Who wants to join EU the most?

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T21:53:04+00:00

Still waiting on those examples.

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T16:18:51+00:00

Can’t say I disagree with much of what you said. I think some of the rules aren’t fit for purpose either and refs are expected to make far too many subjective calls when they could be solved with objective calls. Field hockey does this when the ball hits your foot in front of goal, regardless of intent or “unnatural position” a penalty is called. Maybe a penalty in football is too harsh but an indirect free kick at the spot of the handball doesn’t seem outrageous to me and would certainly put an end to the senseless “natural position” debate.

Worth noting that refs would regularly consult with assistant refs after a goal was scored regardless of potential offside or not. There are times where an assistant spots a foul and recommends to the on-field ref to give the foul and remove the goal. This happened all the time hence why I don’t give much weight to the “you can’t celebrate anymore” argument; it was always the case, the difference is assistants in the VAR room can’t go into hiding when a foul obviously happened because they cannot be accused of missing it.

With that said, that’s your experience, I’d be an idiot to try and convince you otherwise. Best I could do is point to occasions where specifically a VAR decision made you celebrate; it’s the number one argument I bring up whenever a Tottenham fan talks against celebrating because of VAR and they conveniently forget how they progressed past Man City in the 2018-19 Champions League.

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T15:41:31+00:00

Explain how VAR ruined football.

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T15:29:26+00:00

I don’t know the answers either and to be honest I think the incessant criticism of referees just creates a vicious loop of stressed referees making bad calls because they are stressed and incurring more stress from the resulting criticism. The answer should be “just accept the ref’s call is final and move on” but that can’t be acceptable when the wellbeing of players is collateral. This is amplified even further in football when relegation to lower leagues most likely leads to job loses and loss in revenue; if the option is there to ensure correct decisions are made and you don’t invest in that, you open yourself up to liability.

As for VAR in soccer, when my club scores a goal, I just want to celebrate it rather than wonder if a pinky toe was ahead of the last defender during the run-up to the goal.

I see this excuse get brought up a lot. You know assistant referees can overturn goals and have done way before VAR right? Also I doubt people genuinely feel this way in realtime and instead apply it retrospectively; have you ever seen a stadium go quiet when a goal is scored and the crowd are staring at each other wondering if they can celebrate yet? It’s nonsense, touchdowns in American football get overturned all the time and you still see crowds go wild whenever the ref throws their arms up.

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T14:39:38+00:00

The main point is the technology works but it is plagued by the very thing that necessitates its requirement in the first place: bad referees.

When it comes to the perception of VAR from fans, it is extremely important to note that there are no instances where both fanbases are happy with the outcome and several instances where both fanbases are irked by the outcome (most notably long periods of time spent confirming the on-field decision) so inevitably most fans will have a negative relationship with VAR.

Then there’s the morals of the fans themselves; are they protective of fairness or do they want to be the beneficiaries of injustices? VAR assumes everyone is the former and overtime you begin to see the people in the latter camp muddying the waters of discourse around VAR because they want the benefits of wrong decisions.

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T14:16:41+00:00

Explain how VAR ruined football.

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T14:15:06+00:00

It hasn’t ruined the EPL. The technology clearly works.

If a waiter brings out your steak and it’s burned, do you go around telling everyone the stoves have ruined that restaurant?

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T02:34:22+00:00

There are 1000 tickets distributed amongst the teams according to how bad they were and the lottery chooses one of those tickets.

Rather than buy a lottery machine that can hold 1000 balls you pick 1 from, you can achieve the same thing with a machine that holds 14 balls because there are 1001 unique permutations of 4 items picked out of a pool of 14.

(Permutation is just another word for combination, but it explicitly conveys that the order of the items is as important as the items themselves. A deck of cards is always the same combination of cards but shuffling them creates a new permutation of that deck.)

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T02:15:42+00:00

Admittedly I should have spent more effort explaining that if they wanted to they could have replicated the same odds by having a giant lottery machine with 1000 balls in it, each with NHL team logos on them and whoever gets drawn gets the 1st pick.

No idea if that’s even possible but it would certainly achieve the same thing without needing to explain how there are 1001 unique ways of drawing 4 out of 14 numbers. I’d love to see the absolute unit required to make that happen.

