Sampson

It’s harder and harder or almost impossible to protect children from the realities of the adult world today I think. Neither can the shut off from bullies or the harshness of the playground after school. Honestly, I’d hate to be a child or teenager growing up today since the invention of social media. 10 years ago I thought the internet on balance was a force for good but since 2016 I’ve probably flipped the other way.

They announced the 15 year old isn’t the suspected perpetrator but potentially someone who knew about the plans in advance.

According to bbc website it’s due to “following complaints about workplace conduct” which sounds more like complaints of bullying/discrimination than anything to me.

5 years is a long time tbf. Think about between the 2019-2024 elections - we left the European Union, there was the biggest pandemic in anyone’s lifetime, the cost of living crisis and war in Europe. All these events radically shaped the trajectory of the country on their own, and we essentially had 4 of them. Hard to know whether the leader will last until 2029. The world is more volatile now than I ever remember it previously.

Albrighton vs Sevilla. Can’t find a good video on it but you all know the one.

Tbh, with the Tories it’s of their own making really, so I’m not convinced “we get the politicians we deserve” applies to them right now. They chose to have a referendum, they chose to purge their party of all its moderates and focus on its populists. There have been 3 or 4 different pivotal junctions the Tory party categorically did not need to go down since 2015, but in each case it chose to placate the Farage-style right wing populists to try and gain voters from them (and looking at UKIP similar 2015 and Reform 2024 election numbers, all these choices haven’t worked at all). And by this point, the party has made it very difficult for probably a generation for anyone but a brexiteer on the right of the party and with populist style campaigning techniques to become party leader.

He still achieved winning the FA Cup though, you argued he achieved nothing with us. You’re changing the goalposts of your argument now. Really? He mostly just got a warm applause to acknowledge he was a good player for us, that was it. It was nothing like the great appreciation Albrighton got in his final game of last season for us as a comparison. I don’t think it was anything like what someone like Vardy would get on coming back to play us either. You seem to have a weird mindset where just because someone isn’t being actively booed they’re being put on a pedestal. He was a very good player for us, he got a warm applause to appreciate that fact, Barnes and Dewsbury-Hall will probably get the same later in the season (even though KDH was nowhere as good for us as the other 2 were for us). That’s pretty much the whole story. It’s such a weird thing and he’s such a weird player to get so worked up about.

It’s just a game, buddy. Football is not worth raising your blood pressure like this and dying early over. Much less get so worked up some 20-something guy you’re never going to meet who was a good player for us.

I don’t get Badenoch either. She’s comes across as a student politician ranting endlessly about culture wars and immigration and nothing else, I just can’t see her doing anything in a position of responsibility going through actual legal legislation. She doesn’t seem to care about that, she just seems to want to debate about how “woke” people are bad all the time. She reminds me a bit of when Jo Swinson became LibDem leader and it was like a student politician just talking about movements and the overarching philosophy what liberalism means all the time as if she was a 19th century philosopher rather than actual concrete legislation and ideas in a 21st century post-industrialist economy.

I’d recommend therapy mate. It’s a much better solution than this kind of needless and irrational anger. Some people’s irrational anger at Maddison is just bizarre. It’s like he attacked their family member or something. He was a very good player here. He achieved plenty here, won the FA Cup, finished 5th twice, reached a European semi final, got capped by England on merit, that’s far more than all but a handful of Leicester players have achieved. No one is saying he is the best Leicester player ever and didn’t have slumps, but overall he was unquestionably a very good player for us and certainly feels like a weird player to get so worked up over. He was far from a major reason for our relegation, reality was that him and Barnes were the only 2 players who had reasonable seasons, it was Rodgers stubborn insistence on playing Ward and Amartey that cost us far more, if we’d have had bog standard PL keeper and centre backs we’d have stayed up with ease. And regardless even if you think he was a key member of the relegation side, he gets way more irrational hate than the likes of Barnes, Dewsbury-Hall, Daka, Iheanacho, Amartey, Ndidi, Justin, Evans, Mendy, Tete or whoever else all do. I fully expect you’ll be frothing at the mouth for the same reasons if Evans, Iheanacho, Barnes or KDH come up against this season, right? Mind you, some of our fans seem to bizarrely hate Mahrez which I just cannot get my head round at all, so I just never understand the mindset I guess.

Why? He was a very good player for us and life’s too short to get wound up over players who were very good for us.

