RandoEFC

UK deaths are still high, but the case count has come down significantly over the past week or two. Yet the anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine, anti-science brigade are somehow still acting completely self-righteous about their cause, despite it being completely and utterly evident that this lockdown worked exactly as the science (and basic common sense) said it would. The mental gymnastics performed by these idiots continues to amaze. They'll happily rubbish everything said by actual virologists but as soon as one person in the WHO says "lockdowns aren't the answer to this pandemic" (in that they will drive down the infection rate but they are no substitute for a long-term strategy to balance a return to normal life with a manageable spread of the virus) it becomes their gospel. I haven't been impressed by much of what this government has done throughout the pandemic but at least at this vaccination stage, they have recognised the danger of the anti-vaxxer movement and are taking proactive action to meet it head on. I think it would be an excellent move for Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson to have the vaccine live on television to boost the confidence of all the sane people out there who have what I'd call legitimate reservations about whether the vaccine might not be as safe as it should be having been 'rushed through' so quickly. I think the rabidly stupid big government conspiracy theorists are beyond convincing so all we can do for them is look forward to hearing from the dark corners of Facebook and Twitter about how the vaccines taken by any high-ranking government officials or celebrities live on television are actually fakes or placebos. Surprisingly, the Isle of Man is getting a bunch of vaccines next week as well. I thought we'd at least have to wait a couple of weeks longer than the UK to start getting our hands on them but local government are saying that vaccinations over here could start as early as next week too.

Honestly where do you even start.

Not for the first time, thechicoazul has half of Everton and Liverpool Twitter wrapped around his little finger, along with a select few neutral fan accounts and even some actual journalists.

This has moved very quickly, well done to all involved.

That line is drawn from Watkins' elbow. If he scored with that part of his body and it was allowed to stand it would be an absolute scandal so there's no justification for drawing the line from there, and yes it also looks like he's being fouled. I think if you draw it from his forehead or shoulder it might still be offside but that shot makes it look ridiculous.

Goal line technology has a margin for error as well. The crux of the argument is the same though. People are basically complaining that the decisions they are making are too accurate. I get elements of the arguments made and I've acknowledged those but nobody can provide a better alternative than doing it by the human eye or a 5cm margin of error which basically amounts to either moving the line which causes the same problem, or "when it's close, just let one person make it up" which is what we always had in the past and it caused just as many arguments, with the added downside that the decisions were wrong much more often. There's loads of valid things to complain about in this thread, but offside goals getting correctly ruled out for offside isn't one of them.

I agree which is why I think faffing around with the offside rule is a step in the wrong direction. A better step would be to have a 'linesman camera' that follows the ball up and down the pitch so that the VAR can look at the screenshot that is actually looking across the pitch instead of diagonally.

Standings after Round 2 of Last Man Standing 2020-21 @Viva la FCB hits the front with @RandoEFC, @...Dan and @DeadLinesman in close attention. Pressure on @Stan to get on the board in Round Three as he is the only one not to score any points in the opening two rounds.

I certainly intend to.

I WISH TO REPORT A MURDER.

What do you actually think this solves apart from allowing a couple of offside goals scored by your team recently to stand? It just changes it into an argument about what qualifies as clear and obvious instead. The lines thing is imperfect but at least it's rooted in some sort of scientific approach. Changing it into some sort of fluffy, undefined "naked eye" criteria just opens it up to more inconsistency because you know with our current referees and probably any set of human beings that you can show them a marginal offside call and they'd be split down the middle on whether it's onside or offside. The offside rule itself is about the only thing in football that is clearly defined. It's literally the last thing you need to be fucking around with. There are countless problems with VAR and officiating in the Premier League, I just can't see this suggestion at all that we should start introducing grey areas to one of the only black and white rules in football, it's ridiculous. The sooner we all admit that we're going to cry about it when it goes against us but there's no other sensible way to enforce the rule, the better. Nobody has this issue with the goal line technology. Should we start allowing goals now where all of the ball hasn't crossed all of the line but it looked like it did "to the naked eye"? A line is a line, that really is all there is to it.

