Rayvin

What is even the point in bringing these people onto the show, it always goes like this. None of them can speak on behalf of the PM, they don't have the details, blah blah, what is the fucking point.

Aye - and given that we seemingly walked away from a lot of those deals, the reality is that clubs like Man Utd have actually shot themselves in the foot. They could have had £5 or 6m for a player who they won't use and will lose on a free at the end of the season. And now? They're paying the wages of a player they won't use and will lose on a free, possibly to us, at the end of the season. If we stay up, they're the fools in that picture.

Why have they let him go? Villa aren't that much better a side than we are so I'm a bit unsure on this particular signing. We've definitely done enough overall to turn our fortunes around though, hopefully we can make some real headway now.

As an aside to all this, I assume that Johnson has survived yet again? Seems to have gone quiet on that front at least as far as leadership challenges go.

Burn for £13m sounds absolutely fine to me. He knows the league, is better than anything we've got, and would come down to the champ with us if worst came to worst. I mean if we go down after this window we're going to kick seven shades out of the championship at this rate.

I can never get my head around what is meant to be threatening about transwomen in female changing rooms. If someone is going to assault a woman in a changing room, they don't need to change their entire gender to do it. There aren't armed guards at the door, they could just go in and do it. Transwomen are not predators, they're just people. Predators exist, but they are no more or less likely to be trans than they are to be any other demographic. Including non-trans women, I might add. What frustrates me in particular about this is it buys into this notion that biological men have absolutely no ability to control themselves around women. That if you put a half naked woman in front of any man, it takes everything in his power not to rape her. That is the only reason anyone could possibly imagine transwomen would be some kind of threat in female changing rooms, because testosterone is still a factor in pre-op and therefore they can't control themselves. I doubt that anyone on here would find it difficult not to rape someone if they strayed into a female changing room, so why do we assume transwomen are incapable of the same thing? That's before we even get onto the fact that a lot of them aren't into other women at all. I'm not going to get further drawn on this but it's really a sad one to read because I know many trans people and they're all very kind and compassionate folk who just want to live their damn lives.

Well the last page on here has been pretty depressing.

What evidence did the alternative media have that Covid was manmade?

Well, true, but I'm talking more about the receipt of information with that post rather than giving it. If you're already a nazi then the argument doesn't make much difference anymore, but the reason censorship is needed is to stop you infecting other people's minds - and the risk there comes from a large number of people in our society being so poorly equipped to differentiate between well thought out views, and total nonsense. I have a hard time believing that a hypothetical 'neutral' person who is well equipped with critical thinking and reasoning skills, could be incorporated by stealth into supporting fascist views in the way that the alt right took in many young men off the backs of wider movements like antifeminism.

Agree but again, this is where you build up critical thinking. Ok so, example, my aunt is in her mid/late 60s and is a complete fruitcake IMO. She more or less 'discovered' the internet about 5 years ago and since then has attempted to argue with me on several occasions that the Pope is heading up a New world order, that aliens are already here pretending to be humans, and that you can see evidence of aliens and occult stuff in all sorts of art and religious items over the course of the centuries. We're talking full on assassin's creed storyline here. She is not equipped with sufficient critical thinking skills to discern fact from fiction. She opens a website, finds that it vaguely agrees with whatever bias one has to have to believe in alien conspiracies, and runs with it. As far as she's concerned, what she has read is absolute fact and she will not be told otherwise. Because she saw it on the internet. That's an extreme example, but it's a really good representation of the problem. Yes, no source of information is untainted, but if you or I read the same information sources as she has, we would come out with, I believe, some pretty healthy scepticism around it. Now, if this piece of research that she's basing her view on had been a peer reviewed piece of work that is widely supported by most of the world's experts in related fields, that would go quite a long way to convincing me that I would need to give it a serious look - but I would still engage with it using a critical mindset so that I could make peace with the concept logically. Even if it upset my worldview (which has happened to me before). My aunt can't do that. She's not a 'stupid person' in the sense that she has had a fairly successful life, worked, had a family etc - but she fundamentally lacks the emotional maturity to challenge what she wants to be true with the most rational and logical interpretation of reality. And while her delusions are harmless, many others end up in the same position in support of much more harmful ideologies. Those ideologies need to be censored or controlled in some form specifically because people like my Aunt exist.

Ah fair. Is that before the proposed Sunderland takeover then? Must be surely, although I can't quite remember how long ago that was. Wonder if they're still partners in some form or another.

Still effectively an echo chamber though - censorship is important in places IMO, because we have too many people who can't be trusted to engage in proper critical thinking. It's a bad solution, I agree, but it is a solution. In the same way that democracy is a bad solution, but is still a solution. The better option would be to develop critical thinking skills from an early age so that people learn to understand what a reliable source is, what persuasive writing looks like, how to recognise their own bias, etc. If you had that, in a robust enough system, then you could get to the point where you don't need censorship - because ordinary people could be trusted not to swallow things that aren't necessarily true. There is no political flavour to this post incidentally, it applies in every direction IMO.

Unbelievable By which I mean, so completely believable/predictable that I'm wondering if I've strayed into that funny pictures thread and jumped the gun again. Fucking made for each other.

As the junior member of the modding team, this one is above my paygrade Suggest you drop MF a line about it

Guilty, although less so these days. Not a 1v1 player really, mostly stick to 3s. What's your rank?

I always think of this webcomic when people talk about debate and so on - explains why people are so resistant to changing their minds: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe For my two cents on it, I think everyone knows everyone else's positions now anyway. I wouldn't go on Grimes' show either, but if I did, I'm fairly sure the entire structure of the discussion would be set up in such a way that I would not be able to get any sort of point across and that my data and evidence based arguments would be dismissed. He's not intelligent enough to have an honest debate with, certainly not a public one. It'd be like that saying "never argue with idiots, they'll bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience". I would further add, never argue with anyone who isn't prepared to change their mind.

Which industry are you in, out of interest?

Aye, sorry about that.

Fair comment but I reckon it's in part down to the fact that half the time most of the league barely remembers they're even in it.

It's really encouraging indeed - plus a full week for any new signings to get up to speed with the team and tactics (to an extent at least), we should see them all play against Everton. If we get 3 points there and another 3 against Villa, we won't see the relegation zone again this season.

In my defence, I'm overtired and not paying a huge amount of attention to anything being said. I just saw it and thought to myself that it seemed a lot like what you read in the Daily Mail and then that was that.

Aye, I saw and edited

What the actual fuck... who are those absolute bellends? I think you could quite comfortably show this to anyone who thinks 'political correctness has gone too far' as evidence that it was necessary tbh. EDIT - sorry, meant to click the politics thread and ended up in here Thought it was real. Was gonna say, don't remember it ever being that bad...!

Thanks for all your efforts and hard work on this place over the years Ant. Please pop in from time to time, it'd be nice to see you - totally understand the decision though. Stay well and take care of yourself.

I'd be fuckin furious if another player did this to our keeper You need to be a special kind of shameless to actually do shit like that.