Inverted

Just finished these two, currently close to finishing this off: Not usually big on poetry but I'm really enjoying Milton. There are lots of lines that really stick with you, even after just one or two reads. "The mind is its own realm, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, and a hell of heav'n" (Think that's how it goes, at least)

It's fucking mental. All of the UK governments are guilty of the same flaw of being shit scared of upsetting people, all the while introducing half-measures that blatantly insult people's common sense. Yes, people don't want restrictions on their life, but they'll much more readily accept being told "don't meet up with your mates indoors", than "don't meet them at home, but go see them in the pub so long as you pretend you all live within 3 households for our sham track-and-trace system". The mind grasps absolutes a lot more easily than half measures. And I can say for sure that a lot of people I know who were previously very observant, even paranoid, about the measures, have stopped taking them seriously for that reason.

Officially one week done as a trainee solicitor. My brain has felt pretty fried at times but overall my colleagues are pretty supportive and patient. I'm also going to be working from home mostly so I don't always need to get up at 5am for the Glasgow-Edinburgh commute.

All that's happened is that everything implicit within UK education has been made explicit. The unis, for all their talk of a "holistic" approach to admissions, will be rushing to send their condolences before slamming the door on all those "unsuccessful" students from poorer areas that they grudgingly made conditional offers to.

Watching Normal People on BBC iplayer right now. First time I've got into a drama series in ages. Idk how much it would extend, but for someone just recently out of university, coming from a working class background, dealing with relationship issues both romantic and social, it's amazingly realistic and relatable. The acting, the script, direction, and the cinematography all just combines to make it feel so vividly like that time of your life.

I went into the middle of town today and had a sit-down lunch for the first time in 5 or 6 months. I enjoyed it, doing something so normal after so long. But in hindsight it feels wrong, like everything has just went too much back to normal too quickly. People are mostly trying to distance, and wearing masks, but I just don't see how this leads anywhere but another spike. I certainly don't see us reaching elimination or near-elimination.

Britain's elite institutions foster a vicious breed of pederasts, rapists, crooks and mediocrities, and the Tory party gives them a direct pipeline into government.

The system benefits from Henderson. City won the league practically without De Bruyne, whereas Liverpool noticeably dipped whenever forced to go without Henderson. Henderson in the right of Liverpool's midfield is largely what has enabled TAA and Salah to have the outstanding seasons they have had - he's the one they combine with, the right-sided defensive cover, and also the one who often stretches the play out right.

I think there are Liverpool players who could have gotten it, but I disagree with any outrage over De Bruyne not getting it. His figures are ridiculous but he's become a bit of a system player for City - play a combination with the right-winger, get the ball in the right-hand channel, curl a cross to the backpost, assist. When it works he can easily get a goal and multiple assists in a game, and when it's not working he looks a bit lost. He's much like an encapsulation of City in general, the stats are padded out by lots of meaningless demolitions, and they gloss over many key moments where they came up short. Henderson is nowhere near as talented a player but he's entrusted with responsibility to pick the team up and push them forward, to do something unexpected in tough games, and he delivers. He thrives in a much more difficult role, for a better team.

I'm not denying that it might be a savvy political decision, but it doesn't make it any easier to watch a shower of liars and racists waltz off with hard-earned members' cash. And Corbyn is now being sued for pointing out the basic fact that it was a political decision to settle. There is very little factfinding or reason going around here, just dirty politicking and bullying. Edit: Also nobody had touched on the irony that in an era of hysteria, over far-left ultra-woke destruction of free speech, the reality on the ground is that those with wealth use their resources to relentlessy hound and litigate left-wing figures into silence. If cancel culture exists in any real way, then Jeremy Corbyn is objectively the biggest victim of it in the UK.

