Kenny McBride

The Catholic thing is a complicated issue. A Catholic entering a mixed marriage by necessity has to try to raise the children as Catholics. If the heir to the throne marries someone who then raises his or her kids as Catholics, the implications for the established Church Of England are pretty serious. I don't care if the CoE collapses because William's kid falls in love with a left-footer, but the CoE might well feel differently. I'll be extremely upset, though, if some sneaky settlement is negotiated whereby the Catholic partner would have to agree not to raise the kids as Catholics, as that's forcing them to abandon a fairly major part of their religion's teaching.

It's pretty much a no-win situation. The sad part is that the Catholic bishops have campaigned for it without really thinking about what the real implications are, or rather, what the realpolitik is.

Surely if they were travelers, this wouldn't be a problem? They'd have fucked off by now.

That's kind of trite. Being from a traveller culture does not necessarily mean they travel all the time.

Inflation is the expansion of the supply of money. Rising prices are a consequence thereof, not the phenomenon itself. Just sayin'.

For the record, rape within marriage has been illegal in Scotland since 1982.

I'm actually right behind raising the tax threshold. It really ought to be a Tory flagship policy. If there's no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families, then no-one should pay tax until they've earned enough to feed, house and clothe themselves and their immediate families. What's important to understand about progressive taxation, though, is what no-one ever seems to point out. It's not about class war or envying the rich. It's about understanding that NO-ONE can get filthy rich without the work of people further down the food chain. You can argue the toss about different theories of value all you want, but the fact is that ultimately, value cannot be created without labour. Thus, if anyone is making money at the top of the organisation without being a capital investor (who, to be fair, also have a right to a return on their investment) then they are making that money because workers are working and some of their input is flowing upwards, while the nation as a whole is providing infrastructure (including education and healthcare for those workers, not to mention things like the transport network) to enable that wealth to be created. Progressive taxation says that the more you make, then the more you are taking - proportionately, not just absolutely - from the system, and therefore the more you should pay into the system as a whole. Since the lowliest workers get the least return on their investment of labour, they should pay the least.

This is one of the problems with socialism for me, speaking broadly - it can't distinguish between individuals, and so has to lump them together for the purposes of distributing "fairness". Because spurs 4 life doesn't fit into Whiskey's model of the poorly educated, it's irrelevant to his thesis. The fact that people from identical backgrounds are capable of achieving such different results is aggravating to those who'd like to do broad social re-engineering, as it kind of pisses on simplistic views like "oh, it's a lack of good education that causes poverty, therefore better education=less poverty".

 

That's not to say that the thesis doesn't have merit - there's undoubtedly a link between education and poverty, but it's not a simple analogue.

But then your view ignores the vast social engineering carried out under 18 years of Tory government which helped establish such a fragmented society in the first place. The 60s and 70s weren't some idyllic utopia, but there was at least a sense of solidarity and a belief in self-improvement through education and hard work. That solidarity was eroded by Thatcheristic individualism and the concept of self-improvement was lost when traditional industries were destroyed, removing many job opportunities for people who wereen't high achievers academically.

Headless Kross

Link to my mate's new band. Tbought a few of you might appreciate it. If you do and you're in Glasgow, they're paying the 13th Note on the 28th.

Hopefully not the feds.

I hate British people using the term "feds." I may have to come and burn down your house.

Many artists don't even own the copyright to their recorded works. I strongly recommend you read Steve Albini's "river of shit" article, or Kristin Hersh's "Thoughts on Sustainability" or Tim Quirk's piece about his $62 royalties. The music business is fucked. Download all you want and send a fiver in the post to the artist. Oh, and bomb a record company if you get the chance.

Ah, OK. I'm type 1 too. The one time I did night shift I had two horrific sleep hypos. I feel your pain. Sorry to hear about the neuropathy. It's scary stuff. Good luck brah.

Diabetes means you can't work a full-time job?

Whilst I'm here, I might as well post this, which I saw the other day and couldn't help but laugh.

 

He should have known better (or insert equally shit gag here).

Did he come in through the bathroom window?

Paul McCartney's "Give My Regards to Broad Street" is a horrendous film, especially for Ringo's acting.

 

Soundtrack is bloody good though.

And it features Giant Haystacks~!

The D&D analogy doesn't really work since D&D is about following a plot of some sort and the plot (as well as the chance element with dice and whatnot) is essential to how the game is played. Mafia is the same basic set-up every time and the "flavour" of the game is more or less irrelevant to the gameplay.

