A'Villan

3 minutes ago, Mandy Lifeboats said:

I disagree.  My existence before I was born seemed OK to me.  I don't recall anything bad happening.  My existence after I die will be the same.  What's to be fearful of? 

Have you experienced death?

Edit: Also, I didn't suggest you yourself feared death. If that's the way it came across there has been a misunderstanding. 

4 minutes ago, RicRic said:

Who would we rather sign out of the two is it divided amongst us or are we keen on Bentancur?

Boubacar Kamara or Rodrigo Bentancur 

 

Bentancur. 

Kamara is more well rounded and pretty handy on the ball but not sure he'd pull it off to that standard in the PL.

1 minute ago, Mandy Lifeboats said:

If we stopped telling people that life after death is better than life - people might expend more effort making life better.    

I am happy for religion to continue.  But its time we broke the connection between religion and state.  

The fear of death is equally as profoundly detrimental.

6 minutes ago, limpid said:

If there is life after death then what are the stars? This is a non sequitur.

Or are you suggesting that stars are alive? You would need to define what you mean by life.

We are all a form of this universe experiencing itself.

Life, all that makes up the universe and this experience of it.

Edit: I will google non sequitur. And thanks for asking. 

19 hours ago, nick76 said:

Is there any new news on the investigation?.  I’ve googled but nothing new.  I appreciate he’s been out of the country but the man in his 40’s involved I can’t find anything.  It’s getting close to 4 months ago without any charges, is that normal.  It’s an incident in a club on a night so why does it take so long? Interview the witnesses, look at video footage, back and forth with the investigation conversations but what am I missing?

In Australia, if the case is rape or murder you can be incarcerated as a 30 year old for alleged crime committed even as a junior.

I don't even know what this bloke is accused of but I had a high school acquaintance reach out to me just recently who had been behind bars and was vague on the ins and outs.

I sought counsel and the feedback I got was stay away, or be very careful because the alleged crime and charges would be rape or murder in those circumstances. 

I thought I read Bissoumas case was allegedly rape?

Could go for a while.

Just now, Seat68 said:

They are luminous spheroids of plasma held together by their own gravity.

I almost was going to make comment on my thinking that a scientific explanation would follow, but I was anticipating @limpid might be quickest on the draw.

Not sure you've got me on this occasion though. As always, open to the possibility I'm just airing my ignorance. 

If there's no life after death then what are the stars?

4 minutes ago, DaveAV1 said:

I can’t see any reason why it 

Don't mind me it's just a thought, but perhaps by bolstering the last line, someone to cover it is less pressing, unless that specific target is an ideal one who we very much want to sign, as opposed to signing for purely defensive cover.

I am probably airing my ignorance here. 

Thoughts on if the signing of Chambers makes the likelihood of signing a DM less likely?

Just now, Vive_La_Villa said:

Tbf that’s his job. Win the ball back and move it on at pace. Cover areas of the field when other midfielders have pushed on. Always be available for a pass to keep the ball moving. 

I wasn't suggesting any different. Agreed. 

4 minutes ago, Peter Griffin said:

Better than Coutinho?

Guessing Coutinho won't feature in our midfield three or at least that's the thinking from @Zatman

1 hour ago, Zatman said:

He will easily be our best passer of the ball in midfield

I watched ten minutes of highlights which consisted of immaculate tackle after tackle, which adds up to a few and there was no slow motion or replays.

The on ball aspect of his game featured maybe half a dozen very simple passes that all were to play it to a team-mate who was better positioned to play it forward.

What do I know after seeing ten minutes of highlights? Not much. But thought it might be worth adding to discussion. 

1 hour ago, rjw63 said:

When I saw your name on the notification I knew this was not anything remotely related to football but very appropriately inappropriate.

You are a magician. 

21 minutes ago, Vive_La_Villa said:

You got me mate. No idea what that is! 

Kill/death ratio.

Edit: maybe you knew that and I've misread.

I've done my best here

He is a great tackler. He's audacious but he pulls them off like it's nothing and I think the guy he's dispossessed is always as surprised as I was watching.

I don't think he is going to add anything at all from an on ball perspective but I could be wrong.

11 minutes ago, limpid said:

Really? Religion and cultural traditions are about reinforcing "in group" thinking and maintaining the religious and cultural (political) status quo.

It's late @blandy and I'd love to be able to engage but I will get back to you later.

I'm not really talking about the institutions that hold authority over both though. 

