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calscot

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Everything posted by calscot

  1. calscot
    So, have you just insulted me? If you can't see that what you said could be perceived as underhand with what looks like bait and switch tactics, and also can't see that quite of few of your comments could be construed as insulting, whether you meant it or not, then I'm very disappointed in you. Try challenging the accusation and objectively gauge whether it has some validity. I can at least see where my comments can be construed as insulting, and so challenge them. I feel "underhand" is justified in it's accuracy in my opinion, the intent - as a complaint, and the fact it was in response to what looked like a veiled insult. You also seem to be insulting in this post and either can't faithfully interpret what I've said or are deliberately misinterpreting my words. I could explain it more but it's verbose enough as it is and I can't see the point if you're not receptive. I'll admit this is not a subject I know much about or really want to get into, but as a voter, my opinion does count at some level. I never actually know who to believe, and with all the propaganda from many areas, I doubt many people know much "truth" or "facts". I do know that I struggle to understand people who can't make a straight case or straight bat my points, and this is far from that. I'm sorry, but you've not come across well to me on this (remember it is you who is trying to convince me not the other way around), you seem think you know the "truth" and instead of trying to persuade or convince me, you want to hit me over the head with it and belittle me, and when I complain, you act all insulted... and then belittle me some more. I'm pretty sure this will just make you angry rather than make you think.
  2. calscot
    Insulting? Look, I don’t want to get into some kind of flame war and I can’t see how I insulted you – especially over a post to where I was trying to imply in a polite way that your own post comes across as a veiled insult after me playing along to your fishing, even though I’d already outed you on that. To me that was underhand. (I’ll let you work the veiled insult out. It’s a lot easier than the subject matter.) Like I was asking straight, just what are you trying to achieve? If it's to persuade me of anything other than you think you are right, then it’s not the way to go about it. Your whole argument comes across as, "you're so stupid if you believe the government" - and I haven't even said I fully do. You mean they weren't genuine, just like I said? So why do you feel insulted by me pointing that out? Your repetition meant you pretended you didn’t know the answers. Like I implied in my "insult", I knew it was a leading question. To me, it's an underhand way of making a point. You didn't even get that I didn’t fall into your trap as I worded it thus: "Like I said, you might disagree with it and have conjecture that there are deeper and less noble motives (and I probably agree there, to an extent)," However, as you repeatedly demanded the simple answers like you just didn't know, I played along and qualified it with: "It's a very complex issue." If you're into challenging, why are you so biased to one side of the story? Just because a certain reason to justify something isn't the only reason, doesn't completely invalidate it. Why aren’t you challenging your own side which isn’t exactly cast iron so far? I said no such thing. My words are in the thread so please quote them. The "received wisdom" for me is that they were a safe haven for, and supportive of Al Qaeda and also responsible for radicalising young men into the mind-set of joining the terrorist group. There was also the proximity of these terrorists to Pakistan who own nuclear missiles. However, it seems that part has definitely backfired. That's the same line of argument as the IRA... But then we are not occupying their country as an invading force who are attempting to annex it like the IRA believe we are. The received wisdom is that were trying to give the Afghanistan to its people. It seems the IRA have a far better case there, and “occupying” takes on a more concrete and sinister meaning. That is a complex and subjective area which is very difficult to answer. But if they have nothing to do with terrorism, believe in the freedom of their people, and are the most popular choice for leadership, why don't they just denounce terrorism, embrace democracy and become the elected leaders? You're arguing like this is the case and we're just repressing them to put in our own martial law, when it obviously isn't. It would certainly make us look like the baddies if we subverted it. Why don’t they just play it clever? Or is the answer that they want totalitarian rule and are despised by most of their own people which doesn’t fit? Democracy is not perfect by any means and comes in many flavours, but surely it's obviously better than tyranny - what's your choice for the UK, the current democracy or Taliban type rule? What evidence do you have that they don’t want it? Maybe I’m indoctrinated by Scotland’s history about freedom and the enlightenment that brought democracy, but I can’t imagine people