Pack your suitcases and prepare for Round Two of the European Cup.
Cardiff v Harlequins
Home advantage and Ellis Jenkins won’t do enough for Cardiff against in-form Quins. Quins by 10.
Castres v Munster
No-one will ever know the result of this match as anyone who attempts to watch it will die the most horrible of deaths from boredom, judging by the reverse fixture.
Wasps v Toulouse
Ooh. Toulouse by at least 35.
Ospreys v Racing 92
Surprisingly, Racing 92 are languishing even further down the Top 14 table than Ospreys are in the URC. I still think they’ll win, though – by about 12.
Connacht v Leicester
This could be the surprise of the weekend, possibly depending on the weather. Connacht by 3.
La Rochelle v Bath
Bath to take a Bath. La Rochelle by 20.
Exeter v Glasgow Warriors
Glasgow have been looking the business in their last couple of matches, and Exeter are not what they were last year. Weegies by 6.
Bristol v Stade Français
Neither side setting the world on fire this season, so home players by 4.
Leinster v Montpellier
Despite being toppled off the top of the URC, Leinster remain a team to be very scared of, and are at home. Blue Meanies by 17.
Bordeaux v Scarlets
Ooh là là, les Médocs par approximately neufty.
Northampton v Ulster
Will the return of Baloucoune and Hume mean an Ulster away win? Probably not, but I’m going for Ulster by 7 anyway. (This is why I never win the leagues.)
Clermont v Sale
Oh dear, Yellow Army by 30.
Onna telly this week
Friday 14th January
| Castres v Munster | 20:00 | BT Sport 3 |
| Cardiff v Harlequins | 20:00 | S4C / BT Sport 2 |
Saturday 15th January
| Wasps v Toulouse | 13:00 | Channel 4 / BT Sport 2 |
| Treviso v Dragons | 15:15 | S4C |
| Ospreys v Racing 92 | 15:15 | BT Sport 3 |
| Connacht v Leicester | 15:15 | BT Sport 2 |
| La Rochelle v Bath | 17:30 | BT Sport 3 |
| Exeter v Glasgow | 17:30 | BT Sport 2 |
| Bristol v Stade Français | 20:00 | BT Sport 2 |
Sunday 16th January
| Leinster v Montpellier | 13:00 | BT Sport 2 | ||
| Bordeaux v Scarlets | 15:15 | BT Sport 3 | ||
| Northampton v Ulster | 15:15 | BT Sport 2 | ||
| Clermont v Sale | 17:30 | BT Sport 2 |
Ovally Balls 
Find it hard to be overly pleased for Bath even if they have managed to attain underdog status.
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Refit – that story illustrates something I came to a while back. I don’t think many career politicians actually like poor or working class people. Yes they’ll happily have their vote but otherwise they have nothing in common with them or view them as racists or whatever.
Saying that, I believed Bernie wanted to make a difference. But they fucked him and he lost to sleepy Joe.
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Refit – I don’t understand this transphobia thing, I really don’t. First of all, it’s a very, very niche issue. Then it appears to have got all shouty through women who don’t want to share toilets with trans women. I mean, wtf? It strikes me that a man who chooses to identify as a woman is most certainly not an anti-feminist. The two (count ’em!) trans women I’ve known in my 50+ years were certainly not people to be afraid of.
Any vaguely competent PR person would have completely buried the issue.
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Away from the pros and cons of Labour, this might make you question your sanity. Especially if you’re a fan of the Potter books
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Always think TB gets too much ‘credit’ for that war. Obviously he attached our names to it, but it’s hard to think it wasn’t going to happen anyway one way or another.
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Cam Redpath had a couple a decent breaks, but Huw Jones was probably the better of the Scottish centres tonight. Nice to see the two of them having a chat after the game too.
Also, D’arcy Rae played the whole 80 after being part of the Bath scrum that got hammered in the first half.
