Leaderboard

Going old school...

On holiday in Marmaris last week and went for a walk one dinner time for a few pints and to find somewhere to watch the match later that night. Come across this sports bar with massive signs up saying they show all games, have sky sports, TNT and BeIn. I’m sat on the decking outside having a few in the sun reading my book. Around the decking they have flags of loads of different football clubs. I’m sat there minding my own business when another obviously British tourist comes in and gets himself a pint and sits on the table next to me. About half a pint in he starts to chat and he’s perfectly reasonable and the chat is fine. He then starts talking to me about these flags and that there’s obviously one important one missing. Alarm bells start going immediately. I turn over my book (Crouch: How to be a Footballer) so he can’t see the front cover as I just couldn’t be arsed with it. He goes to get a pint and walks all the way round the decking checking every single flag on the way. He’s at the bar and all you can hear is; You need to have a word with yourself. Not one Everton flag. That’s a disgrace. Not one Everton flag. Half those clubs have two flags. Not one Everton flag. Leicester, Leeds, Stoke City, fucking Stoke City up there! I just finished my pint and fucked off laughing to myself.

I hope these biffs are on a train from lime st to birmingham tomorrow that breaks down just after crewe and they are stuck there for hours.

10 goals and 10 assists in 15 starts, 17 games in total for Salah this season. What a wonderful human being, love him to bits!

We were supposed to scatter her dad's ashes on a nice hill they used to go walking on, but then my mother-in-law found evidence of him having a decades-long affair and lashed them in the canal instead.

VID-20231219-WA0028.mp4.220c08e94eac3270f3c079f415b69cb2.mp4

Caoimh has been brilliant too, superb handling. He's miles better than their prat..

Just give Mo whatever the fuck he wants

I wouldn’t rule out a lot of the sociological arguments being put forward elsewhere in the thread, but a huge amount of influence on this result is what’s seen a lot elsewhere: an increased trend towards lashing out at incumbent governments and leaders: Someone (Section?) on this thread or the Trump one said that there’s no ‘true’ undecided voter in the US; simply people in tribes that either slightly tilt or are fully horizontal in favour of the Dems or the Republicans, and the trick is to simply try and encourage as many of your tribe out to actually vote for you, whilst simultaneously hoping your opponent fails to do the same. On the solidly Dem side, you’ve got all of the issues with Harris the candidate, Harris and her selection ‘process’, and the big foreign policy gripe of most folk on this side of the fence: the ineffectiveness of the Biden administration in reeling in Israeli belligerence. And that’s before you get to the slight leaners, who’re in much the same boat as the slight Republican leaners, which brings me back to the graph above. The last few years have seen rampant inflation everywhere because of the cost of Covid response, the sudden post-Covid release of pent-up demand that scaled up much faster than supply could get caught up, and then the realignment of global energy markets in the aftermath of the Ukrainian invasion. The effect of this has been people feeling poorer, and needing a target for their ire, hence the trend towards incumbency-bashing in the graph above. In the US, this has seen some Dem-leaning folk unable to summon the enthusiasm to go out and vote (especially when combined with the other factors above). For the Republicans? Well the cult of MAGA are still squarely behind their spiritual king, and his assassination attempt survival simply underlined his cult leader status yet further. But for the slight Republican leaners outside of the cult, the fact they felt poorer under a Democratic government, especially allied to Trump’s direct appeal to people’s inner selfishness made them all too eager to get out there and punish the incumbents. The Republicans also don’t generally have to deal with the Palestinian issue in the same way as the Dems either for good measure. That’s most there is to it I think. Likely almost every soul likely to vote Republican - no matter their motivation - went out in support of Trump. Too many people with Democratic leanings simply couldn’t, for a variety of reasons. Wish my fucking 1-year-old would sleep.

We have no new players out there since last season. We looked absolutely shot last May. What Slot is doing looks more remarkable with every game.

50/50 chance they’ll get hit.

