velo army

But I'm a Catholic. Also, the first time I ever heard that term my mate got called it and we both pissed ourselves laughing. It's funny. In fact it became a running joke with us for years. My da' has a set of rosaries in every one of his 7 (seven) jackets, so it's fucking apt. Another thing. My pal and I had never been called anti-irish Catholic stuff before. Why? He is a Motherwell fan and I am a jags fan. You're right about sectarianism in that it isn't the right word to use. It's nowt to do with religion. Catholics and proddies tend to live and let live and are mostly baffled by "Scotland's shame". It's kept alive by Rangers and Celtic.

As a church going sonny jim myself (these days mainly to sing hymns and see my pals) any anti-catholicism I've seen and experienced is mainly based on anachronistic beliefs and their impact on homosexuals and women (as well as shaming sexuality as a whole), so it has a basis in things people can choose to have or not. It's also reasonably fair. Unlike others some of my objections to Sellick fans are to do with Catholicism. Most Celtic fans I know and have witnessed haven't set foot in chapel and wouldn't know their way around a set of rosaries, yet are more than happy to identify as such so that they can inject that sweet sweet heroin of persecution and victimhood. There are also Catholics who can't see that being called out for having discriminatory beliefs is not the same as persecution Clown Job may fit into one or both categories. Performative bead rattler would be my guess though.

I thought it was against Aberdeen at home. If it wasn't his debut it was the game where he first came to prominence. We pumped Aberdeen at home and Strachan was full of gallus flicks and tricks. He ripped them apart, frankly. He had gotten his life in order in the last few years. He played for EK and was coaching youths, passing on the benefits of his experiences. This is sad, sad news.

Three or four pages of this shite. Give it a bye lads eh.

That was absolutely magnificent.

The Venezia top is an absolute stunner. Full kit and a lovely pair of Pantofolo d'oro fitba bits to finish off the look. Perfetto.

Have a look at the anthropology of gender, it's pretty enlightening and, I think , liberating. Rather than think of it in terms of facts and opinions I view it as an ongoing enquiry, but one that ought to be done in good faith and with compassion. Gender is constructed and expressed differently across cultures and is based on what that culture deems to be either masculine or feminine. Those masculine and feminine traits are often ideas projected onto perceived physical differences. Gender changes over time, but sex does not. What it means to be a man in our society has undergone constant revision, often due to social changes and larger psychosocial healing. An example being that men are now allowed to be nurturing and emotionally expressive. It's more rewarded now. The gender role of men is changing. Changes in the gender paradigm have also given women permission to be leaders, to be rational decision makers and are trusted with such responsibility as they are no longer deemed mentally fragile due to being overly emotional as, broadly speaking, their ascribed gender role would have it. These are very broad brush examples, and the veracity of them from person to person isn't relevant. What is relevant is that we have myriad examples that this thing we call gender seems to be more malleable than had previously been thought of. Gender roles were thought to be biologically determined, but under dedicated scrutiny they have been shown to be determined by social psychology. Sex differences remain largely constant, but even then we have the likes of Caster Semanya, who seems to defy the binary paradigm of the sexes. If one of the goals of a civilised society is to make everyone feel welcome and included (and I think it should be) then it perhaps behoves us to call into question paradigms and structures (strictures too) that create so many outliers as they obviously no longer fit.

The post I quoted had in turn quoted a post of mine back in February, when I certainly had the same username. The post I just quoted I hadn't spotted before, I don't know why, but the Anders Breivik reference irked me because of what I felt you were implying. It was a weird thing to bring up tbh and seemed unneccessarily argumentative.

JRR Tolkien wanted to write a mythology for England as Christianity had pretty much succeeded in eliminating it. He based it on Norse Mythology. He didn't base it on Norse history. The fact that there were black Vikings is very cool. I'd watch the hell out of that series. That's history though. Not mythology. I hope that you take a breath, read my post again and understand why I brought up the link with Norse mythology. It's because this is a thread about Tolkien and his world being recreated for television. Bringing up Anders Breivik in this context is passive aggressive and cowardly. E.T.A literally nobody is talking about banning black actors. That's a silly and obtuse way to frame this.

That Celtic top is excellent. They're really going for the early 90's nostalgia pound this year.

The Holland game has obviously been mentioned, but I remember, for some reason, the new year OF game in 1998 that Celtic won 2-0 (both unstoppable goals) and he was unbelievable. Brattbakk gained a reputation as a bit of a dud at Celtic (very unfairly imo) but against another keeper he'd have had a hattrick in that game and his Celtic career would have been very different. It might be against the grain to say this just now, but I felt that Goram was one of those players who was profoundly gifted but wasted it by not looking after himself. He was tremendous for Rangers, and he won loads of trophies, but he should have had 100 caps, and played at a higher level than the Scottish Premier Division. The man had supernatural ability to stop shots. It's awful news.

Hate to bring the mood down further, but one of the consequences of school massacres that isn't covered much is the cost of medical care that bairns who died (but didn't make it) received. Parents who are having to deal with the sudden bereavement now having to sell their house due to the 200k or so major surgery sets you back there. A few bankruptcies came as a result of that too. So aye, I'm super grateful for where I live.

I was £200 for treatment for fire ant bites (an injection of something and a smashing chat with the Polish doctor about Scotland's upcoming clashes with his homeland) plus about a tenner for a cream at the pharmacy (there were tablets too, but they gave you the runs and I didn't need to be running into Florida's long grass every half hour......I was on a bicycle tour, I should add). It was a pain in the bahook filling out the forms too. I'd have thought your Mrs' travel insurance would have covered it as it was an emergency. What's even scarier is the hospitals/insurance companies who charge for stuff, but then when you query it they quote you a different, much lower price. Dreadful.

