Kenny McBride

The reason why I wonder about whether it's really a sectarian thing, rather than sectarianism being used as a pretext to continue an inexplicably venomous rivalry in football, is because of the Edinburgh clubs.

 

As I understand it, Hibs are Catholic and Hearts are Protestant, right? Can someone in the know elucidate as to why the Edinburgh rivalry doesn't seem to be anywhere near as hateful?

 

Celtic and Rangers are usually competing over the prizes? Anyone who's read some Irvine Welsh knows there is definitely tension there.

 

But surely that further validates my point? If it were truly about sectarianism, wouldn't the Edinburgh rivalry be equally vicious, regardless of whether or not they're challenging for the silverware?

Not really. If Man City were the only realistic challengers to Man Utd and the league had been fairly evenly split between them for 100 years, don't you think the rivalry there would be pretty vicious too?

Also, to my knowledge, Hearts never had an explicitly anti-Catholic signing policy that still rankles with the other side. Also, Hibs made a decision pretty early on in their existence to distance the club from its Irish Catholic roots specifically because they felt they needed to be less conspicuous in order to get ahead.Catholic club they actually had difficulty getting other clubs to play them.

Yoghurt - so basically, Lennon brings it on himself by being a Tim? Or am I misunderstanding you?

Chris - yeah, almost certainly a lone nutter. As for your point about Muslims, I actually disagree that Muslims are "made into hate figures." Some individual Muslims are made into hate figures - Abu Hamza and the like probably got more abuse than they actually deserved, and they deserved a good deal. As a rule though, any time there is any sort of badness committed in the name of Allah, the media trip over themselves to get talking heads in to proclaim Islam as a religion of peace, perverted by lunatics. I think if this was a Muslim sending letterbombs to politicians and their lawyers, you'd get a bit of foaming at the mouth from the Sun and the Daily Mail, the majority of people would say it was terrible and wrong but most Muslims aren't like that and the perpetrator would be hunted down. You wouldn't under any circumstances get anyone saying that both sides are as bad as each other, or that the victims bring it on themselves.

This issue goes far beyond football, Loki. It's the very worst of the sectarian bigotry that is rife in this country.

 

If this was skin colour racism the entire footballing world, and most of the UK would be up in arms. Because it's religious bigotry, it's just taken as "ah well, that's what happens in Scotland" by a lot of people.

 

Something we can agree on. A horrible reverence for religion allows it a much freer reign in doling out the hatred. Football does have the worst fans.

Frankly, that's nonsense. I think it's more a complete lack of reverence for religion (and specifically Catholicism) that says "ach well, that's just how things go." Racism is actively opposed and would be challenged by most people who encountered it. Homophobia too. Misogyny is a little more of a grey area - you can still get away with some fairly awful anti-woman chat in plenty of places - but you'd still never get away with songs about being up to your knees in women's blood. But with religion, you're allowed to say almost anything and it's written off.

Tricky though, if he's left unanswered you can end up with people agreeing with him, then it's harder to not jump in.

Anyone who agrees with the vast majority of what Happ says isn't worthy replying to either.

Liberal fascist. Stop trying to squash free and fair debate with your brutal intimidatory tactics.

Lister's book is more accurate but less juicy. If in doubt about the facts, I'd rely on TTT, as there was some actual fact-checking involved. As a pair, they give a good overall impression, though.

People argue your points all the time. You don't answer them.

Also, I am BEGGING the many people who've PMed you to stand up and be counted. In the spirit off fair play and honest debate, I think all us liberal bastards should volunteer forr suspension in the event that we are rude. It is incredibly sad that debate should be stifled by our horrific levels of hostility.

But who's going to investigate the parents who are getting it wrong?

Also, stop moving the goalposts every time someone points out idiotic flaws in your arguments.

Oh, and prisons are expensive because they're big, highly secure buildings requiring large numbers of well-trained staff who need to be pretty well compensated to do a pretty unpleasant job. The TVs and Playstations are a tiny, tiny fraction of the costs. I understand the ideological argument against those perks, but the financial case is nonsense.

So you're going to reduce the bloated public sector by having an army of Gilliam McKeiths studying the dietary habits of every family in the country, fining and/or locking up the bad parents and taking the kids into care?

To hell with your priorities on the wellbeing of children. It's your economics that blows my mind.

I'd prefer to hold on to them and use the as the basis for a Norwegian-style national pension fund. Crisitunity~!

