andy steel

I wish I knew how to get rich off writing on Rangers forums!! You can add your own name to that list, btw. The Queen's Park analogy is superb, sir, superb.

Where? When? I don't mind going but some details would help!

I don't disagree with a word. From a May, 2011 blog I wrote: But I maintain it is up to us to get our record squeeky clean, the better to drive home the false and self serving nature of the 'official figures' and especially the groups who use them to their own benefit. Every time a Bear says the word '******' or lets go with an FTP - regardless of how meaningless the expression actually is - it makes it harder to expose reality. Us acting alone may not solve the issue entirely, but it would expose it to the cold light of day, where I feel it must be ridiculed as the bullshit that it is. I think we're getting there, but let ourselves down every so often. With the prize of exposing sectarianism as a myth, why we do this is beyond me, because we can all agree that when people talk about sectarianism in Scotland they're really having a go at Rangers fans.

Many thanks for the kind words. I have ploughed through 'Discipline & Punish' and had a stab at 'The Birth of the Clinic' but, just as I prefer the German language, I prefer the German sociologist. I was a bit unhappy with bringing in Adolf & his goose-stepping chums, Godwin's Law and all that, and it's hardly the most apposite analogy. But the worry I have nagging at the back of my head is that there is now the actual WW2 and a media WW2 - rather than the constant flow of programmes about it acting as a 'warning from history' it seems to be acting as little more than a titillating ratings grabber of ever decreasing taste. And if something as vital as the way humanity treats itself can be reduced to nothing more than a marketing exercise, well, there's no reason why a football club on the edge of Europe can't disappear. Certainly a period of introspection is and was inevitable given what happened but it won't do as a long term strategy, whether any or all of our grievances have been addressed or not. 'They' have made it crystal clear that they won't be doing any apologising any time soon, so our options are limited to either choking it off and trying another strategy or, as you say, giving up entirely. It's either try to influence the horizons or chug along as we are, allowing celtc to define the game from top to bottom. I appreciate the distaste for compromise with haters but the alternative is to let 'them' dominate us for the foreseeable future, which is likely to be even worse! Realism is going to have to inflect our idealism on this subject or else the chances are we'll die off as a force - an honourable death maybe, but a death neverethless!

Well, then, I think those of us who hold a more progressive attitude are duty bound to try to persuade the angrier fan that the only way is dialogue. And as the years go by without the baggage carousel showing any signs of becoming empty, I start to think we might have to make a choice between enforcing this attitude or watch the club die. Not much of a choice! Chicken and egg, isn't it? Perhaps we will only see some restorative justice when we adopt a more engaging approach. Or, the only way to avoid the swinging lynch mob mentality is to be more involved with the mob, so to speak. Certainly there are no easy answers, but building a castle and hoping we can lay waste to the footballing countryside without stepping outside it seems overly-optimistic.

Fabulous link, what a riot. I suppose if you wanted to master German via a teacher or textbook you would soon find your memory heavily taxed. But the best way is just to go there and either learn or starve, without worrying about Dative or Nominative too much. I had enough of that when I was doing Anglo-Saxon. Hwaet!

Wow. It's amazing how often our fan slogans turn up in other contexts. At least that one is less horrifying than the Union Flag with 'We are the People' on it belonging to the EDL in this funny-as-anything report. Watch out for the winners and losers in the 'Most Nonchalent Man In a Riot' contest and the 'angry serf army defending a castle made of shit'. http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/edl-fascists-antifa-police-lgbt-bristol-gay-pride

Depressingly, you have summed up in eight words what I took about 1,000 to do! Tbf there are posters like yourself, BB54 or AMMS who have been calling for this sort of attitude for years, but I just couldn't get past the hate engendered during our agonies. But there's no alternative, when you look at it in the cold light of day.

Ach, I read the first sentence and thought 'Glen Gibbons' - scrolled down and sure enough, there's the link to The Scotsman. At least he's honest about it, unlike others.

Seriously?!? £16,690?!?!?!? I never knew UEFA had a sense of humour.

Is there a link to this event anywhere?

I dunno, like I said in that other giant post I think the rest of the country and even the rest of football is pretty sick of listening to us and them bickering. Given how classless they are on a predictable, weekly basis, there's an opening for us to act like adults and maybe stop pissing the rest of the country off. Can't see it happening though, it is football after all and I'd be a rank hypocrite if I pretended I was all mature when it comes to The Rangers.

