calscot

Trouble is if you start thinking about the good of the game you might start talking about keeping Dundee Utd up along with Hibs. However, as these clubs have been getting a kick out of repeatedly harming the game, maybe a bit of extended karma might make them rethink their attitudes, which would be a long term benefit for the game. Kilmarnock have done the least damage to the game and have no desire to do so, so for its good I think it might be best if they stay up - but best if they ditch the plastic pitch.

I would choose Kilmarnock.

As things stand Raith just need to play averagely till the end of the season again and then beat Hibs again. If they can do that, the next two playoff games are anyone's guess.

You never played poker?

That's a good point but I'm not sure about all those consequences. I'd have to learn more about it. However, it's not the issue under discussion. And I still think the Bank of England could have been bluffing as a form of blackmail. However, the damning thing it shows is that there is no benign feelings for Scotland from England and that to me proves that the campaign for no from England was in their own self interest, which puts a massive question mark over their arguments. I found that inconsistency a bit sinister which was added to when there was signs of not following through with promises over additional devolution. As I said, there is only one side that appear to be the bad guys. You seem to be emphasising that.

You are factually wrong here. Scotland could use any currency it fancies including Sterling, the Euro or the Dollar. No-one has to allow it, you just use it. Several countries use the dollar without needing permission. The only problem is that the central bank of your currency will not take your needs or wants into account on the policies which affect its value. We'd probably stop printing our own notes though.

Agree again, but not sure how much power the Scottish government has to do this. Maybe we're spending too much on education and old people, but that's something I like about the Scottish government. I do think we have some opportunities that aren't being taken but then when we do stuff like wind power and other renewable energy schemes, you end up with a lot of opposition. I don't quite get that - logically if Scotland can't cope with UK levels of deficit, then I don't see how the UK can. The UK's also used to be larger - £156b in 2009, which is proportional to Scotland's now, but we've survived and supposed to be one of the stronger countries. I think Scotland would cope and get through it as the UK have. My point is that the UK deficit is large but people aren't saying we can't cope, but they are saying that for Scotland. Although it's bigger proportionally, it's currently a one off, but although it's 40% out of proportion, it's not yet orders of magnitude. It's like someone overspending by £1100 one year telling someone who overspent by £1500 is doomed. But they just pull out the £15b in isolation which sounds infeasible with no context of what the UK and other countries have coped with. or the history of Scotland's and Uk's deficits. I agree. But a lot of the no argument ignores the fact that Scotland has generously shared its wealth for decades, and coincidentally, when we want to leave that income is at a low and possibly less than half left, and so we're insulting told how we've no chance of coping on our own. To me it's a bit like, "We've sucked the life out of you and now look how helpless you are". But in the end, there are countries our size, without oil, that do ok, and we're not exactly lacking in education, technology, infrastructure, innovation etc. I think that with some big adjustments I can't see how we wouldn't do just as well as some of them without the oil, but obviously much better with it. I'm talking Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria and Belgium. What do they have that we don't? Even Slovenia aren't doing too bad after independence, despite the civil war and having none of our advantages or natural resources. Taken on its own and including oil, Scotland reportedly has the 14th largest GDP per capita in the world (2014) - with the Uk at 18th. It's similar to Belgium and Finland. Austria, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark are between 5% and 10% ahead. Norway are second after Luxembourg but massively higher - about 70% higher than us, almost twice the UK. Our spend is also higher than the rest of the UK - purportedly paid for by our higher share of the oil revenue. So maybe we spend too much on things that don't bring us income.

I don't hear Rangers fans generally using words with the same venom, all though I don't talk to many these days in England. So it's all pretty mild here and usually the words are Celtic or Tims. That's not always as polite when I meet a Celtic fan. In fact I don't hear any other fans spitting words of hate out either.

St Mirren could be more evidence that the league is reasonably strong, they've just been relegated with a parachute payment and not coped at all. However, I think outside the top 3, the best of the rest are for me, teams that would only last a season or two in the top tier - especially once you promote the top 3. I see Rangers as a top 2, Hibs as a potential top 6 and Falkirk as more a bottom 6. However, that's three strong sides plus St Mirren, and a couple of more sides better than an SPL bottom team. That does makes a stronger than usual second tier - relatively speaking as we are talking about the current Scottish leagues. Maybe the point is how weak the top tier is...

One thing that I find most offensive about the word is how Celtic fans enunciate it - they tend to spit the word out viciously with contempt - much like you'd hear an openly racist, neo-nazi spit out their derogatory terms for blacks, Jews and gays. They don't seem to use it as a word for us in casual parlance with normal inflection.