not choosing freedom and choice over some sort of autocracy (or some equivalent strict theocracy). Your argument could apply to the southern states in America about abolishing slavery. The north imposed a culture which they had no exposure of, not that generation anyway. The majority certainly didn't want it. Once they have democracy they can customise it to their own tastes and culture - if your culture is equality of women, what chance do you have of adjusting the Taliban rule to your culture? If a culture is forced upon you, I think it's actually patronising to say you wouldn't be able to even conceptualise the freedom to form a “better” culture for yourself. Democracy is about freedom and choice, what could be more fundamental to transcend forced cultures? The main trouble is implementing a reasonably fair democracy that lives up to its ideals. I don't actually know the time line or number of deaths and admit that. But you are saying no Brits had previously been killed by Islamic terrorists at all? Despite all the Al Quieda propaganda we hear, you don't think any would have happened if we hadn't gone to Afghanistan? You don't think there are other factors? I'm sure you have the rhetoric waiting for them. Like I said it’s a complex subject and I think I’ve shown your questions are not without answers – and further questions. What you don’t seem to get is that I’m open to both sides of the story and realise there is some plausibility in each and I’m surprised you didn’t see any of that. What I don’t need is games made up to pigeon hole myself and others as non-free thinkers because we ironically don’t blindly agree with everything you say. It’s not a very compelling way to put across your view. As usual I’ve put care into this to try and explain things clearly. I hope it’s read in the way it was intended and not subverted into some perceived insult…
  3. calscot
    Following your posts, the tone of this comment comes across as very strange, and pretty much supports my thinking that your original question was totally disingenuous. I take it some agree with the answer you already had in mind? What is it you really want here and why the underhandedness?
  4. calscot
    The reason I gave it is because I see the answers as very similar. It's a fight against terrorism and attempting to bring a strong, democratic government to a province (which most of the indigenous people seem to want), which if successful, should reduce the number of terrorist attacks on our country and peace to the region in question. That's part of it anyway. Like I said, you might disagree with it and have conjecture that there are deeper and less noble motives (and I probably agree there, to an extent), but that doesn't excuse you from pleading ignorance of the answers. The reason no-one answers you is that they are so obvious that the question appears loaded and most don't want to get into a conspiracy theory debate, as the burden of proof is ONLY EVER on the non-conspiracy point of view. Conspiracy theory is all about doubts, which is relatively easy to conjure up. It's a very complex issue.
  5. calscot
    Not sure if I get what that link is all about. The only conclusion I can glean from them are that there are poppy fields and soldiers walk through them while out on patrol. No evidence that the two are connected in any way. What are they supposed to be doing - dropping Agent Orange on them?
  6. calscot
    Seems a bit like the question, why are we fighting the IRA? Seems very similar to me. But a simple Google will give the main answers - whether you agree with them or not.
  7. calscot
    Supposing he gets five times the salary to that at Dundee, does the job for six weeks and then gets a one year pay off. That's five years of Dundee sized wages banked. I think I know which seems more settled as he could lose his job at Dundee any time in that five years. If he's any good he's bound to find another job and still keep the money.
  8. calscot
    Sorry to invoke Godwin's law but referencing Nazi Germany, looking after yourself and ignoring your enemies doesn't always work, if you don't make a stand against your enemies you can find things spiralling out of control. If some people are right, that has already happened to us and our enemies are at work to finish the job. I really can't see how we are fully to blame for the perfect storm we've been through.
  9. calscot
    HIVs are a derogatory nickname for Hibs, due to the number of needle using drug addicts in or around Leith making Edinburgh considered the HIV capital of the UK.
  10. calscot
    I suspect CVAs are normally accepted if it's as much as a company can pay. Liquidation usually means you get less money and so is not usually a good option for creditors. They also don't have a false creditor intent on destroying them either for punishment, to make an example, or as part of a bigoted conspiracy.
  11. calscot
    I realise we need a CEO but with the kind of payoffs we're giving it seems to be stupid appointing someone now when he could be removed in six weeks. So, how much is he on at Dundee? Bet it's not on the same planet as £600k. When you consider St Mirren's total wage bill in 2011 was £2.2m they can't have been paying their CEO much more than a normal wage.
