On Patrick Barclay's refusal to engage with Liverpool fans in the Roy Hodgson debate (from early January)

Shithouses like Barclay can’t debate. They’re not used to being questioned and think because they’re paid to offer their opinion it makes their opinion more valid. Actual research is neither necessary nor desirable to these people because being right isn’t their goal. Their goal is to sell papers and provide as good a margin for their paymasters as they can manage. Research would detract from this in several ways.

Real research is expensive and time-consuming. Also, their desire not to challenge their readership’s knowledge or prejudices as this is detrimental to sales. Sales and prejudice are what seems to drive the mainstream media. The desire for profit over all. Don’t stray from the pack. Animals that stray from the pack get eaten. And it’s a cycle. These ideas drive sales/ratings/website hits. This makes money. Lets have more of the things that drive sales/ratings/website hits. It’s why every major TV channel has got the same bullshit celebrity/member of the public dances/sings/skates in front of judges while the public call in and pay a quid a minute to vote nonsense show. It’s why we have the same smug, self-satisfied little prick choosing the Christmas number one every year. It’s why the rolling news channels turned the tragedy that was the Raoul Moat affair into a strange hybrid of a circus for whooping, knuckle-dragging cavemen and a live 24-hour shit-your-keks-fest for old women. It’s why every mainstream political party has declared principle to be a thing of the past in favour of the same pressed-suited replicant leader who’s all hand gestures and earnest looks with a complete vaccuum where everything that really matters should be. It’s why every high street looks the same, with a Starbucks and a Subway and a Weatherspoons and a Body Shop and a Carphone Warehouse and a fucking Tesco Express. It’s the constant hunt for the demographic that wouldn’t exist if these people hadn’t moulded it over the past decade or so themselves.

 It must be because everybody in this country is so busy working the longest hours in Europe only to have every security they thought they were investing in pulled out from under them to cushion the fall of the wealthy and to prop up a system that so plainly doesn’t fucking work for anybody but the rich that there’s an allure to having people do things for you, including your thinking. But as most of us here will know, thinking for yourself is so much more satisfying. Thinking for yourself; questioning the status quo, what you were taught at school, what your parents taught you, what politicians and the media tell you, and to understand that most of what they tell you is wrong, or worse, lies; that is the beginning of real liberty.