Ne Moe Imya

If the main opposition guy in Russia had live-tweeted multiple crimes, we probably wouldn't care much.

I don't think 2 lbs/week of weightloss is very sustainable. At least it wouldn't be for me! I really admire the discipline of anyone who can burn 3000 calories/day while eating 2000, but it's simply unsustainable for most of us. And in my opinion, if it's not sustainable, then why bother? I know so many people who can lose 15 pounds when they put their minds to it for a few months, but then they gain it all back the second they stop. For me, the "click" moment was when a doctor told me to only try to lose 1 pound a week. I was 50 pounds over my goal weight, so it was frustrating to hear that I'd need a year to do it, but I worked out the exact number of calories I could eat (500 calories less than you burn, essentially, there are loads of calculators online) and have held fast to that for a couple of years now. It took quite a while to drop it off, but it did come off little by little and once I reached the goal (well, I actually ended up 10 pounds above my original goal, but close enough), I've stayed there. Exercise is essentially for health, not for weight loss. If you want to be healthy, you need to exercise. But if all you care about is weight loss, that's 99% just how much and what you eat. And drink, of course - probably half the battle for me was just recognising how many calories I was drinking, and immediately cutting that out and replacing it with diet drinks and water.

The thing I don't understand is why we binned off or marginalised the best recruitment department in all of football for ... this? Right as we need to go on a major buying spree, too. Give Edwards the reins and he's probably sold Salah (to much weeping and gnashing of teeth on here) last summer, a few others as well. Instead, we didn't listen to him, listened to someone else (Klopp? Lijnders? Who knows?) instead and now we're going to really struggle to get it right next summer. We obviously have one of the deepest and best forward lines in the league. I'd sell Salah - he's still got a lot of value and we have Jota/Nunez/Diaz/Gakpo/Firmino/Doak behind him. The place we're really going to need to spend is in midfield. We need probably one centre back and one forward (to replace Salah), but those can be young players 20-22 with potential. But we need a massive upgrade at midfield - Henderson, Keita, Milner, and Oxlade-Chamberlain should never see the pitch again for us after this season. Thiago, Bajcetic, Harvey, and Fabinho are all fine for depth but shouldn't really be starting next year if we want to be competing for trophies, for a variety of reasons. That means we really need 3 starting-calibre players in the centre of the park. At least 2, if we're really confident that Harvey and/or Bajcetic will continue to improve and we can squeeze one more really good year out of Thiago. But getting 2-3 players at the level of guaranteed starters for a CL-challenging club? That will cost a fortune. And the money we get from sales is not going to cut it.

Setting aside the (obviously massively important) issue that you're totally ignoring the desires of the Ukrainians and Taiwanese, this sounds sensible until you realise that you can't have peace that is only agreed to by one side. So it doesn't matter if the US/NATO/EU/whatever agree that the Ukraine should be neutral territory, as long as Russia doesn't agree then there will be a war there. Essentially Russia has guaranteed that there will be a war - the only question is, will they get what they want through that war or won't they. Same with Taiwan. It's fine for the West to say "Taiwan should be neutral and not weaponised." But as long as China doesn't agree, and they clearly don't, then you only have two choices left - either support Taiwan militarily or just let the Chinese take over. Because you can't just have one side agree to any potential peace agreement if the other side doesn't agree. They'll just keep on attacking whenever it's convenient for them.

I don't know why anyone engages with RP on stuff like this. He's either too thick to understand that he's on Putin's side on this or he's enjoying winding you all up and being contrarian just for the sake of it. I personally think it's the latter and that he doesn't believe a word he's saying. Therefore any time you engage with him, you're just giving him what he wants.

Ha! Now we've gotten to the point where our fans are actually complaining that we're not being turned into the mouthpiece for an evil regime.

If we had Edwards and Graham running the show, I'd take that 80m in a heartbeat and give it to them. They'd probably find a replacement for 40m and use the other 40m to buy some unknown midfielder that would turn out to be the next Alonso. With the current situation in our recruitment department, I'm not so sure. Lijnders will just buy Benfica's or Sporting's best player and hope that he can replace Salah's goals that way.

