Thumper

Aye, mostly whining that the let the pooves marry each other of late.

Three reich-wing nutters, one principle-free centrist, and an independent journo. More balanced than usual, then.

Hahahahahaha. The Liberals have plenty of stealth backers, being a fundamentally elitist party, and the Blair PLP would ally with Donald Trump tomorrow if it gave them a shot at Parliament. You know this alreadyl, and support them regardless.

It would be hilarious that Kincardine's alias were honestly arguing that mixed marriages are no longer controversial in Scotland if not for the evidence, which is that they're still verboten amongst Sevco season ticket holders and responsible for more than a few pennies out of the pocket of every Scottish resident when it comes to the police and NHS budget. As it is it's rather horrifying, in fact, that someone would earnestly argue the contrary when it directly results in women getting beaten.

Nobody wants the law only applied to a select group of people. It is, however, the case that fewer Dumbarton and Stirling Albion fans can be found singing The Billy Boys on an average Saturday afternoon than fans of certain other teams.

Excellent use of examples. The United States and Saudi Arabia being two countries known around the world for their awesome tolerance of speech the state doesn't like, particularly of the sort that might occasionally see some less enlightened countries indulge in a bit of extrajudicial killing. But yeah, a law that stops people from singing The Billy Boys. Definitely one hop away from being North Korea now.

Hard cases make bad law. Stuart Campbell has for once picked a reasonable hill to die on with this one. For all the multi-party anecdotes that are recited, or indeed made up, about the ills of this law, we're still waiting on a single case where anyone has plainly been unjustly convicted for a nonsense reason. I'm not especially keen on the SNP's general level of authoritarianism. But a law being sloppily constructed such that Pinochet's Chile would use it to disappear anyone the state disagreed with is quite different from it existing in a small, liberal democracy, especially one with an almost unprecedentedly hostile free national media. I rather thought that the PnB consensus that yoons should all be put in concentration camps had already made this clear, champ.

If this were anything other than a law which targetted Old Firm fans singing about Northern Ireland, nobody would be mental enough to invent some of the shit that gets contrived to strike it down around here. Scotland fans who live in Aldershot getting hit by dawn raids for slagging off Jimmy Hill.

Voltaire, and that's apocryphal. For the record, Voltaire was a champion of fighting against the repression of the Protestant faith. Unlike Sevcos and their Section B vassals, whose primary reason for existence is to sing songs about killing ******s.

Not authoritarian: invading a country, occupying it, converting its inhabitants to another religion, and singing about it for 330 years Authoritarian: suggesting that acts which are already counted as hate crimes when not partaken in a football stadium are criminal acts when partaken in a football stadium.

Well, quite. The SWP is just Sheridan writ large without the sex appeal. Game of Thrones has nothing on British socialism. Except perhaps dragons.

Because Sheridan has irreparably damaged the name of the SSP. It's honestly conceivable that Sherdian was an invention of the Murdock empire. That's how catastrophically he's fucked grassroots socialism in Scotland.

Much like how every conversation with a Celtic fan about the naughty songs act starts with them saying "this has nothing to do with Bobby Sands" and goes within five minutes to "what's wrong with singing about Bobby Sands anyway", Ad Lib is now arguing against the existence of any hate crime legislation in principle. The free market will definitely solve that in a sane time frame, of course.

I genuinely had no idea that Progress was an SNP front. What a marvellously Machiavellian scheme that's turned out to be.

I honestly don't think it'll get repealed. It doesn't make any sort of electoral sense to repeal a popular piece of legislation: nor does it help the Greens at all to support repeal based on the merits of said legislation when the people proposing it are doing it for no reason other than craven political calculation. If said legislation could be altered so as only to criminalise misspelled political banners at games, though, this would still directly target the Green Brigade while leaving the theoretical Motherwell and Partick fans Cat Boyd always invoked instead of her own lot. I'd support that.

Picking a JPEG with too high a compression ratio as your source material, so that one's shit Photoshopping effort would have been immediately obvious even if the Ls were properly aligned with the rest of the text. Do I win?

Twitter *is* the Internet for a great many things these days. I meet people who don't use it and they sound like the wee grannies in whatever village it was in Wales that didn't get electricity until 1962, saying they didn't really see what they'd use it for. McGarry's in the pretty awful position that as an elected official, in favour of Scottish independence, who is a woman, she's under a ridiculous amount of scrutiny from people who hate her and want her to suffer.

Why? He's a Tory, he doesn't have any feelings to hurt.

They spent the entire campaign briefing against the leadership and trying to neuter Goldsmith's flagrantly racist campaign by insinuating that their own candidate's was anti-Semitic by association. Literally. John Mann would have been vastly, vastly happier if Goldsmith had won.

Which was utterly opposed by the PLP, who literally supported Goldsmith.

Unlike Totally Electable Ed Miliband and his excellent council gains, which propelled him to easy victory in the heads of the pundit class and no-mark political wannabes alike.

Not in theory, but certainly in practice.

Solidarity's base consists of people who bought into the Cult of Sheridan more than a decade ago. Any actual policies are irrelevant. George Galloway got over 100k votes for London mayor, as an aside. I'm a bit puzzled by RISE's numbers really - if I were still eligible they'd have gotten my second vote, because I wanted to see Colin Fox back in parliament. I suppose it should be marked as a success of the "both votes SNP" camp that nearly every self-identifying lefty in the country ended up throwing their second votes onto the pile. There's also the rather silly decision to repeat their vow to repeal the naughty songs act the day before the election, especially seeing as it was worded like the usual Green Brigade press releases.

As I recall, Hitler had the decency to do the right thing when he was beat.