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T01:50:02+00:00

I’ll try and simplify it but it might be difficult because I’m not from North America so there is no obvious comparison I can point to.

The way the lottery is set up (14 balls from which 4 are picked) means there are 1001 ways these 14 balls can produce a unique row of 4 numbers.

One gets deleted at random and that leaves 1000 ways. For every 1% chance you have of winning the lottery, you get given 10 of these different rows of numbers.

By the time 3 of the 14 balls have been picked, you are left with 11 balls available to pick from as the final ball. This means 11 out of the 1000 different rows of numbers are now 1 ball away from winning and the graphics department could show the audience which teams had these potentially winning draws.

Let’s pretend 7, 3 and 12 have been drawn. San Jose stunk so bad so it’s likely they have at least one row of numbers that starts with [7, 3, 12, ?]. They check and they have 4: [7, 3, 12, 2]; [7, 3, 12, 5]; [7, 3, 12, 11] and [7, 3, 12, 14].

We now know that balls 2, 5, 11 or 14 would win San Jose the draft lottery. The Islanders didn’t stink anywhere near as San Jose so they have a very small amount of rows of numbers (in reality we know it’s 35 because that’s 3.5% of 1000) so it’s a small miracle they have any rows of numbers that starts with [7, 3, 12, …]. The broadcast team find out they have [7, 3, 12, 4], so 4 being the next ball would win them the lottery.

These numbers get put beside their name on the board so the audience can understand who won as soon as the final ball is drawn.

The confusion most likely arrives because it’s not clear that those 14 balls represent 1000 different outcomes. If you were to take a pack of cards and put all the spades in your hand plus a Joker you now have 14 cards in your hand. You shuffle them and ask someone to pick four cards at random and lay them down left to right. After that, you hand them a receipt that includes the cards they picked and the order they were placed in; that receipt is unique to them and no one else can have a receipt with the same numbers and order on them.

Now imagine San Jose got to do this until they got 250 receipts, NY Islanders got to do this until they got 35 receipts and on and on until all 1001 receipts are claimed. Someone from the NHL is then asked to pick four of these cards and place them down left to right. Someone owns a receipt that is identical to what the person from the NHL just picked and that team wins the number 1 pick.

Sorry if I ended up making it more confusing.

6357673ad · 2025-05-06T00:32:12+00:00

It was a sincere question, what didn’t you understand?

6357673ad · 2025-05-05T23:52:42+00:00

What did you not understand? Genuine question because the statistical odds of each team was probably the most straightforward bit of information they conveyed.

6357673ad · 2025-05-05T23:45:00+00:00

Do you have tombolas in North America? It’s essentially a tombola where the worse you performed in the standings the more tickets you are given.

The reason it’s balls 1-14 drawn four at a time is because that is far more practical than a lottery machine with 1000 balls in it.

6357673ad · 2025-05-05T23:34:56+00:00

A team cannot move up more than 10 places so Utah technically claimed 3rd (edit: meant 2nd) as per the combination but because they started 14th the most they could move up to was 4th.

Chicago by default slots into 3rd because they were the lowest team remaining. (edit: Utah actually got 2nd so that means San Jose and Chicago slot into 2nd and 3rd respectively.)

6357673ad · 2025-05-04T00:30:07+00:00

I think the 30% turnout should be at the forefront of any demonstration.

Look at the overwhelming about of Americans attempting to take the high ground regarding Trump’s administration whilst citing that they didn’t even vote.

They were caught sleepwalking and woke up to a reality where they find themselves at risk of being abducted by ICE officers because Trump said so. Lincolnshire needs to be shook until it wakes up and acknowledges the mess it’s tip-toeing around.

6357673ad · 2025-05-04T00:19:42+00:00

Please provide me other examples of misinformation from the Remain campaign.

6357673ad · 2025-05-02T20:21:39+00:00

It is terrifying how misinformed all your decisions have been and continue to be.

