Jump to content

Bobzilla

Members
  • Content Count

    342
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Bobzilla

  1. I’m not sure I agree here. Absolutely, our natural subconscious mindset is one of prejudice. You look different so I don’t trust you. It’s a natural inbuilt reaction, and part of our survival as a species. We are still just caveman in suits. The difference between someone who has a prejudiced subconscious mindset and someone who is prejudiced, of whatever flavour, is the link between subconscious and conscious. If you can’t control those urges and engage your conscious brain to rethink your natural judgments and control what comes out of your mouth, you’re prejudiced. If you say racist stuff, you’re racist. Now that doesn’t mean he can’t become non-racist. He stops saying this sort of ****, and stops acting based on it. That’s the difference between a normal everyday person and someone who is racist.
  2. I'll agree that if he's based his identification of those individuals based on specific knowledge of those individuals, it's not racist. I'd disagree with the last comment though. There are very few out and out conscious racists who are showing hate based on race. That's increasingly rare nowadays. The issue is subconscious bias, where observable facts about a community are applied to individual members of a community without reference to their individual facts and circumstances. That is by its very nature making a deciding about an individual based on observable characteristics. I.e. Prejudging the individual. Where that prejudgment is based on race, that is by definition racism. The fact that someone would make that judgment makes them racist. It's a different type of racism than outright hated based on race, but it is racism, and makes the person thinking in this way racist. He may not intend to be racist (and probably doesn't intend it based in subsequent behaviour) but he is, by definition, racist. He becomes not racist by spite realising where he is making judgments based on appearances and by not making those judgments, by controlling his subconscious judgments and changing his actual behaviour.
  3. I’d say that a defamation case would be difficult. The loss of reputation isn’t there. The only person who has lost face in this is Webber himself. My understanding is that he hasn’t committed a criminal offence (not because of intention, as it’s often victim perspective that counts more than intention) but because there is no crime to attach the racism to. There’s no incitement to violence, no physical attack, nothing that is actually illegal. Just a very stupid, and racist, statement in an interview.
  4. I couldn’t give a flying **** about what he’s said about sections of our fans in the past. I like him as a SD. He took us up twice. The fact that we came back down again immediately says more about the state of the game than it does about Stuart Webber. Absolutely, he should move on - ultimately his City career has ended in failure, but it’s been a pretty ****ing good career, and we’ve seen some of the best football played at Carrow Road ever (by us, not by the opposition) under his tenure. But none of that matters. What he said was undoubtedly prejudiced. It was taking a stereotype that in many cases is true, and applying it to individuals where it was not true, based on the colour of their skin. He judged those players and their background by the colour of their skin. Whether he meant to do it is actually a massive red herring. The fact that he didn’t mean to do it and STILL did it is proof positive that actually there is still an undercurrent of prejudice in this country - the fact that you’re defending him because he didn’t mean to is yet more evidence of it. Understanding the issues and how they affect different populations as a whole is fine. In fact, it’s laudable. Applying those generalisations to specific individuals is the very definition of prejudice. The fact that you think it’s OK is actually just evidence of your own prejudice. It’s horrifying, but sadly not surprising, to me that you not only don’t see it but won’t even listen to it.
  5. I feel sorry for you mate. With views like that that would have been out of place 30 years ago, the world must be a very lonely place for you. That or you’ve surrounded yourself with similar bell ends.
  6. So racism etc is totally fine up until the point it turns into violence? We killed that idea as being acceptable at least 20 years ago. As for a lot of footballers being black, exactly how many black players are there in our squad, out of what total number of players? In north London clubs there are a lot of black players. The rest of football? Not so much... Norwich? **** all.
  7. More falling down a hole. Are you telling me that in order for prejudice to be bad, there has to be ill intent? That it’s an issue of intention and not outcome? Go read up on the impact of subconscious bias and then come back for an adult conversation. Yours, Someone who’s actually been the victim of subconscious bias, and trust me, it sucks just as much as conscious and deliberate bias.
  8. Only with a bit of background knowledge…
  9. No. I’m telling you that you know **** all about things you’ve never experienced. I’m telling you that you are disagreeing with experts. And I’m telling you that you’ve crossed the line from pig ignorant to just plain offensive.
  10. My God this thread is utterly depressing. Let’s just make a few points clear. Saying that people with lower levels of life chances often end up in a life of crime is accurate. Saying that this very often comes down to money is accurate. Saying that this is often a racial issue is accurate - this highlights the issue of intergenerational wealth, and how social mobility is a multi-generational issue that doesn’t get fixed in one person’s lifetime. The disadvantage here is long standing. None of the above is racist yet. The racist bit is by linking all of this to specific individuals. The attitude of ‘lets apply all of this accurate profiling to an individual to make a judgement about that person and his situation by reference to a set of general criteria and a general statement about the general group they belong to. If he’d have talked about helping young black players in disadvantaged areas from a life of crime because of the disadvantages they often suffer because of institutional racism and the issue of inter-generational wealth and how that impacts on life chances, that would have been fine. If he’d referenced a black player that specifically had that issue (say, Jermaine Pennant, for instance), that would have been fine. BUT HE DIDN’T. He referenced 5 black players, two of whose families have already come out and said ‘they haven’t had those disadvantages. They had a stable background and lived in decent areas.’ In other words, ‘you’ve just racially profiled my kid’. And they’re right. I don’t blame people for not immediately recognising this as racism - many people are ignorant as to what discrimination actually looks like. However, it is deeply disappointing to have it pointed out to them and for them to still be arguing that it’s just clumsy, not racism. It’s proof positive that we’re still not winning the war against discrimination. As a disabled person, that leaves me pretty despondent.
