flyingrodent

Just to be clear, here - are you saying that it's the government's fault that your club ripped off its creditors?

Yes, you do get plenty of that stuff, and good - it's a football board, not parliament. It's pretty telling that your response to accusations of deflection and question-dodging is... to point out that other people are pure daein' it as well and they other ones are worse. Again.

Oh, come on Benny - if the last few pages show anything, it's that trying to have any kind of reasoned debate with you and your fellow RFC supporters is utterly pointless, because it's the last thing you want. Every time some new facet of this ongoing saga crops up, you lot are only interested in rubbishing it, no matter how credible the source or whether it turns out to be true. We've got about five pages of exactly that, just from last night, and that's without addressing the serial whataboutery. P&B may not be a posh debating society, but you've got a clacking set of brass balls to accuse anyone else of dodging debate. You and your pals here have done nothing but dodge, deflect and divert for months, shamelessly so.

Geezer has a point. (Slinks off)

This is an open forum - you're free to say whatever you like. Go tell it on the mountain, brother - testify! Of course, if you'd prefer to pretend that your speech is being constrained in some way, feel free to keep pretending. I'm laughing at your ridiculous and totally unwarranted victim complex, but maybe somebody, somewhere, will buy it. Oh no! Maybe my "openly mocking your idiotic paranoia" stance is some kind of devious plastic strategm designed to prevent your voice being heard! I never even considered that. Sorry Bendarroch, I never intended to throttle your opinions with my magical Timmy-beams. Please, continue.

Three-way shoot-out in the civil war graveyard, FFS. After all the hanging escapes!

This thread and recent posts have had nothing to do with poppies, remembrance, war or anything relating to those topics. You deliberately raised them so that you could dodge inconvenient questions, because you're a bit of a topic-avoiding, deflecting dick, so you can't really complain when your diversion blows up in your face like an exploding shite-in-a-box.

Oh, come on. TGTB&TU and Unforgiven, head and shoulders above the rest, even above Josey Wales. What are you Buns on about, saying otherwise?

Not getting what you mean, but it's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and Unforgiven for me, every time. I have a soft spot for High Plains Drifter too.

And yes, I'm aware that I just said "I don't want to deploy emotional blackmail, but I am actually deploying emotional blackmail". Sorry, but I couldn't think of any other way to put it.

Apologies, Bendarroch. Earlier on, I called you an almighty fud. Having seen your follow-up, I can see that such a tame insult could never do you justice. I really don't want to get into this bullshit poppy debate, and I really resent the Green Brigade for their stupidity and ignorance in bringing this on-topic for anything even tangentially related to Celtic. But whatever we think about poppies and remembrance - unifying national ceremony, monument to senseless slaughter, imperialist whatever in the exploitation of so on and so forth, act of reverence for the sacrifice of our forebears... We can surely agree on this single, straightforward point. The poppy shouldn't represent an opportunity for some thick c*nt to dodge inconvenient points put to him on a website. I'm trying not to deploy emotional blackmail here, but surely no decent person who understood what the armistice meant at the time would try to pull this kind of stunt.

Well, bang goes that attempt at "reasoned debate" and mutual understanding. Back to the Pleasing! Gifs it is. As you were, people.

Just thought I'd give it a bash, since my usual skills are less "reasoned debate" than "nuking people with smartarsed insults for logical inconsistencies" - bored and waiting for The Thick of It to come on, really.

I hide behind a blog name myself though, purely because I've got an unusual surname and I'd rather my boss couldn't find me cursing a blue streak on the Internet. I don't see why it's a big issue whether I use my real name or a made up one, so long as I don't go inventing multiple personalities. And I haven't seen any major gotchas on any of the main bloggers - Say, RTC, PM or Phil -that suggest we should discount their analysis. It's all been trifling pish of the type that goes down well at Rangers Media, but nothing that impressed me. I mean, most of these guys are Celtic fans and are loving your situation, but I can't see how that means they're automatically wrong and suspect in pretty much everything they say.

Well, it is probably the worst scandal in Scottish sporting history and he is a corporate lawyer, with expertise that far exceeds that of the mainstream press. But who knows why he's so interested in this case? I don't. I'm just judging him by how his previous pronouncements have panned out, which is all I can do without knowing the man personally or professionally. Let's say he has some personal interest in the matter, for the sake of argument. Has it made him any less correct so far?