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Thaum – part of the problem is that transphobia is amplified by a whole bunch of people who keep screaming they’re being silenced in their national newspaper columns, a billionaire children’s author and, at the moment, the BBC.
Despite most polling showing that the majority of people in the UK, including women, support people’s right to self-ID as the gender they identify as, it’s being presented as the end-times. Up to the EHCR intervening in Scotland over proposed legislation, that has been publicly reviewed twice and supported by the EHCR twice in past.
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Ticht
Thaum, legislation securing public spending could just be thrown out by the next government, couldn’t it?
Yes, legislation about spending. I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about legislation that restructures the way society works. Like undoing Thatcher’s selling-off, so re-nationalising utilities, railways and so on, reversing right to buy which has killed the chances of anyone getting secure and affordable housing, and so on. And also not going along with Thatcherite policies like demonising the disabled and unemployed. Restoring arts grants that, with a more generous dole, led to the massive explosion of British (working-class!) domination in the 60s and 70s.
Where are the Beatles (who generated a massive amount of money for the Treasury, as well as soft power) of yesteryear? Languishing in a zero-hours contract job.
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The Middle One finally finished Harry Potter last week. Last couple of books seemed to be a real slog that she was just reading for the sake of completing it. Looked massively overly long to me. My brother’s read them and tells me they do go downhill, quite probably because Rowling had too much power and could make them as long as she wanted. I have no intention of reading them as the bits I’ve read when the girls were doing the first one at school were fine but unexceptional and there’s just too much of it. The Middle One is back on to Lemony Snicket now which is where she wanted to be for the last month or so of Potter and I will keep reading those (I’m two books behind her) as they’re pretty funny.
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“Always think TB gets too much ‘credit’ for that war. Obviously he attached our names to it, but it’s hard to think it wasn’t going to happen anyway one way or another.”
CMW, I think that is correct, someone was going to pay publicly for 9/11 and after the first round it was odds on that it was going to be Iraq.
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Very weak Quins team this week Bath the better team after the first 15 mins. Probably the critical difference was Nathan Hughes debut for Bath. Nearly pulled off an undeserved win when demonstrating the lack of Bath defence with the try in 74 mins but we can’t keep trying to win in the last 10.
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Refit @21:45 – that is a parody, shurely?
And I am a fan of the Potter books, although I know that JK Rowling has some dubious political views, including transphobia (as I now see you’ve mentioned later) and Corbynphobia.
CMW @21:46 – yes, the war was going to happen anyway, but we didn’t have to participate in it, and lend it some international approbation.
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Get ’em on Pratchett (if you haven’t already). Much better life lessons from that.
And speaking of lessons from Sir PTerry, this is pretty awesome:
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It having occurred to me that the Welsh teams must be playing this weekend I now see that the Dragons already have and didn’t lose.
The European ‘adventures’ have pretty much finished any vestiges of interest I had in the season outside of the 6N I’m afraid.
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CMW, I read the first 3 pages of the first Harry Potter to my boy last year and then snobbishly refused to read any more. I let him watch the films.
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@Thaum – nope, that was from the official Pottermore website.
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Treviso had a last-minute penalty to win it, a fairly easy shot. Then the stream I was sort of watching died so I presumed they’d lost.
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Clyde – the first two HP books are OK, the third one is by far and away the best. Number 4 is a bit too long, but the real slog is number 5 – it could have had about 300 pages taken out of it and been a far better story. 6 and 7 take ages to get going and are a bit repetitive, but 5’s the killer. I usually say to any pupil taking it out that they can skip about half of it.
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CMW – I loved the books despite their somewhat clunky style. Rowling’s ability to plot over 7 books is pretty amazing. I also like her adult books.
I don’t agree with some of her political views, although we’d probably broadly agree on most things. Maybe she has been attacked by a man posing as a trans woman at some point in her life, or just has a vivid* imagination about this happening.
*If I were setting Wordle, I’d use this word. Guaranteed fail for most people.