The basic set-up involves a "scum" team (usually three players) and a "town" group (any number, but usually at least double the number of scum). Scum (in the original versions of the game, this was a Mafia group trying to infiltrate the town) kill someone every "night". Town try to figure out who is scum and lynch them by a majority vote during the "day" phases. Scum can talk to each other elsewhere (quicktopic.com is the usual place) so they can plan their attack and co-ordinate their message in the game thread. Town can't, so they have to rely on asking questions of each other and trying to figure out whose actions and statements look suspect. It sounds kinda daft and probably reads as totally ridiculous if you're not playing, but it's actually quite good fun once you get into it. It's an exercise in paranoia and trust and once you get a feel for how it works and what sort of things you're looking for, it's pretty absorbing. I totally understand why some people don't think it's their thing, but I don't get the sniping about it. I'd recommend having a go at a game and see what you think once you actually play. It's different from just reading the thread. Also, don't go on what you saw in that Chinatown thread. Snake and Teedy Kay were on my team and I thought they were twats at the end of it.

Always loved the way Lennon sang "In summer, meanwhile back" on Penny Lane

That was Paul.

I think they're pretty damn great. If you don't like the music, fine, but you can't even argue that they're not the most important band there will ever be. When you figure they were only active for seven years and churned out almost two albums a year plus singles, their output is truly incredible. I like to remind people that the whole Please Please Me album was recorded in one day. ONE DAY!

George Martin deserves a lot of credit. He invented techniques and equipment that changed the whole way music is recorded. He really was the fifth Beatle, especially after they became purely a studio band.

I could list a bunch of favourites but I'd be here all day. Later highlights though are Lennon's Rock'n'Roll and the first Travelling Wilburys album, especially Handle With Care.

So which of Beijing, Sydney, Atlanta and Athens aren't major cities? Also, there's the whole Montreal disaster. It took the city 30 years to pay off the cost of the Olympics. I don't know so much about any others, but there are horror stories about virtually every Olympic host city, winter and summer, of the past 30-40 years.

That's not such a crazy topic. Around the time of the Stephen Lawrence murder, there were plenty of people on TV saying "is Britain racist?" or "does Britain treat black kids differently?" Asking the question "does Britain have a problem with Muslims?" prompts debate about whether they get fair and equal treatment to non-Muslims. I don't see what the problem is with asking it. If anti-black racism or anti-Semitism was a bigger problem in this country, I don't see why you wouldn't want the issue discussed freely on mainstream TV.

Also, Melanie Phillips is a weird one. I want to like her, because on a small handful of issues I agree with her pretty strongly, and I tend to admire anyone who will forcefully argue their case against mainstream opinion. But she's such a fucking loon on the issues where I don't agree that it's impossible to get on side with her.

You know what I was saying.

Loki, that's nonsense, he has to go. What he said, and it wasn't taken out of context or anything, showed a complete lack of understanding around rape. He called predatory attacks "Classic rape" when in fact this is the least common form of rape. He was making out that some rapes are less serious and violent than others and that is terrible.

I don't know that that's fair. His phraseology was clumsy as all hell, but in the heat of an argument things sometimes come out wrong. It is absolutely the case that some rapes are less violent than others. Some rapes involve brutal assualt while some involve no physical violence at all. There are some where the question of consent is blurred. There are cases like the sainted Julian Assange, which arguably wouldn't even be classed as rape in this country, but is classed as such in Sweden. Other countries already classify rape into different categories. For example, I think it's France that has three different crimes - "violent rape" (where the sexual assault is combined with some form of physical assault), "standard rape" (non-consensual sex without physical assault) and another, I think called something like "non-consensual intercourse" (wherein someone gives consent but perhaps under pressure, like a boss pressuring an employee, or someone using emotional blackmail of some kind). All are wrong, but it's not at all unreasonable to look at the differences in sentencing for different types of crime. Very few people would say there's a problem with having different tarriffs for murder, manslaughter and causing death by dangerous driving, despite the fact that the outcome is identical for victims of all three. Also, I think that given the horrendously low conviction rate for rape, it's worth looking at anything that might make it easier to build and prosecute a case.

Finally, I don't think the term "classic rape" is particularly nice, but I think most people would understand what he meant. It's the image most people have of rape, even though it's pretty rare. "Date rape" is a pretty horrible term, but it's one that's used by plenty of people without question.

The last game I was at, I told someone I thought a song they were singing was not cool. I've walked out of pubs when I've heard songs I didn't think were cool. The thing is that by and large, the problem doesn't exist at Celtic Park any more. There are a handful of offenders - led by the Green Brigade, for the most part - and I've said a million times that if only to get the real moral high ground, Celtic fans should button it and the club should permanent ban anyone who can't. I've condoned nothing and repeatedly tell the Celtic fans I know not to get into the knuckle-dragging contests.

