LongTimeLurker

Halkirk got cover and lights and were talking about potentially stepping up to the HL at one point but ultimately nothing happened on that.

The phrasing I used was "oblivious to the way that". That has a different meaning from ill-informed.

Completely airbrushing the island of Ireland out of things like that is pretty much what recent posts were commenting about. Modern British identity wasn't capacious enough to be warmly embraced Mo Farrah style in Crossmaglen because so much of it is still tied into what happened in the 17th century. Modern Irish identity has similar issues in gaining full acceptance as well. You can't just ignore that in any honest appraisal of the present day.

Did somebody not post recently that there is planning permission instead for housing where the stand is/was supposed to go?

Probably what should happen but licensed clubs like Wigtown would probably want to stay in the SoS and would be at risk of losing their Scottish Cup entry if they stepped outside the pyramid in progression terms. Think it's something we are just going to have to learn to live with. The three way playoff into the LL could easily be adjusted so that two out of three get promoted. Not ideal but at least 9 times out of 10 that would almost certainly be the EoS and WoS champion.

All they had to do was raise the seating a bit and arrange the rows at a steeper angle to have reasonable sight lines for both. Looks like Edinburgh City were supposed to take the hint that they weren't wanted there.

Doubt it. Looking increasingly likely that it may even have been speading in the UK before it was ever in South Africa: South Africa is well past its Delta variant wave so a new variant emerging with slow exponential growth is much easier to detect there than it would be in most other countries right now.

There was a Blantyre team that was planning to play at the Jock Stein Centre in Hamilton and was supposed to have been delayed by a year but South Lanarkshire Council appears to have decided not to sell the facility to them: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/in-your-area/lanarkshire/council-refuse-application-sell-jock-25519921

...which of course leads into the whole question of whether the CIA only organises coups outside the United States. I understand the Oliver Stone sort of narrative on this. All I am getting at is that JFK had been gung ho about supporting South Vietnam militarily prior to that as he had long been one of Diem's strongest supporters in an American context. Diem was part of the Roman Catholic minority who had collaborated with the French and by 1963 his regime had become problematic for those pursuing a Cold War related intervention based on the Domino Theory because it was actively anti-Buddhist and Buddhists were the majority in South Vietnam.

Think you should read up on JFK's links to the Diem regime.

Probably also oblivious to the way that still having an Anglican monarchy due to how a series of 17th century civil wars ended rather than a modern republic with roots in the 18th century enlightenment made it impossible for an inclusive unitary modern British national identity to emerge because Anglicans were rather thin on the ground outside England & Wales. Would have been better if the UK had secularised and rebranded in the early 1800s before competing modern national ideas took root but the establishment were able to keep a lid on protests by the proles and keep archaic institutions like the monarchy and House of Lords in place into the times we currently live in.

Would be hilarious to watch unfold but think they would understand that their presence would be about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit because of the number of midweek games a league like the Midlands League typically wants to do when the daylight hours permit. The NCL's format is better for clubs in remote locations.

That's only possible if there's a rule change on how many clubs can go down each season but agree there is going to be a lot of turnover on this especially if the top WoS premier clubs fully commit to the concept of moving up into the national divisions as appears to be happening. Clubs like Talbot, Darvel, Irvine Meadow, Kilwinning Rangers and in the not too distant future Pollok putting floodlights up was the litmus test on that. The league structure of Scottish football has always been distorted by having strong local regional leagues that had clubs that drew bigger crowds and had higher quality teams than a significant portion of the part-time clubs in the national divisions. Next season there will be several more top WoS clubs in the Scottish Cup to provide a reality check on that if all goes well with the club licensing process over the next couple of months.

Somebody remind me why we were supposed to be confident again. Guess there's still time to turn it around.

Accies have usually been well run for most of that time with obvious exceptions. Jan Stepek was the Ronnie MacDonald figure in earlier times. If a club like Airdrie are now a League One fixture can Accies expect to be more than that if badly run? All depends who has control of the club in the years ahead.

Yoker have to fancy their chances of a semi-final now:

The SFL operated as a cartel so don't see how that first bit can be justified. Don't think the second bit is true. There has always been significant overlap in quality at the top end of the juniors and the lower end of the national divisions that has meant that the overall standard of the elite part-time professional level has not been what it could have been. If a club like Auchinleck Talbot play their way into League Two by the end of next season they will probably have a significant number of players on board that would have opted for the west superleague five years ago.