He's highlights of ten minutes bored me but to be fair to him it is ten minutes of him pick pocketing players with some very skilled standing tackles, there's some great slide tackles and many interceptions too. The little they had of him playing on the ball, nothing special just tidy in simple situations. 

5 minutes ago, RichW said:

All are great options for the number 8 positions and is fine for when playing the bottom 6 teams. Coming up against teams in the top half/mid table it doesn't look solid at all. 

7-2

50 minutes ago, fruitvilla said:

I'd love Alphonso Davies at Villa.

God, this is so reasonable.

It's all effing luck, being in a particular place, at a particular time, with the a set of attributes, polished by genetics and environment.

I don't mean to come across as a total git here but I couldn't disagree more.

Don't take this as a slight on you, please, it's not, but this line of thinking really bothers me because I've entertained it and at times believed it long enough to see how detrimental it is for us.

This notion that we are this inconsequential blob of matter that are strangers in a universe so large, helpless to the whims and ways of the world, well it hurts me that we see it so. It hurts because I am inclined to think that this mentality is planted in us by design to divorce us from what's true.

I do enough ranting and expressing my views on here that I am wanting to balance respecting other people's space and energy, and by that I mean I don't want to assume what I post is of interest to everybody, I'd be inclined to say it isn't.

When it comes to our role in this life and that so many are so hopeless in their attachment to the mindset that life is explained best by science and our existence is insignificant and meaningless. I want to rip the heart right out of the chests of those responsible for seeing that we as a people became so out of touch with who we are, when we tell ourselves we live in a democracy, which means power of the people, and yet simultaneously we say we are powerless to determine our own fate. We tell ourselves we are the best version of ourselves any society has known. I bloody wonder about that. My word, I do.

I don't have the time and energy today to write you why I am so strong in my stance here, but this very subject is what my post in the thread on what we most dislike in ourselves was on about. I think there's an important and perhaps even urgent need for people to at the very least explore what makes us who we are a little deeper than just handing it over to a scientific method and those dedicated to it. 

Take the initiative for yourself. Maybe that's why we find ourselves thinking it's all left to chance, because we have forgotten how to take it upon ourselves to think creative, critical and self determine.

I'm by no means saying I have discovered all the answers for myself and by myself. 

The acknowledgement of a lack of knowledge is when we can begin to wonder and develop as there is room for learning to take hold. If the only room you have in that wonderful world of yours is to accept scientific facts, I think you've sold yourself well and truly short.

Quote

In 431 BC war broke out between Athens and Sparta - the two superpowers of the Greek world. Socrates was enlisted as a hoplite, a wealthy and well-equipped infantryman. Shunning personal comfort and able to endure great personal hardship without complaint, he was to make quite a name for himself.

 

One story, in Plato's 'Symposium', describes how Socrates remained oblivious to harm even in retreat. After one disastrous battle, this total lack of concern is said to have intimidated the pursuing enemy so much that he was left completely untouched while hundreds of his fellows were picked off and slaughtered.

 

Plato also recounts that when Socrates returned to Athens after a long tour of duty, he refused to answer his friends' questions about the war. Instead he insisted they first tell him the more important news about how the search of truth was going. 

 

 

https://www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/characters/socrates_p3.html

Quote

Edward (Ned) Kelly probably came into the world in June 1855, although his brother Jim would later say that Ned was born ‘at the time of the Eureka stockade’. That might or might not have been true, but it tells us something about the political sentiments associated with the Kelly family. I’ll come back to that later. First Ned’s family background. His father, John (Red), was born in Tipperary, Ireland, in 1820 and sent to Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania) in 1841 for stealing two pigs. After serving his seven years, Red went to the mainland to try his luck on the gold fields. He was one of the few lucky ones, earning enough to lease some land in the Port Phillip district, a part of NSW that would become the state of Victoria in 1851. That same year he married Ellen Quinn, the 18-year old daughter of a farmer he had been working for as a bush carpenter. During the time they were together, they had eight children, five daughters and three sons. Ned was number three and the eldest boy. 