We invited in the Normans about as much as the French invited the Prussians in 1848! And, interestingly, it's only in the last 40 years or so that Scots has become virtually standardised with English, due to television mostly. Prior to that the regional dialects to be found around Scotland (and England for that matter) were diverse and, in the main, of Norse/Danish (and so Germanic) origin, although Wales and the Devon/Cornwall region are more Celtic/Brythonic iirc. I could never understand why I was forced to endure 'la salle de la maison' French lessons at school when I would have far rather done something about Danish or German. Beowulf would have been easier to read in the original Anglo-Saxon for one thing. Pete - is there really a Motorcycle gang called No Surrender?

Another weekend with no game...sigh. Here's your Sunday morning 'long piece' a day or so early. Today's musical accompaniment is Hannah Georgas with 'Enemies'. Takes a while to get going but grows on you, kind of like a modern Suzanne Vega. Living with other people isn't always easy. Look at cities - the number of urban dwellers who look for ways to escape tells its own story: living with other people creates tension. So it's no wonder that many of the 20th century's finest thinkers on cities and how to live in them from countries which suffered the most devastation to their cities: having seen their countries convulsed for the better part of the entire 100 years, you can't be surprised that so many French and German intellectuals turned their minds toward how to improve the world for the future. Le Certeau, Foucault, the wonderfully named Lyotard...but what about the Germans? Unfortunately, for many Brits raised on a TV diet these last 40 years, mention of the word 'Germans' brings on a kneejerk reaction where an image of Hitler appears unbidden in your mind, either sauntering 'neath the Eiffel Tower or giving it laldy at one of the lads' night's out he and the rest of the gang were fond of. There he is at the podium, one fist turned backward on his left hip, his right hand karate-chopping an imaginary swarm of bees as he yells 'Niemals! Niemals! Niemals!' A strange man, indeed. But hardly the definitive image we want to take forward of that country, surely? Adolf's ubiquity on British cable TV is now such that it is only a matter of time before someone decides to hive off another arm of the History Channel into a dedicated Hitlery Channel. They may as well: from serious, academic studies such as The Nazis: A Warning From History or The World at War, through well meaning but poorly (cheaply) made cut-and-paste jobs like Secrets of the Nazi Gold to the recent, alarming trend in US low budget movie making to use Nazis as almost a comedy stooge - Nazis From the Moon, anyone? It's a real film, although even it is eclipsed by the appalling bad Nazis From the Centre of the Earth. What Jake Busey, so effective as the ghostly psycho the in Michael J Fox movie The Frighteners, is doing in this trash is anyone's guess: but any answer other than paying off a gangster's bill will reflect very badly on him. Hopefully America, given it provides pretty much the cultural compass for the world, won't go down the Nazi obsessed route the British media is addicted to. If you think the next four years, with day by day accounts of World War One are going to be full on, just wait, if you're old enough, until 1933 - I should think you will have a minute by minute account of what Herr Schicklegruber was up to from the day he assumed power until the Fuhrer's butler served up the cyanide and Lugers in the bunker. Given I'll be 63 in 2033 I imagine I will be either (a) dead or (b) gaga so it won't matter to me. I don't envy the rest of you, though! I suppose it shows how getting your image, your public perception out from under some kind of media imposed identity is not easy. Hence the reluctance in Britain to take people seriously who have names like Mearsheimer, Gadamer, or Bauman. Stuck in a Dr Strangelovian timewarp, we see them as sinister candidates for the experiment room rather than people who may offer something positive. Michael Schumacher, it's true, was popular, but his popularity in the UK was of the grudging respect kind last seen in veteran Desert Rats when they were talking about Rommel. In my lifetime I can think of only Prof.Heinz Wolff, woolly-haired boffin of TV science-fest The Great Egg Race, who has been accepted in Britain. Even he was looked upon with grave suspicion by my mother, although admittedly she was bombed out by the Luftwaffe in the 40's and has never forgiven 'the Germans' since. We as Bluenoses know all too well that if you don't control your own image, others will happily control it for you, and those others will almost certainly have nefarious intent. Our current status in the game - if this were India we would rank somewhere between pariah dog and untouchable street sweeper - have led many, me included, to adopt a defiant stance of 'get it up ye!' and to hold ourselves apart from the rest. They'll need us more than we need them, I have said, and meant it. Now, I'm not so sure. When veteran sociologist Zygmunt Bauman recently took a look at urban life, he diagnosed it to be suffering from two separate but connected illnesses, which, in the time honoured fashion of the intellectual, he gave the unfriendly names of mixophobia and mixophilia. The former sees fear of other groups than one's own run rampant, and those who can do so barricade themselves into gated communities with security guards, gradually losing the ability to