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Thaum, I don’t disagree with any of that, but if I can use a stupid analogy, it takes seconds to jump up and down on a violin and smash it to smithereens.
It takes months, years to repair that damage.
Thatcher didn’t just jump up and down on the post-war consensus, she made it really difficult for people to see that things were broken needed repairing. “I’m alright jack, loadsamoney, buy a council house and we are tidy”
There’s that window thing where the consensus moves left or right, in terms of equality and treating “different” as equal we are better re some rights, though we have a long way to go with trans.
However there has been a shift to the right in terms of governments and Labour have to play a long game, small incremental gains. As much as I’d like to see a Michael Foot win, I can’t see it happening with one great big swing of the bat
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Thaum, I’m not sure JKR did a lot of forward planning with the books. Shaun (the tweeter above) is currently working on a video about the HP books and has been talking about them during some of his Twitch streams. He’s noticed a lot of occasions where she’s had to write her way out of a corner, due to something in a previous book.
This is an interesting analysis of the ‘politics’ in the background of HP.
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Oh, come on! I’ve just finished reading the latest Elizabeth George, which must at least equal any of JKR’s word output, but when I like a book, I’m willing to put up with the pain in my thumb and little finger that comes with reading a humungous book. Of course, none of these are the greatest books ever written, but when you do read something truly excellent, you want it to go one for longer. The Victorians understood this.
I can remember taking Clarissa to a place where some friends were, and one of them asked, Are you actually reading that whole thing? Well, yes, I was. Although Shamela, a bit shorter than Richardson’s original output, was also well worth reading.
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@Ticht – nah, Corbyn would have been in with a shout, if a large portion of the party hadn’t decided to actively sabotage. And even if he hadn’t won, there would have been a clear indication that there is an actual alternative to the status quo, which could have been built on.
Instead, we’ve got a party which is actively celebrating losing 10s of 1000s of supporters (and millions in funding) because they believe they’re all dirty Marxists.
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@BB – I think that’s what my brother told The Middle One, but she still had enough enthusiasm that she didn’t take that long over 5 even though she said it was boring. She was ages on the last one and reckoned nothing interesting happened until near the end, but by that point there were other things she wanted to be reading so that maybe had quite a bit to do with it.
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Refit @22:10 – ha, that is actually a brilliant analysis! Harry is Starmer.
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Thaum – she had an abusive relationship with a previous partner. Most of the ‘controversy’ stems from her desire to be able to clearly speak from her own perspective and about her own experiences as a female and for that she received a bunch of rape and death threats from ‘activists’ on twitter.
Yes she is a billionaire now but I’m not sure how that affects her past experiences.
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Craigs – yes, I know. Most women have had scary experiences with stalkers, but the least likely to do that are transwomen. In my experience.
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To add: the type of man who is into stalking is also invariably too invested in his masculinity to pose as a transwoman.
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Refit, do you think that the actions of right wing of the Labour Party swayed the vote in 2019?
I’d counter that Brexit was the overwhelming factor in that election and Corbyn blew it.
I read an Irish poster on another forum the other day talking about how he wasn’t surprised that the UK fucked up the Brexit referendum and the PR one before that because we have no history of referendums, no idea how to set the questions and how idea how to run them.
The Irish referendums are portrayed here as re-asking the questions until they get the answer they want, however this guy was saying that is not the case. The government realise that they haven’t put the case how it should be put and are prepared to ask better focussed questions.
I haven’t explained this well, I’ll go back and have a look
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Thaum – I agree. It’s males that are the problem imo. You can’t change the risks to females posed by that bunch.
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Ticht – (although you didn’t ask me) Yes, but I think more importantly they swayed the vote in 2017, which was obviously winnable.
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Although, I disagree on your next post. Many a stalker will do anything it takes.
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I certainly think the co-ordinated resignations, the attempted coups and the active briefing against Corbyn and the left of the party didn’t exactly encourage people to vote for Labour.