Hun is not the opposite of Tim - that is Billy. For a newspaper editor the guy is pretty ignorant of his own country and even just logic. Billy and Tim are both actual names based on religious preferences, both are used reasonably fondly by their respective sides. No Rangers fan I have met has called Rangers fans, huns. It's a slur and to me would be like Celtic fans calling themselves something Rangers fans use as a derogatory term - like one beginning with T. They seem fine with the F word which is why it's strange they take offence at it. Where has this guy been hiding?

Just thought of another thing the no side might have got wrong - the Schengen agreement has a schoogly peg at the moment.

Completely agree. The no side are getting found out quite a bit. The EU thing is huge. Then there are the devolution promises which were not 100% genuine. Because the no side won, we can't know if a lot of the stuff they said were lies - and if the yes vote had won, there wouldn't be much accountability. The thing about the "lying" is that a lot of it is not technically lying - it's more disinformation, spin and propaganda. The £15b deficit is a current example. £15b for Scotland means it can't fend for itself. £93b for UK is fine. The fact that if Scotland was the same as the UK it would be about £11b anyway is brushed under the carpet. Previous years when oil price was higher are totally ignored. The lie is the sensationalist assertion that it's evidence Scotland would have gone bankrupt or otherwise in deep crisis. I agree that we can't rely on oil. It's too late - I've already explained the Norwegian analogue. However, there is more to independence than that - when you have control over your income and spending you can change that. As Norway have shown there is usually a surplus, a few bad years doesn't necessarily change that. With good, targeted investment Scotland could perform a lot better - instead of targeting London all the time. I can't really predict whether it would be better or worse but I think the whole the UK suffers under the London-centric model. However, hypothetically I do see the oil as a possible crutch to lean on while Scotland builds its strength back, hopefully not needing it after a while.

You have absolutely no idea about the veracity of that, you can't possibly know what would have happened. Firstly you are lying, they didn't promise that, it's what they believed, they offered other scenarios. It was a bit of blackmail by the UK government which has a high likelihood of being a bluff. That's a very poor one that shows you cannot see both sides. You even just have to look at it in the context of who are the good guys and the bad guys: Scottish people want currency union and SNP would try their hardest to negotiate this - good guys. No campaign threaten no currency union and would deliberately block it - bad guys. Really, that showed how much England care about us as a nation, what kind of family are they? That was one of the shittiest things threatened by England in the campaign and yet you use it against the SNP... Again, you cannot possibly know that and it was not a lie, it was an assertion, BUT it's also a very weird allegation considering the no campaign and in out vote. Are you really giving this as an argument consider the vote is in June? Again the Scottish people want EU membership and so yes campaign would fight to retain membership - good guys No campaign say while there is no precedent, we wouldn't be members and would have to stay in UK to be members - then create a vote to leave the EU - bad guys Please show me where they have "lied". It's not something you can lie about as no-one intelligent person will state a future price of a commodity as fact. Getting a prediction wrong is not lying. I personally predict the price of oil will rise at some point. You come out with stuff like this and then call people gullible? At worst the yes campaign were optimistic and possibly mistaken. At best the the no campaign threatened us about the currency, conned us about Europe, and were right about the short term price of oil. I'll say again, the no vote are consistently the ones who distort the truth.

History has shown that sometimes there are better ways out of recession than austerity. Eg Hoover vs Truman. Austerity does not have much of a track record. How does it prove that? Like I said, without any context it's completely meaningless. The UK has had a massive deficit for a long time so does that prove Scotland are in serious trouble by staying in? Your argument makes no sense without some kind of qualification and explanation. The £15b is totally taken out of context and actually is a pretty subjective calculation and based on full UK spending. But you can see the implication is that the rest of the UK have zero deficit and only Scotland is racking it up. Scotland could have had the calculated deficit of say £10-11b and you still could say we would be in serious trouble (still sounds large to me), but that would be the similar level as the rest of the UK. If that's the case it means you are saying the UK is in deep shit, which has nothing to do with the SNP. That's one of the lies by omission I was talking about, making you assert pretty false conclusions based on the argument you gave. Another lie by omission is that you can't say whether Scotland can stand on it's feet on the back of one year. You have to look at decades to make a judgement - say the past 30 years. If Scotland have had a lower deficit for much of that amount of time then it blows your argument out of the water - I can't find the data. As I said, Norway are in the same trouble BUT the difference is that instead of giving most of their oil money to another country over the decades, they have invested the surplus in an oil fund where they collect the interest instead. It's value seems to be about £500 billion - think of the interest they earn on that. The funny thing is that I think I read that Scotland has produced more oil... They plan to "withdraw" about £15B of that to pay off this years deficit. A bit of a coincidental number. BTW This is what the SNP have been proposing for decades - seems they were on to something. But comparing previous years, or Norway, doesn't suit the anti-independence agenda, coincidentally, one of the worst years for oil income has been just after the referendum. The oil price will go up, that's virtually guaranteed. Better off instantly or better off in the long run? You think they were looking just at the short term? But then when you strike off bills for Trident and HS2, you could balance the books in the short term... I think all governments generally work under a deficit and some years are worse than others. Scotland would be no different in that respect and unless you show that the amounts mean Scotland would go bankrupt or suffer under severe cuts and tax increases to prevent this, your argument applies to the UK as well. Your argument is that Scotland somehow can't afford to run a deficit but the UK can. You see, with my arguments above, it actually doesn't lend much credibility to their opposition. I don't remember it being once in a lifetime, I thought it was once in a generation. It would have been once in a lifetime had they won the vote... However, circumstances change - the problem here is the No campaign may have lied. They said Scotland would have to stay to stay a part of the EU. Now that's a huge betrayal of the electorate there if we vote out. I have not really looked into what the SNP's record is - things like unemployment are also in the domain of the UK government and it has a record of shafting Scotland on that score. I'm not a support of SNP nor against them, I'm pretty much on the fence, but I see most of the disinformation and propaganda coming from their opponents. As in this case. That's what I'm against. I would do the same for the SNP but I have not seen their arguments as being so facile. For me, a lot of the anti-independence lot, do talk down Scotland a hell of a lot - some of it is ludicrous. You would think that if Scotland was so crap they would be encouraging independence. Like I said, there is only one side and one scenario where there is a possibility of a nefarious motivation to do this. Combine that with the blackmail and you see which side is darker. I would get your point more if most of the criticism was justified - and like this case, without context and qualification, it's just attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the electorate.

