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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

Don't know anything about the channel, it did pop into my feed and I listened to it. I don't regard Syed as a right wing nut job, and his dad was Iranian so he'll have his own viewpoint. Maybe it just reinforced my prejudice, fair enough. But nothing scares me more than fundamental religious believers with a track history in martyrdom. The tension and conflict with Saudi btw, is very much sectarian and religious motivated. People always brush away the obvious fucking elephant in the room. The problems in the ME, like countless wars and conflicts before them, all stem from religion. You have a confluence of Christians, jews, and muslims, each of many different sects. Never going to end well.

yeah, you might be right. and like i said, if elanga is howe's pick then you have to trust him. semenyo has always excited me when i've seen him. he has that maverick technical ability that maxi had but unlike him, he also puts the graft in defensively.

FYP

My concern with Elanga is he could be appearing better than he is on the basis that he's a perfect fit for Forest's system. It didn't work so well at Man United. I think a lot of what was good at Forest this last season was down to Gibbs-White. Including the effectiveness of the front three.

Thank god for the PSR rules protecting the competitive nature of the sport.

But then they could just have done it by now. No one can stop Iran developing nukes if it wants to - no one. Not Israel, not the US. The best any external entity can do is try to force regime change, but that isn't a guarantee. IMO Iran is adopting the same strategy that Sadam attempted to use - he didn't have WMDs but he didn't actually tell anyone that because it was more useful for him to be in a position whereby people assumed he was dangerous than to actually justify that perception. Iran doesn't need nukes, it just needs to look like it can be close enough to getting them at any given point for Israel to leave it the fuck alone. And the reason I'm confident that this is the strategy they're working to is that they could have had nukes by now if they really wanted them. I've done a lot of reading over the past few days about the Iranian regime and its politics, and it seems that its regional militias are worth more to it than any nuclear weapon would be. Moreover, it seems to be focused more on Saudi than Israel or the West - which I would argue supports the idea that it is a politically motivated actor, not a religiously motivated one. Triggernometry is a right wing youtube channel that talks highbrow but we wouldn't cite it in any other context. EDIT - if you don't believe me on that last point, look at their most recent videos. They've interviewed Reform's chairman, they've got another view a few days earlier talking about how Britain is a nation of immigrants, South African farm murders, yet another video on immigration into the UK, the end of wokeism, how the left is to blame for creating the right, another video on UK immigration... that's going back 1 month. That's the sort of channel this is, and the one you're aligning yourself with on this point. Maybe they're right, but I don't know why I should believe they are based on the nonsense of the rest of their channel.