LongTimeLurker

The rational side of my brain is beginning to regret knocking back pursuing one of those when they tightened up the great-grandparent angle to the regulations back in the 1980s, but then the visceral side to my brain kicks in over The Soldier's Song being my national anthem and I remember why the chances of my name ever appearing in the RoI's foreign births register were somewhere between exceedingly slim and none. Not sure which will be the stronger of the two responses when I am standing in the other passports queue at Frankfurt Airport or somewhere like that in another couple of years.

Bit quiet on this thread given the new season just started. Was today's result a freak scoreline or is this season's squad weaker than last time around given the drop in the parachute payment?

It probably will need the whole baby boom generation and their twilight of the Empire era mindset that skewed their votes strongly to the Leave side to have departed the scene to get to a point where either the Tories or Labour (more likely of the two obviously) will feel 100% comfortable pushing a strongly pro-EU posture in the context of a general election. Initially it will have to be the Lib Dems.

It would be nice to think so but the Tories need Brexit to be able to kill off UKIP once and for all and have the numbers at Westminster along with the DUP (who are terrified of what Corbyn might do if he was in power instead handling this) to see this through to the hard border type outcome. It will probably take about a generation to undo the damage inflicted economically and build the momentum needed politically to successfully re-enter.

^^^Still in denial as to what leaving a customs union implies. There were probably also people that assumed there was no way there was ever going to a hard border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the Velvet Divorce but they soon found out otherwise: http://www.radio.cz/en/section/books/paul-kaye-twenty-years-of-the-czech-slovak-border It's not just Nigel and co that are in for a rude awakening on this.

Or maybe reality is finally sinking in as is also the case where the future shape of the NI-RoI border is concerned: http://www.businessinsider.com/irish-taoiseach-border-brexiteers-northern-ireland-republic-2017-7 Can remember when I would post about the possibility of a hard border post-Brexit on here and was basically dismissed as making it all up because Common Travel Area, Good Friday Agreement etc. What will be interesting to watch will be what it does to SNP support when it becomes clear that separate EU membership alongside a Brexit rUK would mean custom checks and passport controls at Gretna, Coldstream and Berwick.

The entire plot for the series is alleged to have been leaked on reddit. My understanding is that so far the information from that has been reasonably accurate, unfortunately, so it's probably best to avoid threads like this over the next few weeks, if you want to avoid spoilers.

Hopefully it will be worth the wait after all the seemingly endless and at times monotonous filler content amongst the Dothraki and in Mereen etc. This could easily have been a trilogy as was originally planned but somebody wanted to cash in big time.

The idea that Trump is uniquely dangerous as a US president on foreign policy definitely doesn't stand up to close inspection. It's more his domestic agenda that is of concern. Wonder if John McCain leaving the scene for medical reasons made this easier to do somehow given the timing.

It's what happens after Brexit turns out to be a bad move economically that is the potential game changer. The SNP looked dead and buried in 1983 and even devolution wasn't being taken all the seriously. They bounced back because the underlying reasons that made a stronger Scottish dimension to the political process likely to unfold hadn't really changed in the 9 years since 1974 despite the serious tactical blunders they made in the late 1970s. The Lib Dems will return to prominence because there is an obvious void for them to fill when both the Tories and Labour have tilted towards their more extreme wings.

Don't remember anybody in Nazareth being called Jesus. That would have been a bit unusual in Dunfermline. If I was going to complain about that last episode it's that they have gone from the gritty realism of how bad Medieval feudalism was in the first few series to scenes that just don't ring true in any way. A wee lassie can really convince dozens of family members that Walder Frey is acting normally and then escape the castle unscathed in the aftermath of the mass poisoning because nobody was on guard and then after pretending to be a boy in the earlier series for safety reasons she can now openly ride a horse and not think twice about approaching a group of soldiers the way she did? All getting a bit lame now, but I am looking forward to finding out what really happened in the upcoming books. Moving past the original source material is not a good thing, unfortunately, as now they are giving the fans what they want to see in a typical Holywood sort of way rather than what drew people to the show in the first place.

