RandoEFC

Bloody Spurs

When does the question get genuinely asked about Ange? I don't think it's controversial to say that an unpopular or unglamorous manager would be the subject of a lot more media scrutiny with the same results.

Watching Forest do so well is a sickener. We did the double over them last season and finished ahead of them despite a points deduction. They've not made many notable signings or changed manager. Big things can happen if you come into a new season without a mentality of already being resigned to a relegation fight, and a manager who is actually capable of progressing a group of players. Slightly lower in the table but the same applies to Brentford almost word for word. Both have pretty much already guaranteed safety while we look forward to another season of being allergic to anything above 15th in the league. We have a horrible schedule coming up throughout December and it'll be a miracle if we manage to cause a single upset. Dyche will have the mentality that we expect to lose to all of the top teams. The chances you see us do what Forest did at Anfield, what Bournemouth did to City, what Ipswich are doing at Spurs this afternoon, are the lowest of any club in the league.

Fucking hell Spurs.

There's a difference between saying Liverpool are favourites and saying it's a done deal. For me it's probably Liverpool 45%, Man City 40% and Arsenal 15% or something like that.

City never kick into gear until they're 6+ points off it anyway .

Brighton will fancy this match I think. If City drop points here and Liverpool win later I think Liverpool take over as favourites for the league to be honest.

Missed parts of the second half but looks like it continued in the same vein. Not a bad point but not a good one either. We've now played Ipswich, Bournemouth, West Ham, Southampton, Leicester, Palace and Fulham and only managed 2 wins.

Diabolical lack of quality on display from both sides. We've been the better team but we don't know how to create chances outside of set pieces. Similar to the Southampton game so I expect we'll end up losing 1-0 again. Lopetegui surely won't make it to Christmas. How he's got West Ham playing this poorly and short of confidence with some of the players he has at his disposal I don't know.

£10 > £20.90

Lose this and I think over 99% of our fanbase will be united in wanting Dyche out. He deserves credit for keeping us up the last two seasons but this season he's the main cause of us having to worry about relegation in the first place. He's entering his Allardyce era now where he knows he isn't going to be offered a new contract at the end of this season so it's self-preservation. He's done enough in his time at Everton to paint a good picture of himself because he talks a good game. We did win at West Ham last season though so hopefully we can repeat it and chug along for a bit longer.

One factor amongst many but I've seen a few people point stuff like this out. You could see it in the UK elections as well where a lot of people voted for Reform, Lib Dem or other third parties. A lot of Western economies are just in a bit of a shit state at the moment and have been for long enough that people are increasingly fed up of what they see of "the establishment" or whoever has been in charge, regardless of whether they're left, right, centrist. The whole capitalist/neo-liberal thing just isn't really equipped for the simultaneous challenges posed by post-Covid economic recovery, climate and various wars affecting supply of important goods.

There was a steady improvement in the polls for Harris for about a month following Biden's dropping out, possibly more. She was a narrow favourite for a while and then she stalled and over the past 4-6 weeks the polls and betting markets started moving back in Trump's favour, and then it went slightly back to Harris in the final week but Trump was still a narrow favourite. Whether the polling would have followed the same pattern if he'd dropped out closer to the election, and whether that would have translated into actual votes, I'm not sure. You can make the case but I don't think changing candidate less than a month before the election day would have been a winning strategy.

She lost across the board though, with all demographics, men, women, Muslims, whites, Latinos, blacks. You might be right about Michigan but that's one state. There were other issues in Georgia, Pennsylvania, etc. I just can't see anything remotely socially democratic succeeding in the USA. It would be interesting to see it tried though.

This is true but when the "left option" is just not aggressively right wing, the energy with which this is done is a lot lower than when the "left option" actually dares to flirt with a bit of mild social democracy. Again, see the media establishment treatment of Corbyn in the UK vs. its treatment of Starmer. In both of those instances, the opponent and the biggest head-bangers in the media continued to pursue the Marxist/Communist line but it doesn't get nearly as much traction in the mainstream. I know Harris will have lost voters to Jill Stein or other third parties because of her stance on Israel as part of the previous administration. There was some Harris > Trump movement among Muslim voters though apparently which is baffling. The problem is that any leader of the US that breaks from the pro-Israel status quo might save 20k Muslim votes here and there but they'll take serious damage elsewhere. You're not wrong I just can't take the smug leftie posturing on "well if only Kamala Harris hadn't committed such a big genocide". Those voters are perfectly entitled to use their vote as a protest. Yep, shite.

