Inverted

I'm still ambivalent about whether any new restrictions are needed, but I have noted quite surprisingly that my girlfriend's family are becoming a bit more relaxed about covid. Most surprisingly, her dad, having been extremely cautious about covid and supportive of maximal restrictions, is coming around to the idea that in the long run we may just need to bite the bullet with Omicron and hope improved treatments and vaccines can keep it manageable. He's also got a mum who's almost 100, and he himself is immunocompromised due to past surgery, so he has more at stake personally than many people. I am allowing myself some hope that within 2022 we perhaps reach a stage that covid is mild enough and our treatments are good enough that we can actually move into a kind of permanent normalisation of life with covid.

I'm in the UK, but I got Moderna for my first two and then a Pfizer booster. I think almost all of the jabs in the UK were Astra-Zenica and Pfizer, and then a relatively small number of Modernas.

My symptoms from the booster are a bit more varied and longer-lasting than from the first two. The pain in the arm is a bit less mild but has lasted two days so far, and yesterday morning after the jab, I woke up at 5am feeling a little unwell - sweating, drowsy, and thirsty. I seem to have got a way with almost no symptoms for the first two, so maybe I was just the opposite way round from other people.

I think we were briefly on a decent track with rolling out the boosters, keeping some mild restrictions and masks/distancing in place, and beginning to introduce vaccine passports. The restrictions were easy enough to live with that people couldn't complain too much, and they were much better than nothing. The vaccine passports were slowly bringing us toward a stage where we could set aside spaces where people could crowd together without worrying about the unvaccinated. Pretty much everyone except dedicated anti-vaxxers in turn felt that getting the boosters was worth it to keep us on that track. Whatever consensus existed now seems to be coming apart. Most people are still in favour of some restrictions and support the booster drive, but a very large segment of the population, if not a majority, is also opposed to closing down any further. There's a very big and uneasy overlap, I feel.

Got my booster this morning. Woke up early and walked to the centre for my 8:30 appointment, and ended up joining a queue stretching halfway round the building. I'm a big believer in the boosters being worthwhile and even I questioned for a moment if I really wanted to stand in the dark, in the 1c cold, wait, and be late for work to get my jab. Especially when we are likely going straight into lockdown anyway. And if I wasn't lucky enough to have a job where I can start late and just compensate at the end of the day, I wouldn't have stayed.

I'm quite concerned that any effort to reintroduce lockdown measures is going to lead to complete rejection of the whole pandemic response. The response is too incomplete and arbitrary to really be taken seriously, and people are smart enough to remember last year, when a tiny circuit-breaker turned into almost a whole extra year of complete lockdown. People are really starting to feel like they're being taken for a ride. You run the risk that a lot of people think "what's the point in getting the booster if it doesn't avoid lockdowns?". And then we are really going to be in trouble. Even I started to feel a bit unbothered for a while about getting my booster, although I eventually managed to get an appointment. My girlfriend got hers from her dad, since both of her parents are GPs, and they were all confused as to why I hadn't gotten mine yet - they didn't fully understand that most people don't know any doctors, and normal people have to book appointments and might be limited in choice of timeslots by work, etc. Which, although they meant well, I think is the kind of attitude from the professional middle-class that I think illustrates the whole divide between the kind of people who make the decisions, and the normal people who need to live with those decisions.

Historically, in most countries, Middle England types are exactly who far-right movements draw their core support from. Nazism for example was sustained in its early days by a very intense, disproportionately middle-class following - respectable people like minor professionals and small business owners. Not that these people are as bad as Nazis or even close. The most commited believers in far-right conspiracism are generally people who are sufficiently low down that they can feel oppressed by someone, but just high up enough that they don't want to be treated like the rest of the rabble.

I can imagine Aubameyang wearing people thin but at the same time this Arsenal management seem to have made a habit of picking fights with players for the sake of coming off strong and authoritative. And despite freezing out a large chunk of the former squad it’s evidently not worked a bit if the club captain is still taking the piss.

It looks like Havertz is coming into his own a bit as a centre forward. I remember thinking he would be ideal as a Firmino-type striker and it looks like Tuchel likes him in that role.

Markus Anfang? More like Markus... Ende.

If Poch only has a 2-year deal with PSG then it seems quite plausible that United could get him mid-season with a long-term, 4 or 5 year deal which at least matches his wages. Meanwhile, PSG can get Zidane, who walks into the exact kind of job he likes.

