_mm_

i wish i were on the other side of the planet after those last two displays. my tongue in cheek bravado is turning into self-loathing far too soon in the play-offs. is it better for them to end the misery now or delay it until i start to believe?

i was thinking of staging an anti-monorchid demonstration. hitler...franco, 1+1...you do the math.

is this the year Vancouver go all the way? i think it is. go Canucks go!

sorry, didn't mean to make you feel like you had to Fleegle the forum

it's a shame though. would have thought our fans to be of a higher moral fibre than that. however, football is a roughage business.

i silently weep myself to sleep nightly when i think of any pairing involving either of the caldwells or berra. i am beginning to sincerely believe we need to bring back the 2-3-5. is there no way levein can scour italy for someone with a scottish granny?

bruce rioch, andy goram, neil sullivan, stuart mccall, richard gough, nigel quashie, paul devlin, scott dobie, james morrison, kris common, phil bardsley, jamie mackie, matt gilks. this and our attempts to lure gabriel agbonlahor and andy carrol into the fold. (and let's not even get into the ill advised attempts to get david johnson - jamaican born, but adopted in the uk - to represent scotland) pot, kettle, black and all that i don't remember this much harumphing when dominic matteo decided that he wanted to be scottish again.

i have always failed to see the issue in all of this. he picked a country he was eligible for. so what? we've benefitted from the same. if he changes his mind, great...more options for scotland. if he doesn't...no loss. and frankly, if there is a talented scottish player who opts for another country, so long as it is one of the 207 that aren't england, i couldn't care less. failing that, i'll start an anti-stuart holden thread. wee turncoat!

We are going to have to here. Just not on the same page in how we define them. I think you misunderstand my point. Taking my definition of negative freedoms, I am saying that Freedom of Speech is only negative freedom in the context of Western Constitutional Law. I say that, because it is a freedom from government restraint of speech, not a guarantee of ultimate freedom. Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech (at least in the States, where it’s actually written down) doesn’t mean that an employer can’t stop you from posting your political beliefs on your desk, it only stops the government from stopping you from doing so. Ultimately, within this context Freedom of Speech is a social construct and a negative liberty (again taking the definition as freedom from restraint). Taking my definition of positive freedoms as freedoms of pursuit without inhibition, then the affirmative action of speaking freely regardless of whatever restraints may or may not have placed or removed is a positive freedom. The question comes in whether you think constitutional rights are reserved or conveyed. I think that due to the nature of organized government, those rights are going to be conveyed unless explicitly stated as being reserved. In terms of Constitutionally guaranteed Freedom of Speech, it is conveyed as a mechanism of limiting your positive freedom to speak with the social inhibitions of libel, for example. Tort actions for libel or slander do not violate one’s constitutional right to freedom of speech, but they do limit one’s right to speak freely. agree to disagree. we define the concepts differently. for what it's worth, i think you are using inverted reasoning in this statement and bootstrapping your notion of negative freedom to an acceptance of private property rights. you follow this by saying that because negative freedom exists, positive freedom does not. while i concur that that is a statement, i don't find that it is a properly formulated logical one. so, Locke’s proffering the notion of a social contract was a concession to the times in which he came, but his theory that property is a natural right is not? How is his opinion that property is a natural consequence of labor not equally as defined by his surrounding culture and based upon a millenia of agrarian development within it? Considering that his thought developed at a time when deviation established agrarian culture was seen as "primitive," I find it fair to critique his contention that property is a natural right of labor as one borne of his culture. To take as given that property is a natural consequence of labor demands that you adhere to Western concepts of ownership. again, my complaint is that this Lockean notion of property rights is a hinge proposition (if you will allow me to drop a little Wittgenstein), upon which his reason and inquiry is based from which he formulates his conclusions. It being a hinge proposition does not invalidate it, but it does demand that the thought stemming from it accept it. this is exactly where i was going with my mention of normative impulses. i would posit that hinge propositions are effected by the normative impulses imbed by our culture and that basing an entire philosophy on one hinge proposition is symptomatic of the Christianized impulse of Western society. and here's where you let me down. your homework is to sell some drugs in a non-coercive manner or engage in a non-coercive exchange of sexual pleasure for money. live outside of the boundaries of society! break free from the taxman! sex and drugs are perfectly satisfactory! get your nose out of those "books"

