Panto_Villan

Indeed, I really hadn't appreciated quite what a strategic advantage it was for Turkey before I read the wiki article. You learn something new every day.

Actually reading on wikipedia what the convention actually says, there's some very strict limits on warships being sent through for any purpose at a time of war (which Turkey have declared is happening). So NATO flat-out can't get a task force through even if it wanted to. I had no idea it was that restricted to be honest. I guess we could send some unarmed merchant ships through and declare them under NATO protection but anything resembling a warship won't be getting anywhere near Ukraine.

Jeez. There's not going to be too much dead weight in our team at the rate we're going. £25m+ players everywhere! Except Coutinho obviously. Better upgrade him ASAP.

I think if they're travelling specifically as part of a humanitarian escort for civilian ships then I think they probably would be allowed, right? Because they're not warships that are party to the conflict. Whether Turkey would choose to allow it is another matter entirely.

Yeah, I think that's a possibility.

My own perspective is a bit different - the Ukrainians are fighting to protect and reclaim their country. I think high losses are more acceptable to them than they are for Russia. Currently there's plenty of support for the war in Russia but there's always a "rally around the flag" effect at the start of a war and we've only been going three months. If thousands and thousands of Russians keep coming home in bodybags every month while the economy falls apart due to sanctions, I think Russians will become disillusioned with the war - particularly if the casualties suffered necessitate a more general mobilisation where people who don't particularly want to fight are getting called up to die in a war that they have no hope of winning. Which will be happening soon if current trends continue. So while I appreciate it's not easy to reclaim territory I suspect what'll happen is the level of casualties being taken is going to cripple Russia before it does Ukraine, and it'll lead to the Russians desperately trying to negotiate for peace when they realise this war is bleeding them dry for no gain.

One nice thing about Leon being in terrible form is that we've not had to hear from his dad in a while.

I think their best chance of getting way with it would be Boris going, and I don't know why anyone wants that to happen. He's a dead man walking going into the election among all but the most hardcore Tory voters so I think the best outcome (both for country and even the Tory party) is he keeps weathering scandal after scandal and then proceeds to gets annihilated in the election.

That depends on your definition of a victory, really. Ukraine isn't going to win a decisive victory where they invade Moscow but if the war degenerates into a stalemate with both sides suffering huge casualties with minimal gains I know which side I think is likely to cave first. And I think the Ukrainians do too. Given how much the US spent on trying to keep Afghanistan going, I think they'll be pretty happy to keep bankrolling the utter destruction of Russia's military / economy.

It was kind of inevitable given the circumstances, and I think it makes sense. It's not something that should be done lightly but prices have gone up so much the normal rules shouldn't apply at this point. Also the good news is that apparently the price of gas has collapsed in the UK because so much LNG has reached our shores recently. It'll take some time for this reduction in prices to work through the system because energy companies hedge their prices X months in advance, but it does mean that the upward trend reversing is locked in at this point.

As to it being impossible to deal with the sheer number of firearms in the US via legislation - it's far from impossible if there's the political will to do it. If ownership of a certain class of weapons was made illegal and a buyback scheme was established, I guarantee you 90% of those weapons would be voluntarily returned within a few years. Not many people want to own something that is actively illegal. And it'd be perfectly possible to maintain use of high-powered rifles for hunting purposes even under such a system. You'd just need a permit for it with appropriate background checks, and probably membership of a hunting club. I think the UK has similar rules for people in shooting clubs being able to own shotguns. You don't need high-capacity magazines to go hunting anyway. If anything above a 5-round magazine is illegal, shooting up a school with your dad's AR-15 is going to kill a lot less people.

I genuinely feel like the best way to ensure gun control laws get implemented in the US is to ensure that ethnic minorities buy as many military-grade assault rifles as possible - and it should be obvious as to why that is. Apparently, that's is actually happening. Left-leaning people and ethnic minorities are responsible for a lot of the growth in firearms sales in recent years (although whether or not they are buying assault rifles the article didn't say).

My problem with Suarez from a purely footballing perspective is that the club already has a bunch of strikers who all have good aspects to their game but just aren't quite doing the business overall - Watkins, Ings, Davis, etc. If we're going on past form then I don't really see *that* much difference between Ings and Suarez. Both are proven goalscorers (depite Ings missing a bunch of chances recently) but Gerrard seems to prefer Watkins to Ings due to his athleticism. Is Suarez going to be the best of both worlds? I doubt it. Feels like we'll just have two poacher-style strikers sat on the bench not playing that much while we watch Watkins stumble around like a drunkard week in week out. And the age thing is a concern. Best case scenario is we get a couple of years out of him - but it's quite possible he arrives here and is deeply average while on big wages for a couple of years. The problem with that is that we've actually got quite a strong squad on paper these days (especially since we signed Kamara) so I feel like we should be throwing money at a marquee signing in the positions we're still lacking. I'm no scout but I can't believe 35 year old Suarez is literally the best striker available to us in the market.

