bmck

i still think he may be having to cover for weir slightly too much, but i think that this only puts him up in my estimation. he has been a standout this season - exactly the sort of professional the club should be after.

now thats a better argument. why dont you start a thread about it? im sure plenty of people here will take either side.

what, straight after you managed to read someones malign intentions into the creation of a flag? you accused them of being an typical antiscottish ibrox moron long before they turned on your intentions, so lets stop the poor me syndrome please. you dislike the british emphasis in our club? you are one of many, not some minority group. either be bold enough to have your own views, or dont say anything at all - this persecution complex on a message board shit is ridiculous.

we are also a british club playing in britain. if nationality has nothing to do with it, then lets apply it across the board, eh? you either want stuff emphasising our scottishness, or something thats only to do with football. make up your mind.

mate, if you dont like it here, then feel free to leave. if people are too weak to go against a trend without complaining then they are as well leaving.

if we are simply a football club, what does scotland even have to do with it?

^ i definitely dont think its "only 50k" we should be taking from this. if anything its just made tangible how possible it is to take a proper stake in the club, and will hopefully excite others into doing it.

calscot, there's no doubt that it made good financial sense & that our business ken has improved after the wakeup call of the uber-debt. my objection is more one of principle, or ambition, or whatever. we can never know what went on behind the scenes, but if alan had any inclination at all to stay i would have liked to seen us do our utmost to keep him. i just think, rightly or wrongly, that we while we might not have gained financially for keeping hutton on, it would have had a less quantative though more qualitative gain. we are not in such a bad state that we just Had to sell hutton. i think the kind of things gained by keeping a player of his quality, his age, his nationality, for the team, the club and the fans outweighs the 8 million or so we got for him. yes, it made good business sense to sell him, but i fear it is going to be more costly in other areas less easily measured. i certainly dont blame murray for making the decision he did in accepting the offer, because it makes sense, but i just tend to want more in a leader. its not that i think he is deficient, i just cant help but think someone with bigger ideas for the club than domestic success every couple of years would have at least attempted to persuade him to stay. the world in which it is plainly obvious that someone should move up from rangers to totenham, the world of this transfer, is not my world yet. i still think rangers should theoretically have more to offer - if we were a club headed in a sort of forward looking way.

you cant win with some people, its true, but that doesn't mean he is always right. if i was in murray's place i wouldnt. so there you have it. its all just opinions

great news! hopefully it will continue to be a success, can hardly wait till i earn enough so that i dont get back to zero every month and can afford to save with it. cant help be jealous of liverpool though in their current bid to conjure enough cash from fans to own the club. imagine the trust with, instead of 0.01%, around 15-20% ownership of the cub. all in good time though.

i like levein (sp). not sure how he would scale up to a job like rangers, but, i dunno, i think he's a clever guy. interesting to see how dundee utd develop. but we'll hump them though.

look what murray made him say!

to be honest i think this is the part of it that i missed. you were saying "the people on the phone in who are talking as if its been scientifically proven that david murray is the antichrist are morons" and i took you to be saying "anyone with reservations about murray are the kind of people who phone in phone ins to talk about murray as if he is the antichrist". to be honest, rightly or wrongly (i think, on reflection wrongly), if i thought you were talking specifically about phone in peope i would've said "anyone that pays money to phone in to speak to peope who are paid to twist what you say to anger more people to make more phone calls and more money are not the kind of peope i woud expect sense from", which is probably far more condescending than anything you might have said. and is pretty wrong actually. there are plenty of good reasons to phone phone ins, but thats probaby what i woud have said. i thought you were talking about half the rangers fans and you were talking about 0.005% them. anyway, taken wrongly or not, its been the most controversial piece in a while (Cammy needs to start writing controversia pieces again), so cheers.