On the one hand, we're one year away from a near-quadruple and having the best recruitment team in all of football. On the other hand, we've seemingly dismantled that recruitment team for no reason at all and just spent the entire January window desperately needing a midfielder only to spend 40m on a single signing ... who plays up front? So yeah, fair to say that this upcoming summer will probably determine what the next 3-4 years looks like. Get it right and we can rebuild a bit and be back to challenging for the league title by 2024-25. Get it wrong and with the likes of Newcastle suddenly spending billions and making it a top 7 instead of a top 4, we might be in and out of the race for CL places the next few years.

Listening to some Lorient fans talk about Le Fee and they're all convinced that whoever gets him will be getting a huge bargain. Brought them up from Ligue 2, has them in 3rd this season in Ligue 1 ... all sounds a bit Kante, really. Just coming into his prime as he turns 23 in a month, quite an intriguing one if the fee is as low as rumoured.

In what world would Caicedo and de Jong be a similar cost? De Jong's wages are already astronomical and it will take an insane offer (600k/week?) to get him to leave Barca.

I watch a fair bit of the youth teams and this lad is a serious player. Obviously can never say with any certainty when you're talking about a teenager but he has a chance to be something special.

I hate to bring this up again but 3 years ago we had the best recruitment team in all of world football, we had around an 80% hit rate with transfers, everything we did was brilliant. Now we've systematically dismantled that whole team and replaced it with Lijnders and vibes, as someone said on Twitter, and we're starting to see the effects. Gakpo is more or less fine, given the price, but it's a much bigger risk than we needed to take. Especially with the needs in midfield. It must be said, however, that even if he's not completely brilliant, having the following rotation: Salah, Nunez, Diaz, Jota, Firmino, and Gakpo for the rest of the season must be one of the deepest forward lines in all of football history at a club side.

Why do you say that? I would say the most important part of his job right now is to ensure that Western support continues. At this point, the Ukrainians are totally dependent on Western (mostly American) arms deliveries. If they continue, then Ukraine will inevitably be able to force Russia to retreat to at least the pre-Feb lines eventually. If they don't continue, if the West falters and then pushes them to negotiate from a position of weakness, then a lot of Ukrainians are going to be tortured to death in basements as Russia continues to hold sway over their territory. So, when you look at it that way, it makes perfect sense for Zelensky to be going on American talk shows. Because sure, the people that follow things are going to be supportive of the Ukrainians, but if the likes of Tucker Carlson can get the "average American" to be tired of sending weapons to them then it can all end pretty quickly. And so I'm sure his staffers are well aware of that and putting him on television screens across the USA is aimed at preventing that from happening.

He doesn't care. It's always the same with people who are into whataboutery. Someone complains about their favourite dictator doing some evil and they say "but what about this other country over here doing heinous and evil things?" So you point out "yeah, we also complained about those evil things a lot back when that was in the news" but their response is always "well, I don't hear you doing it now!" To which you come back with "yeah, but they're not in the news right now because now the football tournament (or whatever) is being held in YOUR favourite dictator's autocratic regime" and they just disappear. Russia's sportswashing was evil. Qatar's is also (and this is really the key word here, as difficult as it may be for you to comprehend - ALSO) evil. That's the whole point, JK, you complete and utter ostrich. Russia's evil does not make Qatar's evil OK. Whatever the US has done to the Palestinians doesn't make Qatar's autocratic regime OK. It doesn't work that way.

Are you accusing me of being soft on Russia? Are you aware that I lived there for over a decade and have a very lengthy history of posting on this forum about the regime there which you are welcome to search up? To make myself perfectly clear, Russia's human rights positions are so egregious that they are even worse than Qatar's, in my opinion. And that is why 90+% of the posts during the 2018 World Cup about Russia condemned these abuses, just as they have Qatar's.

