On the contrary, you understand me perfectly! Either that, or Albania is even smaller than we thought. I’ll bet you know how to spell "well-heeled" as well. Tbf, maybe they’re talking about a convalescent ward.
No surprises.... We're away at Everton. First 6: A - Everton H - Palace H - Liverpool A - Stoke H - Sunderland A - Middlesbrough Could be a lot worse I suppose...
It's not the first six.... It's the last six: H - Bournemouth A- Leicester H- Arsenal A- West Ham H- Man Utd A- Hull
Yes, when there blocks of PL games against certain opponents +/- interleaved with UEFA games. You can at least test the hypothesis statistically over a few seasons (identifying such blocks and comparing the PL points tally to a desired 2 pts per game etc) .
Absolutely. That run of 6 wins on the spin that transformed us from top 4 hopefuls into title contenders was a grouping of 5 exceptionally winnable games with Man City away being the only real challenge. The fact that this run occupied half of January and all of February was also significant, as that tends to be the time when things level off and teams pull away from eachother. It's no coincidence that our new-born title run was immediately rushed into intensive care after the following 2 games at the beginning of March - the double body blows from West Ham and Arsenal that represented two missed opportunities to go top that we never fully recovered from in terms of confidence. Swap the March fixtures around to face Villa and B'mouth first and suddenly the picture changes entirely if you go into 2 London derbies in 4 days already top of the league.
There are a lot of bad people out there. Where we are mistaken is thinking that we can live in a perfect society or anywhere near it. There is vast evidence that humans are never far removed from barbarity and it only takes someone else in a position of authority to give "the orders" to give some an excuse for participating in genocide. And there are people that will associate with any "cause" to excuse their base instinct, for which many understandably blame that cause, when in fact those sort of flawed people are always liable to lose control. Some are easily led, some are easily corrupted, this will not change I'm afraid.
I do not believe anyone thinks that. The goal is always to push society towards perfection, and while accepting that such societies by definition allow bad people to attempt to commit these acts if they choose, make such people an ever-decreasing minority whose intent can be discerned and/or thwarted long before the event.
As much as I think the modern world is overrun with humans and atrocities occur everywhere we still have plenty of evidence for the goodness of most humans. We can never be free of the psychopaths, many of whom rule us while others languish as bottom feeders looking to strike, unless we genetically engineer it out, and I'd find that very frightening. Disgusting tragic stuff is all around but we are still far better off than our ancestors were and most of us in the UK live safe lives. I want Scotland out of the UK but I still respect that I am very lucky to have spent my life in what is largely a very civilised state.
It's interesting to see the absence of a certain word following the tragic death of Jo Cox. I suspect that the suspect would've been referred to as a suspected terrorist if he were browner or more Irish. Seems more like a mental-care problem, from what I've read about him, but that's another area where we're failing at the moment.
The world is as bad and as good as it has always been. Modern technology and mass media means that we just know about more of the bad, in more graphic detail.
Some idiot on the right will no doubt claim that the lack of control of immigration means that people were at breaking point and someone was bound to break. It won't occur to them that people are only at 'breaking point' because they've been fed scare stories about the effects of immigrants. There is definitely a cause and effect here but it will be hard to discuss it without appearing to make political capital out of this tragic event. No-one is ever allowed to defend 'terrorism' on the basis of mistreatment though despite the fact that the causality is completely obvious. If you are getting bombed in your own home by a the US its not hard to see why you might join a 'terrorist' organisation.
I don't want to put words in your mouth but that kinds of goes with my argument of associating causes or ideologies to actions, maybe after the event. There seems to be a certain (luckily small) percentage of people who are liable to commit extreme violence and I would argue it's not the cause that made them, they are just an incident waiting to happen, regardless of cause. Do we really think that the guy who shot all those people in the bar recently was indoctrinated by ISIS, or that was the cause of the moment that he jumped on board? Or indeed whether the cause was anything to do with it at all, he was just looking for an excuse for his savagery. As you say, there is a problem when others try to use these events for their own ends, particularly when they try and associate a whole movement, belief or religion with the actions of a disturbed individual. The simple facts would tell you that if the problem was really a widely held belief then these incidents would be far more widespread. And people that jump on board for their own political ends are the lowest of the low.