Offside is offside. If you want goals that are less than 3mm offside to be allowed then you're only moving the line and then when you have a goal disallowed for being 3.2mm offside you'll be getting your Kleenex out again. The offside rule is the offside rule. The way you have to wait for VAR to celebrate a goal now is a problem I don't contest but the offside rule itself is about the only rule in football that makes sense and doesn't need changing. Whether or not the technology can reliably enforce the offside rule with 100% accuracy is another debatable issue. Personally I don't think it can but there's always going to be a margin of error, whether you try and give the benefit of doubt to the attacker up to a certain threshold or you accept the current use of the technology. As much as nobody wants to see goals getting chalked off for any excuse, in this instance there has at least been a bit of consistency in how they're enforcing the offside rule. It's not high praise but it's happened to a lot of teams. As for the number of offsides against Liverpool. We've been hearing for years as an explanation of why teams like them and Man Utd get so many penalties from fans of those clubs is that it's only because they spend more time in the opposition box and their players are harder to tackle or drawing a foul or whatever. If that's an acceptable reason then you also have to acknowledge that a team that goes on the attack more often like this Liverpool side does is also going to get caught offside more often. All I've read about the Salah goal since yesterday is "his toe was offside" or "he was only just offside". If his toe, which he can score with, is offside, then he is offside, that is the rule, that has always been the rule, with or without VAR. This is how lines work. Your problem isn't with the rule, it's with the false hope you get from the flag staying down. So yeah, just about everything surrounding the implementation of VAR is again flawed and impacts on the experience of the fans but in this instance the rule itself should be left well alone and I don't think this one thing is actually affecting results in an unfair way.

I think it clearly has. All the numbers are pointing to the infections falling again at about the time you'd expect. Deaths are probably peaking again now but should fall back away soon. It's hard to see how you balance it going forward so you can keep the numbers lower like the summer without having constant lockdown on, lockdown off. Hopefully the vaccinations are the silver bullet people have hoped for.

I have to say on this tiers business, that I don't think the government can really win. Of course it's unfair that if your town is fine and the next town over is rampant with Covid that you have to be locked down still as well, but didn't they try and do the lockdowns heavily localised before, and it didn't work? Now they're trying to make the restrictions more of a blanket thing, they're going to get slated either way aren't they? Not that I have any sympathy for them or any faith in their management of this whole thing.

That's shit, and yes he's a key player. Good chance for Nkounkou to impress.

Polling showed that roughly half of Trump voters thought the election was rigged so that's some 37 million people who don't believe that Biden is the legitimate president unless that sample is way off.

It's abysmal, Economics is an option subject at GCSE and A Level, which means the majority of school leavers never study it at all. Even those who take it at GCSE learn very little that's applicable to the real world aside the broad strokes of supply and demand, trade and a few definitions. Understanding a but about economics and more broadly, politics, is pretty important if you're armed with a vote that can impact the lives of everyone in the country. Most schools teach PSHE or something similar, it was called Life Skills when I was a student. It covers stuff like healthy living, substance abuse, safe sex, relationships, mental health, employability, basically things that are quite important if you're alive and you want to stay alive and not have a shit life. I'd be very much in support of them throwing a vague understanding of democracy, politics and how the world works in there as well. So many people in the UK are pretty much born into their political views at the moment either through their family's preexisting loyalties or where they are geographically. We're not much of a nation for thinking for ourselves and thinking about what we read or hear before believing it.

This letter is the type that'll appear as a source in a history/politics textbook or exam. It's done the rounds so many times now but it remains poignant.

