Panto_Villan

Even Gerrard had a pretty spectacular start to his reign so it's always foolish to praise a manager too much early on - but I think 12 games is probably enough to firmly conclude Emery is the real deal given the results we've been achieving. Hopefully he'll continue to rack up the points for the next month or so because it means him and the team will have much more credit in the bank when he inevitably has a string of bad / unlucky results. Some of the reactions on here when we lost three in a row (two against the top two teams in the league) were pretty over the top and hopefully in the future people will have the confidence to recognise a blip in form for what it really is.

Hmm. I've not seen even one poll that has said a majority of people in NI would vote for reunification if there was a poll held today, and I did have another quick look after your last post. There was apparently a recent poll suggesting a majority of people support the idea of a unified Ireland in the next 20 years, which was perhaps what you were referring to, but to my mind that's something quite different. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, though, the long-form piece I read on the matter a while back suggested that nowadays the people of NI are now making these decisions on bread and butter issues rather than ideological / religious reasons. So if there was a credible plan put together where the current public services (especially free healthcare) in NI was guaranteed with unification then you might well find a majority of people in NI would suddenly be willing to support it. And it doesn't seem completely implausible to me that a UK government (particularly a non-Tory one) might be willing to enter good faith negotiations about what a handover agreement could actually look like, which would then give a solid basis for a proper vote on unification. It's possible the EU would provide some funds to help pay for it, too, which might help reduce the chances of voters in the Republic balking at the price tag that reunification might well otherwise come with.

Yes, in the scenario you outlined, we would. I get this is an emotive topic for you, but it sounds like you're trying to say that Northern Ireland shouldn't get to choose whether it is reunified or not. If so, that's pretty wild rhetoric. Right now the obvious examples of places that risk being absorbed by their much larger cousins are Ukraine and Taiwan, and China and Russia would say literally everything you've said about Northern Ireland in justification for their aims. They're our cousins, they've only been independent less than a hundred years, they have much smaller populations, there's a sizeable amount of support for the "motherland" there, their governments are not legitimate, etc. If Northern Ireland votes for reunification with the Republic then I'm all for it, frankly. But it absolutely has to be their choice.

That's just not true though - Ireland has famously low taxes, as I'm sure you're well aware. That 15bn would be even larger under the Irish tax system. You guys have a tax take of of 21.1% of GDP and the UK has a tax take of 27.8% of GDP. And that's heavily distorted by the fact you get far more corporate tax than the average country as so many corporations have their HQ there for tax reasons. You can't put those taxes up too much without eroding your competitive advantage there, so those tax increases would have to fall far more heavily on the population than on corporations. It's not a number that's easy to absorb. Conveniently your annual VAT take is currently around £15bn. Sure, you're willing to pay 25% VAT rates for reunification, but that's a drop in the ocean - would you be willing to pay 50% VAT rates? Ireland is a rich, successful economy but I think you're massively underestimating the actual cost of integrating the North. I'm not sure if taxpayers in the south would actually be willing to foot the bill, although the matter might be smoothed over if the EU stepped in to help or something.

It is of course true that the South *can* afford the North if they want, but the question is - do they want to? Looks like total tax take in Ireland last year was about £83bn, while the UK paid out net £15bn to subsidise NI. Are there enough romantics in Ireland to vote for taxes going up by 20% to pay for reunification (along with all the potential political problems)?

I guess the question for you is how much you actually want NI within Ireland, and why you want it? I think you’re right that over time the old hatred will evaporate but that doesn’t necessarily result in countries wanting to join together. If the status quo ends up working people on both sides might think “why change it?” (by watering down their own political representation) and the memory of a united Ireland is also disappearing further and further into the past with each year. Not to say it won’t happen, of course. I just don’t think it’s going to happen automatically with the passage of time. Recent political trends are more about countries breaking apart than merging together.

I've not seen it if so. Could you link some of it?

I reckon you can probably find a dedicated forum or subreddit where you could ask this question and get a proper answer. From what I gather most of the figures are worth very little even if they're old, but the proper nerds would probably let you know what the really valuable ones are so you can at least feel confident that you aren't handing over something that's worth absurd amounts of money when a shop gives you a price for it. In terms of giving them to your own kids - my kids are currently playing with a bunch of the toys that belonged to my wife when she was growing up. Polly Pocket, etc. It's quite cool to see but at the end of the day, they're kids - they smash things to bits. If the figures are worth anything I'd probably just sell them and buy the kids some proper toys you'd be fine with them breaking. And that also means you won't be expecting them to have a deep emotional connection to the characters from a bunch of films that came out 40-50 years before they were born. They'll probably just toss Vader in the bin and ask you to buy them a Jar Jar Binks figure instead.