Except nobody's said that have they? Plus it's not as though the GF is the only place bemoaning the results. People like Dan Rather are fucking suicidal. Trump is a liar, criminal and a rapist, shocking that people would be baffled about it. I never understand why people like you and Rico waste your lives just coming on here posting snide, glib shit about "this lot", why don't you fuck off and get an allotment or something if it's so shit?

Nice controlled performance. Great way to finish off before yet another international break.

Five points clear at the top. Fuck everything else, that's it - five points fucking clear. I may or may not have had a few drinks this evening. FIVE FUCKING POINTS CLEAR! TOP OF THE LEAGUE! GET IN!

He’s not going to shag you, mate.

I didn’t follow this forum during this game, but people are down on our performance? we bossed. That game. We let them Back in A bit too much, but they never looked like threatening I’d have preferred us to keep forward 45-75, but we beat a good team again. this might all turn to dust, but for now it’s fucking boss

He should theatrically remove a hankie from his pocket, wipe his shiny dome, then throw it into the crowd.

Villa are a good, dangerous team and we made that look so easy.

Wise decision, he does everything right!

Can thank the look-at-me set piece twat for leaving them so open on the other end.

Just give him the contract for fucks sake.

Gravenberch has been outstanding, he's always in the right place. What a player.

(Sorry!)

Another day on here

Might have a wank as she's at the gym early.

The fact that I'm still a bit disappointed that we're not 8 points clear speaks volumes about how well we've started under Slot. Who knows what the season will ultimately bring, but I couldn't possibly have imagined we'd be in such a good position at this point. In a way, the lack of expectation following Klopp's departure has made it all the more enjoyable so far...

Oye.

We’ll draw Bad Gateway in the FA Cup.

Oh, and BTW, Gravenberch might be the best player in the history of sport. All sports. I'd pay to watch somebody else watch him.

Allez allez

Not wanting to go overboard but Slot has broken City and Arsenal and we're going to win the quadruple.

There’s Mo limits. Mo. Mo. Mo.

These set-piece coaches seriously need to fuck right off! I have no interest looking at either of them.

Ahh Darwin, needed a bit more finesse there! Side note, am I the only one who thinks Bailey looks like Patrice Evra's illegitimate kid?

I’m taking full credit. As a rule I don’t watch City but decided to start watching at HT because I reckoned Brighton needed my support. They never looked back.

Win tonight and it's fucking on isn't it!

Scattered my Nan's ashes earlier this year, nice spot on Exmoor. Went back on her birthday and I check what three words, they were tearfully.scattered.extra. Bit on the nose.

Carly wanted hers scattered in the New Forest as she’d had a couple of horses from there. We took her ashes down and went for a walk around and found somewhere where we thought fitting, this beautiful clearing surrounded by trees that created an almost natural amphitheater. Milo was trying to eat the ashes and as we’re walking back to the car there’s a signpost saying the area is called Deadman Hill.

Practice makes perfect.

This is from a FB post by political journalist Heather Cox Richardson. The screenshots are her notes/sources. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/podcast? November 8. 2024 (Friday) Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.” After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump. Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.” Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.” Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’” In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region. Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them. In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. "Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote. In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law. When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war. When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to. Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region. Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights.

Again?

Well I don’t hang around with golf club racists, bankers and members of the Conservative Party. You’ve deleted that many accounts you don’t even remember when posters have interacted with you. I don’t need to justify myself to you. You hang around with people who think Liverpool is a shit hole but lack both the political and historical acumen to understand why it’s economically depressed. Then you get arsey with people who pull you up on it. I help other people by not being a right wing fucking cunt and by organising in my community against a destructive road and subsequently forming a community action group to pressurise the council ( one of the hardest hit by ToryFibDem cuts) to better deliver for all residents. Thinking of standing for MP on the trickle down economic platform. Maybe in Walton.

Just back from the ground. That was fucking brilliant. I'm giddy out.

Something about "lack of control"....Something about "lack of intelligence".....Something about "boring football"....Something about failing "eye tests"...blah blah fucking blah.... Or alternatively....

Gotta sign SALAH and VDV up. They are both like Peter Pan. SALAH was like a runaway train for his goal.