acrossthepond

Had never rated Valdes and although I've not watched any La Liga this year and everyone says he's been in great form, so I may well be talking out of my arse, he never fills me with confidence between the sticks. I think Barca could do significantly better. It'd be like us keeping Harper because he's a Geordie (maybe) when we could have Buffon.

BBC gossip column has Robbie Keane linked to Wolves and Scharner meant to be leaving Wigan. Well, I know Keane played for Wolves before, but imo he'd be better off signing for us. Spurs supposedly want 8 mil for him - he's worth another look I'd say. And Scharner is a proven PL player, the likes of which we'll need.

The trouble with the Old Testament is that (in my opinion) it's mostly meant to be allegorical, which people unfortunately don't understand. So they scurry off looking for Arks and the like that never existed, at least not in the form they expect. I think there was a vast flood and that God told Noah to build a boat and put his family and other necessities on it so he would survive. I don't think the flood wiped out humanity, I don't think the Ark had two of every animal on it, etc etc. Those embellishments are mythology, and the point of the story isn't that Noah and his family repopulated the earth or any of that, but that Noah had faith in God, even though the others mocked him for building his boat in the desert and made him doubt, and that faith was repaid. I could be wrong, but that's what I take away from the Noah story.

Looks like shit. Blacker version of this year's. Same trashy patch on the back.

Personally, since I want them to get top 4 instead of Tottingham if it comes to that, I hope it goes through. Objectively, I don't think it should be allowed, but I expect it will be.

Support builds for Qatar's 2022 WC bid: Link: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/col...5901&ver=us

Yes, let's be sure to repeat the arch cock-up out of an entire season of cock-ups that got us relegated. I thought we wanted to leave Hughton to manage the team that he did such a good job with, etc etc. Is this an implicit admission that Hughton is just a glorified coach after all and can't be trusted to run his transfer negotiations Ashley-style? What happened to backing the manager? Let's hope this is all just lies.

what will end it ? I've already answered your question but you didn't answer mine. I told you what will end it. Islamism teaches that the structures of ignorance exist all across the world. They say that the way to overcome the ignorance which has led to the dominance of the Muslim world by the West is twofold: 1, we must return to the sunna and the 7th century and 're-Islamise' ourselves; 2, we must violently destroy the ignorant system of the West and Islamise them. The only way to defeat that kind of us vs. them mentality is to demonstrate that we are all on the same side, which is the side of the human race and of modern society. To defeat the spectre of Islamism, the West has to abandon their preconceived notions of the Muslim world and welcome them into our society as equals, helping them to modernise themselves. @NJS: It can work in the Muslim world. But you have to realise that it's all very well to say that they must embrace Western/modern values, but attempting to make Muslim society forcibly embrace the West is emblematic of the kind of superior, imperialistic attitude the West has exhibited toward the East since the 17th century and that is the very attitude that Islamists feed off of. Why do the Moroccan urban youth embrace Western values? What is it they see in the West that makes them choose to align themselves with it? That's what the West needs to examine and to offer the Muslim world rather than attempting to force it upon them. Giving someone the option to move into the 21st century is the right attitude. Telling them they must or they will be killed/censured/sanctioned/barred from entering will only engender more hatred.

@NJS: I have just explained at length where that sense of paranoia you describe originated. Now I want to know what you think we (we in the sense of we as members of the human race) should do about it. @Leazes: I notice you skipped my post entirely. You must've known it all already? I don't think I've ever actually asked you before, but here goes: in your opinion, what is the source of Islamism/Islamic extremism? I was hoping for a higher level of discussion in this thread, you know, one actually backed by facts and logic rather than the usual "all Muslims are killers/baddies/etc." vs. "nah they're all right like."