 

For every one of us, our background and upbringing are critical in determining who we will become and it was no different for Ned Kelly. First of all, it was important that his family had Irish roots. Not only had his father been sent here from Ireland, his grandfather, James Quinn, had been a free settler from County Antrim, who had arrived in Australia, as Red had, in 1841. James, Ellen’s father, rented a block of land at Wallan, about 50 kilometers from Melbourne, where he ran stock and horses. For a while everything was fine, but from the end of the 1850s, members of the Quinn clan kept getting arrested for cattle duffing (theft). Most of the charges were dismissed, but it set up a strained relationship between Ned’s family and the local police. This was exacerbated when Red himself was charged with cattle stealing and being ‘in illegal possession of one cow hide’ in 1865. He was sentenced to 25 pounds or six months goal. Before the end of the prison sentence, the money was raised and Red was released. But because he had been suffering from dropsy (oedema) before he went in, he died not long after. [1]

 

It was December 1866 and suddenly Ned, not quite twelve years old, was the male head of the family. His mother, now a widow with eight children, moved to a small landholding in the Greta district. This made her a selector, somebody who fell under the provisions of the Grant Act of 1865. I’ll come back to this a little later, but for now it is enough to know that selectors were small farmers, who could select a piece of land if they were willing to sign up to a number of conditions. They had to fence the property, build a house and live there, put at least 10 per cent of the land under cultivation and pay the rent. If they were unable to do that, they could lose their land and everything on it. Most of the fertile land that had access to water went to big landowners called squatters and people like Ellen Kelly were left with the unprofitable scraps. The family was poor, there were too many mouths to feed and soon young Ned got into trouble with the law himself. In 1869 and 1870 he was in front of the court a number of times. First accused of assaulting a Chinese digger, then for highway robbery, as the apprentice of local bushranger Harry Power. While he got away with those, he earned his first prison sentence at the end of 1870, for sending an indecent letter.  

 

Not long after his release from goal in 1871, he was back in front of a judge, this time for stealing a horse. Although the police exhibited some questionable conduct before and during Ned’s arrest, he was convicted to three years and hard labour. While Ned was in jail, his younger brother Jim was also arrested and sentenced to five years for the theft of four cows. In 1874 Ned was released, in time to see his mother marry an American, George King. For the next couple of years, everything went quiet. Ned took a job in the lumber industry, then panned for gold and spent some time mustering. But in 1877 he got arrested again, for being drunk and disorderly. On his way to court, two police officers, Fitzpatrick and Lonigan, grabbed him by the throat and the genitals, apparently because Ned refused to be handcuffed. It did not help to dilute the bad blood that already existed between the Kelly’s and the police, and soon Ned decided to throw caution to the wind and specialize in cattle duffing and horse stealing fulltime. [2]

 

Then things went from bad to worse fairly quickly. In 1878 there was the ‘Fitzpatrick incident’. In April, Ned and his brother Dan were suspected of horse stealing and a warrant was issued for their arrest. Fitzpatrick, the police officer Ned had already been in trouble with before, came to the Kelly house to try and arrest the boys. Although there are a number of versions of what happened then, in the end Fitzpatrick had a wrist wound and after some skirmishes Ellen Kelly , Ned’s mother, was arrested for attempted murder. In October she was sentenced by Judge Redmond Barry (remember that name!) to three years hard labour. Ellen took her newborn baby Alice with her, because she also lost her house and land after being unable to pay the rent. Realising this was serious, Ned and Dan went into hiding, with the police in hot pursuit. A few weeks later the two parties ran into each other at a place called Stringybark Creek. Again, there are several different accounts of what happened there, but a few hours later police offers Lonigan (see above), Kennedy and Scanlon were dead. Ned and his brother Dan, who had been joined by their friends Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, were now officially the ‘Kelly Gang’. In November a law was changed, so the gang could be outlawed and a reward of 500 pounds put on their heads. In essence, this meant that anyone could shoot and kill them without needing a trial first.

 

But this did not happen. Ned and his Gang were famous by now and the people in the bush and the small villages helped them out by feeding and hiding them. This was especially the case after the Kelly Gang pulled off robbing a bank at Euroa in December of 1878. Not only because they took the money and got away with it, but above all because they destroyed paperwork that tied poor selectors to their debts. Now more than ever, the small farmers viewed the Gang as the Australian version of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Geographer and historian John McQuilton explained this phenomenon by looking at what had happened in Victoria in the years leading up to what he called ‘the Kelly outbreak’. Before the 1840s, most of the land had been controlled by squatters, large landowners who had established themselves in the area as a social and political elite. They not only held most of the land, but also had a good amount of politicians and the best part of the police in their pockets.  