You've got to ask why anyone against Scotland leaving would be gleefully extolling the £15b deficit while taking it completely out of context to throw a worse light on it than the reality. Is that a form of lying? And if so why? What is the motivation? The most benign reason I can come up with is that people just like to do the "I'm right and I told you so" thing.

Can I ask you why the SNP would lie? There is no motivation for them to do so as they would be left carrying the can. If Scotland are better off outside the UK, SNP have no reason to lie, and in fact they must be telling a lot of truth. If Scotland are worse off outside the UK, SNP have no motivation to lie - they are just mistaken, generally nobody lies to create a situation where they are worse off. If Scotland are worse off outside the UK leaving rUK better off, rUK have no reason or motivation to lie, generally nobody lies to create a situation where they are worse off. If Scotland are better off outside the UK leaving rUK worse off, rUK HAVE A REASON to lie. (Although doesn't mean they have lied.) There is only one side and scenario where lying makes any sense.

Are you saying rUK didn't have a budget deficit? Surely you have to qualify that figure or it's just meaningless? You do understand that a significant amount of Scotland's income is tied to the price of oil which goes up as well as down? Do you realise, Norway are also running a deficit for the same reason and are about to withdraw money from their "oil fund" to pay for it? Now why does't Scotland do that? Oh wait...

There seems to be a massive amount of disrespect from all angles to RD, that can only help us...

I can't see how we can lose in the SC based on the premise of how we lost. For me it's common sense that you can only judge a case on common sense if the law is based on common sense, otherwise you have changed the law after the fact. Logic follows that breaking the law due to common sense is equivalent. The normal thing is to make some rules that you think are fair, people then know to play by the rules. If some people find a loophole in the rule, you make the rules better and close them. If fudging the rules means people's lives are at risk then you can have overarching rules that require you to have a duty of care. When it's tax, the rules are just a game.

I think it's one of those nonsense ways of thinking - how does she know he wouldn't have been run over and killed had he stayed in Scotland? Or whatever. There is no obvious cause and effect, no related decision made against a better judgement, just that if you change a tiny bit of what led up to something, then it wouldn't have happened. It wouldn't have happened if he chose to do something different that day, or stayed in bed, or got up earlier, or moved to another city... or an infinite number of other slight changes. It's a destructive way to think.

The irony is that defenders of the licence fee will argue that with a publicly funded broadcaster we are guaranteed high quality and impartial programming and news...

Any other business would have sought to resolve it, or faced a customer backlash and a load of cancellations of subscriptions or drop in advertising revenue due to lower viewing figures. Of course the BBC have nothing to fear there... We need a petition to send to the BBC headquarters in London.

I'm so glad that we rarely have any ex players etc that come out with such really cringeworthy, embarrassing bollocks like this. It's the kind of stuff which reminds me of why I'm so glad of which side of Glasgow I have given my allegiance. No matter how good a player is I hope we turn them down if they are this big a twat. But it also smells like there is something so rotten in Parkhead that it taints anyone that spends any time there.

Please don't - that will really make me cringe... They somehow think they are Irish, I'm glad our roots are Scottish and not English (with all nationalities welcome).