Rayvin

I love that we have close ups of the M&S logo and BHS, presumably to prove that civilisation has indeed reached Sunderland.

Yeah but if we end up buying these loan players you could argue it's just 'try before you buy'. Which, as I've said previously, I'm actually ok with. EDIT - sorry, to answer the main question - based on the fact that it'd be stupid not to and I don't see where the money goes if we don't, really.

I actually think Ashley will let the club spend whatever it makes, I don't see why he wouldn't. Unless he's eager to pay off that loan of his I suppose.

So, I see where you're coming from with that but at the same time we have brought in loan players who are all a level above anyone they have IMO. Plus we have Rafa, and his ability to train up and improve on an existing team would appear to be superior (as you would expect) to Hughton and Wagner. So I think it's fair for us to mark our progress, given our manager if nothing else, against those two...?

I'm guessing we can't play Slimani in this one? We should, I think, be good for at least a draw - based on our recent form. Can't see any reason why we couldn't talk all the points if we play as well as we have been.

I think Gareth Barry, irrespective of how shit Pardew is, should be above that kind of thing tbh. I imagine he intends to retire at the end of the year and just doesn't give a shit anymore. Pardew just sounds like he's been found out IMO. If the mackems love him so much though, they're welcome to him. Wasn't he in League One when we picked him up anyway?

I'll be satisfied that we've done as well as we should have if we end up above both Brighton and Huddersfield. The rest are a bit of an unknown but we can peg our progress against those two quite comfortably.

Fair enough then, I guess being 5 places higher gets us another £10m in the transfer fund at the end of the day.

I was under the impression that it didn't really make that much difference where the club finishes but I suppose an extra few million probably counts all the more for a club like ours given how tight Ashley appears to be on these matters.

They're down now, right? Like we're in "would take a miracle" territory now? They seem incapable of playing well at home. The result against Derby should, in theory, have given them the boost they needed to fight their way out. Hard to say it's not at least partially the fans' fault at this point...

I'm not concerned about where we end up as long as we don't go down, but I'd actually be pretty surprised if the team simply switch off. Rafa doesn't seem like the kind of manager who will allow that to happen, and I don't really think the players have shown that this is something that they might do anyway. I guess on that basis it would be disappointing if they did, but the final league position isn't too important.

So... you guys have had an eventful afternoon...

He definitely did though - they're down. No question. And I agree in general, too little far too late.

I would love that to happen. But it won't.

You and I both know, that the leader of the opposition not raising it, is not why nothing will happen. It would be dismissed by May probably with some biteback about anti-semitism, the whole house would erupt in juvenile roaring, the Guardian and the Independent would report it as a 'major victory' for Corbyn and then.... fuck all.

I agree.

Let me ask you, honestly - is the fallout from the CA stuff going to change anything at all? Cos from where I'm sitting, it's gonna result in fuck all. It'll hang around for a bit and then be usurped by the next big scandal that won't actually affect the established political actors in the least because the press are more concerned about drummed up charges of anti-semitism than they are about anything remotely important. I don't care at all about the CA thing because fucking nothing will be done about it. But yes - Corbyn should be raising it. If nothing else, it's a line of attack. Will him raising it change anything though? Will it fuck.

I dunno, because he seems to prefer focusing on issues close to him rather than the latest outrage? I agree it's a missed opportunity that exposes his lack of political savvy.

Yep. I still hope Thornberry gets a shot at it, and if her policy positions are broadly consistent with his, I'll vote for her.

Not disagreeing that he's weak, or that what anti-semitism there is will come from far left conspiracy nuts. But I don't believe for a second that he is anti-semitic. And I believe this is a manufactured outrage that they've sat on for maybe years, waiting for a moment to hit him with it.

Ah so you're insinuating I'm racist now because I looked at that mural and saw neo-liberal white guys oppressing the world instead of Jewish guys. My anti-establishment bias has presumably gotten the better of me with this as honestly, that's all I saw. But given that Corbyn has a similar anti-establishment bias, I can see why he ended up in the position he did.

You know the outrage is being written by anti-Corbyn fanatics, right? I don't care who it was written by. The logic stands.

Why is it headlining with all the other shit that's going on? There's an agenda man, they're just trying to pull him down with the only guns left in the arsenal that might work on him - the identity politics howitzers. Aided and abetted by the 'centre left' who 1) don't give a fuck about anti-semitism unless they can weaponise it - I note with interest that fuck all was done about this wave of anti-semitism in Labour in the pre-Corbyn era - and 2) seem to be landing the blows against Corbyn that the Tories can't. Poor judgement maybe but I ended up thinking the same thing as he allegedly did, and I'm still struggling to see how the people who don't look at large nosed bankers and see 'Jews' are the ones who are racist. As you said before, I guess I'm just not 'educated' enough with racist tropes.

I think this section from the article I linked sums it up for me: Now as I say, this whole business has been a nonsense. Even if there were genuine anti-Semitic content in the mural, so what? It was years ago, and it was very clear that Corbyn’s comment was not meant as a defence of anti-Semitism. Now, how is a passing comment that Corbyn made six years ago on a bit of bizarre artwork suddenly so important that it takes priority over the Local Elections, over Conservative laundering of Russian finance, over Tory and pro-Brexitgroups getting potentially-illegal help from Cambridge Analytica, the fantastic fraudulence of Jeremy Hunt’s untrue ‘pay-rise’ for NHS workers, the suspicious-looking miracle of only three people getting exposed to a lethal nerve agent in Salisbury and all of them so slightly that somehow none of them are dead almost a month later, the never-ending Brexit chaos, rampant child poverty… ? Good grief, I reckon even the ball-tampering scandal by the Australian Test Cricket team should rate as more of a priority than this!

I don't think leavers give a shit about this really. I could see some left wingers branding it imperialistic but the only possible issue that the right could have with it is that they might end up being told what to do by 'foreign' people if the EU actually becomes a federation of states. Objectively, a federation of states would be ideal for the EU, to protect our interests in a time of super states and economic wars.