 

Then gold was found in Victoria and tens of thousands of people streamed in from everywhere around the world. Some of them were lucky, most were not, and when the Rush was over, there were a lot of people with nowhere to go. From 1860 to 1884, the Governments of the day tried to enact a series of Land Acts, to make it possible for ex-diggers to select and lease land, at the low price of 1 pound per acre. As we have seen before, there were conditions attached and a lot of these so-called selectors did not manage to make a go of it. Some of them because they knew nothing about farming and failed to rotate their crop, focusing on the farmers’ choice for the region, wheat. Other small farmers were unsuccessful because the rich squatters had taken up the best parcels of land and the best stock to put on it, leaving the selectors with very little. Over all, McQuilton says, the land reforms were a fiasco. Of the 1.8 million acres that were made available, 1.6 million went to the squatters, not the selectors, as had been the intention. During this process, the selectors had watched the squatters use legal loopholes, dummying, harassment and corruption to get their way. They also knew that many of the Judges and JPs were squatters themselves, which did not bode well for the impartiality of the judicial system. On top of that, there was a strong relationship between the squatters and the police. Also, country duty was very unpopular within the police force, which usually meant that the bush got the worst men, who were corrupt, low in morale and often engaged in misconduct, prejudice and bias. [3]

More on the website link 

 

https://www.australia-explained.com.au/history/ned-kelly

38 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

The Lingard deal including loan fee and wages would have cost them over £15m. For 16 games. 
 

I think the most surprising thing there was that they were sensible enough to say no to that. 

They have Maximilian the Saint, Joelington finding some form to finally justify his record fee, and is it Wilson up front. One of my better friends is toon and doesn't miss many games, not since we begun watching fixtures together each week in 2010. Back when they had Lovenkrands and Leon Best, and Andy Carroll's prime.

Anyway, he's adamant they need essentially a back four to come in as starters, and I've got concerns about their midfield from the little I know about it.

Lingard would be throwing money into the one area of the field they have three adequate if not good starters.

@mjmooney interested to see if this hip hop track speaks to you at all.

51 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

As they say, the worst kind of poverty is poverty of aspiration.

They use the term precariat these days, to describe those who live from hand to mouth, and certainly, what was true of our grandparents would be doubly-true of Irish Catholics.

Folk memories of the hedge-schools are hardly likely to encourage people to believe that the world was their oyster.

As E P Thompson wrote about the English labouring classes, earning a sufficiency could never be taken for granted.

Whether it was Hardy's Jude The Obscure, Emlyn Williams' The Corn is Green, or Wesker's Roots, the barriers to educational aspirations, were well known and understood.

Your parents must have been very proud of your achievements.

I'm out of reactions for today but that's probably for the best here because it's made me write you instead, to say, your posts in this thread are appreciated and thank you for that. 

Honestly for some of them it's a language foreign to me but that's what's driving the thanks, as I can now go off and learn something I didn't. I can understand enough to know you are speaking about issues deep in my heart and at the core of where I see the world as we know it, lacking. That's not to say I think we are not good enough, I think the world of people and want everyone to live their best and a quality of life worth their time and effort here. 

You convey a message I can only guess is well versed in the history for certain aspects of why they are this way. And I aspire to share that insight. 

Forgive the following but the Greek side of my family have always lived in villages in Greece that were Spartan territories, and it was slightly odd that I had of my own thinking, started questioning my friends, family, and even at times strangers, on what they believed to be our greatest resources. And I would always follow up that for me it was one's heart and mind. As I delve deeper into Spartan history and philosophies, I learned that this fundamentally core to their belief and life approach. Virtue, courage and commitment to something beyond one's own importance. It was a nice coincidence to experience. 

On to the Irish side of my family and my dad believes that I've never had a serious injury from 27 years of basketball and 21 playing for a professional club, outside of one as a 13 year old, because of the Irish working class blood running through my veins, all the way back to the plantations and the fields. I don't know about that and I haven't done much reading on the Irish perspective on history and what's become of us. However again the way you offer a concise and clear understanding for what you are discussing has inspired me to keep on my path too, and that there are others too with a keen interest in such matters.

Most of my friends are black. Partly because of basketball, partially because I'm well known around Melbourne's inner city and live in social housing myself at among the high rise commission flats.

You talk about poverty of aspiration and forgive me if I misinterpret but for me that's synonymous with the heart and mind, as we aspire only what we feel and see as befitting in becoming something more than what was true for a time.

I am both liked and respected by the Africans I know for more than a friendly and kind manner, we have some wonderful chats about life and so once again, thank you for adding to that indirectly through sharing here.