Happy Face

But for a Pardew one off special against Chelsea, or if we could have held on to our lead a few more minutes under mcClaren we'd be 2 points better off. Small margins.

One point less than we had from the same games last year.

Always I agree criticism of ideas is a good thing. And that debate is stifled by low brow, defensive bullshit. I just don't see that running interference like that is the remit of the 'social justice warrior' alone though. In this instance a "feminazi" has set up a petition to ban a speech. University speechifying should never be banned, but calling for a ban has done more to stimulate actual debate of the issue for this lass than just taking to facebook and having a little moan among like-minded friends. You would hope that there's no chance in hell of the speech being cancelled, but Greer's cause has widespread popularity already, pointedly hitching your cause to her wagon and stifling her speech to amplify the little heard cause of transgender issues has been effective, if rude. The primary example of an issue where free speech is stifled, where universities pull speakers and most lobbying money is spent on keeping facts away from the debate is Gaza where the Israel lobby have successfully limited the debate to either agreement with them or anti-semitism. They're hardly social justice warriors.

The women i respect and admire tell me not to use the word 'cunt' It's 'coconut'

Here I am begging for a dialogue, opening the debate, wanting to learn, and understand your perspective, and you shut it down. I wasn't fussed really, but you stepped to me

[emoji38]

Not at all. I just didn't follow the logic of your post at all.

You're allowed to with a safety wink eh. I never called anyone racist/islamophobic in the Saudi thread either btw

So what you're saying is fuckwits are stifling speech with name-calling? Nutjobs censor with accusations of personality disorders?

Reeves has said he's sorted... "I'm so pleased the operation has gone well and Bob is fixed"

That's what's wound me up about McClaren. He's going about saying how Sunderland never had a chance. Ignoring that one where two mackems danced past our 6 defenders to win the pen to turn the game. Better chance than any of our scrappy efforts had been up to that point.

My tickets are February. Fingers crossed for a speedy recovery.

Ignoring the £5 tickets offered last season but not this, tickets prices are up an average 11.3% for this game. Really encouraging the support to help us pull away from the bottom.

Godspeed You Black Emperor were excellent on Saturday. Shame about the fire alarm which saw the Sage emptied and killed the mood. At least it was a false alarm and it resumed within half an hour. Listening to the new Joanna Newsom one now.

The subject line of the email Steve McClaren sent out to Newcastle supporters on Thursday, ahead of the derby said it all. “We won’t be complacent”. Unfortunately the game against Sunderland ultimately turned on a calamitous moment of complacency all too familiar. Newcastle had utterly dominated the first half, with several excellent chances spurned and barely anything coming back the other way. Then just before half time we lost our heads. While we were still complaining about Robert Madley’s decision not to award us a penalty (either for Lee Cattermole’s handball or for his other hand hindering Gigi Wijnaldum’s run) Sunderland were doing what a Sam Allardyce team does, hoofing the ball out and lolloping upfield after it. Four (Four!) Newcastle players surrounded but stood off the aged Jermaine Defoe, all jogging back at his pace rather than taking roles to close him down or drop deeper with more urgency to ensure a solid defensive line. Nobody but Fabricio Coloccini concerned themselves with the run of Steven Fletcher, despite the captain being the least capable of anyone in our team to win a one on one race for Defoe’s fine through ball. No matter how light Coloccini’s lean into Fletcher, no matter how dramatically Fletcher fell, no matter how unlikely he had been to reach the ball before Rob Elliot, Newcastle should never have given the referee a decision like that to make. Up the other end I would have been screaming for those decisions to be given to us so I’m less inclined to say the ref ruined the game than I am to say we shot ourselves in the foot. Again. The fact that McClaren placed so much emphasis on avoiding complacency before the game tells us much about what must have frustrated him in the first 10 games over which he has asked to be judged. He could see it coming, because it has rarely been the manager’s tactics that have let the club down this season, but player complacency. We matched or bettered Southampton, Man U, Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea, Norwich and Sunderland tactically but have dropped points to all but two of those because of our inability to keep our focus for 90 minutes and maintain a standard we displayed very well for long periods of those games.. I have a running battle with Crystal Palace fans on Twitter where I lay into Alan Pardew at every opportunity and they crow back whenever they’re able. Yesterday’s result saw much crowing - “#Pardewin” - but the disinterested viewer of Newcastle ignores the strides under McClaren and the painful memories of Pardew. The latter lost two derbies by yesterday’s margin and losing his last four derbies in a row is what set us up for being in this ignominious position of losing 6 derbies in a row. The first time it’s ever happened. Pardew’s four derby defeats in a row added to one from John Carver and one from McClaren mean that we’ve lost as many derbies in the last two and a half years as we had in FORTY EIGHT years prior. Pardew is the man who built the foundations for that. McClaren is trying to fix that. The difference we’ve already seen is clear too, while Pardew sides never looked like being in derby games, we looked like we would win, we deserved to win, we just took our eye of the ball for a second and were punished harshly. We didn’t fold, we kept chasing and paid for our endeavour conceding more to the gaps we inevitably left. But how long can that enthusiasm be maintained while we’re looking up the table? If we’re going to climb out of this mess, we cannot look to blame referees or diving opponents for our predicament, we must look at ourselves and the mistakes we made. Emailing fans to say there’ll be no complacency isn’t good enough, the players are going to have to show it, with 90 minute performances from front to back.