  12. calscot
    I think it's pretty obvious there is a Tim conspiracy against us and you don't need to be paranoid to see it. All you need to do is pick up a newspaper or watch the BBC or read any comments under any Rangers story. Just even read the quotes from any Celtic source. The propaganda is there and was exceptionally noticeable when it switched from attacking Rangers to defending Celtic in Amsterdam, and then switching back to anti-Rangers as soon as possible. In fact the anti-Rangers stuff never really stopped as Manchester was referenced again and again to deflect from their disgrace. You see it in the SFA and SFPL and the influence on some of the clubs is pretty noticeable. While there is no real proof about HMRC and LBG, their actions were certainly incredibly damaging to us for no apparent or normal reason that has been explained. The question is not about whether there is a conspiracy, it is how far does it extend?
  13. calscot
    I think he will be holding fire any moves till after the AGM. The future make up of the board is like a Schroedinger's cat till then.
  14. calscot
    I hope I have my numbers right but happy to be corrected. From what I read in the accounts our income was £19.1m and our wage bill was £17.9m. There is the 13 month anomaly which I'm not sure if it applies to both numbers.
  15. calscot
    With Rangers' wage bill now running at 93.7% of turnover there is definitely far too much money being leached out the door and the club cannot be sustainable. In any other club you’d expect most of that wage burden to be spent on the players but at Rangers that was actually only £7.8m out of £17.9 and at a very reasonable 40.8% of turnover. This has reputedly actually dropped to around £6 despite significantly enhancing the squad with a massive difference in results as the reward. So looking at the player spend there does not seem too much fat to trim for a club with a huge following, without giving very poor value for money to the fans, most of whom do not want the club to become an ordinary side by reducing the budget of the squad from about two or three times as much as a middling Scottish Premiership team to something similar or less. Not while the club are attracting 4 to 10 times as many fans in through the gates. Besides the blue pound doesn't stretch as far as other clubs, with agents sniffing our far larger store of resources than less popular peers. The problem with tinkering with the wages of the players is that you tend to provide a proportional product and if the quality and results drops dramatically, the “customer” loyalty will start to take a battering. And when you look at the figures, even bringing in an amateur squad like Queens Park will still have our wages running at 52.4%, which with the widespread target of less than 50% making that look ridiculous. So it seems we should start by looking elsewhere for savings and you have to wonder what we are paying our executives so many millions for while giving them severance packages after being found unfit for their job in just a few months, that your ordinary worker would never get a sniff of. When you combine that with the ludicrously poor financial figures where the money generated outside the IPO and ticket sales would struggle to pay the executive wages, you have to wonder what planet they are on. Surely, a club like Rangers even when at its peak in today’s population based income, is not a money generating monster of the likes of top English sides, has to treat the running of the club more like that of a non-profit charity which wants maximum income without squandering it by overly rewarding those that bring the money in. That becomes more necessary when the club is recovering from a crippling illness and with just a glance at the figures, struggling to make ends meet in a cash starved environment. You really have to wonder what these executives are doing to deserve their ludicrous wages with totally illogical payoffs during what would normally be a probationary period for most jobs, that shackle the club even more. You can understand what a top player brings for the money and you can see that he will receive similar remuneration at any clubs he ends up at, and you know that the team will struggle for results if you don’t pay the going rate. But where is the comparison for the board and CEO? Are they really bringing in the same kind of results as the team compared to lesser paid opposition? To me it’s like paying through the nose for unknown players who don’t perform and put you in the relegation zone. Surely we would be able to attract some savvy, hardworking business types with impeccable references and integrity with a salary of say £150k a year? Most board members should be there because they want to, they should be making their money from their businesses and at worst using a club like Rangers to raise their profile or as some kind of trophy position for their outside success. They really shouldn't need a huge wage for whatever paltry hours a month they actually do for that position. In my perhaps naïve viewpoint as someone who gets by quite comfortably on a more normal salary, I can’t see why the club executive should be draining the budget by more than about £500k. As I said, I think we should be looking at more of a charity model. After that we can look at whether the rest of the staffing is at an appropriate level for our income. Aberdeen’s full staff cost is about £5.3m, including the players so you have to wonder why ours is around £10m excluding the squad. Once you trim a couple of million off the executive salaries, it still looks overly high when you’d expect some economy of scale for looking after a stadium that is just two and half times the capacity of Pittodrie and a training ground that is mostly one building and bunch of football pitches, and how much better is the latter compared to some top SPL sides? There are a lot of people pointing fingers at our playing squad but for me, that is the one place we seem to be getting somewhat reasonable value for money, it's cronyism at the top that first needs to be excised, and people brought in who actually perform the job for wage befitting the market sector and able to bring in a lot more income than the current few million outside of ticket sales.