I also think that a lot of the choices that Corbyn made, both in personnel and actions, left a lot to be desired.
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Craigs – women also engage in stalkerish behaviour, ie ‘accidentally’ turning up where the object of desire will be, maybe spying on texts and emails and so on. But it’s not usually violent, just annoying. Perhaps very seriously annoying, but not usually terminal.
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Isn’t what JK Rowling cops it for pretty much just not accepting self-identification of gender as being the end of the matter. I very much doubt she hates trans people or doesn’t want them to be treated with respect. I also suspect that she has this in common with a lot of the other people who get attacked by the trans lobby who don’t always seem to have much grasp of who the enemy really are.
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This is a good video on the way transphobia works in the UK
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Refit – yes, I agree. If he’d won in 2017 it would have been good, but perhaps he should have resigned after that, when he could have influenced who his successor was (although hopefully not the electorally godawful RLB).
Craigs – maybe. I can’t see any of the stalkerish blokes I’ve known dressing in women’s clothes and so on.
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Labour has to win and then take the country leftwards with them.
Corbyn was never going to win, I used to get all sorts of shit for saying so from the off, but if you get the Telegraph urging its readers to join the Labour Party for a quid and vote for him as leader, you should know it’s not going to end well
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CMW – she has inferred that all trans women are potential predators and attacks companies that use inclusive language for sanitary products – because trans men and intersex people do actually exist – for attempting to ‘erase women’.
The words and actions she takes, particularly with the amount of money and social power she has, actively harms people. Her views about hormone blockers for one https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/07/06/jk-rowling-puberty-blockers-nhs-tavistock-gids-horomones-trans-healthcare/
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Pink news is an absolute shit show
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Refit – it was the UN and go back to my previous point about wanting to speak clearly being female. But I sense we are not going to agree here.
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Ticht – Corbyn would easily have won the leadership even without the cheap voters. The PLP is totally out of touch with its grassroots, which it is trying to eradicate, leading to the problem of the party being in near-bankruptcy.
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Also, Starmer is never going to take the Party to the left. Quite the opposite.
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Refit, that looks like an interest and and informative video form the first six or seven minutes I watched, ta.
Thaum, the point about the Telegraph story was that they knew, they knew he wouldn’t win an election,
We can cry foul, but any Labour leader is going to face the same press and misinformation, these people have a lot to lose so they are going to do everything they can to protect their interests.
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Thaum – well, I don’t think I know any stalkers. I’ve heard second hand accounts of people who work in safeguarding who say that predatory males will work any angle they can.
That does not mean that trans people are inherently predatory or deviant or whatever. But males are males. Safeguarding, protected spaces etc is there for reasons and these are linked to predatory males.
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Ok, is Reuters good enough for you? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trans-rowling-trfn-idUSKBN2472DC
The Lib Dems? https://lgbt.libdems.org.uk/en/page/debunking-transphobic-talking-points-shorter-version#Rowling
Thejournal.ie? https://www.thejournal.ie/jk-rowling-transgender-twitter-5116833-Jun2020/
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@Ticht – I would also recommend videos by Shaun
Lonerbox
And this speech by Sophie From Mars (a trans woman)
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Asides from the trans videos, I would heartily recommend all the content from those 4 creators.
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Refit – Reuters have summarised the views of two people in that article.
The Lib Dems… well ok, you got me there.
The Journal article summarises a situation that has changed considerably since it was written.
People being angry with JKR doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t make here wrong to speak about her experiences.
It was telling that the EHRC report recommended that more data be collected before a decision was made and that was enough for it to be condemned.
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Refit, the only qualm I have about the TERF nomenclature is that I’m not sure that many of the people named were radical feminists in the first place.
I’d like to think JK Rowling would be open to hearing why her views are hurtful and misguided, but I’m not sure she can be held responsible for those who are using her name as a right wing battering ram, those are not her politics at all.
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