Quite. We'reactually already making a profit on the toxic debt insurance, because things really weren't as bad as predicted. Confidence collapsed, not the real ecconomy. And we'll maake a substantial profit when our bargain shares are sokd.

Until a couple of years ago, Grrmany's debt as a proportion of GDP was bigger than ours. Now they escaped some of the worst effects of the banking collapse, but the fact is that at that time, Labour's wicked overspending haadn'teven made us the most debt-ridden European G7 member. Also, our debt is mostly due to mature on a much longer timescale than the PIGS or many other, bigger economies, so the pressure to repay was not so intese.

There's also a big increase in VAT, so most people will end up giving much more cash to Whitehall.

What about people working for low wages in the private sector, that have to pay increasingly large council tax bills in order to fund the inordinately high wages and benefits of those in the public sector? How are they benefitting from Labour's increases in public sector spending?

 

They got a radically improved health service, almost beyond recognition from when I was young....

 

It's not a question of whether Labour made the NHS better

 

You asked the question, how did private sector workers benefit from the increases, I answered, you then changed the question.

 

You've been caught out. Again.

 

And you wonder why you got banned from CiF. I imagine you get banned from a lot of places.

Council tax doesn't fund the health service.

No it doesn't, so it was a stupid question. Even so, it's set by councils, not central government. Tory and Liberal councils have put council tax up too.

Libya's been an enemy of the US and UK for a lot longer than it's been a friend. I guess that's a factor.

If you have the ability to do something about a wrong doing do you think your inaction is indirectly supporting that wrong doing?

 

A million times fucking NO, Duane. Don't be so fucking stupid.

Am I allowed to call on you for support in the "Holocaust enabler/paedophile enabler" debate in the religion thread?

They're still talking about Libya and Bahrain, but that news is understandably playing second fiddle to Japan. More interesting that the escalating problems in Ivory Coast has been completely ignored by news channels, and with all the talk of no-fly zones in Libya, there's been no political discussion of intervention in Ivory Coast. It's the same situation, protesters getting shot. Why do we care about Libya but not Ivory Coast? No oil to protect.

To be fair, Libya also has more white-ish faces.

Hulk Hogan was filming Thunder in Paradise at the time. No point promoting a none-Hulkster WCW PPV, because they usually didn't draw shit without him anyway. And it featured a bunch of Japanese lads. That years Starrcade was treated like a B-PPV by the WCW top brass.

They didn't even treat it like that though. It was basically a non-event. I think they mentioned the world title change on the next Nitro, but other than that it was like it never happened at all.

Still, I got to see Benoit/Liger and Guerrero/Ohtani live, so I'm not complaining.

In the WCW in the year 1995 what came first the last nitro of the year or Starrcade?

The last Nitro was on Xmas Day. Starrcade came 2 days later. First Nitro of 1996 was New Years Day.

Yep, and the Christmas Day Nitro doesn't even mention Starrcade. Seriously - that Starrcade gets almost zero build on the company's hottest new show.

WCW was weird.

I strongly recommend Mary's Meals. To the best of my knowledge they're still run on a voluntary basis, so basically 100% of your donation goes to help people. That ought to satisfy Happ. They work mostly in Malawi, but are expanding at a fair speed. What they've achieved in a very short time is, quite frankly, incredible.

Not "acceptable". The word you want is "essential."

Well then I call on them to join the debate. I promise to be nice, as I know of a couple of people who felt the same way about the religion thread. All they have to do is bring any sort of evidence for Amnesty's grotesqur corruption. Or anything, really.

Happ, everyone has tried to engage you in debate but you are refusing to even look at the evidence while throwing out extremely dodgy accusations with no evidence whatsoever. People can only bang their heads against a wall for so long before they get pissed off.

Don't be a dick. People change their industry all the time. Please go and look up Amnesty somewhere before you open your stupid fucking mouth again.

AI isn't a poverty charity.

Most of its work is done by volunteer letter-writers.

It also does awareness work and lobbying.

Most charities have paid staff because it's tough to do it as a freebie forever.

It's not unreasonable to pay a good salary to the chief of such a big organisation. If Amnesty were a company,the boss would likely be making several times that much, and no doubt the boss of Amnesty is qualified to make that kind of money in the private sector.

By the way, if we abolish the public sector, who's going to do all that work if not charities?