LongTimeLurker

Get a grip. It's equivalent to US troops celebrating the 4th of July or French troops celebrating the storming of the Bastille. Much of the UK's constitution rightly or wrongly revolves around the Glorious Revolution.

Think my grandfather's brother might have because I can remember hearing a story about how he was a scout for "The Rangers" (as my grandfather always used to say long before Sevco Scotland arrived on the scene) in West Lothian at one point, so I suspect he would probably have played the game to a decent standard at some level before his recommendations would be taken seriously. He died quite young in a tragic way, so not a lot was ever said about him when I was a kid. Searching records to find out what that was all about (if anything) would probably be a major undertaking though given he had a surname that was extremely common in the Bo'ness area at the time and all of the generation that would remember are dead now. Have found the hard way that detailed genealogical research on Bo'ness mining families is not for the faint hearted.

The average IQ level in Bo'ness was found to be 10 points higher than in Linlithgow due to the invigorating effects of sea breezes.

Sometimes on youtube the sound gets out of synch with the video stream so not sure that's really dubbed, although it definitely looks a bit weird. Here's a good conspiracy video that is more difficult to dismiss than the Titanic one, in my opinion, because a lot of the information on Iran-Contra is very much in the public domain even if the full implications of the disclosures made about Oliver North's escapades at the time were never spelled out by the media: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgIAFMaEfhU

During the Troubles the media, police and army often needed to know when they were receiving a genuine communique from the paramilitaries rather than a crank call from some wee ned/spide, so they were told code words to look out for so they could tell what was genuine. If those were received it was taken seriously, if not it tended to be ignored. Reading the media reports on this there don't appear to have been any recognised code words in the messages to the media.

...or a 12 foot tall shape shifting lizard. I think what kickstarted the recent craze in conspiracy videos was the escapades of Alex Jones and Jon Ronson at Bohemian Grove. Alex Jones is bat shit crazy but there is no denying that he was able to film a weird ceremony involving the American elite and a 40 foot giant stone owl that may or may not be called Moloch. The Alex Jones version of what happened: and the more balanced and rational Jon Ronson version of events: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDVbyRJmvds Beyond that the niche channels on US cable television that used to produce interesting documentaries have degenerated into doing whatever it takes to gain ratings. Hence load of series about aliens, UFOs and hunts for monsters that always lead to SFA ever showing up on the trail cams and the use of the Bible as a historical source and lots of hints of intelligent design being involved in evolution to keep Cletus and Jethro out in the flyover states happy.

The Serbo-Croat for "Hello I'm pleased to meet you" is "Idi u tri picke materine". Eldorado wine was only ever sold in Scottish council schemes and South African townships. Ian Paisley actually did help to save Ulster from sodomy. Studies show that Ballymena in NI has the lowest percentage of the population participating in anal sex in Europe and the lowest number of pet gerbils for any comparable sized town in the United Kingdom. Dundonians only pronounce the word "pie" as "peeeeeeh" as a pisstake to confuse gullible visitors from other parts of Scotland. The Hillman Imp was the most popular imported car in Albania.

If you make it all the way through to the end of the second clip with the BBC documentary I posted you'll find there is reasonably strong evidence available that it was the Titanic rather than the Olympic that sank based on some of the finer details of what has been observed when submersibles have visited the wreck. The bit at the end of the first clip with the "M P" beneath the nameplate letters looked faked to me.

Here's the hardcore conspiracy theory narrative on the Titanic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UWwdkH8UJU and the more balanced BBC look at it that was mentioned above by Kilbowie's Finest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdxJp2fVXJ8

The advantage claimed was that they couldn't get an insurance payout on the Olympic because the Admiralty refused to blame the navy for the collision, but could by effectively scuttling it during the Titanic's maiden voyage.

The boats were claimed to have been swapped at Harland and Wolff. The Olympic was in for repairs after colliding with a navy warship and the finishing touches were being done to the Titanic.

An interesting one I watched on youtube recently was that it wasn't the Titanic that sank but its sister ship the Olympic as part of an insurance scam. Probably bollocks but enough to it to be thought provoking.

No question it was a superb documentary. After watching it I did some googling to find out what the reaction was in Croatia to it and some people including former teammates of Divac and Petrovic were very skeptical about Divac's sincerity but Petrovic's family, including the older brother who was also a famous basketball player and their teammate on the Yugoslav national team, were strongly supportive of him and the accuracy of the documentary.

