El Pibe

Irish pundit had Chile for the whole thing

Some of it might stem from the lack of ambiguity in intent. If you bite someone its a deliberate act to inflict pain on someone else, it's assault plain and simple. A stray elbow, a late challenge with studs up can certainly do more damage, but it can be clumsy rather than vicious, and it can be very hard to tell which. Effectively its part of the game. You can't ban tackling or jumping for the ball on the off-chance. See also Cantona's kung fu kick.

But their british lorries will pay british taxes, the bins and education will come from the local taxes and rates they pay, the workers will be paid and pay income tax on those wages, the book you buy may well (lmost certainly in my case) come from a local (just not local to me) bookshop acting as a reseller, an important income stream. And you may well live in the middle of bloody nowhere and face either using amazon or having a 2 hour drive to bloody dublin ;-P

I dunno, you just calculate your income from your take home. I never really look at the tax paid column and ever think of it as my money as such. When negotiating a wage in a new job you do a bit of mental arithmetic and work out what your real wage is andd go for that. But then I've always been paye, rather than self-employed where you have to write the damn cheque (on some pittance of a tax rate you ingrate!!)

intersting article SJ, so less loopholes than dodgy preferential back room deals?

I was just making a point that people were talking about ethics because it's often reported here that these corporations are paying no tax at all, when in reality the picture is more complicated, especially for large transanational corporations where your robot hoover bought on a .co.uk website may in fact be coming to you from a french warehouse, or even a romanian reseller. Amazon bad is a bit simplistic, but certainly it would be sensible to tighten up the rules. I may be very wrong, as I'm as far from being an accountanat as is humanly possible, but aren't 'loopholes' usually rules put there for good reasons that get exploited by clever bastards, probably with a degree of disingenuity?

Oh god, game still on. Please don't be kiss of death

What an enjoyable game, if rather scrappy. Soon England out with its millionaires and Algeria qualify in a group with Russian Belgium and cosseted ex semi finalists S Korea. Well done Algeria

I may be wrong but the problem isn't that these companies are paying 0 tax, just not paying it in the countries they earns it from. Swelling dublins coffers whilst denying Londons. Some may call this karma.

"holier than thou" Given most of us haven't bitten anyone (at least without a safe word) since we were one, that's probably a safe attitude to assume.

He is a persistent cheat and people know that, hence the jubilation that there's some sort of comeuppance. Plenty of others in the game I'm sure people would feel equally pleased about, no one's claiming he's unique. Irony of course is that biting isn't actually cheating (though his feigned reaction was) , just plain wrong.

Now I didn't expect that!!!!

of course there's a nice place i've heard of out in Ireland, plenty of room for tents if that's your thing.

Dale Farm?

on a theme.....

oh god yeah, she may be evil, but the ginger witch look definitely does something unhealthy to my psyche. Or maybe its just redheads with power....

interesting article. denial, closed ranks, excuse making, talk of agendas...familiar....

Ok I'll counter bite . My understanding was that it was a one off slap in the heat of the moment, the mainstay of the Hollywood romcom for the best part of 80 years. The humour arises not from the minor violence itself, but from the irony that Ross kemps entire career is predicated on his hard man image. Sigh, how tedious having to explain that. So do we now need to censor every great Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn moment? If of course I'm wrong and it was actually part of a cycle of walk into door style abuse I can only apologise for my insensitivity.

This was to domestic violence what Punch and Judy is to gritty and poignant documentary. Equating the two in a snotty fashion is rather guardianista shurely?

I think it boils down to people just don't like proper gingas, especially if they look vaguely like a witch. Thogh beating grant mitchell up is pretty funny.

we took on a bloke who pushed over a ref, and was happy with that, and a bloke involved in a (possibly) racist assault, which i wasn't. I wouldn't want Suarez at west ham, not that BFS would have the faintest idea what to do with him, so moot point really.

Some of a Kingodm? Then we can make jokes about going back to the old SOAK.

:D they're getting worse!

There isn't, but you leave behind you one post about a camcorder which will probably be deleted pretty soon. I'd move on and never think about it again. Someone will just have to be Goldfish9 ;)

bugger couldn't resist