Rayvin

Then you have my respect and acknowledgement that you are a man of principle.

Hypothetically, how many lives is that principle worth? Because that's what it's starting to come down to.

Yep, that's what I'm saying. I'm not going to virtue signal in the face of evidence to the contrary, sorry. Having said that I'm making a more general point. I don't know the specifics of who started what at Charlottesville - maybe the racists are to blame for that entirely based on that single episode. But Antifa and the counter revolutionaries have a series of incidents of setting buildings on fire, hospitalising opposing protesters, hell one of them was killed in a fire fight a few weeks ago after trying to murder a republican politician. Just makes it acceptable for the racists to do the same stuff IMO.

I don't think we have white nationalist rallies because of Antifa, no. I do think escalation in violence takes two sides, though. On the rest, I remain satisfied with my current assessment of how things are.

Right, because these things should be tackled by cilivians. Vigilante justice all the way. It's only going to escalate, its only going to lead to more violence. We need a level of emotional maturity, not gung ho clusterfuck inducing 'social justice'. Also, as an observation, those Nazis are probably saying things like "aye it's not like history offers any examples of what happens when you just sit back and let communists get too big for their boots". Antifa are not left wingers like you or I. 'Liberals get the bullet too', according to Antifa themselves.

So it turns out 3 people died at this fucking crazy rally. What the fuck man. Some fuckwit decides to ram a crowd of counter protesters with his car, killing one and injuring 20, and two police killed in a helicopter 'accident'. This is why you don't punch political opponents. The violence escalates and people fucking die. The next one might be a full on pitched battle.

It's shameful but both sides are doing it. I've seen videos of "the left" walking through cities with Kalashnikovs. The political dialogue has become fucking mental.

Arsenal actually are beyond parody. It's an overused phrase but fuck me...

Doesn't he answer that in the statement before? We have too many players.

Yep, hard to argue with that.

As a political entity I agree. I think it's all about the humanitarian cost and the risk of having major powers facing off against each other. Trump's plan seems to be to publically humiliate North Korea into doing something stupid or shutting up. If they give him an excuse, he wipes them out. China accepts this and we're all good. I think if you can do it without collateral damage (which you can't, but for the sake of the moral argument let's assume you can), there would be no reason not to take them out. They're a repressive rogue state that is persistently aggressive to its neighbours and a destabilising force on the global arena. It's as cut and dry as it comes IMO. If you can do it without collateral damage.

Actually you're right - it's not a blinder if scenario 2 comes to pass as far as the human stakes are concerned, I meant more in a strategic sense - in terms of victory, Trump wins either way. If they North Korea settles down and doesn't fire, Trump has made a statement that has had to be choked down by one of the most unstable nations in the world. A statement that Putin and the Chinese will note. Whatever you might think about the guy, if North Korea back down here, it's probably a more significant diplomatic win over them than anything Obama managed. It's high risk though because obviously, if we end up in a war, that's not good.

I think most people are fine - I don't share this notion that we need to be systematically horrifying to different groups based on unchangeable physical attributes. It used to be that this was considered a liberal thing to think, but these days it seems not so much...

The Guardian strikes back! All men are lazy and don't work as hard as women. We sit at our desks playing poker and then ask for more money. I don't know how they worked it out, but the wimmenz are finally on to us, apparently. In my case they're right, tbf https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/11/salma-hayek-feminism-inequality-men-women Compare this with the article they were losing their shit over from that software engineer...

See, you could have cut that post down by 2/3rds and conveyed exactly the same meaning. You're a lost cause, man.

Is Trump actually playing a blinder here? Saying stuff like this basically forces NK to respond - if they don't fire a missile at Guam now, they're going to look ridiculous and like they're empty on their threats. If they do fire, the US will obliterate them and China will let it happen. Is this becoming lose-lose for NK?

Coutinho has handed in a transfer request, of course. Liverpool have rejected it though. Looks like Barca and Real are going to have a harder time poaching players from the PL now... £90m sure as shit would have done it last year.

You're right on strengthening ahead of the CL for sure. I dunno then, maybe he's hoping for the same thing as Ashley - that prices start to fall running up to the end of August.

Well I was thinking more about the management team on the whole. Spurs don't come across as only in it for the money at board level, I genuinely think they want to win things and to be successful. Even the board. So why would they just 'not spend' unless they felt that they had a decent chance anyway.

Ok so, why aren't they strengthening? Levy hasn't been averse to spending previously. Presumably they've figured that they're already happy with the current team and don't want to unsettle it. It'll not be for the same reasons as Ashley.

Interesting post, thanks.

Maybe, maybe not. Their main strength is the size of their standing army though, whereas the Americans have strength in technological ability. As you've said, none of this is going to come to pass anyway. I rather fancy the US and China have a number of backchannels in place for keeping everything under control.

So what? They had a great team to begin with.

I think I'm missing this, what is going wrong with Spurs at the moment? Beyond Danny Rose whinging about his pay?