  11. That’s lovely. However, the guys’ family have called it out as racist. Who do you think is the better judge of what is and isn’t racist? The people that have to deal with it day in day out or you?
  12. He wasn’t talking about ‘young black people’. He was talking about 5 specific young black people. He was judging the individuals by reference to statistics that apply to a general population. If that isn’t discriminatory, I don’t know what is.
  13. And there’s the issue. Any form of ‘ism’ usually isn’t intentional - not many people go out of their way to say that black kids belong on a sports pitch or in prison, for instance. But that doesn’t make it right, or not ‘ist’. I’ve had this in my career, where I’ve missed out on career milestones because what people have decided ‘senior’ looks like doesn’t coincide with an autistic skillset like mine. So I’ve been discriminated against not directly because I’m autistic but because people have decided that X is necessary for a role and therefore I’m excluded, whereas X actually isn’t necessary for the role. I.e. artificial subconscious barriers. The most dangerous sort of discrimination is that which isn’t always obvious, or can be excused as unintentional, because we don’t actually want to face it for what it really is.
  14. What my employers charged me out at is a significant multiple of the salary they were paying me. I’ll comment on the figures later, when I’m not working.
  15. I'd need to do a bit more work on the accounts to work out when and how it went wrong but my suspicion is that the seeds were shown in our last year in the prem. We needed signings to survive, but we needed to survive to make the signings make sense and not cause us any financial issues. Pandemic also didn't help there. At the beginning of last financial year we had shareholders funds of about £5m. They're now negative £20m, more than. I suspect the answer is in player wages but the accounts don't break down into detail by player. We don't know where the dead wood risk is, and we don't know who the additional £65m contingent fees are payable on. It would not surprise me if it was no more than 5 players creating the majority of this risk. I don't think that realistically we could have avoided this position without avoiding going up last time around. It's expensive being a yoyo club without totally embarrassing yourself and not even trying.
  16. I’m not sure what you think I’m paid, but thanks for the compliment.
  17. Was more the transfer fees rather than payments to players, which is very small in comparison - £4m at most I think.
  18. No, the £96m (actually about £90m as at end of fy23) debt is not of itself horrendous. The accounts are horrendous. That's all of it taken together. Wage bill (plus associated expenses) being more than gate receipts and ticket sales, and 79% of total income. £22m deficit on shareholders funds, so club survival is being funded by debt at this point, albeit that there's £37.5m of shareholder debt. 40% of our assets being unrealisable by any means other than a sale and leaseback arrangement. £70m of continent liabilities on player signings. I'm not worried about the debt. I'm worried about the ongoing financial performance of the club, and additional fees becoming payable for using our players or success. Ironic - promotion could possibly bankrupt us because of additional player fees and signing bonuses. To be clear, I don't know whether it will because I don't know how much of the £70m relates to players appearances or success bonuses. To be really clear, this isn't mismanagement. This is modern football and pushing for top end of championship, bottom end of prem, and not having rich enough owners.
  19. Absolutely agree on the later. The 'unsportsmanlike conduct' rule is far too infrequently used for conduct that is actually unsporting.
  20. There's an old joke. How do you make a small fortune out of owning a football club? Well, you start with a very large one... The 'doing a very bad job' is simply trying to be competitive without mega millionaire owners. Look at Stoke. The Coates family are orders of magnitude richer than Delia, but they're at the wrong end of the table and looking at relegation. Quite frankly it is amazing that we are where we are, which is, at time of writing, 6th, without the backing of owners with hundreds of millions lying around. Without MA stepping in, I reckon we could have gone into administration last year. Possibly.
  21. To anyone else considering shelling out £25k on a vanity asset, they are not.
  22. You mean the game has refocused into one about kicking a ball rather than kicking the opposition? Good. If I wanted to watch someone smack 7 shades of **** out of their opponent, I'd watch boxing.
  23. We’re a selling club. We don’t want it to stop. We did pretty well out of Buendia, and we’ll likely do pretty well out of Sara and Sainz and Sargeant when the time comes. It’s player sales that keep the club afloat, and I think we win more than we lose from having to pay high fees for players.
  24. It’s not an annualised liability though. It’s potential lost revenue, but no liability. In any event, the membership rights derive from the articles of association, and to the extent that there were promises in the offer document re free membership, the club could only have any form of obligation to the original subscribers for the shares, not to subsequent purchasers. The club could change the articles subject to approval by the shareholders (i.e. DS, MS and MA), such that the membership offer was changed to include a minimum shareholding, or removed altogether (subject to maintaining the rights of original subscribers). If the shareholder base gets too wide, the club might opt to do that. That said, at £80 a share (seems to be the going rate), you only need 4 seasons of membership to be given out to get back your initial outlay on a single share. That’s the gamble you’d take for buying a share in the secondary market.
  25. You cannot have a system where player registrations change hands for over £100m and yet their career can be ended overnight by deliberate physical violence from an opposition player. That simply does not work. But more importantly, I can’t understand how we ever had a game where you could commit acts that were not within the rules of the game where you would be arrested and charged with some pretty serious offences that could carry jail time if you weren’t on the pitch.
×
×
  • Create New...