Let's hope so. I will grant that my pessimism isn't based on much at this point, and you're right, we could be sold to someone who basically carries on as we have been, only better. But in my view, the absolutely inexplicable dismantling of the best recruitment team in football is a really, really worrying sign, if you take a long-term perspective. It won't come back to bite us for a couple of years yet, in all likelihood, but if it's any sign of the direction we're going it's not encouraging.

*double post, apologies*

I've gradually come round to the idea that the best times are over for LFC. There was a brief moment in time where we were the best-run club in football, with a charismatic genius for a manager and the most forward-thinking data scientists running the recruitment. We were up against a classic antagonist, a sportswashing club with all the money they wanted, and we held our own. In fact, were it not for a few unlucky bounces, we might have won the league 2-3x and could have even had a quadruple. Even so, we won the CL and league, despite all the obstacles. Really the worst thing that happened was that the ownership refused to push the boat out now and again for a really top signing to put us in a better position, but overall, we held the moral high ground AND we got to watch some scintillating football to boot. Now, we've demolished our recruitment department for some unknown reason and we're going to be dragged down into the mire with everyone else in terms of ownership. I suppose we can wait to see for sure, but if the businessmen making this new bid are indeed connected to the governments of these two countries and we become a sportswashing project, well, we might win a few trophies but it won't feel quite the same, will it? I mean, I'll certainly celebrate if & when we do, but it won't quite hit the same heights as it did when we were doing it, if not quite "the right way," then as close to that as is possible in this world.

Oh, for goodness sake, surely you can't actually believe this! It's perfectly valid to say that there are a lot of evil things going on that are perpetrated by Western countries - that is beyond dispute. But you can't also argue that those things are on the same level as the evil things that are perpetrated by, say, North Korea or the CCP in China. The whole "whataboutism" in this thread is really too much. Yes, human rights issues DO exist everywhere. That is absolutely true. But it is not at all true that there aren't places where human rights are much better than other places. There are entire indices of human rights, freedom, human development and such that track such things for this exact reason.

Don't think he rates as highly as that overall, based on inconsistency and injury, but I have long maintained that using the category of "best player at his peak" that the original Ronaldo is ahead even of the likes of Messi and Maradona. There were 2-3 seasons there where he was absolutely untouchable in a way that even bests the likes of them. Shame that injuries took most of the second half of his career away.

In Russia, there's nothing to worry about, the war is going great and everyone is still sane and rational:

Fewer wars, but the ones we did have would be much, much worse.

De Jong is sensational, he would be brilliant for us. We'd still need another midfielder to replace/rotate with Fabinho, as I think he'd play further forward alongside someone like Elliott for us, but he would be absolutely great in our midfield. The problem, as others have noted, would be wages. He's rumoured to be on 25m/season or something at Barca. If he were on a free, that would make him our most expensive player overall, combining wages/fee amortisation. And since we'd have to pay a hefty fee as well, it would be well over that. Never going to happen.

I think this is a really interesting question. I don't think anyone particularly wants him to, but I still think it's what will end up happening. Biden wouldn't mind riding off into the sunset, he must know that his age is getting to be a significant factor and he would leave with a decent reputation, all things considered. The Dems will want a replacement, but ... who is going to be the unifier for a pretty diverse coalition? I think what they fear above everything else is losing an election, especially if it's Trump that's running. So someone like Kamala Harris, who would probably assume it's "her turn," but is extremely unpopular, is going to terrify them. And in the end rather than risking a divisive primary where they might come up with another Hillary (read: the one person who could possibly lose to Trump) as the nominee, the party will coalesce around the safe bet of running Biden again.

I hate to break it to you, Jose, but ... the US just finished their elections. Unless you mean the ones 2 years from now, in which case the war will surely be either on a much better or much worse footing for Russia by that time. Probably the latter. I can't see how Russia could continue at anything like the current rate of losses past next summer. And that's saying nothing of the utter smoking crater their economy would be by then.