Has to be the Lib Dems eventually south of the border, but they have lost many of their most able politicians over the last two elections so a repeat of Cleggmania isn't easy to engineer and Labour voters in the Tory shires are still a lot less inclined to vote tactically than they used to be after what happened with the coalition. Corbyn's window of opportunity will probably be quite narrow because pro-Remain centrists and hard left Syriza/Podemos style populists are unlikely to stay in one place electorally for long and the Tories and DUP are unlikely to go to the polls before the Brexit negotiations have fully unfolded. At that point the Tories will probably ditch Theresa May and might try their luck at the polls if the opinion poll numbers look solid in a new leader honeymoon sort of way, but that may be too late for Corbyn.

I agree that DeeTillEhDie has lost the plot. Not a lot of point arguing with people who are not responding to what you actually write but to what their base irrational prejudices convince them you actually meant, so over and out for now until this thread returns to its actual subject matter, which is the DUP.

Agree the last bit is probably a big part of it, but even without the EU angle a Corbynite Labour party and a UKIP light Tory party should have made it easier tahn usual for a party of the centre.

^^^^ So now we are back to the William Ulsterman stereotype despite having written the following: But oh aye don't bother with what somebody actually writes, because you can magically discern some unstated hidden motive based on a mix of paranoia and prejudice.

...not clear if hard Brexit means a hard border at the Solway and Tweed. I'd be a Yes on a soft Brexit. A hard Brexit is a disaster with no easy escape route.

^^^This guy needs help. Even with independence in an era of globalisation how much control does Holyrood really have? Obsessing over national sovereignty as both Holyrood and Westminster are doing at the moment belongs to another era. European integration is the better way to go.

Good to see the penny has finally dropped then and that people have moved beyond a posture that a fancy dress party at a private function in Airdrie five years ago actually matters all that much in the big scheme of things for anybody that isn't driven by highly irrational visceral level identity politics in which the "other lot" in whatever "them and us" world view they hold are routinely demonised as being latter day stormtroopers. I found both the Yes and the No sides in the Referendum deeply off-putting because of that sort of stuff and could live with either outcome just as long as this whole turgid kulturkampf finally comes to a definitive end, so more important matters like building a strong economy and socially just society can take central stage.

I still can't get my head around the Lib Dems not surfing that wave to 20% plus again across the UK a few weeks back. They had the wrong leader for what should have been their chance to bounce back big time.

What catches the eye and pushes peoples buttons though at a visceral level? Whinhall flute band Adolf and family or Jean-Claude Juncker and Brexit negotiations? Which is more important and should be a lot more newsworthy in the big scheme of things in what purports to be a quality Sunday newspaper?

What's that even supposed to mean? My guess would be that Franco Begbie rather than William Ulsterman is the stereotype that I am supposed to fit for this guy, but who knows? Maybe some day people in Scotland will be able to move beyond all the backward tribalism and adopt a Jon Stewart mentality:

Latest Scotland subpoll numbers for a repeat Westminster election over the last week or so: ICM Lab 30 SNP 27 Con 17 LD 4 DK/refuse 16 Survation SNP 32.5 Lab 25.3 Con 22.0 LD 12.5 Opinium SNP 35 Con 31 Lab 29 LD 1 YouGov SNP 36 Lab 31 Con 25 LD 5 Combined you get a pretty decent sample size. Looks like the SNP would probably lose a few more to Labour but might gain a few back from the Tories. Not long to wait now until the negative impacts of Brexit become much more obvious to people and it will be interesting to see what unfolds after that.

Bizarre that people are still responding as if I am defending something, but par for the course on here.

...link a patriotic pro-British organization that backed the No side in the Referendum to Nazism on a tenuous basis despite Britain (with apologies to the Czechs) being the Nazis fiercest enemy all the way through from 1939 to 1945. Same old same old. The Orange Order merits criticism over many things such as chronically bad dress sense and taste in music and still banging on about differing brands of sky fairy worship well over 100 years on from the voyage of the Beagle and the works of Nietzsche, but splashing this all over the front page of a newspaper was all about generating an eye-catching headline to temporarily boost an ever sinking circulation in a "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" sort of way rather than serious journalism.

Orthodox brothers angle I suspect and beyond that it's basically a mafia state that the West tolerates as part of its club to weaken Serbia. Ditto Kosovo on the latter bit but it's mainly Muslim and has no beach, so the dodgier portion of Russia's population isn't quite so keen on it as a holiday destination. Suspect it will take a while for them, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia to get into the EU, because there's just too much negative baggage and the Germans don't see them as part of their back yard to anything like the same extent as Croatia and Slovenia as they weren't part of Austria-Hungary either at all or for anything like as long.