However, I'm not actually a huge Celtic supporter. I've been to a few games over the past few seasons. Before that, my last game was in the mid-90s. What I AM is someone who deals with casual anti-Catholic comments at work and in the pub very regularly. Oh, and on here, obviously. The fact is that Catholics historically have been a put-upon minority in the west of Scotland, often resented and discriminated against and usually misunderstood and mistrusted, and today, with the Dawkins crowd at one end of the spectrum and the knuckle-draggers at Ibrox at the other, that anti-Catholicism is on the rise again. I fail to see how anyone can look at the objective facts and not see that. Who was the last Rangers player or manager to receive death threats, or even get beaten up the street? Who was the last CoS Moderator to receive bullets in the post? Did Donald Findlay, when defending the scumbag who killed Mark Scott, get letterbombs for his efforts? I also mentioned elsewhere the statistics on religiously motivated crime in Scotland, which is overwhelmingly anti-Catholic. As Reznor noted in the football thread, while the latest stuff is pretty extreme, the attitudes that enable it have been tolerated for far too long.

I can see why some people disagree, but I don't see singing rebel songs as being the same as singing anthems to a specifically anti-Catholic razor gang. As one Irish friend noted to me, Scots Wha' Hae, Flower of Scotland and Ye Jacobites By Name are all Scottish "rebel songs" that celebrate killing the English, but no-one questions those. For what it's worth, I have no problem with the Rangers crowd singing The Sash or Derry's Walls to their hearts' content.

On a somewhat related note, I'd also argue that the existence of the pIRA is quite explicitly not the same as the existence of Loyalist paramilitary groups. Catholics were very definitely a subjected minority in Northern Ireland and some people felt that war was the only way to change that. I think even the biggest opponent of their methods should at least be able to understand the motivation and the frustration they felt after bullshit like Bloody Sunday and what we now know to be a shameful government cover-up. I'm not justifying their actions by any means, just as I don't try to justify Palestinian terrorism, but I'm intelligent enough to understand that people sometimes have legitimate motives which, for whatever reason, boil over into extreme actions when they feel they have no other recourse. Loyalist paramilitaries had no such justification. The British government was already murdering Catholics and locking up innocent men without trial. They really didn't need a pseudo-army on the ground to do their really dirty work for them.

Tacitly dodging the religious issue. Kudos. You are a paranoid idiot condoning violence though.

 

I fail to see what living in Scotland has to do with it.

The fuck? I have no idea what your first line even means.

The second point regards what your actual perspective on things is. If you live in England, you only get what's in the news. You don't actually see the low-level shit and you don't have any real personal experience. You don't hear the stories of friends and family. You don't hear about the stuff that doesn't get in the papers (which itself, as I'm sure you can understand, is coloured by the agenda of the journalists concerned and the mandatory PC line - only crossed by Graham Spiers - that both sides are absolutely equally responsible). I think even people outside Glasgow (or at least the west of Scotland) probably don't see anything like the whole picture.

That's why it was so disappointing to hear some chap on the BBC news last night playing the Kenny McBride game of making it out to be an issue of Catholic bigotry rather than a straight issue of criminality and violence.

 

As long as prominent people are trying to blame one side more than the other, this sort of thing will continue. That attitude just perpetuates the excuses that the violent minority use to excuse their actions.

They're connecting the Lennon/McBride/Godman issue to a direct threat to the Pope via Cardinal O'Brien. But yeah, it's all about football. The fact that the majority of anti-Catholic violence is not regarded by the police as "football related" should probably just be ignored, because you know better and I'm just a paranoid nutter.

For the record, I'm not saying that football doesn't play a part in it. I've said before that I think the songs at Ibrox play a part in making anti-Catholic bigotry acceptable, not least because everyone paints it as "two sides of the same coin" and "they're both as bad as each other". The facts show that anti-Catholic bigotry is significantly more of a problem than anti-Protestant or even pro-Republican/IRA attitudes. Just listening to the crowds show that the worst some Celtic fans do is sing rebel songs - not very nice, I'll grant you - while Rangers fans (and yes, I know it's not all of them, but it's not a tiny minority either) sing about killing Catholics and driving Catholicism out of Scotland. There IS a difference, and one side IS worse than the other. I won't argue that Celtic (and the Catholic community as a whole) don't have a role to play in wiping this bullshit out, but this "blame the victim" game that some people try to play is the most appalling form of bigotry imaginable. No-one would tell a woman who gets beaten by her husband "well no, he shouldn't have hit you, but you didn't have his dinner on the table on time so it's not all his fault." But that's how a good number of people seem to treat the issue of anti-Catholic violence in Scotland.

Just because you choose to accept and tacitly support anti-Catholic bigotry (you're from the intellectual "they're evil, so it's OK to perpetrate hate against them" school, which provides a lovely balance to the knuckle-draggers) doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If a Scottish imam was receiving bullets in the post, I'm quite sure you'd be up in arms at the vile bigotry stirred up by the wicked, racist media.

By the way, are you Scottish or living in Scotland? I'm curious as to what your actual perspective is on this.

Barca and Madrid are pretty far apart. I mentioned Utd and City because they're the two clubs in the city. Actually, if Barca and Madrid were closer it'd probably be worse. The explicit politics of Spanish clubs is intense.