Rayvin

Also, as a general point about Ashley here - a year (or was it two?) ago, he turned down £250m from Staveley, holding out for £300m. Now he's managing to sell for £340m to broadly the same people. He's played a long game here, presumably aware that their interest was serious, and has potentially made himself £90m for two years of patience. I think he'll take it.

This. As far as I know, anyone who has managed to become a billionaire has done so through exploitation of a failing system and by standing on a great many others. That being said, Saudi Arabia is a broadly deplorable country and almost on par with the USA in terms of general psychotic behaviour. But whatever the situation here, this is football and not politics - they're gonna buy someone, it may as well be us.

If the government won't, and these guys will, it's hardly the worst outcome surely? Decent statement in favour of globalism too.

That's a reasonable view in most clubs maybe, but there's a solid contingent of non-plastic and non-fair weather fans who refuse to buy season tickets for NUFC these days. Well into the thousands. I would also suggest that you haven't perhaps factored in the economics of some people's situations, and that your research might be skewed a bit in favour of better off fans (who can afford to up-front a season ticket/have the job stability to commit to ongoing payments - and who may indeed be plastics despite this). At least it's worth noting down as a consideration. Either way, I suggest that with our club, you'll struggle to find anyone outside of Sunderland who doesn't think the owner is a cunt. Good luck though.

If we don't, I think it points to the Joelinton deal not being dodgy. Instead, it suggests that it was sheer incompetence, that no one involved is prepared to accept the hit to their ego on.

You're gonna be busy with that, I reckon. Good subject to have taken.

What is the MSc in? Congrats!

It's on everything I think. I played it on PC - not sure how well it fares on switch, look up some reviews on that first. I like the Switch but I would have thought the Witcher 3 might be pushing its capabilities. And only go for it if you're prepared to legitimately drop about 60-80 hours finishing it (which should assist in justifying the cost). It took me two attempts if I'm honest, and I'm not quite as bowled over by it as many seem to be, but it is undeniably well executed. Suffers from weird video game nudity and sex though. Never works, don't know why anyone ever bothers with it - but the Witcher has it in spades.

6 cases of Wuhan Coronavirus in the UK now. And one in France as a result of a Chinese woman being aware that she had it, lowering her symptoms before pre-flight screening through use of medications, and flying anyway - before promptly boasting about it on social media. I personally think that's heading on for terrorism.

I mean it's true, but it's also because you're supposed to have room to project yourself onto him in the video games. I think they get away with it but then I'm appreciating it through a slightly different lens to the uninitiated, I suppose

Well yes and no. The games are based on a fairly well renowned series of books - and the series sticks closer to the plot from the books than the games. But Geralt is modelled and styled on the game. Right down to the voice.

Aye, one thing I found difficult in the early episodes was the unannounced flashbacks which are just not obvious enough that the viewer doesn't take a period of time to figure out what's going on. Truthfully it's hard for me to say how the story holds up without the games for context. Having said that, the overall arc to keep track of in particular is Geralt and Ciri. That's the main story.

I just finished The Witcher series recently, and I genuinely enjoyed it - much to my surprise. For those who aren't sure, it has the benefit of significant screen time for Anya Chalotra, and quite a bit less screen time for her wardrobe.

It did. Was just reading that the main reason this happens is because of their dedication to warm meat and wet markets. They don't chill their meat, disease passes far more easily as a result. Their populace determinedly sticks to it.

Yeah just read up myself - apparently the CCP had been pretty indifferent to it for about a month, so the idea that this is precautionary seems doubtful. I suspect many more than 17 have died and in fairness, quarantining an entire city is fairly extreme. It is absolutely not beyond the Chinese government to level the whole city if it feels it has to, so we'll see how things develop i suppose.

I'm hoping it's just precautionary by the Chinese. As in, it's better to overreact in case it suddenly becomes more potent, than to risk it remaining relatively benign. Alternatively, official death toll is much higher than is being reported and it's a full blown crisis.

In fairness I've been doing ok ignoring it. But my phone pushed a news report or tweet by Kuennsberg and then obviously I had to read it and there we go. I'll go back to trying to avoid it again.

Yeah I guess they need to make a big thing of it. The most depressing point of all of this for me is that I don't even feel British anymore. Curious that leaving Europe in such an embarrassing and humiliating way could achieve that.

Hard to fucking argue with this. But what possible dodgy deal could it be? How does Ashley benefit from being out £40m that he won't recoup?

This next week is going to be painful. The triumphalism from the Brexiteers is goìng to be relentless..

Voted for the Tory austerity welfare bill or whatever it was called. The dismal, pathetic Labour betrayal that prompted me to vote for Corbyn. But mostly it's all relative, isn't it? The spectrum changes. In the US he'd be considered a radical. Although i daresay in the US, he would position himself pragmatically.

If Blair hadn't gone to Iraq, I wonder how different all of this would have been. Labour would have been nowhere near as toxic and perhaps more left wing voters would remember the years fondly. Honestly I see more people go after him over Iraq than anything else.

The party is indeed fucked.

You have to remember, many Labour voters/members are a lot more desperate and disenfranchised by the system than you are. You have a house and a stable job. For people on zero hours, renting, no prospect of really increasing that stability - yeah, intelligent pragmatism of the Blair years isn't going to cut it. It's ultimately the same reason we ended up with Brexit. Nothing has changed though, people's lives aren't better - and hoping that they're going to come back to the centre and be all sensible again, I mean.. yeah it's possible they'll do that, but I'm struggling to see it. So I mean, despair at them if you want - but they're more desperate than you are, and will be despairing at you right back. And yeah, you can say "well just vote for a beige centrist candidate and they'll stop the Tories". Except that the current generational fuck up isn't just on the Tories. It's the entire political system that failed. Every party. Some more guilty than others, but there we go. It's ultimately why I'm comfortable backing Starmer - because even if he is a "centrist" (I think he's sufficiently left wing personally anyway) who has no great plans for achieving actual change, I think circumstance is going to start forcing the hands of our politicians anyway. It already has for the Tories, they're nothing like the party they were a few years ago now. Something in the West needs to change - and it's going to, with or without Labour. As for evidence based policy - the evidence appears to be that we need to knock perpetual growth capitalism on the head asap because it is literally going to kill us all I don't really see any politicians saying that though, do you? I see a lot of people coming up with absolute bullshit in order to be elected, about how jobs are more important... but that's it. "We need to protect the economy, and yeah ok, also the environment where we can".

Corbyn won London though..? I don't think this hurts her there. None of us know anything about what it was like living through Nazi Germany, but you can still look and and study the period, and come to a fairly good idea of what happened, why it was bad, and what we can learn from it. NB - please note, I'm not equating Thatcher with the Nazis. Surely that is what we want our politicians to be? Politically informed and well studied. And honestly, how controversial is it to look at a bunch of policies one leader enacted 30 years ago, and to judge them for what they have done to society. I mean if Thatcher had brought in executions, carried out at random by the police on the streets as a means of maintaining public order, would you be saying "no no, Nandy can't criticise that because she wasn't alive in the time the person who instigated it came to power!" Of course you wouldn't. I also had a thought though - Nandy is a long way behind the other two - so realistically, she needs to be seen as an alternative for both sides. That means she has to appeal to the 20% of the membership that are anticapitalist, and who will be supporting RLB as well as those supporting Starmer. The latter are more pragmatic, clearly, so it's probably a calculated risk to try and win votes off RLB without hurting her chances too much with the Starmer crowd. Come any electoral exercise with the wider public, I think we can safely assume the Blair bashing wouldn't play a big part.