I agree, and I don't particularly think it's healthy to have heroes without the reminder that they, too, were human beings with flaws. The thing is, and I'm not saying you're doing this, I guess I'm projecting a lot of other conversations and writing I've seen onto your posts, but what I've seen a lot is actually a magnification of these flaws that are then used as evidence to discount the greatness the person in question brought to the world. As I said, Burns is revered as a poet. I haven't seen much of people elevating him as a man whose life is an example we all follow. He is revered because he was a poet who wrote about things which touched people of all classes. Shakespeare was the same. My main disagreement with you here is that the "negatives" you point out are evidence against an argument nobody is making. I'll also own that I get pissed off at what I see is prurient censoriousness which I feel has a cynical and mean spirited undercurrent, which says that past artists have to be viewed through current identity-political glasses and that we should all be aware of Mozart's sexism, Beethoven's racism or Shostakovich's homophobia and we should always be reminded of it when we talk about how great their music is. I appreciate this may not have been what you're going for, and I definitely projected that meaning onto your post.

He never went through with it though, and became more strident in his abolitionism. Slave's Lament was probably pretty controversial at the time given that the popular view was to view slaves as little more than cattle. Do you think he should be condemned for having considered it through poverty and desperation at the time even although he never did it? I've been to loads of Burns events in my time and I haven't seen too many folk being overly hagiographical about him. Burns is seen as a national hero because he wrote great poetry and used his poetry to point out religious and moral hypocrisy at the time. He's elevated because he was of these parts and wrote in scots. Also, you can't dismiss arguments just because they don't suit. He lived in times where the equality of the sexes we have today would have been like a fever dream back then. He may have been ahead of his time actually if we look back without the prurience of today's lens. And to the poverty thing. Only somebody truly desperate and on their uppers will know what it means to have to take a job or starve. Survival tends to trump morals. Also, and this is crucial, he didn't bloody do it. He spent approximately zero time on a slave ship. It's well documented how tortured he was about having to do it, but once he had a promise of income which meant he wasn't going to go to penury, he stayed where he was.

The big thing that stops me using racism as a stick to beat the USA with too much is the fact that it was the result of slavery and the triangular trade, which built some awfy nice buildings in Glasgow. It is brutal though and no amount of representation at the highest level can distract from it.

Aye, gentrification of popular culture is another not so PTTGOMN.

Waltzing season sounds better than Marching season.

I heard a guy make a joke that he had recently been given a year to live, so would be doing it sober to make the time go slower.

Judging the attitudes of folk 200 odd years ago by the morals of today is daft and is often the cutting off of your nose to spite your face. We celebrate and have a national holiday for a fucking poet. Not a soldier, or man of violence, but a poet. he's not held up as a national hero for being a flawless human being, but as a great poet. It's one of the wee things that make me proud to be scottish tbh (and I'm no tartan gonk....although I'll vote yes and I wear a kilt to scotland games...so maybe a bit). As a classical music fan and a fan of impressionist art, I'd suggest separating the man from the art. I don't even think Burns was that bad. He fucked about for sure, but he was a seducer by the sounds of it, not a predator. The slavery boat thing was because he was dirt poor. We might think (with the prism of retrospect) that we would definitely not work on a slave ship, but if poverty is a good balm for cognitive dissonance. I can't believe that decrying McCartney headlining Glastonbury is a controversial take. He was a great songwriter but f**k me, Glastonbury and pop music should be for the youngsters and should be broadly inaccessible to the middle aged. I know nothing about the current scene, but surely they could get somebody with charisma, presence and high octane music to be the one act a'body is looking forward to.

That's not terrible to be honest. Take away a few of the drums, add in a couple of bass flutes, tenor flutes to carry the melody, piccolos to provide harmony and descant (and I do love a descant) then you've got something.

Weans in America can get arrested for daft wee wean stuff when they're at school. There are police officers in school now who arrest actual children for any breach of school rules. They've been known to use excessive physical force too. The polis in the USA are generally thick bullies. That's in schools. The school to prison pipeline is not something we talk about here. Also actual school children have to do actual drills to prepare for massacre by AR15. Being a child in America sounds traumatically stressful. The Abortion Act 1967 is going absolutely nowhere. Say what you like about the Tories (and I'll join you) but they don't seem to be on a mission from God to completely erode bodily autonomy. Women in America can now be arrested for having a miscarriage and if you are raped and get pregnant, that's your life now. After they fix the next election, the US supreme court will then go after Obergefell v Hodges, which overturned anti-sodomy legislation. After the SCOTUS overturn that then police will be able to knock down your door if they suspect you might be engaging in sex with your fellow man. You might think that this only affects gay men, but what if you have a pal or cousin staying over and you have an affectionate relationship with them? Some neighbour grasses you up and you've got a few blue shirts battering down your door and arresting you "on suspicion". That's not to mention the stories that are no longer in the news. Michigan still has poisoned water and the effects of that will be felt for generations. The elimination of first nation culture and society will be complete now that their lands are no longer sovereign. Latin American children are still separated from their parents in concentration camps. There are strong rumours that the children are being adopted out to willing white American parents. The Tories definitely want to ape the US in some ways. They'd privatise air if they could, and you just know that they salivate at the thought of performative patriotism and pageantry at every sporting event and school assembly. I don't think they could, or would create the hellscape they have (and is getting worse) in the USA.

I sense an incoming change of avatar....

Absolutely devastated to read this tbf.