I find it fascinating that back in 2006 Renton referred to not 'fundamentalist' Islam but all of it as 'a particularly intolerant religion' and 'completely joyless.' Now in the year of our Lord 2010 it's just 'fundamentalist Islam.' What changed? We invented chess, by the way. I just re-read the entire thread and felt moved to explain some things about the Islamic world that you may not understand, so forgive the rant that is about to ensue. There are a lot of problems with my religion. There may be hundreds. Islam is having an extraordinarily hard time of moving into the 21st century and I'm not entirely sure we ever made it to the 20th. Islam is more split than non-Muslims can probably ever imagine. We have the obvious Sunni-Shi'a divide, but we also have Wahhabis, Ibadhis, the four major religious schools of thought in Sunni Islam and the seven or however many it is in Shi'a Islam. We have Egypt and Syria and Lebanon trying to take us forward and we have the Saudis, Yemen and Iran pulling back. We have Indonesians who really don't give much of a shit, Albanians and Bosnians who are Muslim in name only, Turks who are frantically trying to pretend they aren't Muslims (and other Turks who are frantically trying to pretend they are), we have South Asian Muslims who fast an extra day during Ramadhan "just to be sure" (despite that it goes against the sunna), we have French and German and Dutch and Swiss and American and yes, British Muslims who went to Europe/USA as liberals but are slowly being turned back into ultra-conservatives. We are pulling in a hundred different directions and anyone who shouts loudly enough can get his views covered under the aegis of 'Islam' and have himself some followers too. 7-8 years ago, if you'd asked me, I would've told you that as a people we were moving forward. Increased equality for women, relaxation of restrictive mosque policies, the spread of moderate ideas via globalisation. It was going well. I laughed at the 'clash of civilisations.' But now, I'm not so sure. Egypt was one of the first countries to abandon the divisions in mosques between men and women, but they're back now. al-Azhar, the greatest religious school in Islam (and the second-oldest university in existence) is slowly being corrupted by the Saudi brand of 7th-century throwbackism. All around the world, the backlash continues. People who were once progressives are becoming regressive. Why? The most obvious reason is that this much-vaunted disparity in wealth is not just an issue within the First World, but between worlds as well. The West have been the 'haves' and the East, the 'have-nots', since the 16th century. That disparity is constantly increasing. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are staying just as poor. Now, a lot of that can be attributed to the corrupt governments that rule over much of the Muslim world. The Gulf states may not have these problems, but most African Muslim states have advanced little over the last 40 years and the less said about Pakistan and Bangladesh the better. It's easy for those downtrodden people to take what some lunatic preacher tells them to heart when he says that they are God's chosen people, and that it is the devils of the West who have reduced them to the state they live in now. That's the first great tool of the Islamist - and his secret weapon is that like all good lies, it contains much truth. I'm not sure that many people know this, but what most label 'Islamic fundamentalism' literally did not exist until the early 20th century. Much of the Muslim world had remained under the Ottoman Empire or its immediate predecessors since the time of the Prophet. And as time went on, the Ottomans modernised and even Westernised. People in the Ottoman Empire - Muslims, Jews and Christians alike - enjoyed considerably more religious freedom than many of the people in the modern-day states that succeeded the Empire's split do. But - because of poor decisions, because of the ill-fated ventures into Europe in the 19th century, because of the even more ill-fated decision to side with the Central Powers in World War I - the Ottoman Empire fell and was carved up by various colonial powers, and it was then that Islamism, which some label political Islam, arose. People like Jalal ad-Din al-Afghani and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt began to think about why the Ottoman Empire had lost. (Of course, they weren't the only ones. A bloke called Mustafa Kamal was thinking about it in Turkey and came up with a radically different answer.) They said that the umma, or Islamic nation, had given up on its true values and they had returned to a state of jahiliya, which means the period of 'ignorance' that existed in the Arabian Peninsula before the Prophet's message. The only way to overcome this jahiliya, which afflicted the entire Muslim world and made us 'less' than the West (as was evidently demonstrated by the fact that, politically, the Muslim world was dominated by Western powers - the UK in Egypt, Transjordan and Palestine; the French in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Lebanon; the UK again in the Indian subcontinent) was to return to shari'a law and to 're-Islamise' their societies. The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood (of course still active politically today in Egypt) is "the Qur'an is our constitution." This is where the violence comes in. The Brotherhood, who are derided as terrorists by many, are not actually a violent organization. They prefer to attempt to effect change through political means. But Sayyid Qutb, who was a founding member of the Brotherhood, wanted more. He preached that the structures of the jahiliya had pervaded not only the Muslim world, but the entire Earth, and the only way to knock them down was through violent struggle, which he termed 'jihad.' It is Qutb who is at the heart of the Danish cartoon rioters, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and all who practice violent Islamism. It is not Islam, but Sayyid Qutb, who clashes with Western civilisation, and it is his ideas that we as Muslims must excise if we are ever to achieve harmony with Western society. How do we accomplish this? Well, first, let's look at some examples of successfully modernised states that rejected his ideology. The best two examples are Turkey and Pakistan. In Turkey, Kemal (later to be known as Ataturk) completely revamped an entire society. He forcibly brought Turkey into the West and into Europe, first by finally separating Islam and the state (which had been joined in one form or another since the Prophet himself) and thus ending the Caliphate, which had nominally existed since the year 632. He rewrote Turkey's laws and based them on the Swiss Civil Code, then abrogated an entire alphabet and replaced the Arabic-style script with the Turkish alphabet as it is now known today in order to solve Turkey's literacy problems. Ataturk never disavowed Islam, but he made it clear that Turkey was to be, then and forever, a secular state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah had the same vision in Pakistan. Through the Muslim League, he organized the Direct Action protests that contributed to the eventual cession of South Asian sovereignty, eschewing violence. And in speeches both at home and abroad, he emphasized that Pakistan was to be an Islamic state in character, but a secular state in government. Unfortunately, both movements have been derailed to some extent. Turkey remains the black sheep of Europe and anti-secularism is ever growing there, and Pakistan was Islamised against Jinnah's mandates during Zia-ul-Haq's 11-year military reign in Pakistan. In both cases, the struggle for recognition and standing in the world failed because of outside influences. Turkey have never managed to attain their greatest goal, and maybe never will: membership of the European Union; Pakistan have always been overshadowed by India's dominance of the Indian subcontinent. These failings have only encouraged the militant Islamists in these countries, who have said all along that the West are 'ignorant' and would never accept them, and who have only gained standing after what they perceive as being 'proven right' has occurred. I apologise for the history lesson, but this is what I am trying to say: all across the world, Muslims are finding themselves second best. In their own countries, they are poor and broken. Egypt's blinding poverty has literally not improved in the 40 years since my father left. Iraq and Afghanistan are essentially civil wars. Yemen has already had its fill of civil war, and it improved nothing. Or worse - the Islamists have already won in some Muslim countries, namely Saudi and Iran, and they are trying their best in places like Pakistan. And they cannot leave, either. They are not wanted in France. Not wanted in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, or indeed Britain. Persecuted in the United States. These are the people who are the fuel for the Islamist hate machine. It has nothing to do with Islam and never did. To these people, the West have left them with no option. The West destroyed their previous society and refused to accept them into its successor. Is it any surprise that they turn to the Islamists who promise them a return to the glory of the caliphate? It is only through tolerance in the West that the intolerance of Islamism can be defeated. The 'clash of civilisations' is every bit as much of Western origin as it is of Eastern - see colonialism, the 'white man's burden,' the need to 'civilise' them. Only when those concepts are abandoned and the East is embraced as part of the modern globalised world, rather than as a battery of natural resources to be drained, or a bundle of savages who must be 'modernised', will the threat of a battle between the West and Islamism be finally put to rest.