Definitely a very good documentary but I knew just enough about the former Yugoslavia to notice they left out a very important detail. Petrovic is a very Serbian sounding name and when I googled to check it turned out the ardent Croatian nationalst guy actually had a Serbian father. That left me wondering what more had been left out to simplify the story for an ESPN audience. Have to echo what somebody said about Adam Curtis documentaries always being worth a look. His latest All watched over by machines of loving grace really helps the viewer to understand what led to the credit crunch.

Not in my experience. People should be judged as individuals, in my opinion, and stereotyping is something that is best avoided.

The dictionary definition of bigotry revolves around holding a particular viewpoint to an unreasonable extent, which is something that people from a wide variety of different backgrounds can be prone to, while others from the same backgrounds are more easy going and flexible. In Scotland bigotry tends to be understood a wee bit differently as being a kind of tribal attribute characteristic of certain groups of people, who don't conform to the prevailing consensus on certain social issues which are often arrived at on the basis of what's best for the powers that be in political terms. In Scotland that was usually the Labour party in recent decades, who badly needed the working class RC vote and made certain modifications to normal socialist principles to curry favour with what would normally be their natural ideological enemies within the RC hierarchy, as a result. The Tories were also happy to go along with this because they saw the RC church as a bulwark against schemie Bolsheviks like Tommy Sheridan and generally liked keeping the plebs socially divided. That made the LOL public enemy number one when they pointed out certain awkward truths on issues like education such as sending children to the same schools saves a lot of money and reduces the level of division. End result is it's socially acceptable to go after Orangemen by spewing all kinds of bile and peddling very crude stereotypes to an extent that arguably fits the dictionary definition of bigotry, when in reality the LOL are by no means the only ones who are complicit in keeping the divide going from generation to generation.

Who the hypocrictical bigots are is all in the eye of the beholder.

We of course are not going to be hearing anything about a 700 year old battle next summer in the run up to the referendum, because that would be backward and bigoted after all. Another thing to bear in mind maybe is that Scotland had much the same conflicts going on internally that the island of Ireland did in the late 17th century and there were battles like Killiecrankie and Dunkeld that happened in Scotland at around the same time as the Boyne. The main difference was that the pro-Glorious Revolution forces didn't need any outside help from William of Orange to come out on top in a Scottish context. The traditions of the Covenanters who won that conflict have been suppressed to a large extent by the powers that be and were largely replaced by all the kilts and bagpipes kitsch and Highland landscape fetishism of the likes of Sir Walter Scott as the underpinning of Scottish identity during the Victorian era to the extent that people have even started to believe that Culloden was a Scotland vs England thing. One of the reasons a lot of people find modern Scottish nationalism difficult to take seriously is the way that it often all seems to revolve around a false cultural identity of pseudo-Jacobitism that was cynically promoted by Victorian era Tories to make Scotland fit in better with the imperial project of the 19th century. Hence why the vulgar and cringeworthy displays of the Tartan Army are a Scottishness that many people find it very difficult to identify with.

This Daily Telegraph article provides context on what was being referred to: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3610190/So-now-another-estate-has-been-cleansed-of-Protestants.html

I'm guessing you are too young to remember William Wolfe.

In your own little world maybe along with the notion that it is the big clubs in the SJFA that insist on a national all in draw etc etc. The point you were making about the DUP breaking the UUP-LOL link was pretty much on the money, in my opinion,all I was pointing out was that you were pushing things a bit too far on the proles being too thick to see how there was an element of manipulation to it all angle. What you wrote also only really fitted the larger urban areas. There is also the rural and often bible belt type areas to consider as well.

Bet you googled furiously to come up with that reply. You peddled a bit of a stereotype, while reality was more complex, was the point I was making.

Up until the 1960s the Northern Ireland Labour Party often used to be able to beat the UUP in Stormont elections in working class Protestant parts of Belfast, so the "lower orders" didn't always meekly follow the script.

There are also no water cannons needed for the vast majority of Orange walks that are held. If the LOL had intelligent leadership on this, they would parade somewhere non-contentious to protest what's going on as a way to steer people away from rioting.