communicate with the others outside, the fear of whom grows the more they become unknown. A self-perpetuating cycle where no one wins except, presumably, Barratt Homes. Mixophilia, meanwhile, seems a bit optimistic to me, a happy city with lots of mixing between classes and sects, Bauman foresees 'benign, and often deeply gratifying and enjoyable daily encounters with the humanity hiding behind the frighteningly unfamiliar scenic masks of different and alien races, nationalities, Gods and liturgies'. I remain doubtful how enjoyable daily bumping into hordes of celtc fans would be, especially in a city with trams, but I do take his point: hiding ourselves away in a ghetto will, in the long run, do more harm than good. Hang on , though, I hear you cry. What about Timmy? When O'Neill appeared, they drew back into the cultural enclave, they've never come out of it since and they're doing alright, aren't they? Well, not really, no. Although they have people at the top of the game and are very much the country's strongest side, there are two caveats. First, obviously, we handed it them on a plate, both due to our implosion and our mismanagement of the game during the SPL period. If we were to pursue the Germanic theme of this piece a little further, you could call the SPL period the Weimar Republic and the present lot the early days of Adolf. It certainly looks like a one party state, anyway. Given the delusion which appears to run rampant through their support - 'we bring smiles wherever we go' must rank up there as one of the best lines of this or any other year - perhaps Stalin's self-delusional Soviet Union would be a better comparison. Secondly, in broad terms they are dying every bit as much as the game as a whole. Although many Bears see the Sectarianism Legislation as directly only at them, it reflects a wider belief in Scotland that the day of Old Firm bigotry is past. Teams may be multicultural but the fans you are obliged to step past, usually pished and almost always giving it something from some idealised Irish folk history song book certainly are not. Scottish society, which seems to have been taking a look at itself in recent years (probably due to devolution and the independence referendum) has clearly concluded that shibboleths like the Old Firm are shibboleths no longer and must either change or wither. I think we're both doing a pretty good job of withering at the moment, crowds or no crowds, the mutual hate and societal impact of recent events causing disquiet among those who are fans of neither club. How appealing will the present antipathy be to the generation which comes along after us, which has to have the last few years explained and which, like all new generations, will probably look at us with the same unconcealed contempt my son directs at me when I tell him to cut his nails or tidy his room. Certainly it will keep me going for years, this hate, but as a long term marketing strategy it is lacking. We exist in the Scottish leagues, and we're going to have to come to some kind of understanding with the Scottish leagues. Hans Gadamer, in a book called Truth and Method, explained that mutual understanding can only occur when there is a 'fusion of horizons' between peoples. This fusion can only come about through shared experience and that shared experience can only come about in a shared space: if we exist in a vacuum, our horizons, whatever they may be, will be ignored in favour of everyone else's. Given how much everyone else's appear to accord with those of celtc FC, this is a genuine worry, but more broadly, if the OF continue on their road to cultural isolationism, they may well both be victims of the rest of society's impatience and end up moribund. This may seem needlessly pessimistic to celtc given their CL money, but it goes out as soon as it comes in and even it is far from guaranteed. Another German, philosopher Emmanuel Kant, talked about a general association of mankind: 'allgemeine vereinigung der menschheit'. For this Scot, who suffered at school trying to get his bunged up nose and gutteral, throaty accent around the romantic cadence of French, German is a godsend - it is basically 'say what you see' and none of that Froggie rubbish about silent letters or nasally stops. It even sounds like English. How two countries with so many similarities as the UK and Germany ended up so far apart is one of the great questions of the century gone by, but it's generally ignored in favour of endless programmes about Hitler, Goering and the rest. Unless we take steps to address our current position in the game: no power, no influence, no friends, nothing other than a sometimes useful chip to throw down for small clubs looking for a payday - we may end up more a curiosity rather than a vibrant player, and contribution we might have to make ignored in favour of bone-picking over the last few years. Given the present shambles that is the club, any kind of future vibrancy may seem like lunatic optimism but we fans have a duty to at least try and shove the club into engaging with the outside world. A voice which is constantly telling everyone else to go stuff themselves is unlikely to win many arguments. I suppose at some point we have to engage: even if the ultimate aim remains the annihilation of certain clubs,we don't have to shout it from the rooftops. The AGM is coming up: there will be a possibility of change, though it varies from day to day and depending on who you read. How I hope we seize this chance, for the alternative is terrible: Rangers from the Centre of the Earth, anyone?