Can we not use 'fundamentalist Islam'? All Muslims are by definition fundamentalists because it is a tenet of the faith that the Qur'an is to be taken literally as the word of God, which is what fundamentalism means. 'Islamists' or if you must 'Islamic extremists' is better. I have spoken on this topic before and just let me say this: remember that these people with their threats and their Qur'anic misquotes do not represent us. If non-Muslims (non-Sunnis, actually, because the 230 million Shi'a Muslims in this world do not actually have a problem with depiction of humans) want to depict the Prophet, they should go right ahead.

Nothing rhymes with Nolan though. Rollin, Rollin, Rollin. We've got Kevin Nolan Keeps on putting Goals in Not Wideeeeeee! In all types of weather He's really rather clever Connecting with the leather Raw Hide! That's actually not bad! On topic, I think there is a distinction between best player and player of the season and I think Jose is obviously the former, but Nolan is the latter.

I zoomed right in because I thought it had something to do with the picture at the back. I can confirm that this did not enhance the experience. I just thought I'd seen it in the slightly open bottom drawer of the dresser, so I'd just stuck my face right up to the screen to have a look....

From http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...and&cc=5901 What's that? A mystery payment owed for a deal that was never done by a club formerly managed by Harry Redknapp and owed to a club currently managed by Harry Redknapp? Stone the bloody crows!

Let it never be said he wasn't hardworking. Bye Butt and good luck.

The Fist will pay for that "you'll shit bricks one."

It's a brave man who'd bet against Barca at the Camp Nou. Even if they lose though, Mourinho has restored Inter and no matter what his detractors say will leave yet another club better off than when he arrived. Madrid would be truly formidable with him in charge and I think if he spent a couple of years there and waited for Old Whiskey Nose to (pop off) retire then he'd have another top club waiting for him in Man U.

Fair play Plymouth, we'll remember you fondly. WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS!

4-0 to us and the Green Army go down the drain, volcanic ash and all.

YA RLY. NO WAI!

True hilarity. Good post though. I'm not quite as ready to write Germany off as you are but I think with their keeper troubles they won't pose much of a threat. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed we don't face those Portuguese scum again. Argentina won't get far, I don't think - it'll take more than miracles from Messi to undo the fact that Maradona is a crack-addled fat dullard.

For me, the board is always this way around this time of year. Obviously not last year because we were going down, but by this point our season is usually effectively over, so we're just in a lull waiting to get to summer and hoping that this time the board (whoever they are) will get it right in terms of transfers. I don't think it's symptomatic of some kind of decline on this board, just the times we're in at the moment.

They should swap us Diaby like. I'd fly over and drive Nolan myself.

Oh aye so the 30-odd million tonnes of cargo a year that they deal with is all imagination is it? Christ, when was the last time you were there? Late December back in '63.

I thought he was a mackem at first. If only