Dr. Gonzo

Fuck the premier league saying we can only wear that badge for one match, and that it can only be against Wolves. If we’re going to flex on anyone, why Wolves? There’s clubs from Manchester and also our dickhead local rivals? If not for not wanting to piss them off so they don’t fix matches against us, I’d say fuck it wear it each match. But they can arbitrarily make things up as they go. Fuck the premier league though, the worst thing that ever happened to football was them breaking off from the football league and pretending they’re gods gift to football.

I just want to once again congratulate the Leicester board for absolutely fleecing United with the Maguire signing

They were talking with Arteta for a week or more without even contacting and discussing compensation to City. It’s understandable City would be annoyed with Arsenal

Jesus the people making the big decisions at Arsenal truly have no idea what they’re doing, do they?

I wonder if we'll be in for a CB in January. Lovren/Matip/Gomez are all good when paired with VVD - and I think young Joemez is the best of the 3 - but they've all got their injury problems. Lovren's never played more than 6 games in a row for us... so I think he's unreliable as a backup in an injury crisis... because chances are he'll soon be out with injury/illness. I think we want to avoid moving Henderson/Gini to the defense as much as possible. I think bringing in a CB as competition for Matip and Gomez would be good, particularly if they're less injury prone than Lovren in case the other two are out for whatever reason.

Minamino is having his medical before January, so he’ll probably be the first signing of the window

I don't think humanity will ever be rid of racism. Fear of "the other" is an effective political strategy to get votes (and is nothing new and certainly never went away at any point in our history) because of how tribal people are - it's an easy way to paint an "us vs. them" situation. I don't think humans have the capacity to not be racist or xenophobic... and even if they do, I imagine some other type of bigotry would take it's place. Tribalism is in our nature & it allows emotion to beat out reason. Sad, but true. The London thing is also pretty easily explained, tbh. For decades we've seen Westminster throw money at London and comparatively neglect the rest of the country - we've seen towns around London have massive spikes in population, while cities around the country have eroded... because there's less opportunity in peoples' hometowns, so more and more people move to London. To be honest, I have no idea if that's anything new or not - I imagine it's probably not, London's always been a bigger hub for business than anywhere else in the country. It's the business, media, and cultural capital of the UK... as well as the actual fucking capital. It stands to reason that throughout history, people have left the city they come from to go to London because of higher opportunity. But people, rightly, feel irritated when they see their cities and towns neglected and money has been funneled to London. I'd argue that's actually a big part of why we've seen a rise in populism in the UK. That disdain for the status quo of London first + Tory scapegoating of the EU for most of the domestic problems is a big part in why so much of the rest of the nation has fallen in love with EU-skepticism. When people point at London's high crime statistics... I feel like people always need to be reminded there are more than 7 times as many people in London as the next biggest UK city. And what people discussing crime statistics should really doing when comparing crime rates is looking at the per capita statistics. In any case, if the UK wanted to address the disdain towards London... we'd need a government that doesn't just prioritise London & particularly the City of London (which the financial sector won't stand for - and as they're the biggest portion of our GDP, they've got an enormous amount of clout). It's not exactly an easy fix. And if you want to address people talking negatively about London in respect to understanding crime statistics... well we'd need more educational funding around the country. Which we need regardless tbh, before critical thinking is completely killed off. One thing I'm looking forward to in a post-Brexit UK is that the government's failings will have to fall on the shoulders of the government - after Brexit it would be so hard for anyone to point the finger at the EU for the shit our government has failed the country in.

I wouldn't so much say he was a nice guy - he was a bit weird tbh. But nothing that'd make you stop and think "oh he's a nonce, nailed on" - just a pretty socially awkward guy.

"It's okay to stoke fear and paranoia about one group of people - but not another." What a twat.

Yeah it's utterly fucked.

Nah, he was fucking kids - the fucking vile bastard *edit* allegedly, for legal purposes

Yeah mate, Everton are minted and have been since the takeover

I've got a coworker who never showed up to work today. Turns out he was arrested over the weekend for some pretty grim shite. Pretty shocking.

The artist explained why he chose gorillas. But fucking hell, artist man, use some common sense. If monkey chants are being used to racially abuse players in Italy, perhaps it would be wise to avoid using primates in your anti-racist art.

I doubt they play in the one that’s less than 24 hours from the game they’ll certainly feature in

I was there almost a year ago on a business trip, and tbh it didn’t feel like a third world country. In some respects, it was better than the US in terms of every day shite - like well paved roads in all 3 cities I was in. Meanwhile the richest nation in the world has crumbling roads all over the country. Granted, I was in 3 massive cities - I know there’s villages and remote areas that are more like 80s & 90s China. The people I met were all quite friendly too - the ones I actually interacted with, not all the random people staring at the white guy walking around amongst them. But control of thought is very real there. If you live in China, if you’ve got an opinion on politics you keep that shit to yourself and publicly you don’t have an opinion on politics. You don’t criticise the country. And you don’t trust anybody, because the culture there is you report shit you see that looks wrong - so you keep and eye on everyone else and don’t let anyone see you fuck anything up. The party is called the Communist Party, but they’ve embraced capitalism and they’ve been rewarded with it with shitloads of money and a growing middle class that’s really changed lives for ordinary people for the better and made people happier. And at the same time, they’re still heavily oppressed and directly prohibited from free thought. But it means you should ignore the ideology listed, China is more a hyper authoritarian quasi-fascist state than anything. It’s an issue to the west when they’ve got a huge market of consumers that want to buy into our media content. But they also demand their censorship apply to the west. I think it is sad but telling that these media entities worth billions, see the prospect of more money as worth more than our values. And as Chinese censorship floods into our media, the result is our thinking will become less free as well.

I mean normally we do shit back from the warm weather training, so perhaps it being replaced with a warm weather FIFA cash grab will actually help us out.

Sadly because of how rampant nationalism is there and how effective propaganda is there... they see criticism of their government as an attack on all Chinese people (which is ridiculous because Uyghurs are Chinese). So your average every day normal Chinese guy in Beijing isn’t seeing the west as just wanting to know what the fuck is happening to the Uyghurs. Instead they see criticism of that humanitarian situation & the Hong Kong fight with democracy as western involvement into how the Chinese do things in China.

Klopp’s been trying to get knocked out of the League Cup for the last 2 rounds though. We’ve pretty clearly picked that as our lowest priority tournament - I can understand why, even though I think the CWC is stupid. The league cup doesn’t really offer prize money to most clubs in the top flight, the CWC pays out millions. Also we’ve never won the CWC, we’ve won the League Cup. This season, Klopp just don’t Carabao that competition at all.

Rees-Mogg May find himself less politically relevant soon, so that’s a silver lining.

That’s not what fascism is...

I'm a week late to this, but yeah I've broken my arm before. That doesn't really sound like the sort of pain I felt with my arm though - because your right, it really was a more constant pain until it was in a cast.

I'm so happy he's extended his contract. He's put in so many good performances for us since signing. He spent a whole season out at left back and was one of the better left backs in the league - which was incredible. Then he moved back to midfield and went back to being great in the midfield.

We sure they'll come around to realise it's the party that's been in control that's let that happen?

Fascinating is one word for it, I suppose.