Starmer was scared of any court proceedings dragging the furore over the Panorama documentary out over time, even if the party ended up winning. And they had been advised thet the party had a good chance of doing so. So basically the party has decided to settle, in principle accepting that all the Jewish party members who fought for a GE win, should apologise to the treacherous cranks who purposefully sabotaged disciplinary proceedings against anti-semites. Here's the idiotic, transparent plan which has now somehow worked: 1. Express concerns over the new leader's anti-semitism. 2. Purposefully bury and delay disciplinary proceedings against anti-semites using your positions in the party. 3. Send some people to the BBC as "whistleblowers" about Labour antisemitism, conveniently not mentioning that they are affiliated with the rebels within the party who are paralysing the disciplinary system. 4. Sue the party for correctly insinuating that the whistleblowers are affiliated with those paralysing the investigations of anti-semitism. 5. Shit yourself when texts are leaked which essentially prove points 1-4, and the lawyers advise you have little chance. 6. Laugh all the way to the bank after the party decides it doesn't want to defend itself, drops its case and all it's evidence against you, and chucks some money at you to fuck off.

King Gizz dropped a new track so naturally I've been listening to that all day.

The collective mind and conscience of this country is just rotten. A kind of national dementia has set in. I've swung from pro-union to pro-indy and I can't sum up my reasoning any better than that. I just don't see the potential for anything good to happen anymore with British politics. There's nothing left but saccharine sentimentality, pathetic anti-intellectualism, and deference to the wealthy. We're all going to be poorer anyway with Covid and Brexit, we might as well break ourselves off before the rot sets in up here.

All of Europe breathes a sigh of relief that, for the foreseeable future, this mob is kept on their island rather than being let loose onto the mainland.

I think Klopp signing that enormous contract extension was a statement of intent that he doesn't want to just milk this current team for all the trophies he can and then bail. Liverpool are stylistically quite an unusual team and the recruitment in the next few years needs to either sign direct replacements who can keep playing in that way, or change the balance of the team to adapt away from it. Signing players to replace the likes of Salah or Henderson is not extremely complicated from a stylistic point of view - there are lots of goalscoring inside forwards and energetic box-to-box midfielders to look at. But Firmino is a more tricky question, since eventually you either have to sign someone with similar qualities, which seems almost impossible, or you change how the entire attack works. Likewise with Van Dijk, there's a freakishly broad skill set which you either have to either replace with one player, or you have to adapt the whole team around.

I think the main turn-off with Werner is that he would create pressure to alter the system. For a club like Chelsea, looking to put together a top side, it obviously makes sense to go for the best players you can, and then build yourself around them. Liverpool already have a top side and I think are very wary of disturbing it, especially since in it's current state it can probably continue to perform at this level for another couple of seasons. But either this summer or the next, I think they will need to start bringing in players who could step into the shoes of the likes of Firmino, Salah or Van Dijk.

The BBC's fundamental uselessness has always been that objective reality isn't always politically neutral. If it has to dump reality or impartiality, it will be reality that's shunted out the door.

She goes from relatively calm to literally sounding like she's being murdered, in a second. She knows what police in America are capable of when a black man and a white woman are involved, and she knows exactly what the police need to hear to get a potentially lethal response. It's dangerous for people like that to be out in the world. That's just raw sociopathy.

It's honestly like they're taking the piss now. They've obviously given up on any cogent kind of justification, and if the idea is just to grit their teeth and wait it out, silence would make more sense than continually reminding everyone of how ridiculous their response is.

And he's actually had the human sense to see the reason why people are furious in that 6th paragraph. People have suffered so much exactly because they have had to suppress their instincts to be there for their family, so to then offer that as an explanation for Cummings' behaviour, and to in fact say that he behaved correctly, is to tell them that they all suffered needlessly.

There are dumb and selfish people in every country, the point of government in a time of crisis is to guide and control the population anyway. It's not an excuse. You give out a clear message, set the example from top-down, and then you can keep the number of idiots low enough to be policed. Our situation is the result of mixed messages, no example being set, and police strength being decimated past the point of keeping control. If everyone was a genius and a paragon of virtue we wouldn't need to have a state in the first place.

The thing that is also being obscured is that ever since the start of lockdown, there have always been two regimes - one for asymptomatic people, and one for symptomatic people. Asymptomatic people have always been allowed out for work, exercise, and other necessary tasks. Symptomatic people have always been told to isolate and not leave home under any circumstance. So there's no point comparing Cummings' behaviour with anyone except with what other symptomatic people did - and almost unfailingly they have isolated as instructed.

And in the Daily Mail and Spectator too, apparently.