  16. calscot
    That's what you get from my post??? Whoosh! Could you not just have an opinion and have the conviction in it to debate and discuss it? Is it really that difficult? You never know, you might actually enjoy it. If you do, there are these things called "forums" which are designed for that...
  17. calscot
    You said there were too many 24 years olds and over. We have 15 of those in a 27 man squad (13 that are over 25). Do you not get the logic that if every club makes a hard policy to increase the under 24s and decrease the 24 and above, you will create a situation where there will less places for the older player than the younger ones. That means that you will have to retire players at 25 (actually 24 in this case) as inevitably a proportion will have no places left at any club to go to. You just have to look at the previous post about Dunfermline. Where are the current crop 18-23 year olds going to play in 6 years time? If you take that example and expand it as a rule to all clubs, only one in eleven players will be playing at 26 years old, and none at 27. To me this is simple reasoning of the repercussions extrapolated from a point of view. I think I have a very valid point. I'm sorry if that line of reasoning offends or bamboozles you. I thought it was worth debating but there seems to now be culture where some people just want to either agree or at push to agree to disagree while never actually bothering to think about the validity of the counter view point. I don't get why people don't understand that their suggestions usually have an indirect impact on a situation and instead see the highlighting of that as putting words in their mouth. You may disagree with my counter point but in the spirit of a forum, should you not explain your reasoning so I can understand it? The whole reason for forum is to debate the points, giving evidence and reasoning, listening and countering, which enriches both sides understanding so that they can reach a more enlightened conclusion - even if it is that they keep the same opinion. Why do I keep having to explain this stuff?
  18. calscot
    If that was us I'd still have some hope. If they win both games and Ajax don't then they are through... Doubt they have the ability to beat both Milan and Barca though.
  19. calscot
    Ally shouldn't pick him, average will go up...
  20. calscot
    Almost seems a bit rude knocking nine past a team celebrating their 10th anniversary...
  21. calscot
    If they were normal rivals I'd be looking forward to playing them again sometime but these days I don't know if I would care if we never play them again. At the same time if they normal rivals I still wouldn't wan to play them till we were on a level footing. Why hand them a loaded dice for winning the bragging rights?
  22. calscot
    Do you not find that pretty worrying for those players careers? Before 26 are they likely to be moved on and replaced with 20 year olds? Like I said, people don't seem to want to think about the implications. I don't really get the positive from the post. The young guys were booked, one sent off, giving away a penalty that was the first goal of the game and in the second half, and they lost the game. Maybe they can mix it, but I thought we wanted the beautiful game, not an on-field scrap full of dirty players? We even have a youngish player with a broken cheek who is out for a while just as he was getting back in the team from this. Didn't see the game so don't know how it happened and it could have been accidental, but we also had Jig with a bandaged head and reports of a very physical game. I really don't see any of this as something we should be looking at to emulate.
  23. calscot
    Thought you were supposed to be chilled...? There seems to be too many people on here that don't realise some of the implications of their views and that extrapolating is a way of testing a hypothesis - then they are unwilling to debate the point, which for me is what the site is about. Seems some are only interested criticising and then having people agree with them.
  24. calscot
    Maybe it's just me but we used to complain when it was too many player over 30. When it's players in their mid to late twenties then I think the focus on age is becoming a bit extreme. Like I've said before, what's the point of developing young players when you expect them to retire at 25? Successful teams usually have the bulk of their squad in the mid to late twenties which is when most players play their best stuff with the combination of still being pretty young, while having gained a load of experience and development.
  25. calscot
    Well, if you count youngsters as under 24, we've only got a squad of 15. There are 12 more under 24. I think Celtic have a much larger and more experienced squad probably about three to four times our wage bill. I'm not interested in playing them yet (especially as they have become the scummiest club in history) and don't think it's a level playing field. I'm happy to wait two more years when we should be bolstering our squad to challenge them.
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