Thumper

this is absolutely horrifying, not gonna lie

He's unlikely to have his head turned by the end of the week, which basically just means keeping him happy until January and hoping nobody puts in a seven-figure bid for him then. I very much doubt he's going to fall out with the club over the space of one season when literally everyone knows he'll be moving on to bigger things this time next year. I don't know if you've ever had a decapitated bird fall out of the sky and land at your feet, but it is quite unsettling.

To tell the truth I thought McCall's repeated demands for a substantial increase in season ticket sales were pointless, but if you play football like that every week (and Ayr are doing so) then it might just work. Seriously, it feels like McCall is playing from an old saved game after reading all the strategy guides at the moment. Keep the team together, focus on bringing through your youth, and attack like your life depended on it. A hell of a redemption story even if he's not quite Ranieri yet.

Coming away from that game thinking "Michael Moffat did not warrant his place" is some truly next level shit.

By basically any metric except current form and the intangible feeling of greatness coming together, it is. Still, great draw for Ayr too. Wish there was more notice for this so I could get over, fucking love a day in Dundee.

Significant difference between Chick Young doing this after a fairly lucky win against ICT during the Reid years, and Dodds doing it after absolutely bossing a group containing two league rivals. (that said, I've no hopes of anything except a struggle as usual, especially after Shankland leaves for Liverpool in January.) Coming back from a goal down against higher league opposition, and then going through, under the floodlights? My cousin says that was literally the best night of his life up until that point.

Like, I don't mean to be wide or anything, but did you miss that the second-last game of the World Cup was playing at the same time? Which was a little better publicised than the start of the League Cup. Perfectly understandable that only the core support (plus ten percent!) had both heard of it and was willing to pay for the privilege instead of going to the pub and hoping to see some crowd-shots of crying skinheads.

Seven hour train journey aside*, there are worse times that one could be visiting Inverness than when the weather's like this. * Assuming EasyJet don't see the obvious potential for a regular return service from Prestwick now that the box office days have returned

Yeah, it was a bit of a shame the way he put it. "Jordan made a few mistakes so was out of the team for a bit, then he came back in and did a good job for us. Anyway, we need a keeper." If there's one thing that nobody can deny about McCall he's been extraordinary candid about basically everything in his time at the club. Very, very few other managers are as open as he's been. I suppose the conjecture that he's nothing left to lose if things go badly here holds water, though it still takes a lot of guts to be as honest as he's been.

It's fortunate that he's so humble and open to criticism, then. Rest assured if things go south he won't long overstay his welcome and try to drag the entire enterprise down with him.

Aye, it worked so well that the BBC went on to try the same trick with his successor for a good four years or so, in the process managing to completely mainstream the majority of the fascist platform.

That's not really surprising when the PLP is so overwhelmingly Red Tory than even his inner circle contains the likes of Tom Watson.

And in the context of a Twitter argument, what legal standing does an (implied!) admission of wrongdoing relate to? This isn't even relating to an out-of-court settlement. It's related to someone apologising for something on the Internet and offering a token to charity. And yet you've continually implied that this is, in concrete legal terms, weightier than the Carmichael example whereby he escaped a literal criminal conviction only on a purely philosophical basis.

"Wrongdoing" being a crime here, due to the Wrongdoing Act 1972. Meanwhile, lying is perfectly okay, because it is not a crime, but merely the, erm, doing of a wrong thing which is not illegal in any way.

So informal resolution of a legal case which was merely implied by a Twitter threat is in fact more binding than findings of fact in a court. Gotcha.

And what judge presided over Rowling vs McGarry, again?

I love the way that tweeting "I was wrong" constitutes "proof" to this particular scholar of law, but of course a literal judge literally stating something for the record in a literal court case does not.

I do wonder why Ad Lib is so anti-Natalie when she's literally married to a Tory, the dream of any Liberal Democrat.

Are you not supposedly defending the idea that BotP is sufficient here? It was BotP he was convicted of!

This is bound to be successful when the most rich and powerful football club in the country literally trades on alleged inconsistencies in the handling of the law, and their new partner literally controls the second most popular newspaper in the country's front page.

And its minimum penalty? BoTP in Scots law is catch-all, prosecuted on a literally daily basis. This is handy for a number of reasons, but it means an enormous burden is placed on every component of the legal process to evaluate it. In theory this is perfect, because humans are perfectly rational and infallible actors. In practice it means there's no way it can be used to enforce any sort of widescale social change. This is exactly why conferences etc are finding that a code of conduct which just says "don't be dicks to one another" doesn't work. If you don't enumerate unacceptable behaviours then you're never going to be able to steer the social conscience into avoiding them. I was and I wasn't. It is literally fungible in that it's infamously used as a substitute prosecution: if the polis want to nick someone for something, BoTP is always there. But I also meant it in the sense that it's ridiculously elastic in terms of its own scope, for the same reason.

Yes, let's magically make one of Scots law's most infamously fungible crimes perfectly applied to the population, especially in football stadia where polis are outnumbered a hundred to one. This is plainly a practical approach.

This may not be something a random kid in the street would say, but there is absolutely still a core of the support (particularly the away support) that still speaks in starkly religious terms as if it was 1632. Which of course is precisely the part of the support that this legislation is intended to, if not destroy, then at least contain and ostracise. The average age of an Orangeman may be increasing by one every year, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Catholics can apply for jobs in Glasgow without significant fear of reprisal. So yes, sectarianism in Scotland is not the same animal it was sixty years ago. Anyone claiming that sectarianism was therefore no longer a thing is roughly as mental as someone claiming that malaria is no longer a thing.

Did they abolish literal fucking segregation of schooling while I wasn't looking?