As much as I've reached a point of being pretty unsympathetic towards those dwelling on Corbyn's leadership as some sort of "days of yore", he and his team did come the closest to what I've ever seen towards shifting that discourse. 99% of the public have no idea how commonplace some of the policies he was proposing are across Europe and the world. People don't even know what socialism means in this country and how completely different it is to communism/marxism because anything that involves wealth redistribution in this country has Telegraph, Mail, Sun, Express screaming in unison about communism and the nasty Labour Party stealing your money. One of the standout moments of the election last year was the bloke on Question Time who was absolutely furious that his tax was increasing. He said Labour were lying because tax would only increase for the top 5% of earners, might even have been 1%. The guy said he was on £80,000 a year or something, he was in the top 5% and he was absolutely convinced that he couldn't possibly be. A huge part of the nation has been convinced that everyone else is better off than them. It does my head in when people argue that people who make millions deserve to make millions. You can argue that they do, but they don't need to keep 70% instead of 68% and it's a mentality I'll never understand thinking that those people keeping more of their salary for the sake of making it a meritocracy is more important than making sure that those who come from the most unfortunate backgrounds at least don't have to fork out their earnings for education and healthcare which should be perceived as a basic right in a developed country like the UK.

And on Patel, who has already been sacked from government once for breaking the ministerial code, who has now broken the ministerial code again according to the independent review, but not of course according to Boris Johnson, the question has to become: What do you actually have to do as a part of this government to face some sort of consequence? Cummings breaks lockdown rules and undermines the public health strategy mid-pandemic? Acceptable. Jenrick takes a bribe from Tory donor Desmond to save him millions on his planning project? Acceptable. Williamson completely bungles the primary school reopening project back in June then completely bungles the exam results in the summer? Acceptable. Bullying your underlings in the Home Office? Acceptable but you get a written warning for this one. Refer to Johnson's missus as "Princess Nut Nuts"? Out on your arse.

My response to the public sector pay freeze on its own is that actually, it's fair enough, especially if the NHS is exempt. I'm obviously biased on this but I do think the education sector should be exempt as well. We had to learn how to teach kids through the internet overnight in March, got slated for it if we didn't get it right immediately, then were asked to decide which of our exam students should get certain qualifications without sitting an exam, had our professional judgement slated (unless you work at Eton in which case the grades you provided were definitely accurate) until the cabinet did their u-turn, and have had to completely reinvent the logistics of running a school and timetabling to keep them open after the summer and through this second lockdown. Luckily for me, I'm not under the direct jurisdiction of the UK government's public sector pay policy so financially it doesn't impact me, but that's not what I'm arsed about, it's the disrespect of the sacrifices made by the public sector over the past year. Yes, we're very lucky to have the job security where thousands of others have been made redundant, but apart from the front doorstep clap virtue signalling, any hopes that government and public attitudes towards public sector workers would be improved after seeing how badly the private sector falls to pieces without hospitals, schools, policing, etc., has been sadly misplaced. Time to buckle up for another decade of teachers being labelled Antifa activists by mainstream newspapers with comments like "those that can, do, those that can't, teach" by red-faced morons who wouldn't last an hour in a classroom themselves. Anyway, back to the pay-freeze, all of this furlough money has to come from somewhere, it's just the reality of the economics behind this thing. There will be complaining but due to the nature of most health, education and other public sector workers, I think most of us will understand that we need to accept this as a part of doing our bit to get the country out of debt after all of the spending this year. I get it, but it's the timing again. The amount they've announced in extra spending on the defence budget just yesterday as some sort of show of strength, whether that's literal military strength or "look how much I'm investing in our country" financial strength, now looks ridiculous if they're going to come out the next day and say "sorry public sector, we all have to make sacrifices in these difficult times, we just don't have enough in the treasury to give you the annual pay rise this year". You can't have it both ways without drawing criticism but yes, they'll probably get away with it because 50% or more of the print media will say nothing on the matter and the public are so well trained nowadays to see everything through the lens of "us vs them" that there won't be many outside the public sector who will bat an eyelid at the news.

Then announced this morning that there's a pay freeze for the public sector, including all of the health workers who worked through the pandemic, and the rest.

https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1329337568517894149?s=19 This whole video is funny but watch to the end for the real kicker.

Unless it's proved that he himself was anti-semitic after he retracted his comments about the EHRC report, I don't think you can justify leaving him out of the party. In or out, Labour just need to move on and get on with it.