Oh, right. I just assumed you thought he was talking shite because you responded to his point by ignoring it and repeatedly bringing up the guy's dodgy past. For the record then - PM could be the biggest conman an ripoff merchant in Scotland, for all I know. He might be cruel to animals and chew with his mouth open but really, I don't much care. I don't want him to marry my sister - I'm just interested in hearing his opinion on the matter under discussion, since he seems to understand it better than I do an he's been fairly reliable on the topic in the past.

I don't know, but I doubt it. If he had, would his opinion on the tax case suddenly become 100% reliable? And seriously - and I'm not asking this just to have a go at you... How come, every time some hack or blogger or lawyer with a proven record of accuracy on the Rangers case makes a point, you guys find some personal excuse to dismiss it? I mean, surely after the administration debacle, you must have noticed that everything panned out pretty much the way that these guys predicted it would? So, since this is your club, why not consider what they have to say? They're clearly pretty reliable, and more so than most of the established media. Why go looking for excuses to ignore them, given what happened last time?

I doubt it. Has he been proven wrong or even mildly misleading on the Rangers tax case? Because you know, one of our questions is very, very relevant to the issue at hand and the other isn't.

Wait, I'm sure somebody said something about how shooting the messenger is daft, just now. Just a few posts back, wasn't it?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the prosecution contends that the defendant Bendarroch is an almighty fud. To support this charge, we now present Exhibit A... The prosecution rests its case.

Very good points and well-made.

A thing is either good or bad in its own right, and entirely external factors don't affect that assessment at all. The existence of the Moors Murderers doesn't make burglary okay, and complaining that Mr Hoopy has just farted won't cut much ice with other people sharing a lift with you, if you're currently curling out a big jobby in the corner. Thus, "Whataboutery" - a phrase coined to reject utterly invalid and illogical responses, regularly employed by people who are more interested in working out what is and isn't true, against people who couldn't care less one way or the other. PS: Bunch of fuds, said so at the time and will do whenever the topic comes up; plus, as pointed out, totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand. PPS: Excellent result for Killie, very well done to them too. Sounds like they thoroughly deserved it, and I'll worry about it if we start bleeding points to everyone, and not before.

You seem to be a) Entirely ignorant of what goes on at Parkhead; b) Entirely of ignorant of what goes on in Ireland; c) Convinced that saying "Whatabout they ones, eh? EH?" is a valid and effective argument and d) Completely mental. List not necessarily in order of severity.

This kind of drivel is exactly what I'm talking about when I say Rangers supporters have been quite happy to sit back either greeting or laughing while this supposed "small minority" beshits the reputation of your club. Lazio of the north, the famous Glasgow Rangers - No-one likes them, and understandably so.

Oh, aye. We've got a QC describing how the police had to keep him under protective surveillance; other football clubs reporting serious threats and intimidation and the NUJ saying Rangers have an exceptional problem with threats and thuggery. They're reporting personal threats against journalists all over Scotland, including publication of what schools their kids go to and what pubs they drink in. We've got serious assaults on rival football teams' personnel; bombs and bullets being posted to players, managers, politicians and lawyers... ...But none of that matters, because Alex Thomson reported it. Credit to BearWithMe for calling for arrests - I hope we'd all do that, if our club had similar problems with hate-filled thugs... ...But this "It's Thomson, so it must be lies haha smileyface WATP" response is part of the reason why this shite is happening - because to many, many Rangers supporters, all bad news is a conspiracy, or anti-whatever propaganda that has to be resisted by... Something. That NUJ boy is right - small minority or not, RFC has a serious problem with fans terrorising people they don't like, and this hand-waving, whatabouting, they're all liars out to get us attitude is what's allowing it to thrive. Rangers fans - did nothing or actively helped when their club was being destroyed; doing nothing or actively enabling the vermin in your support while they drag your club's already beshitted reputation into Lazio territory. It's not for me to tell you to man up and take control of your own destiny - do it or don't, it's your club that looks like a criminal enterprise supported by violent animals. But it's a bit ducking rich to sit back and allow this to happen, then complain about the consequences.