Aim Here

Why should he? It's not as if Carlos the Jackal is known for having had any input into the issues regarding the constitutional status of the island of Ireland. Insofar as he engaged in any kind of sectarianism, it would have been little lefty squabbles between the PFLP and the PFLP-GC or between the Rote Armee Fraktion and the Revolutionary Cells and the like. He's known for being somewhat less inclined to religious prejudice than some of his compatriots (refusing to assassinate Simon Wiesenthal for instance). Are we now in the age of 'anything I don't like is sectarianism'?

The big thread must stay open!

Apparently, if the Daily Express is to be believed, we've got a £400k signing clause at the end of Maclaren's loan period, if we still like him by then; we might be in for multiple seasons of the Mac and Flo show.

They're welcome to try. He's on 13 goals from 17 games, and we have him for the next 3 years, so he's not going to be cheap. Does Rangers even have enough disposable income (cash upfront, please don't ask for credit as the words 'git yersel tae f**k ya chancer' may offend) to make a non-laughable offer?

This talk of strikers and wingers is all very well, but I'd be happier if there were rumours about someone who could somehow replace McGeouch and make us less likely to haemorrhage goals.

Between Kamberi and Mallan, I envisage us comfortably scoring an average of 5 goals per game this season; if we can somehow keep the goals conceded down to 4 or less, Lenny might be on to something...

Am I missing something. Why Cologne? It's about 400 miles from Zurich and isn't part of any reasonable route to Scotland. Is there some other piece of transfer news in the works?

According to Wilson's twitter, the player's been 'sidelined by the new manager and told he can find another club' so presumably this isn't Hibs dealing with Grasshoppers. Then again, it is, as you imply, probably just wishful linking by that Wilson guy.

I'm having difficulty parsing the grammar in the first post. He'd attack O Halloran if he wasn't a violent person? So does that mean he's a violent person now, but if, in the hypothetical, he wasn't, he'd still attack O Halloran? Does that mean he already has a hitlist of Rangers players that he would attack right now, but wouldn't if he wasn't violent? Should Rangers FC be concerned?

He's agreeing with me. You've got reading comprehension problems.

Dear me. Saying that a football fan is like a Rangers fan is still using the term to refer to a Rangers fan. If I was to refer to fans of, say, Edinburgh City, as 'Jambos who can't afford season tickets', that still wouldn't make the term 'Jambo' anything other than a term for a Hearts player or fan. Same with ***. And in any case, you're still a million fucking miles away from establishing that the H word is used in Scotland as a synonym for Protestant.

In Scotland, it's exclusively applied to Rangers either directly, or indirectly as in '*** without the bus fare' or 'diet ***' whenever other teams fanbases copy from the Rangers hymn book. I am not aware of any other use, excepting Eastern European invaders in the dark ages, and World War 1-era epithets for German soldiers.

On P&B there are disproportionately few Rangers fans and if they had inclinations towards bigotry, the moderators keep them in line - you're an unrepresentative sample and you're on your best behaviour. It's very, very, easy to find examples of mass bigotry among Rangers fans sitting side by side with self-indignant outrage about the term '***' as you well know.

I seem to recall that P&B's admins acknowledge that the use of the term is disputed but they choose the safe option of banning it, though it's hard to find forum rule discussions here, and maybe I'm getting mixed up with some other Scottish football forums. And no, Rangers fans don't 'encourage' the use of the H word. Rangers fans take offence at it, partly because it's a license to use their own slurs, and partly because it makes the sectarianism points tally a bit less one-sided, if they can contrive some sectarian offence aimed at them to balance out whatever they dish out. Be honest, how many times in your life have you heard a Scottish person use the term to refer to a Protestant outwith a footballing context? I have *never* heard it, so far.

I suggest no such thing. I made no comment on how sectarian the term actually is, merely that Rangers fans currently take offence at it. What I was suggesting, regardless of whether the term is or is unacceptable, is that it's supposed unacceptability isn't always an honest one. You only have to go visit the likes of Rangersmedia to see the abject hypocrisy of significant numbers of people who take offence at the term while making liberal use of anticatholic slurs, sometimes even in the same sentence, I kid you not. (If you must know, I, in common with a huge number of people in Scotland, had no inkling of any supposed sectarian connotations with the word until fairly recently. With the singular exception of Celtic, every major football team in Scotland has a fanbase where the majority comes from a protestant background and the use of 'h*n' to describe Rangers fans occurs pretty much everywhere - are we all self-hating protestants? I actually suspect that the offence taken by Rangers fans post-dates the OFBA as an artificial attempt to find a term that they could use to whatabout when called out for their anticatholic slurs; because the other contender - orange b******d, while definitely an anti-Protestant slur, rather than a dismissive term for a group of football fans, was not in common enough use. Certainly national newspapers - not exactly known for their f****n inclinations - felt able to use the term from the 1980s onwards without anyone taking offence. It's alleged use as a sectarian term in Scotland seems to be a recent innovation). Even if this theory isn't true, though and 'h*n' is an unacceptable sectarian term, I still stand by my main point, which is that Old Firm fans take offence - rightly or wrongly - mainly as a tactic to continue their own offensive behaviour.

It wasn't that long ago that most people had enough money down the back of the sofa to buy their club.

Nearly, but taking the moral high ground is never the point when it comes to Old Firm pointscoring. The aim is to point at some real or imaginary crime of the other side to give your own side a license to be arseholes. Celtic's fans don't really want to see Rangers stop singing about being up to their knees in f*nian blood - because then the onus would be on them to cut down on cheerleading the Provisional IRA in their own songbook. Sectarian-minded Rangers fans don't really want people to stop calling them 'h*ns', they're just using it as leverage so they can keep throwing blatant slurs like 't*igs' or 't*rriers' around. It's the moral low ground that they're after, not the high ground...

Not only did they remember to order the seating, they installed it first and then built the rest of the stand around it. Ann Budge should take note.

They're laughing at us now, it's blatant Let's issue another angry statement

I suggest they declare an amnesty, bring Kenny Miller in to be interim interim player-manager, with Lee Wallace as captain again, just to make a clean break from the hated Murty junta, and get their internet forum orcs back onside. Also, Kenny Miller's wife can do for Rangers what Yoko did for the Beatles.

Hey, it's not just *any* 0-0. It could be a historic 0-0 that half of Edinburgh will brag about for decades to come. 9 0-0 draws in a row off the back of the last win will be the Great Unbeaten Run Of The Late 2010s that hibees will tell their grandkids about. Fifty years from now, you'll have them on your knee telling them tall tales about Scotty Allan and his reverse shroo balls from the halfway line, and Jamie Maclaren being piled on by a rugby scrum of 6 Hearts defenders before digging the ball out and nutmegging the seventh to score. Of course, even if it does turns out to be an important match, you don't really have to go. You could just lie to your grandkids and pretend you were there. They won't be able to tell the difference and they won't give a f**k anyways.

Isn't it the opposite way round? Liverpool will want to pull him if he's actually good, otherwise they'll let Rangers keep him (unless by 'go a bit sideways', you mean Rangers hits another administration event or something). This is basically a glorified job interview for Gerrard - try him out with this toytown outfit up in Scotland to see if he's any use.

Dindeleux posted a Rangersmedia bigot being, well, himself, and that post was removed, hence the moderator warning. I don't think it was aimed at your post.

Celtic didn't take their boot off Brechin's neck at the 50th minute either...

There are rumours that Police Scotland have called in reinforcements to deal with a disturbance at the Rangers Player of the Year awards...