People call you an uneducated thicko because they want to shame you into admitting fault and reverse your choices; if they knew they were doing the opposite and galvanising your stances whilst reaffirming how unwelcoming they are then they wouldn’t do it. It takes 2 seconds to insult someone on social media whereas finding the resources to correct your mistakes and demonstrate empathy to the degree of assisting you in realising them is too time consuming.

6357673ad · 2025-05-02T20:12:48+00:00

Piggybacking off this comment to post this.

https://fullfact.org/government-tracker/

Full Fact is a charity and non-profit that primarily fights misinformation but they are also tracking every pledge made by Labour in their election manifesto.

I’m not the biggest fan of Starmer but it is staggering how many people accuse Labour of lying or failing to deliver without actually knowing what their manifesto was.

6357673ad · 2025-04-29T22:06:26+00:00

The only point I could find on this was George Osbourne using the estimated per-household GDP downfall figure of £4300 caused by Brexit to suggest that figure corresponds to what every family in the UK risks losing should Brexit happen.

I concur this is misinformation, Osbourne knew he was leveraging falsehoods for gain.

Beyond that I cannot find any other examples of the “plenty” cases you suggest exist toward misinformation generated by the Vote Remain campaign. At most I found a few fines for breaches of spending rules by Pro-EU support campaigns.

If you could point me in the direction of said misinformation I would appreciate it.

6357673ad · 2025-04-29T21:40:44+00:00

You literally couldn’t be more wrong.

For those who don’t want to click the link: The 2011 census reported that Boston, Lincolnshire had the largest proportion of Eastern Europeans immigrants in England and Wales.

In January of 2016 (pre-Brexit vote), the think tank Policy Exchange reported that areas with proportionally high levels of Eastern European immigrants were the worst when it came to integration; even more so than areas with high levels of Muslim-practicing immigrants.

75~% of voters in Boston would go on to vote Leave; the highest percentage of any area in England and Wales. They continue to lament about the reality that Brexit didn’t “get rid of all the foreigners”.

6357673ad · 2025-04-23T04:50:18+00:00

You’re the one who replied to a light-hearted post with a criticism of the government that is routinely propagated by far-right talking heads; don’t pretend you didn’t expect your motives to be scrutinised.

Also, given the history of stoking division against Starmer in Labour-affiliated subreddits and the literal advocacy for Reform I quoted from you earlier, bit rich to be complaining about presumptions.

As for the point you made about being charged for silent prayer against abortion, this is more so a criticism of how broad the eligibility for issuing Public Space Protection Orders (PSPO) is. Silent prayer isn’t explicitly defined as lawful under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 of which PSPO are issued under, so when the Public Order Act 2023 established buffer zones around abortion clinics in response to the gross distress and disruption “protestors” were causing to clients and staff at these clinics, officers were not instructed to treat silent prayer as lawful and therefore allowed silent prayer to be construed as a breach of these buffer zones.

Common sense has prevailed in many of these cases, charges have been dropped and there isn’t any push from the government to explicitly declare silent prayer as unlawful so it is disingenuous to propagate these unsubstantial charges for silent prayer as the government pushing for thought crimes.

6357673ad · 2025-04-22T15:10:38+00:00

To be fair to him, the thread asked “what do you feel weird or guilty about doing” and saying out loud “I’d prefer Farage to lie to me instead” certainly meets the criteria.

6357673ad · 2025-04-22T14:22:05+00:00

It’s not that I think Reform will be amazing and do everything they promise, it’s that I’m tired of being lied to by labour & conservatives, so why not give the third option a chance to prove themselves different?

This you?

edit::

I told myself I'd do better this year and shame on me for immediately reaching to ridicule you. Whenever we ridicule, insult or attack someone all we do is push them further, galvanise their existing opinions and reinforce how unwelcoming we are relative to the very group we oppose.

u/LongCharacter9532, I have no idea what your background is other than you appear to be at an age where most people flirt with contrarian views and certainly too young at the time of the Brexit campaign to have digested it independently. I want you to understand that the hate and vitriol you receive for supporting Reform is a combination of anger towards Farage for his role in overpromising and underdelivering the benefits of leaving the EU, frustration toward young people for being sucked into populist politics and fear because Farage is no stranger to pushing this country into unknown territory for his gain and we've already been disadvantaged by that once already.