Isn't the Charizard worth some ludicrous amount of money these days?

Yeah, while I feel the union would be much diminished if Scotland left I'd personally not be overly bothered if Northern Ireland went its own way. Not only is the region a drain on the country's finances, it obviously has a lot of political issues even beyond the issues with the EU. But equally I'm not averse to them remaining part of the UK if they're not causing too much trouble. What I've skim read of the Windsor Framework seems like a decent compromise, and Northern Ireland ends up getting the best of all worlds from both the UK and the EU to keep them sweet. If the unionists torpedo the deal despite that then frankly I'm all for throwing them under the bus to improve relations with the EU. And I imagine Labour will do exactly that if the matter isn't resolved by the time they take power. Funnily enough I think I read the main reason why the average person in NI doesn't want to rejoin Ireland is just because they get good free healthcare as part of the UK. Is the healthcare situation much different in Ireland?

I've been following Israeli politics from a distance for a while, so I'll do my best to give you a genuine answer here - although if other people know the subject matter better than me then feel free to jump in and correct me. I might be getting stuff wrong. Israel is Western-aligned for historical reasons. It's a country originally created by the British Empire to provide the Jews a homeland, and the neighbouring Arab states were not very happy about them being handed a swathe of Arab land and tried to wipe them out on several occasions. But the West feels like it owes a debt to the Jews after the whole Holocaust thing, and having a democratic state in the Middle East when the surrounding Arab states tended to lean Soviet meant that America in particular gave Israel a lot of support. So despite being massively outnumbered the Israelis convincingly won the various wars against their neighbours and that's where they got the occupied territories come from. Fifty years ago I wouldn't be surprised if we would have viewed Israel the way we view Ukraine now; the victims of needless aggression. There's obviously a few problems with Israel in it's modern form. The biggest ones are the Arabs living with the occupied territories and in Israel proper. There was an opportunity missed to settle the Palestinian question with a two-state solution about 20 years back, and now that's effectively dead. Israeli settlers have built settlements all over the occupied territory and politically it's very difficult for an Israeli politican to say they'd remove them as the settlers are a powerful nationalist political lobby, so nobody advocates for a two-state solution any more. But there doesn't appear to be any idea to replace it, other than to continue the status quo with the occupied territories. Recently the other Arab states have actually made their peace with Israel because everyone is worried about Iran (who are Shia muslims rather than Sunni muslims like everyone else), and basically abandoned the Palestinians to their fate. Right now the guy in charge is Netanyahu, who is currently trying to stay in power as long as possible as he's facing charges of fraud (I think?). He lost power recently to a rainbow coalition of opposition parties but then won it again at the last election, in coalition with an incredibly right-wing nationalist party that cater mostly to the ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews. He's trying to undermine the judiciary because they're political opponents for various reasons, not least the fraud case. He absolutely hates the Democrats in the US for various personal and practical reasons, but he knows the current incarnation of the Republicans will back him no matter what he does. This is similar to the Saudis - part of the reason they're being dicks right now is because they think any incoming Republican president will forgive and forget everything, so they don't feel like they need to listen to the Democrats lecturing them. To me it all seems pretty short termist. If they lose America's backing then they're in huge trouble. If their democracy falls apart then there's a real danger all the tech companies that power their economy leave. The Arab question is only going to get worse with time. They've got a massive problem with ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews who are a growing part of the population (currently ~15%) and are exempt from national service and just pursue religious studies until they reach retirement age, all paid for by the government. Etc. It'll certainly be interesting to see where they are in ten years time.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that countries do only ever act in their own self-interest, although I don't agree with that at all. I think the point being made is that Israel's current course is not advancing its interests at all. Israel is a small country surrounded by hostile nations, which has survived mostly because the West (i.e. mostly America) has provided extensive military and economic aid. It's a democracy populated by people that the West feels it owes a historical debt to, and was an important Western-aligned state in an important region during the Cold War. It's a natural part of the Western alliance. Except they currently seem to be charting a course away from being a democracy and don't appear to be very interested in wanting to remain part of the Western alliance. Is that really in their best interest? I'd argue it's very much not. Plus the longer this war goes on the more benefits accrue to Iran from their dealings with Russia, and if Russia gets any kind of positive result from this war then nuclear controls are pretty much dead. Everyone is going to learn the lesson that a nuclear-armed state can freely bully their neighbours with no real repercussions and a whole bunch more countries will realise its in their best interests to obtain nukes. And it's really not going to be good news for Israel when a bunch more Arab states are packing nukes.

