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I refuse to believe anyone on here was shitting themselves that we hadn't signed anyone at the beginning of June.

Is that actually signing a player? Current status of Hot Mitch Summer:

Is all this "Newcastle have had a 25 billion rupee bid for Egil Stardust turned down by the player's current club Ulaan Bator Bastards" a direct symptom/consequence of the departure of Staveley and her sub? It sure as fuck feels like it. This isn't a plea for their return. But it wasn't fuckin like this under them. Maybe it's it prospective selling clubs and the players' no doubt cunty agents being well, cunts but the difference is night and day

HOT MITCH SUMMER STAGE TWO COMING SOON

yeah, i dunno if they'd be batshit enough to acquire a nuke, let alone launch one preemptively. not sure i agree with renton on that one, though nor would i want iran to get its hand on a nuke to test his theory re: hamas, i dunno if i'd be as charitable to describe them as cornered animal, as if they don't bear some responsibility for Israel's retaliatory strikes. i hate hamas every bit as much as i hate netanyahu. my position is this: there is zero justification for what netanyahu has done to gaza. none whatsoever. it pains me to say this as a pro-israeli, but it is ethnic cleansing. netanyahu and his cronies should stand trial for war crimes. the only longterm outcome for the next generation of israelis is more fear, insecurity and death. you can try and destroy then annex gaza but this isn't going away. his actions turned israel into a pariah state while recruiting the next generation of hamas terrorists. that's all it's achieved - along with the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians. however, hamas - and by extension iran - knew exactly what they were doing when they launched the october 7 attacks. they knew the israeli response would be brutal. the truth is khameni/netanyahu and hamas all wanted the conflict. both netanyahu and hamas need it to cling to power, which is all they care about - neither side care about the people they represent.

My assessment of Hamas was about as grim as I could make it, so I'm not sure what in there felt charitable about it. Iran I'm not saying are blameless actors in this, they should just make peace with the political reality of the situation of Israel existing whether they consider it to be fair or not - but regardless I do not see any evidence at all in how they act that they would pre-emptively launch a nuclear missile that would guarantee their own annihilation at the same time. Nothing about how they have conducted any of this suggests that would be true.

the west absolutely is responsible for khameni's grip on iran. it's the classic US-led, western imperialism playbook: get involved in a foreign conflict by arming a rebel group in a bid to access natural resources, before going to war with whatever regime emerges from the mess created by those we armed in the first place. genius

your assessment of hamas and iran is rather forgiving. hamas is a terrorist group committed to the destruction of the state of israel and are supported by iran, which also wants to wipe the "zionist entity" from the map. iran also played a significant hand encouraging hamas to launch the october 7 attacks which helped give netanyahu the political capital needed to start all of this. remember iran did so in a bid to upend the normalisation of Israel-Saudi relations and further destabilise the region, so they achieved that goal. iran has also been engaged in proxy wars in the region for decades. i deplore what nethanyahu and trump are doing now also, but let's call a spade a spade.

Am just not going to agree with you or Rayvin here. Yes, western imperialism has played a role in making the whole situation worse, but religious and sectarian wars long predate British imperialism. Some wars are motivated by resources, others by ideologies with religion a subset of that. And people who are fundamentalists in that regard will not think like you or I, that much is obvious. Self flagellate and blame the West all you want, the root cause will remain. Jews hate Arabs/persians and vice versa primarily because of their religion. From the right wing nut cases of Netanyahu's cabinet to the Ayatollahs in Iran, it is these people who seized power (yes, the west had a huge role in that). And there will never be peace as long as they are in power. But the world is increasingly rejecting enlightened thinking and turning to the easy answers offered by religion. We're fucked because of a sky fairy.

Jose Enrique is in the top 50.

I'll admit to not having read all of the details but it looks to me like the "concessions" they've made on the benefits cuts make them even bigger cunts than before if such a thing is possible. If you're already disabled then you can keep your benefits but if you get hit by a bus or get MND from now on then you'll get the reduced levels. Lovely.

The problems all stem from earlier British imperialism and more recently USA imperialism, and exploitation of resources mainly oil The West created these fundamentalists. Same as it ever was

Yes, religion used as propaganda to motivate idiots into all sorts of things, no argument there. But then so are many other things. WMDs were used to motivate idiots (such as myself at the time, young and naive as I was) into supporting the Iraq war when it was actually about consolidation of Western regional power, encirclement of Russia, and oil. NATO has been used by Putin to justify Ukraine even though he came out the other day and proclaimed that Ukraine and Russia are all one people and that the whole country belongs to him. The fact that such governments may use religion here and there does not speak to why they do any of these things, just how they ensure at least some of their support. You make a good point about how they were sensible in choosing not to be obliterated by the US. In fact, that's the same point I was making. If we can rely on them to be sensible in that situation, and we can observe that good sense, why do we say that they would suddenly throw it out of the window if they had a nuke?

For what it's worth, IMHO Iran is a fundamentalist, autocratic, theocracy. Just because it decided not to be obliterated by the US does not make it politically astute, just sensible. While i accept that both Trump and Putin are almost certainly atheist (how could anyone else be above them?) they do regularly rely on religion for motivation and probably justification. But what do I know?

Well said although I would have been interested to hear more of his rebuttal. Not much anyone can do about it now tbh.

We were interested in Elanga last year though before Forest had the season where their system seemed to click so he's obviously someone we'd been watching for longer than just one season. We as supporters may be basing everything pretty much on this last season but I've no doubts the club aren't.

If you removed all religion from the Middle East tomorrow, people would still be fighting over resources and power. The things that people actually fight over in reality. I've never understood this idea that religion is the root of all conflict when we have so much conflict coming out of the US and Russia, neither of whom are doing it for religiously motivated reasons. The US has actually used nukes on people and yet we still worry about the religious doing it. Anyone is capable of it - I don't buy for a moment that Putin wouldn't launch nukes if he was backed into a corner enough incidentally, as Syed does. He said Putin wouldn't do it for fear of being killed in response... like, what? That's not a baseline concern even I would have in certain situations, let alone someone as motivated as Putin. It's speculative nonsense that assumes all non religious people are entirely rational actors, and all religious people are not. Maybe you are right and Iran would try to destroy the world the second it gets nukes, but then surely it would be doing this already anyway, surely if it was that motivated by this issue, it would have bent itself into fully. Instead it appears to be dithering around for 3 decades and just trying to look tough. To me that seems more like a political calculation than religious fervour.

And Anderson

It’s not difficult to get a football shirt right. This is immense

I dunno, he did seem long in the face