Meh...i completely disagree with your definitions. Negative freedoms are freedoms from external constraint or control. Positive freedoms are the freedoms of pursuit. Both exist concurrently. If memory serves, the traditional view is that liberty is the balance of those two ideas. Per your example, freedom of speech is a negative freedom only within the context our western governments, in as much as it is them relinquishing a restraint they otherwise have on us. The freedom to say what ever you want is a positive freedom that becomes limited by the confines of whatever society you chose (or coerces!) you to be a part. honestly, i am unfamiliar with any views that positive freedoms are only expressed through the actions of a society and not through the individual. you clearly don’t live in my neighbourhood.... That said, though admittedly simplistic, I still maintain that my analogy stands. Me free to have my food without someone taking it (my negative freedom), fella wanting to have food and seeking to attain it by the aforementioned conking (his positive freedom). Guilty. The older I get, the more I like Hobbes. Especially as a Thistle fans, I think we can all attest to life being nasty, brutish and short but you stop short of following his reason towards the dreaded social contract? oh go on! Touche. You are right there. Cultural bias is not indicative of being wrong. I was trying to tie in a cultural bias towards western thought as being representative of the normative impulse that limits political anarchism as opposed to epistemological anarchism - ie. Your system of governance works only upon acceptance of western reason and the application thereof. That’s what I was trying to say, at least. As willing as you may be to accept flawed perception and the existence of competing methodologies, I am just not convinced that an anarchist political structure is particularly adept at handling these competing paradigms. There’s nothing inherently communitarian about subsistence farming or squats. You can do all of those by yourself if you so choose and they are well within market anarchism. I was asking as to whether you engage in fringe economic activities to subvert "the man." subsistence farming or bartering or selling goods without a license - basically subsisting and engaging in markets out of the reach of the tax man. further, market anarchism holding to the principles of private property rights does not put it in opposition to squatting, imo. it's the state that calls the occupation of abandoned property a squat and then asserts its dominance to kick out the resident(s) because they are not adhering to enforced government deeding practices or paying the appropriate tax. market anarchism most certainly does not necessitate that you engage in accepted, government approved markets. The chains of oppression don’t break themselves, WJ. less an issue of society being obliged, more an issue of my intense impatience and open willingness to drop money in the hat so i don't have to put up with useless people in the workplace