He’s about 700 years old. No thanks.

Thing is if we’d got beat 3-0 we’d also have “done a Villa”, just a different kind of Villa.

In all seriousness this is a very exciting signing as far as I’m concerned. It’s an area we really need strengthening in and he’s a player I expected to go to one of the good CL clubs (in fact I thought he’d already agreed to sign for one). Im sure we’ve offered him crazy wages but the last number 1 player we went all out for and got early was Buendia and after a shaky start he’s been pure class. Great way to start the summer imo.

Always disappointing when you finally see Boubs in the flesh. Never delivers on the anticipation.

We were winning against City when I heard about this transfer happening, so frankly he’s been nothing but bad luck since he signed.

If only they'd read the instructions...

Brexit wasn't actually a very good idea, was it?

Realistically Finland and Sweden already have much of the protection of being in NATO because they're part of the EU, and they're long-established democracies that already collaborate regularly with NATO. I don't think there'd be much hand-wringing about the rest of the West getting involved if Russia went for either of those countries (nor would they be easy targets). That said I'd be very surprised if Turkey actually did block the entry of those two countries into NATO. As others have said, he's after something.

I think you're thinking about it the wrong way. There's generally way more accountability for failure in a democratic (and thus meritocratic) state than in an authoritarian one - if there's a major disaster, heads tend to roll at the highest level. This usually fixes both the immediate problem and the system responsible for it. That's not really how it worked with the Soviets. Take Chernobyl as an example again. The guy in charge of the power plant made some mistakes which directly enabled the disaster, and he was sent off the to gulag. But the fundamental problem was that of reactor design, bad oversight and general cost-cutting, and there was no accountability for that. Punishing power plant managers might make them take safety protocols more seriously but ultimately they're still going to be working with dodgy reactors. Contrast the US reaction to the less serious reactor accident at Three Mile Island. The same applied to the Soviet military. Before WW2 Stalin purged the officer corps because he thought they posed a political threat (nothing to do with their competence), which weakened the Red Army. Then, like Hitler, he continued to interfere and randomly micromanage the military campaign. I was reading today he insisted on endless frontal attacks on German positions near Kharkiv / Izyum that got 170,000 Russian soldiers killed for no reason. You can ruthlessly punish the generals for their failure but it doesn't address the real systemic problems so it'll only get you so far. EDIT - if you've not watched Chernobyl, I'd really recommend it. It's genuinely excellent TV and it's as much about why the Soviet political system was rotten as the disaster / aftermath itself. Only six episodes too.

You're making a whole bunch of assumptions there that suggest you grew up in a capitalist system though - the main one being that the defence staff have their jobs because of competence at defence matters, and the most likely reason for losing them would be incompetence at defence matters. In reality you'll find a lot of key staff in the Soviet hierarchy (and this also applies to dictatorships / autocracies everywhere) is that many top officials have their job because they're loyal to the party (or specifically the person in charge of the party) rather than because they are competent. The army is often a tool of internal prestige and repression as much as something designed to fight external enemies. The US loves their military and has the most powerful one in the world but they don't feel the need to do a massive parade of all their gear every year, whereas Russia, China and North Korea sure do. This problem is nowhere near as bad in functioning democracies. In the light of the recent events in Ukraine a lot of analysts have been repeating the mantra that an army can only be as good as the society that creates it. As mentioned by another poster above, you can see another example of this in Chernobyl. The priority was initially to try to hush up the accident so it didn't damage Soviet prestige, and anyone that wants to deal with (or learn from) the problem has to actively fight the system to do so.

Anyone seriously expecting a 1997 style landslide needed their heads checked out. Labour could run the best candidate in the world and still wouldn’t get it now the SNP have Scotland locked up. If Starmer is leading the next government in any form, he’ll have done an excellent job.

Indeed, that's what I was saying (or trying to say). It's not like they had loads of vulnerable councillors they were defending because they'd previously had a good year. They'd already lost all them last time. They've taken heavy losses in areas you wouldn't expect them to because people are apparently waking up to how much of a shitshow this government has been. And that's great. The Tories are going to win power again at some point in the future so hopefully they'll draw the conclusion that flouting the law and the sort of right-wing populism Boris is peddling is a vote loser, as well as being bad for the country.