Rolta

It depends on whether he has sporting ambition or making a load of money from a dodgy country ambition and being complicit in all the controversy that's connected to it.

Am I right in thinking it was in the "news"—the Daily Mail or something—a few weeks back, but they blamed it on the Lib Dems, who replaced the people who actually did it. It might have been something else. EDIT: I just had a search and it was written about, but if the headline was as I say, it seems to have been changed.

My word is this true? That's a shameful lack of class. What an idiot (if true). I already dislike him a lot because he was a charlatan blagging his way as a manager and destroying us in the process. I know it wasn't his fault he was offered the job, but still.

What makes you say that though? He seems pretty on it every time I see him play.

Fair enough! As for the positions, Emery obviously has a bit of a different system to most people that involves a Buendia/Bailey/McGinn/Ramsey playing with Watkins. Barnes would surely be put there—and it's the most obvious position that we could do with improving. We could do with more than one if we were really serious.

They play in different positions. I don't get the hate. He's always looked pretty great to me. He'd be an option to play with Watkins I'd imagine.

Well Man City have three and they're doing OK. We have zero, so three more then.

Isn't this just a standard part of the legal process. 'Discovery' in the US—maybe it's called something different in the UK—'disclosure?'. Famously it's why we know so much about the conversations of the utter bullshitters that are Fox News, Steve Bannon etc. via the Dominion lawsuit. I guess in the past personal whatsapps weren't the standard way of communicating—when people might have had to give access to paper trails/letters/emails. In this case, whatsapps were used to conduct official business. I get that there's maybe a little informal banter in there too, but this stuff is the modern equivalent of official communication.

I've been keeping my eye out for Emery and talking about it with Real Madrid fans. They seemed a bit disappointed we seem to have more money than them! At least they know who we are now—before, whenever I mentioned Aston Villa they thought I was saying someone's name.

Understatement!

He always impressed me.

I've come to the conclusion that Chatgpt and Bard just chat shit. It might sound convincing, but under a bit of scrutiny it quickly seems to fall apart.

Little Britain!

She is an extremist equally as extreme as the ones trying to overthrow actual democracy.

But what is the 'extreme' that you're talking about here for the Democrats? I guess you might mention about 3/4 of just some of the more outspoken members of the party who have been painted a certain way in the right-wing media because the right-wing media here there and everywhere love an enemy to rally around, whether there's rationale for it or not (and of course in cases there can be things people object to). But the actual Democrats as a whole though—what is it? Compare that to MAGA and Trump, who was the actual president. I don't think it's an even situation at all—I don't agree that they've 'both been taken over by the extreme fringes'. The Republicans are losing their perspective on reality. They're winding themselves up with their own demagoguery. It's eating them alive. It's not unfair to say the same thing happened in other countries in Europe a hundred years ago too—the right going nuts, but this time there's even less reason for them to do so. We're not about to have an actual communist revolution anywhere anytime soon, as was a genuine possibility a hundred years ago—the actual thing they seem to be upset about is democracy itself, and if that's not a sign that it's the right who have lost their shit and shifted to an extreme position, I don't know what is.

'Centrist" Elon Musk. There was a guy I went to uni with who became obsessed with Tucker Carsen. He said they were both centrists too. He'd done a lot of drugs. So many.

Openly pining for a fascist dictator when he was 19—maybe he's grown out of it, but I like to like our players. He seems like a prick, and not in any good "we need a bit of backbone" sense. He was quite negatively outspoken about Basque people too, yet Emery signed him for Arsenal, so maybe he's calmed down a bit.

I live in Madrid and Spanish people fall into racism way too easily. They came out of a dictatorship at the end of the 70s, they've barely been multicultural, and in so many ways they're about 20 years behind us. We do have our own dickheads though—and the dickheads in Spain are the exact same dickheads as in the UK. I think they have more of the racist type though—over-macho ignorant crap. There's a bit more status here in Spain found in just bullshitting your way through things and pretending you're 'the man', and a lot of the bravado manifests in souped up arrogance and over-asserted tribal bullshit. There are also a lot of actual, out in the open fascists, and apparently clubs like Valencia and Atletico are some of the worst examples. I played football last night, and the guy who served us in the bar often wears a legionnaires (Franco's fascist army) hoody. He was bitching about Vincius, no surprise. I also have two fourteen year old students who consume endless racist shit on TikTok. 80% of the memes are racist. They play fascist songs thinking it's funny. I know fourteen year olds are pretty much awful, but I've had to call them out on this near enough constantly. Here when 14 year olds act out they roleplay as actual fascists. Some people don't grow out of it. Racism is normalised here, and again it's all from them showing off and trying to be macho. It's a nightmare. I'm leaning on the 'macho' side of things a lot here, but there are female equivalents too. I just don't get exposed to it quite as much. Not all of Spain is like this by any means. There are loads of great people, but it's heavily polarised and the pricks make a lot of noise.

I said this—I wasn't paying any attention to them whatsoever. When we're a bit depressingly shit I barely look above us in the table. My bad! Bring on the conference then!

This was insane and absurd! I remember one game recently with loads of injuries and we got about 3mins of injury time that I don't think were even fully played.

They love it surely. This sets the acceptable line where you can criticise the Tories, being cheeky about a £100 speeding ticket—all the rest of the endless shitery is therefore OK.

Tbh, he looked as if he was about to cry from sadness in his post match interview. We'd given ourselves all the chances in the world to get the Europa League until that equaliser.

Ah yeah but I think Villareal also suffered a little in the league at times while he was succeeding in the European cups.

It didn't work well for West Ham this season! I'm not saying we'd be that shit, but it's arguable that it it be a bit of a shame if our league form suffered just to play in the Conference. I'd think more of it if there wasn't a group stage.

I'm not really against it, but I wouldn't stick now. We might as well hope for the Europa until it's impossible—I was responding to comments about someone wanting Brighton to get the results they need to secure 6th, so they'd be on the beach for the final day, allowing us to beat them to get 7th. Nah—let's hope they lose/draw tomorrow and we get 6th.