In their last 92 games #safc have taken over 20% of their total points off #nufc (18/88)

I'm building a toot toot city. Pinkseatopolis I'll call it.

Aye, true enough, he could like trucks and violence and still want to lob his knob off when he's 16. I think it's an initial pointer towards the social norm though. He liked a pink sparkly head band in the shop the other day like. The wife wouldn't buy it for him. Hope some university doesn't ban her.

I would

Before having a bairn I couldn't understand those parents who let their 5 year old boy dress as a girl. Always thought they shouldn't be indulged. But me and the wife often marvel that it's amazing to watch a boy do boy things unprompted from the earliest age. Just liking trucks and making toys smash and hurt each other rather than liking princesses and hoovering. If kids can be born hermaphrodites and with all sorts of physical ambiguities I see no reason they shouldn't be born with mental mismatches to their physical appearance that should be handled every bit as sensitively.

Those damn savages, using the high tech military kit we sell them

You're jumping around with your criticisms though. Christian v Muslim, wahhabi v western, Jesus v Mohammad. When you're pulled up on special criticism of Muslims you jump back to wahhabis like it's all the same thing. Wahhabism represents 0.5% of Muslims globally. Far less in our own society. I agree its a particularly pernicious strand, something that should be tolerated no more than kiddy raping or aids indifference. Those acts are endorsed by successive leaders of the entire Catholic church either willfully or by turning a blind eye and i think that is evil too. That's before you go into the child armies built and terrorist acts in the name of god by the extremist Christians at the fringes. I think it's ridiculous to say one is MORE evil than the the other on a moral level. Organised religion is something that dies wherever there is education. It's at it's most dangerous wherever in the world education is poor and people are vulnerable. Of course, politically, Vatican city pose less of an immediate threat as the only Christian theocracy than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen and their religious leadership. But religion isn't actually the cause of political instability in those areas, is it?

I always encourage re-appraisal of opinions. But you were saying Christianity is better because Jesus was a nicer bloke than Mohammad and I didn't think any new evidence had come to light on that in the last 8 years, 2000 years after the event. Other things have happened in those 8 years as well though, not just Muslim cluster fucks. I don't need to ask what you think of Joseph Kony, the epidemic of child abuse cases in the Catholic church, continued refusal to endorse condoms etc. I know you'll find those things grotesque too. I wonder why your tolerance for that is greater though? Do you see them as less harmful?

http://www.toontastic.net/board/topic/15663-mocking-peoples-beliefs/page-2#entry378571 What changed?