Its funny thinking back to a time when I was actually envious of Ireland internationally. I was even genuinely annoyed that Scottish players like James McCarthy chose to play for them, because I thought that around 2015 he would easily improve our midfield. These days, we are struggling to accommodate Gilmour, McGregor, McTominay, McGinn and Armstrong in that position. Not to mention young players like Lewis Ferguson and David Turnbull who could easily develop into quality internationals.

It depends on how active an issue independence remained after a hypothetical split. The SNP is an ideological mess because so many people who are personally to it’s left and right hold their nose and support it purely to achieve Indy. Likewise, the Tory vote includes a lot of people who vote Tory purely to try and keep the SNP out. I think if the pro-Indy conservative Alba party types and the right-wing of the Conservative party could perhaps coalesce, then you would have a proper Scottish right-wing party. But I also think there would be a larger move to the left. Many left-leaning people who support the SNP for tactical reasons would probably move to other, less centrist parties once Indy was achieved.

I think for a lot of young people, there is an acknowledgement of the fact that there will be an immediate economic hit. But I think this is largely outweighed by a really sincere fear that the future of the UK is going to be a long, slow slide away from democracy and a constant worsening of social conditions. It's a difficult question because fundamentally different questions are at play. People tend to talk past each other because their priorities are just completely different. Is an overall hit to living standards worth a more engaged democracy and safer rule of law? Could the economic hit be made-up for within our lifetimes? Is there any hope of the UK turning course and developing in a direction which Scottish people can accept? Not to mention that depending on the economic policies pursued, actual living standards for many people could be improved even while indicators such as GDP growth falter. GDP growth doesn't always mean things are improving for normal people, and vice-versa. One issue is that the SNP seems like they would pursue the route of austerity and fiscal conservatism, which I think would exacerbate the economic hit. But I think most young people aren't overly supportive of the SNP in terms of its actual economic policies, but just accept them as a tool for achieving independence.

It really baffles me that Gary Neville is (and was) also absolutely insistent that Mourinho was one of the top few managers in the world when he was at United. Which is just nonsense. Even if some people genuinely thought he was at a time, because you could maybe turn a blind eye to his Chelsea implosion, then at the very least you can say in hindsight that Mourinho was distinctly not world class anymore. I mean, for a lot of people it isn't hindsight - because they could see that Mourinho's way of playing was already becoming outdated even when he was still getting away with it at Chelsea. Neville looks back at that, and how United played in those seasons after he was signed, and still somehow thinks Mourinho was world class in 2016. He has completely bought-into the hype of that era. The real lesson should be "We thought we got a world class manager, but he actually wasn't anymore. Ergo, we should go look harder for a world class manager, or a potentially world class manager on the way up". Neville ends up with "He really was a world class manager, and he didn't work for some mystical reason. Ergo, we should purposefully stick with bad managers, because Manchester United is cursed for good managers, or something".

I don't see why they didn't just sell him. Bayern were obviously a lot more convinced about his quality than Chelsea are, and Chelsea are stacked enough in the forward/attacking midfield positions.

I’ve been really curious to read Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs”. He wrote an introduction for the edition of Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid” I have, which was really interesting, and I’ve been meaning to read more of him since.

Maybe Texas should teach both sides of their own independence story? Namely, that the founding Texans were slavedriving outlaws and traitors, and Santa Anna was the good guy.

Can't believe the guy who coaches the team every day and picks the line-ups has been made the fall guy for the team playing like shit all the time.

To me, the fundamental issue is that getting CL has become too important. Ideally, there would be a group of clubs challenging for top-4 every season, and it becomes normal to occasionally miss-out and bounce back in. But the thing is that the importance of the CL has shifted from being at least partly a matter of prestige and attractiveness to being purely financial in its importance. The self-reinforcing effect of getting to the Group Stage is just too powerful. Planning for many clubs is so dependent on the CL money that to hold onto it is no big feat, but to lose it has a huge impact. I actually think that qualifying for the CL has went from being a positive aspiration to a negative one, in how the involved clubs view it. It's not really thought of as something you achieve, but rather something you miss-out on.

A Christmas gift I haven’t got round to reading until now.

I know a couple of people who have each had an elderly relative (88 and 92years old) catch Covid in the last few months, and both pulled through ok. It's anecdotal but I suppose it illustrates what the vaccines do best. I would have imagined if either of them had been infected in the initial wave when there was no vaccine, one or both of them likely wouldn't have pulled through.

There's something that makes me think Conte would weirdly like taking over a club which is almost starting from scratch and is ready to revamp the whole squad. Normally the put-off is that there are too many players at a club who don't fit his system, and almost nobody wants to rebuild their entire squad to the whim of an uncompromising, hyper-competitive psycho who plays 3-5-2.