Conspiracy.....conspiracy.....you mocked me last week, well, we'll see who's mad....

Well you're a workshy git then. Get a job! Really, this is too much. 'The rebels dirty tricks campaign'? The 'rebels' have had about six months to oust a dysfunctional board which is the worst in the history of the club, running the club's finances into the ground and dishing out tasty payoffs to themselves when they feel like they can't be arsed with it anymore. And they are still not in place! Had they tried any dirty tricks they would have been in place ages ago. It was their (in hindsight) disastrous decision not to push for the EGM which has allowed the present lot to hold on, zip to do with Jack Irvine or anyone else. All Irvine has been is an embarrassment to Rangers. Unless one is related to him, it is beyond comprehension why any Bluenose would support anything he has done, regardless of who they back in the boardroom.

Balanced enough Darther and while I'm happy with the new faces on the board it doesn't excuse Stockbridge or the Easdales their stunning mistakes of the past. Blimey, it takes us years to forgive some players for a couple of bad games, and the board's PR slaves expect us to just forget the chronic financial mismanagement and horrific internal ruptures? They really do take us for idiots, which, considering how they appear from the outside to be, is pretty rich.

Jack's job? I wonder what the hell that was, since his actual effect has been to make Rangers look like a shambles, insult players and fans, drive away potential investment and ensure division for the foreseeable future. When you see every - and that's EVERY - educated, professional poster on here condemning Irvine (I'll pass on the cosy first name terms) and only you backing him to the hilt, it's obvious that his PR has been an absolute disaster for Rangers. And given he will only be doing what he's instructed to, his bosses likewise have been & will continue to be an absolute disaster for Rangers. Keeping the current main shareholders in place will only increase our insecurity by another year. And let it be clear to you, Jack, and those you work for - if the present lot are in place after the AGM they won't be getting another penny of my cash. When you can push away a fan of 30 years standing, you know you're doing something wrong to the overall health of the club. Job done? Only if you're working for the tims.

That quote about the spurned chairman is a bit worrying.

Can do the Boxing Day game if you like?

We're not talking about that level of harassment though, which is completely unacceptable - we're talking, as you said, about playground sniping. I too would prefer a mature level of debate, but that's life! I just don't think it's do-able. Anyone putting themselves up would be fodder for the questions about religion, politics etc. If you're willing to bring that storm down on your family and/or business hats off to you, but I think you can rule out the top 95% of candidates. To an extent we have made ourselves marginalised.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/25023927 Fair enough if it's a football debt it should be paid but this is over a year after the event. Get it sorted once and for all!

Would that not drive the share price up?

please, please, please let it be the sound of rats leaving the (not sinking) ship...

Perhaps I have an unusually thick skin (don't think so, though) but I feel this is being a little overdone nowadays. People can disagree - quite strongly - and still be able to work together. It happens all the time in the workplace so I don't see why it can't happen within our fan base. When someone slaughters something I've posted online it doesn't mean I will never ever ever take to do with them again: surely what is needed is not an end to the odd insult or disagreement, but the ability t o take criticism on the chin? It's pretty hard to forge a consensual body of fan opinion when you have to jump through hoops to 'fit in'. I think we as a support put off a lot of people who would be very effective communicators from the world of business or wherever because if you're standing before a UB or VB banner you're automatically associated with those groups and their politics. Since we show no desire to deal with the detrimental effects of the baggage, there's little point moaning about them when they impact on us or the club.