I think the suggestion is that they should just not provide statistics for Russia at all if there's reasonable grounds to suggest they are being faked. It's fine to say they just don't really know. Political decisions regarding the war are being made in Western countries based on this data, so if they are just regurgitating statistics provided by the Russian statistics agency then it's quite a serious issue - people wouldn't believe the numbers if they were provided directly by the Russians, but they do believe statistics when they come from the IMF / World Bank.

I’m a little skeptical of some of the things he’s saying. I hope they’re true, but I’ll wait until I see some other established sources repeating them before I start believing them. A lot of what he’s saying is uncontroversial though. The ruble isn’t freely traded so its supposed strength is totally meaningless. Same with the stock market, etc. He’s also right that Russian gas has no market any more, because there’s no pipeline network to pipe it anywhere other than Europe (who aren’t buying it). But gas is only 10% of Russian energy revenue so that hardly matters; the 90% that is oil matters much more. And other researchers have been saying the oil price cap hasn’t been hugely effective. His accusations that the IMF / World Bank are just accepting (and thus legitimising) fake economic data put out by the Russian statistics agencies is the most interesting point to me. If that’s really happening I expect to see it reported more widely in the coming weeks. Sounds like it would be quite big news.

Russia is giving lots of money to Iran at the moment, and likely already collaborating on their missile and nuclear programs. I’m not sure if it’s official or not but there’s certainly plenty of talk of Iran getting Russian fighter jets etc in the future too. Israel is being rather self serving with regards to Ukraine and it appears to have backfired quite badly. Russia has picked their side in the Middle East and it’s Iran rather than Israel.

Man, reading all these posts about Benteke just reminds me quite how sensational he was. Obviously big fan of Grealish and Martinez and Kamara and everyone else good we've had since he left, but for me there's something extra special about watching a top-class player who actually puts the ball in the back of the net.

I do love me some Bertie. Glad to have him back.

Yeah, I feel like had Emery turned up at Kamara's house and demanded a bunch of reasons why he's worthy of signing for us on a free we might not have beaten the competition to that particular signing.

It’s hard to disagree with the evidence. Mostly because there isn’t any.

You’re going to look like a genius when he rejoins us in 2030 as a marauding central defender!

An interesting point was raised on Twitter by a defence analyst earlier today regarding the much rumoured upcoming large-scale Russian offensive. His view is that the Russians are already in the middle of their large-scale offensive. It's just that nobody but them actually thinks it's large. (Not sure if it's actually true, but I'd like it to be!)

Yeah, as far as I'm concerned. I personally don't think the police should be approaching situations aggressively when there's an innocent person close by and potentially at risk, and even if Pelosi got smacked with a hammer in this case I think if this approach was taken in every situation a lot less people would end up dead. TBH I'm a bit surprised I'm having to defend the US police for not pulling out their guns and resorting to deadly force within the first ten seconds of arriving at a crime scene. Do you genuinely think that if DePape was black the police would have immediately whipped out their pistols and started blasting, despite the husband of one of the most prominent politicians in the country being partially in the line of fire?

You're comparing a random traffic stop with a hostage situation at the residence of the Speaker of the House though. Obviously the cops sent to the latter are going to be better trained, and they're going to know this is going to be a major news story and their conduct will be under a microscope if they do something wrong. Shooting at the hostage taker when he's stood right next to Paul Pelosi would clearly not be a very smart course of action there. And as soon as he ran away, he wasn't threatening the hostage any more so there's no grounds to shoot to kill. It's an apples to oranges comparison that doesn't really prove anything as far as I can see.

Personally I’m a bit puzzled we’ve sold him, and I think the club missed a trick by not making better use of him since he signed. He’s a good player and perhaps having a plan B that played to his strengths might have been nice, even if Watkins was our plan A. I have faith Emery knows what he’s doing though.

@sne @magnkarl Yeah, I agree. It’s something you need to consider on a case by case basis at the end of the day. Some places should be banned based on their human rights record, whereas in other places it’s something to be discussed but not a dealbreaker. But I think suggesting a blanket ban on 70% of the world because they live in autocracies is ****ing mental, especially if you’re supposedly doing it in the name of inclusion. Which I why I disagree so much with El Zen about this.