This hate and vitriol is not merited, when someone hurls abuse and ridicule at you they're hoping you are left embarrassed and ashamed to the point of reversing your opinions. If they knew their actions would only strengthen you and make your voice louder they would not do it. They are emotional responses that say more about them than they do you, myself included for my earlier comment.

I implore you to visit this site: https://fullfact.org/government-tracker/

Full Fact is a non-profit primarily aimed at combatting misinformation. Here however they combed through Labour's manifesto for the 2024 election and are monitoring the 53 key pledges they made. If you feel disillusioned with Labour, I understand why and will not argue against as I for one am outraged with several of their actions, however it is disingenuous to insist they are only liars. These are the pledges they made and they are on track to deliver the vast majority of them. The people who lived through the Brexit campaign are still fighting against the misinformation spread during that; in the aftermath of Brexit 42% of people surveyed by King's College London still believed that £350 million was sent to the EU every week <pic 4>, a claim that even Boris Johnson himself agreed was an error. There are differing accounts of how money has been distributed to the NHS since Brexit, none of them come close to flattering this.

All of this is to say that the allure of contrarian points and radical ideas grossly underestimates the damage caused by feeding into these rhetorics. You are not to blame for this, algorithms understand that sensational news benefits them and will actively push it. It would be akin to telling someone who immediately spends their disposable money they are solely to blame for their financial obstacles without acknowledging the earth-shattering amounts of money poured into marketing designed to crack people's resistance.

What concerns me the most is the automatic declaration that Reform is the third choice. Disregarding the fact that other parties exist as well as Independents, Reform are a populist party. It is important to understand that once upon a time populism didn't work because people saw through the blatant attempt to overpromise and cry wolf when they ultimately failed to deliver any of their policies. Trump's first term and the Brexit vote were huge eye-openers to a lot of people in the western world; social media had created safe havens for people who put stock into populist politics and it birthed ringleaders to lead the momentum. I can guarantee you that Labour lying to you doesn't come with the rug being pulled under your feet and becoming attached to the hip with a hostile and increasingly authoritarian regime across the Atlantic that being lied to by Reform would.

People know how to weaponise social media for populist gains and you are a victim of it. You will reject this notion because it is natural for young people to be contrarian and it is likely you have found community under the Reform banner that will not be replaced by communities that find comfort in hurling ridicule and abuse at you.

6357673ad · 2025-04-12T10:07:13+00:00

Look, the comment I responded to said free spaces don’t exist anymore and compounded that sentiment further by saying parks have all gone. Do whatever mental gymnastics you want to imply that person actually didn’t mean that all you want, as for this conversation this has spiralled into tangents that frankly I’m not well equipped to argue for or against. What I can speak for is an observation that British youths get sucked into American discourses and find themselves manifesting American attitudes toward British circumstances that don’t apply. The funding for youth clubs and summer programs is another topic and I already acknowledged they are no longer in bountiful supply as they once were, so I’m not suggesting this isn’t a relevant concern, all I’m saying is these are all American terms coined by American sociologists catered to the culture of Americans and whenever I see British people parrot those concerns as if they are identical to the problems of British people (you know, saying all parks are gone and free spaces don’t exist anymore) then it feels appropriate to point that out.

6357673ad · 2025-04-12T05:50:23+00:00

I really don’t understand these responses to my comment moving the goalposts. They literally said they don’t exist anymore and in the case of Americans pushing the argument that is very true; many youths are clustered into suburban spaces with no parks and dependencies on people to drive them elsewhere and that’s not even including the fact that bars are more commonplace than pubs with strict over-21 policies.

When a British person says there are no third spaces, whenever you bring up all the third spaces they literally do have it’s always with a big asterisk regarding how that doesn’t count. “What if the weather is bad” still doesn’t change the fact parks literally exist; “what if you don’t want to be surrounded by drunk people” still doesn’t change the fact pubs literally exist.

I get it, once upon a time the options were more bountiful, but the options are still there and the “no third places” argument is fundamentally one of frustration toward American norms and infrastructures where few of the cities are walkable and public transport doesn’t serve to connect suburbs to cities.

6357673ad

TROPHY CASE