Seems to be in the news very little and there’s a good chance it will be back to the obscurity of The Hague/IDS years but still worth discussing. Cleverly seems to be favourite atm. James Cleverly wins head-to-head against all 5 rivals in @techneUK poll of Tory members Wins against Priti Patel 45-39 Robert Jenrick 49-28 Kemi Badenoch 51-28 Tom Tugendhat 54-23 Mel Stride 59-15

Still can’t get my head around that Craig Shakespeare has died. Just reading that brought back listening to his pre match interviews on RL in the Pearson era before they fell out with Stringer

Yea and they are much more to do the latter if they aren’t unable to get a job for the rest of their life because everytime a potential employer googles them, they won’t hire them because of what they did when they were 13. They’re far more likely to have the opportunity to repent and have a better and productive life if they are aren’t publicly outed for the entire nation for the rest of their life. He doesn’t even have a developed frontal cortex yet, he literally doesn’t have the biological ability to fully use the rational part of his brain yet - that’s exactly why we have laws which give minors limited legal responsibility. Why does not naming this kid affect you so much emotionally that it “makes you feel sick” and “makes you feel tired”? It’s a bizarre thing to make you feel sick and tired about.

Migrants already live in every area in the country and are your neighbours, friends, community members and colleagues. I abhor how since the cynically named “2010 migrant crisis”, the word “migrant” has been cynically used by the British media to lump all immigrants together, be them people who have moved to the uk for refuge, work, studies, love, family or any other reason and whether they’ve filled in the paperwork or not (I hate the terms legal and illegal) and to create a negative association with the word. It’s been a large part of the systematic attempt to turn immigrants into the “big bad” of society. One moment it’s cynically used to mean refugees and people making small boat crossings to create a negative association, next it’s used casually when dropping in statistically for non-British or Irish students, workers who work in extremely high end science and technology that requires doctorate degrees or the American or German or Japanese partners of British people, it’s so cynical. Even the bbc and left leaning media sources like the guardian regularly partake in this I remember during the Brexit debates, Boris Johnson in the same article calling EU citizens living in the UK “EU migrants”, then calling British citizens living in the EU “British expats.” Because the former word had been made so much more charged by the cynically titled “migrant crisis”. 15 years later and it’s been so systematically drilled into the public discourse’s heads by this point:

Yeah Theresa May came across much better than I expected too even if I still profoundly disagree with her on Brexit. John Major also came across well. I’d like them to interview Cameron at some point to see if he profoundly regrets everything. The Clegg one was interesting because you can tell there’s certain stuff he regrets and other stuff he was kind of making excuses for.

Listened to Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell’s Leading podcast - the recent episodes with David Davies and Nick Clegg. Thought Davies came across really poorly and manipulative and was trying to sell himself as some predictive genius who was never wrong and was behind the scenes at all the pivotal moments. But Clegg actually came across better than I thought, even though I’ll probably never forgive him. Does anyone listen to other ones?

I think it’s quite an open secret who Banksy actually is iirc. It’s quite Google-able.

Elon Musk really is just getting more and more toxic. I remember him always being eccentric and outspoken but I don’t remember when he drank the alt-right koolaid.

Watching handball and it’s like an even more extreme version of everything boring about modern Guardiola-influenced football- the defending team make a horseshoe in their penalty area and the attacking team pass side to side trying to find gaps in the horseshoe. Then it goes to the other team and the same thing happens. In a way I kind of feel like all team sports have eventually evolved into this kind of thing. I often wonder whether marginal gains and more elite athletes, which a great display of what humans can do, often make sports more boring to watch.

I think the point about having zero laws on who can stay and live in the uk until the 1940s is interesting. I think we often forget that the notions of nationalism and the nation state are actually extremely modern inventions and only really from the late 19th/early 20th century and codified in their modern form after world war 2. I think the uk was staunchly against passports as late as the First World War because it considered them to be illiberal beurocracy for example

You’re right, and I suppose urbanisation is also a huge factor as more and more move to the cities and away from rural areas, we likely have too many houses in the countryside and not enough in the cities, but that’s not something I’ve read anything into to have any confidence about.

Thanks, it doesn’t quite go back to the 1940s when the baby boom and migration from the commonwealth largely started but otherwise, as expected, the population rise is smaller now, and certainly no bigger than it was in the 1950s. The main difference as far as I can see is the government hasn’t invested at all in house/flat building as it used to back then.

I’d be genuinely interested if anyone has the population growth figures for the post-war consensus period where the population also grew rapidly and the windrush generation of immigrate helped rebuild the country and how that compares to today

The 600,000 a year figure is becoming a big red herring and I wish people would stop using it and referring to it as being unsustainable, because it isn’t the reality of the long term data trends. It’s due to changes in student visas and as 85% of students move home after their 2-3 year studies are finished, it takes 2-3 years for the net migration figures to catch up when the same numbers start leaving again. The reason Kier Starmer was so happy to promise the net migration numbers will fall after he got in power during the election campaign - and he worded it specifically in that way - is because he knows they’re due to fall naturally anyway. Otherwise I would largely agree with a lot of the post above. Although the problems with population ageing and the overwhelming of the NHS and pension systems are already happening, I disagree that this is something that is 30 years away.