... i thought i'd answer these specific things as well as make a more general response about the rangers fans reaction & your opening post in the other thread. no, thats not a matter of reading things into it. when you turn down a job offer, by definition, you say you are happy to stay where you are. unless you have some sort of magic ball that tells you that they are going to come back with a higher offer. any rejection of a new contract of employment means that you would rather stay where you are than accept their terms. thats not reading into anything, its true by definition. this means that the speculation that he didnt want to go has as much evidence in fact as the speculation that he was waiting for the right offer. he never got interviewed in this time, and he never came out and said anything, so the truth is that either could be the case. to hold either side as if it is undeniable fact is to mistake healthy speculation for established fact. have ran out of milk. well, you said in the opening post that we can confidently put down to innuendo that "david murray doesn't care about the fans" and that "rangers are only interested in money, not cups". i'm saying that both these things seem plausible to me, viewed from a certain sort of perspective. ah, right. it seemed to me you were saying that people who think murray doesn't care about the fans are the same people who think he is a some victorian stage villain. i was trying to say that while some, on radio forums and the like, may think he is some sort of evil personified, most people can assess his interest in the club critically without thinking that it makes him somehow evil. i've not heard anyone say it, certainly not as if it were fact, but i reckon there is a decent case to be made for it to have a seriously detrimental affect on our season, saved only perhaps by how shit celtic currently are. and i think the freedom to make this case is natural and right. with our system i think having two attacking fullbacks is essential, and i think that as a matter of principle we should be doing our utmost to keep excellent young scottish fullbacks as an indicator of ambition both to the fans, but also to the players. i'm not sure where that puts me in your assessment of things, but given that i believe some of the things you seem to be ridiculing, i'm bound to respond. its that you portrayed the people criticising bain and murray as somehow nuts, and i've criticised bain and murray, therefore i'm nuts. but i'm not nuts, you see? now, as per the other post, i think it was really those who confuse reasonable speculation with established fact that you were addressing, but it seemed like anyone who held any negative beliefs about this whole saga/murray/the future of rangers/the board etc as gossips who were so stupid as to think of murray in black and white terms, as a sort of idiot or child. i still think that holds from what you've written, but it doesnt seem to be your intention (s_a's a smart reasonable guy, and he seemed to take it the same way). i know what you mean, but this assessment of the situation is speculation. not hard facts. when you get into an intimate knowledge of murray's preferences, and views, what you are saying is speculation. now it may be that your speculation is more reasonable than someone who think murray kidnapped hutton's wife, held her over a cliff, and threatened to remove her unborn child if he didn't sign for spurs. but i've not heard anything that extreme: i've only heard gradients of speculation that says "i could see murray doing his utmost to force him out the door" to "he preferred hutton leave, but would have let him stay if he wanted". these are both speculation, but one can be truer to the facts as we've learned them than the other. it seemed like those people who believed the former were the people under attack in your article. man, you have the same right to your views as everyone else here. if i think what you have written is condescending, i will say so. if i wasnt allowed to say that, it would likewise be censorship. censorship is only when you are forced to say something you don't want to say, or stopped from saying what you want, not when people don't agree with you or object to the way you said things. i found your post excessively condescending towards those who didnt share your views on the whole issue (of which I, and many other more sensible people are included), i said i thought your post was un-necesarily condescending, which i do. but that doesn't mean i would ever want to ban you or censor you for it. thats all pish. i love strong opinions, and i like it when people have the confidence to argue out their point. however, if i think it, i'll say it. i tend to trust people with strong opinions dont mind strong opinions in response. but i think you have read insults that dont exist into what i've said (i said excessively - more than is necessary - condescending, not massively, and certainly never sid you were the most arrogant sob ever to walk the earth), but tone is so hard to judge. i wasn't offended at all by your post, i dont think i have ever felt the thing that people call offense, but as one of the people your post seemed to take into account, on first reading, then i've got the right of reply, like everyone else. must go find milk...

