's Wally trying to find the fragments of article in that sea of click bait. I got the gist though. 👍

This kind of thing has it's moment but I believe that moment has now passed, in the UK at least. Take being gay as an example, it was only 50ish years ago it was a criminal offence. It was a generally accepted norm in society that homosexuality was a sin, as decreed by the church. That kind of backwards thinking was considered mainstream and needed to be challenged. The reason people like Rosa Parks and MLK will be remembered for centuries is because they marched down streets chanting 'black lives matter' in a time and a place where they didn't. Black people were segregated by law and it was considered acceptable in society. The crux of the matter is that in those cases, good people didn't know what they were saying was unacceptable - All they needed was to be told. Today everyone does know but not everyone chooses to accept that.

Are you suggesting that the UK is racist or that racism exists within the UK, because those are two massively different propositions? I can think of very few cities in the world where so many people from different races, religions and nationalities live together in such relative harmony. Gang violence is a bit of an odd one when it comes to racism. I believe in many ways racism is just an excuse that members actively choose as a reason to hate each other. Most of it comes from young men with self esteem issues, low education, low prospects of employment, a lack of role models and generally a lack of purpose in life. As such, they just resort to default instincts - shagging and fighting - and a group of people being a different colour is just a convenience. If you don't believe me, look at the troubles in Northern Ireland. I doubt the vast majority of those involved actually cared about the 16th century reforms of Thomas Cromwell, it's just an excuse for a fight.

Mental gymnastics. The further you become detached from reality, the easier it gets to form your own social construct. Just look at the anti-Vaxers; you’d think a global pandemic on the scale of Covid would have eradicated their conspiracy once and for all, I mean how much more blatant proof do you need of what a world without one vaccine is like, let alone several dozen. However, they don’t see it like that. Somehow this is the concrete evidence they need that vaccines are being used to control the population and that appart from a few geriatrics already on deaths door, nobody really suffers from it. It’ll be the same with Trump supporters, no matter what reality entails.

It won’t, that’s the issue. There are two fantasies in play here from people who purport to be liberal: The idea of racists being wound up, which I find as puerile as kicking the kid in front’s chair in primary school. Deriving satisfaction from seeing ‘the other side’ becoming annoyed and triggered is a selfish form of self satisfaction, which is only making the situation worse. The idea that anyone harbouring and exhibiting racist views is simply uninformed and that you are able to change their minds using nothing but your superior intellect and a repertoire of well drilled slogans and gestures. The false belief that some people simply haven’t been told that their views are unpleasant and that with endless repetition we are, "getting the message across." Nothing I’ve seen from any of these protests has done anything to address the main root causes of these issues, which I regard as mainly class based and not race based, in this country at least. All they’ve achieved is a large increase in tribalism amongst society, which in some people then manifests are racism.

We won’t be locked down come the end of March. As infections ease off and hospital admission falls, there will be a gradual easing, as there was last spring.