Rolta

This is a bit silly. You do know you get three points for a win and one for a draw right?

That's where he played for blues and Brentford. He definitely doesn't have the pace to be a prem winger though and I wonder if he'd fit better as a number 10.

If that's the criteria we'll have a lot of empty seats on the bench!

I think they're not that good Championship players.

Sounds a shame. I have a friend who joined up last year. He told me a similar-sounding story that there are two types of police officer — those who want to help people and those who want to control people.

Second attempt at this in the right format now. This was a really significant read, an eye opener on the police in the US. There may also be a few cross-over UK points in there, although I'd guess police in the UK have a different attitude, so mainly about how 'society' is set up and maintained. https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759 Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop Officer A. Cab Jun 6 · 21 min read I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were. This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me. But enough is enough. The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders. American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth. WHY AM I WRITING THIS As someone who went through the training, hiring, and socialization of a career in law enforcement, I wanted to give a first-hand account of why I believe police officers are the way they are. Not to excuse their behavior, but to explain it and to indict the structures that perpetuate it. I believe that if everyone understood how we’re trained and brought up in the profession, it would inform the demands our communities should be making of a new way of community safety. If I tell you how we were made, I hope it will empower you to unmake us. One of the other reasons I’ve struggled to write this essay is that I don’t want to center the conversation on myself and my big salty boo-hoo feelings about my bad choices. It’s a toxic white impulse to see atrocities and think “How can I make this about me?” So, I hope you’ll take me at my word that this account isn’t meant to highlight me, but rather the hundred thousand of me in every city in the country. It’s about the structure that made me (that I chose to pollute myself with) and it’s my meager contribution to the cause of radical justice. YES, ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS I was a police officer in a major metropolitan area in California with a predominantly poor, non-white population (with a large proportion of first-generation immigrants). One night during briefing, our watch commander told us that the city council had requested a new zero tolerance policy. Against murderers, drug dealers, or child predators? No, against homeless people collecting cans from recycling bins. See, the city had some kickback deal with the waste management company where waste management got paid by the government for our expected tonnage of recycling. When homeless people “stole” that recycling from the waste management company, they were putting that cheaper contract in peril. So, we were to arrest as many recyclers as we could find. Even for me, this was a stupid policy and I promptly blew Sarge off. But a few hours later, Sarge called me over to assist him. He was detaining a 70 year old immigrant who spoke no English, who he’d seen picking a coke can out of a trash bin. He ordered me to arrest her for stealing trash. I said, “Sarge, c’mon, she’s an old lady.” He said, “I don’t give a shit. Hook her up, that’s an order.” And… I did. She cried the entire way to the station and all through the booking process. I couldn’t even comfort her because I didn’t speak Spanish. I felt disgusting but I was ordered to make this arrest and I wasn’t willing to lose my job for her. If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations. We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)… shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community. As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years. I know what you’re going to ask: did I ever plant drugs? Did I ever plant a gun on someone? Did I ever make a false arrest or file a false report? Believe it or not, the answer is no. Cheating was no fun, I liked to get my stats the “legitimate” way. But I knew officers who kept a little baggie of whatever or maybe a pocket knife that was a little too big in their war bags (yeah, we called our dufflebags “war bags”…). Did I ever tell anybody about it? No I did not. Did I ever confess my suspicions when cocaine suddenly showed up in a gang member’s jacket? No I did not. In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it. And that’s the point of what I’m telling you. Whether you were my sergeant, legally harassing an old woman, me, legally harassing our residents, my fellow trainees bullying the rest of us, or “the bad apples” illegally harassing “shitbags”, we were all in it together. I knew cops that pulled women over to flirt with them. I knew cops who would pepper spray sleeping bags so that homeless people would have to throw them away. I knew cops that intentionally provoked anger in suspects so they could claim they were assaulted. I was particularly good at winding people up verbally until they lashed out so I could fight them. Nobody spoke out. Nobody stood up. Nobody betrayed the code. None of us protected the people (you) from bad cops. This is why “All cops are bastards.” Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn’t Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening. Continued in the link – the article is much, much longer than this.

To be fair to them, a lot of them, some of them, at least a proportion of them have been left behind by the system too. They're just too prejudiced and manipulated by the likes of the Sun and the Mail to point their anger where it would be more useful—classic culture war, divide and conquer stuff. I'd bet they've had the voting habits of turkeys voting for Christmas in recent times.

Pretty fascinating read: https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759

Textbook Tory Joking.

So many peaceful protests around the world and you'd rather just focus on the incidents of violence. Conveniently you now get to disengage from the whole thing.

I don't think you know what hot air is. All I said is you literally know nothing yet have judged absolutely. I know as much as you do and I know you and I know nothing. Understanding the limits of knowledge is a good place to start when making judgements on things for everyone. EDIT: I think I've come across a bit strong. Of course it's a message board and we're going to speculate and that's the point. I thought that you were talking as if you had facts when they weren't facts and that you'd built up a bit of a prejudice on things none of us really know anything about.