there's no doubt someone or something was sufficiently under fire in andy's article. i think it was quite easy to take from it that anyone with reservations about the hutton affair was laughably, ridicously nuts. as someone with reservations about the hutton affair, though i make no pretense at general mental wellness, i think i dont really fall into that group. i do think its fair to say when we have less than all the facts, there is room for healthy speculation - otherwise quantum mechanics would've destroyed science, and the economy would fall. but this speculation was, andy said, just gossip. he seemed to be saying more than that those who believed all the speculation as fact were Not Quite Right; he seemed to be saying that any wandering beyond the received facts at all was unhealthy. this all struck me as quite familiar - the fans reaction to the hutton affair, the different sorts of reaction, were quite like the worldwide reaction to 9/11. if it seems like quite far fetched, give me a second. there seemed to be people who believe all the 9/11 conspiracies, no matter how far fetched or contradictory, and they tend to believe them loudly. i think there are rangers fans who are willing to see all the evil conspiracies about the transfer saga, no matter how far fecthed and contradictory, and they tend to believe them all very loudly, on radio programmes and the like. i think though the wording of the article went further, these are the sorts of people andy had in mind. it tends to be these sort of people who disregard people who think there is no conspiracy as puppets of the evil mastermind (be it bush, the cia, or murray) which also accounts for andy's quite defiant stance. but this defiant stance seemed quite like the response to 9/11 that says if you dont believe exactly the given story then you are a conspiracist nutjob. any speculation beyond exactly the given facts is troublemaking/gossip etc. that is, they take the super conservative view defiantly. now if we've learned anything from the many studies into the psychology of conspiracy theorists and their imaginings, and the thing i think is important to this discussion of the hutton saga, is that conspiracy theories and theorists arise when the human imagination is forced to wander because there is a) a precedent for lies in the official story, and b) there isn't full disclosure of the facts. the kind of stuff that would show the far fetched ridiculousness of some of the stories also happens to be classified, or not available (usually for decent reason). andy's probably right that its to play into the media's hands to turn into a mumbling club-hater without the relevant facts, positing the wildest of speculations as if they had actually be shown to be true, phoning in radio programmes and making an arse of yourself. that said, its likewise to play into the media's hands to never ever speculate from the facts as given, especially when there is a precedent of lies ("I will buy a striker from my own pocket") and there isn't full disclosure of the facts ("Excuse me, Mr Murray, when you inevitably talked to Hutton about this, what was your position, and how did you put it?"). you have to use your intution, and make conclusions that are willing to go further than exactly what we know, but without rabidly holding these conclusions as if they were obvious to all and sundry. i think the biggest problems the rangers fans face at this time are a) apathy, and b) disorganisation/disunity. we are calling out for people who will have strong opinions - andy has his, the punters on the phonelines have theirs, but i think that each keeping the other at laughable distance only, as St. Mark would have it, divides the Kingdom of Gersfans against itself, and makes it succeptable to fall. no matter what the differences are its only through some sort of organised unity, the best version we have being the rst, that some greater good, whatever it may be, can be achieved. -- as a finishing aside i'd just like to say the tone's so hard on the internet. i like the general principle that people should be able to say pretty much what they like, have good strong debates, but still be able to have a pint afterwards. in calling your style condescending, i didnt want to censor you, i just thought it was condescending. here you'll be perfectly entitled to say "Well, c'est la vie, if you don't like it that much, dont respond". the reason i did reply because it was a good post, with a decent argument, even if i didnt agree with it all. may ye have many more strong opinions i can disagree with, because there's nothing so ugly as apathy. :cheers:

of course its alright to post it, man - but in general if you are going to write bold posts you'll get just as bold responses! i'll get back to your response later.