Another prominent left wing UK politician who played a role in the Corbynite Labour Party who offered a "radical, positive vision" that led the electorate to hand an 85 seat majority to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, who has convinced herself that people are voting for Trump over Harris out of their solidarity for Palestine. Maybe left-wing politics would have more success if our most prominent left-wing politicians didn't come out with such moronic nonsense.

I like John McDonell but this is exactly what I'm talking about. This guy was part of a Labour Party that put forward a genuine centre-left agenda that was emphatically rejected in the UK, and the US is largely more right-wing than the UK. You don't have the answers here buddy. We can all eulogise about the world we want to live in but you have to be realistic about what you can actually convince people to vote for. It's a crying shame actually that his section of the Labour Party weren't in charge in the UK for the last election because the deep unpopularity of our Conservative government is the sort of exceptional circumstance you need to get a proper centre-left party into power in countries like ours, and it's probably one of the only elections in our lifetimes that they could have won and shown people what actual progressive policies can do for them. He's right about people feeling the improvement in quality of life but again, the idea that Biden/Harris being more left-wing helping them electorally is a nonsense.

The problem with this analysis is that people who come out with it are invariably people who lean further to the left than the nominal "left" option. The Labour Party tried an offer to people who needed it most under Jeremy Corbyn and suffered their worst defeat in decades. There has to be some realism here. People haven't voted for Trump over Harris because Harris and the Democrats weren't socialist enough. Personally, I'd love the UK to have a genuine socially democratic left-leaning offer to vote for but the evidence says that the electorate at large, in the UK and in the US, just don't have the appetite for it. Sometimes we have to step back and just admit that there's a large number of people in the US who actually like the inflammatory, faux strong-man character with undertones of white male supremacy and despotic fascism that Donald Trump plays, and that there's a bunch of low-information swing voters who see nothing beyond "my groceries are more expensive than they were 4 years ago and I'm mad about it so I'm voting for the other guy again" and a "not nice" way of describing this is calling them stupid or idiots when uninformed would be more accurate. It seems unthinkable to us very online people who find Trump's antics shocking that these people exist but go and look on Twitter to see how many Americans searched "who is Donald Trump" and "did Joe Biden drop out" and "who is Kamala Harris" on search engines over the last 48 hours to see that they exist. The Democrats have clearly made a litany of errors. Joe Biden should have dropped out much earlier and they should have had a genuine contest to determine who should have run instead, but there's no way that someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC running on a socialist agenda and promising to be the saviour of the Palestinians would have ended any better for them. Any time Labour in the UK or Democrats in the US dare to go any further to the left than they currently are, they get labelled as communist traitors by 90% of the media and the fight is over before they've begun.

Currently going into next season with all of these provisional guesses coming true. Jack Doohan is going to be Gasly's team-mate at Alpine. Sauber have announced today that both Bottas and Zhou are leaving the team. Bortoleto is due to be announced as Hulkenberg's team-mate. We could still see some Red Bull shenanigans though. The latest rumours have linked Colapinto to the Red Bull family. Presumably this would mean either Tsunoda or Lawson replacing Perez and Colapinto driving for the junior team.

Great result for Russia. Terrible for Ukraine and potentially other Eastern European countries. As bad as Biden/Harris were on Israel, Netanyahu will be very happy with this result as well. Western voters get stupider and stupider. All we can hope now is good old Father Time gets rid of Trump, Putin and Netanyahu for us as soon as possible to give a remote chance of the biggest global causes of dead children across the world to just maybe be replaced by something better. Europe has to get serious about its own defence now. The days of the US being a reliable ally are behind us. Yet another day in history today where Brexit somehow looks even stupider and more damaging than it did at the time.

For fucks sake.

Liverpool have been very good again. There's been some serious farmers league defending from Leverkusen for some of these goals though .

Gyokeres is a beast. It's a funny thought how many United fans will be watching their new manager and the striker they may well bring to the club with him beating Man City and taking it as a sign that they're going to be anything other than managerless and still shit in another 18 months .

I know America isn't great, and for a proper leftie or anyone who thinks Israel has crossed the line by about 200 million miles, etc. (okay any normal person), Harris and the Democrats aren't perfect or even particularly good, but I really don't like the "they're all shit" narrative. Harris is nowhere near as bad as Trump for the USA or the rest of the Western world at the end of the day. If you don't like her then fine, but come on, if someone offered me the choice of stubbing my toe or having my feet chopped off then my response wouldn't be "well they're both just horrible!"