Not everyone had a weigh in on Drinkwater vs. Jota. And maybe none of us should seeing as none of us saw what happened and none of us have any idea what happened. Are you really that upset about El Ghazi leaning his head a little towards Ming's head? Apart from him looking a bit troubled this season – like our whole team does often, because we're struggling, as opposed to last year when we were big fish – your post is all hot air. There is basically no actual knowledge. You have taken some flimsy observations on body language (I take back the flimsy if you're a body language expert, but I'm going to guess you're not) and applied them to what really comes across as a very subjective interpretation that El Ghazi is bad. That seems like a bias against him to me. Personally, on this topic, I don't know anything. Like you don't know anything. But I'm not going to start making guesses about things I don't know about because I'd probably be missing a lot, and what's the point? By all means speculate, but it seems that you've drawn some very certain conclusions for yourself.

If you want to pretend that the BLM protests are a communist uprising, that's on you! Or, you could look at the actual point of the protests. I mean, I haven't heard one person actually say they want to overthrow capitalism and that's what they're protesting about. Sure, some people at the BLM marches definitely do feel like that, but the protests themselves are obviously not about that. Is this what you tell yourself to disengage from what they're saying? Toppling the statue of a slave trader doesn't equal communism, for example.

EDIT. I think I'm saying what you're saying.

This is something that confused me. How can anyone drink that much Fosters and Carling (tempted to end the sentence there) – and also how can anyone get drunk enough on that weak piss to make them that lary. Lightweights.

So you're saying we shouldn't have a right to protest for fear of triggering a bunch of far right words removed? I thought a right to protest was part of democracy.

What a depressing idea. If you want to debate against whether the UK government are pretty exceptional bullshitters, I think you yourself can just go square pretty much everything BJ has said in the last nine months and go square it with what's actually now happening and do your own conclusions. Then pick most members of the cabinet and do the same. Then see what they were all saying back in 2016 and see what they're saying now. Same with most things that come out of Trump's mouth too. I should have stuck to El Ghazi. Truth is, we don't know if he's agitating for a move. And I think it's fair to say building a prejudice against someone is better with some actual truth, some evidence, not just things made up or overheard by someone posting on a messageboard.

I said the first part because you didn't seem to get that the burden of proof is with the accuser. Think about a world where the burden of proof is on the accused and you'll have nightmares. As for the politics, it's easy to feel depressed because it's the same shit everywhere – 'I believe this and it must be true.' Sure it was off topic, but it's there now. Presumably my opinion refers to the fact that truth doesn't matter any more in politics. I mean do you disagree? Our whole government demonstrably, objectively, with proof keep on lying.

I hope the world isn't as insane as the logic here. The burden of proof is always on the accuser. Otherwise we all might as well give up, the whole human race – the way things have been going though in Trumpland and UK Trumpland, I'm sure we'll see plenty more subjective opinions thrown around as if they have this level of actual weight. Our politics is rife with it, truth is becoming subjective and that's utterly depressing. Facts don't matter any more, only what you want to believe.

So that's a no then! Another problem in the world—making conclusions not from actual facts but from a bias you've gone on to confirm yourself with your own thoughts. 'The way he goes off at times'—there's been one controversial example where he might well have been actually injured. He's done a lot for us over the previous two seasons. True, he hasn't been as effective this year, but he's playing in one of the toughest leagues in the world in an incredibly average team, and he's no world beater himself. He doesn't deserve the detectable tone of vitriol in your post, especially as it's literally all based on an incredibly subjective interpretation of events.

Is this one of those things like happens a lot these days where there's no evidence, but people believe it anyway?

'What about black people, they say the n word.' I don't know. Maybe you're joking! For the record, I'd remove the racist statues, but it goes without saying that I'd leave the shows because these two things are completely different. Because one puts racists up on pedestals and whitewashes their history to the same degree as a North-Korean personality cult. The other is TV. It's an actual relic of our history and something that can and should be preserved. Nobody wants to pretend that racism doesn't and didn't exist—they just don't think that in any modern country mass murderers should have statues and buildings and schools and whatever else named after them. We can put statues up and name schools after people who actually did good things (no, philanthropy paid for by a tiny fraction of a man's wealth, a man who made his money on the premise that black lives really don't matter doesn't count). Dublin does it well—Joyce, Beckett, Lynott, Lady Gregory, Molly Malone (so not actually real), Kavanagh, Famine Memorial, End of Civil War memorial, Lady Markievicz, and plenty of other figures I am no expert on but it would be good to learn about.

There's something like 50 under-16 year olds murdered every year in the UK. It's an exception when these become national news.

They're not just protesting about police murder.

I don't think this is a fair comparison. He looks effective and as if he worries defenders every time he plays—he always has done. He might not score, but he looks like he can actually compete. He has a presence in the game that a lot of our players are lacking, along with a certain quality and we've all seen it. I imagine that's what people are getting hopeful about. Obviously, he's been held back by injuries, and nobody is going to argue that his goalscoring could be improved upon. You can't pull a rabbit from the hat unless there's already a rabbit in the hat, and for me, I'd argue there's a good shot at there being a rabbit here as a Premier-League-level first team player even if he won't score countless goals. We look like a better team when he plays. Carles Gil never had that kind of presence. He was too slow for a start.