you implicitly say you want to stay when you knock back an offer to leave. if you think they all mean the same thing then there's nothing more i can say. i just hope those scientists stop gossiping over new ways to cure cancer & dont dare to imagine beyond the facts they already have or they might actually cure us. it seemed to me your assessment of the situation was of a "everybody this is the facts, come listen to me" variety. but if you dont think it was a soap box sort of an argument, thats fine. if you want to further imagine insults into my criticism of your argument, then thats fine too. well you clearly think its enough fans to start preaching about it. but my problem was this, perhaps i could have stated it in a more friendly way, it seemed as if you were looping all these different groups people (those unhappy with the transfer, those who didn't believe your version of the facts, those who think murray is some sort of evil character, or even those who question him, and those who phone in the phone ins) as essentially fundamentally the same sort of people: united by one common characteristic, their stupidity. let me explain why. for a start anyone who held any of your five stated clear falsehoods were immediately gossips & rumour mongers. but i dont think its obvious rangers board arent only interested in money, and i dont think its obvious that david murray cares about the fans. i certainly have no interest in hutton's personal life, but i dont its in the realm of the ridiculously fanciful to think a professional footballer might be interested in winning medals. so on at least part of the five, you've expressed my view, and youhave called it gossip. but its not. then you went onto claim that these nutty fans you've happened to hear on the radio have done more to harm the club than david murray. or rather big baddy david murray. it seems to suggest that its absolutely bewildering to you that someone might suggest david murray done more harm than these people. to me its not so bewildering - certainly not laughably so. then you portrayed your opinion on the value of the signing as fact - forcing everyone who disagrees with you into the world of non-facts. but i dont think it represents good value. i actually think there is at least a possibility that selling hutton could be detrimental to our season, but you've made up your mind that folk of this sort should "catch a grip of themselves". the last paragraph implies that anybody who thinks this wasnt a good deal has some desperately malign view of murray, and are some sort of nutjobs. maybe you have a different audience in mind, but you posted it here. a lot of things rangers fans here and elsewhre take to be at least worth considering are ridiculed in it. you've felt confident & bold enough to satire quite a lot of ideas, so i hope you take some criticism of it as given. these are interesting times, for every rabidly irrational murray hater there's a pro-murray counterpart, it seems. in a nutshell, i just find your general idea that it is playing into the media's hand to speculate beyond the facts presented in the media bankrupt. to not play into the media's hands seems suspiciously like believing the facts as presented in the media. either way, i like it when people are willing to write something and make a stance one way or t'other. i'll be honest, i found your post excessively condescending towards those who didnt share your views on the whole issue (of which I, and many other more sensible people are included), and it dictated the tone of my response. maybe i've misread, maybe not. either way, its all in good fun. :cheers:

actually those are some of the things that can be said with certainty. we can also say for certain that he knocked spurs back and was quite content to play to the end of the season at rangers. what absolute nonsense. these things are speculation - you know, the natural part of the human imagination that tries to fill in the blanks when the facts are dispirate, unclear, or contradictory. its that same part of the brain you engage when you can distinguish between The Truth being exactly the same as the concrete facts you know, and The Truth being a slightly deeper affair than merely what you have been told. that these things cant be proven/disproven just means that for some unknown reason they havent been asked. they may be rumour, they me be gossip, they may be innuendo - but they also may be true, relevant and worth our consideration. you dont know until you find out: to dismiss anything beyond blind repetition of available facts as gossip (with all its negative connotations) when all is not known is just idiotic. and to do it so condescendingly makes it all the more ironic - im not sure it is wise to look down on speculators who are speculating out of some dis-satisfaction with the situation, and portray your own ignorance, and contentment with ignorance, as some sort of pedestal to look down from. and how exactly are you feeling about your taking your "half our supporters are actually dicks who cant distinguish between hitler & murray" stereotypes around the internet? infact, by the gross horrorshow that forms the logic of your argument anyone who has any dis-satisfaction with these proceedings is actually stupid enough to think murray is some stage baddie. anyone who doesnt accept things exactly as they are is clearly some misinformed troublemaker, it would seem. im sorry, but its this fascistically conservative philosophy thats doing the harm to our club, not a few morons on radio programs no-one in their right mind would listen to. its really amazing how "the reality" of the situation sounds so darned like your opinion of the situation. "this is a good price" is a statement of value, not of measurable fact ffs. im sorry, but this is the same old pish. ive heard far too much of this Any Supporter Who Isnae Like Me is Stupid/Ill-informed/Backwards/Hurter of the Club. you would do far better just getting on with supporting the club than calling sections of it morons (in such a flawed way to boot). there are bigger problems.

^ quite right. if he is to be a squad player, then he is a squad player who has played at a good level, and if he manages to force his way into the first team all the better.

are you unsure whether you understand the humour, or was it really not a question after all? must be

didnt need to read the rest of it, this was funny enough.

excellent work stewarty, as soon as frankie gets on he will stick on newsnow!

my versions the best hello, hello, we are the rangers boys hello, hello, youll know us by our noise we`re upto our knees in faineant blood etc.. its pronounced much the same, but its not bigotted (unless its bigotted to dislike do-nothings). sorted.

^ LOL! i 3> pro evo.

^ i actually think we're getting less out of cuellar than we did at the start of the season because he's having to compensate slightly for weir. i think weir has been great this season, perhaps he just needs a rest.