i would like you to back that up more, please. negative freedoms are also procured by action, and hinge on someone else exercising his or her positive freedoms to do what they please. i don't act towards attaining the negative freedom of not being conked over the head for my food, if they other actor doesn't assert his freedom to conk me over the head. next - how are you defining reason? innate ability to synthesize conclusions from perception? are we going deductive? are you equating it with logic? are we adopting Kant's definition? then given your definition of reason, what troubles me is your assertion that the only conclusion (to what question?) based on reason (which you haven't defined) is that nature limits liberty. which "laws of nature?" wee beasties in the grass? gravity? the limitations of our bodies? do you mean nature as in "nasty, brutish and short?" whatever your definition of reason is, you assert that it is innate to humans and that it leads only to a particular conclusion. you follow this by saying... so...there is no one single reason (am i to assume you believe that rationality can be engendered by perception?), but the capacity to adhere to some sort methodology is exclusive to humans and has as its logical conclusion that liberty is in constant strife with nature? you present nothing to back that up. you are just asserting it is so. you're using baseless assertions (or at least axioms which you have yet to properly qualify) and stating them as universals to make the point that you're not dogmatic. that's not a logical conclusion whatsoever. how does "coercion of all kinds are to be rejected" follow thusly from the broad assertion that precedes it? also, are you saying that reason (here i am assuming you mean deductive reasoning) has as its sole purpose, ridicule? i was speaking more of the push for normative impulses and borrowing from Nietzsche's critiques of post-enlightenment western science as exhibiting a christianized impulse in looking for solitary and unchallengeable answers. i hold to that though, in that adhering to a particular epistemology (even if one accepts the existence of others) and consequent philisophy still requires some sort of normative axiom. in the current case - reason is innate and reason concludes that we yearn for liberty from the world around us; therefore liberty = good/right; coercion and interference = bad/wrong. adherence to all of any of this still requires that you accept and profess certain axioms and espouse a right and wrong. your concept of one logical conclusion from reason arguably falls under this. that opinion notwithstanding, that the theorists and philosophers you cite and quote are Western and from within a specific time frame, points to a particular cultural bias. you probably have, but i was rudely not paying attention. i did what i said i didn't want to do which was assume you were and objectivist and then engage you as such. sorry about that. i actually lived for a fair chunk of time in a part of Oregon in the Pacific Northwest that is fairly well known for its anarchist communities of all shapes and sizes - primitive anarchists, eco-anarchists, the black clad mob who harassed shoppers in the battle of seattle. consequently, i am better versed in a lot of libertarian philosophies than you might think. so, as a market anarchist (or close approximation thereof), i know see what i am dealing with. now is this a theoretical alignment, or do you engage in the fringe market practices? if you don't mind me asking - do you subsistence farm or squat or anything? i said i was being glib... my point is less what libertarians want, and more the consequences thereof. in my experience, infrastructure conducted privately on the free market is no less bureaucratic than public infrastructure. it still takes office workers and paper shufflers making decisions effecting me and due to the size requirements of it being effectual and worth me buying, my choices become limited. i can't get my health insurance through some guy running a policy out his backroom because he can't provide me the coverage i need. i have to go through a major insurance provider to ensure i can get covered. this insurance provider is going to be comprised of countless fat arsed paper shufflers who determine how sick i actually am. if i am lucky, the doctor i go to will accept that insurance provider. if i am even luckier, the hospital he works for will also accept it. if i am unlucky (as i was a year ago), i end up in an emergency room in a hospital that does recognize my insurance, with a doctor who does not, who orders diagnostics that my insurance provider doesn't recognize. free market healthcare is a gem. well, not with that kind of an attitude you won't! the works don't break without a spanner! in the states - the investment banks merged with savings banks because they could and they used the money on deposit to leverage the financing of their "dabbling" in the derivative markets because they could. the states (for example) spent most of the latter half of the 19th century in economic turmoil and it was interventionist measures (like the anti-trust act, creation of the federal reserve, labor standards, food standards) that put this country on an equal footing with the rest of the world. it wasn't until the late seventies that the people of a certain bent asserted stronger influence in government and started aggressive deregulation that we started running at a deficit and started having widespread collapses (savings and loan, the crash in 89). would the collapse have been catastrophic without prior intervention? well, i wouldn't be enjoying the affluence i do without it. it would likely be more of the same boom and bust panics that the US had in the 19th century. (as a side note: if you have not already, do some reading on the upsurge in radicalism in the states around that time. truly fascinating stuff. you seem like you might be interested) in my opinion, the true failing in government intervention in the west has been both the right and left neglecting to adjust infrastructure spending to a post-industrial economy. they've either bought themselves a generation of people who can't work in a modern world or created a caste of undereducated and replaceable low wage workers all in favor of not spending enough on retraining etc. that is not to say it shouldn't have intervened, it just should have done a better job. here is where i likely alienate myself from you and a load of other people on this forum... having been a working stiff in three different decades, i can attest to my experience being that some people are so completely and utterly useless and so completely and utterly miserable as workers, that we are better off as a society to pay them to just not mess anything up. it's a trade in its own right...

to Woodstock Jag... am i to assume that you own a copy of Fountainhead bound in the leatherized foreskins of Ayn Rand's former lovers? (or would like to attain such an item were it to exist) i'm in the States and tripping over randy little Randians all over the place, but wanted to make sure before i engaged you as such. needless to say, i have my issues. and that's without getting into my opinion of her. i just caution against and get nervous around proclamations such as humans being "naturally free," as it a) fails to differentiate between positive and negative freedoms and uses the loaded terminology of "natural." the term natural is bandied about mainly to either discredit another person's stance (ie. "that's not natural") or to embolden one's own position (ie. "it's the natural way of things") that statement also hinges an the acceptance of a particular epistemology and engendered reasoning (look at me and my fancy words). what i find interesting about many who profess a (politically) libertarian stance is that their world view is actually totally objectivist. that there is one reason, one reality and from that and the individuals perception of that stems the methodology for interaction with others. at the basis is a dogmatic acceptance of what is real and what isn't real. isn't that ultimately just as coercive? doesn't having one accepted and proper rationality require conformity with the world at large and accepted reason? even if self-realized and based solely on the individual's perception, it would seem to be borne of the same Christianized normative impulses that cause the associations of man to terrorize the individual with tyranny and the like. to be glib, it seems that a lot of libertarians are folk pay some taxes they don't want to (join the club) and start throwing the baby out with the bathwater. in doing so, they seek to replace a government bureaucracy with a private bureaucracy. personally, both get on my t!ts.

badly drawn boy in portland, oregon in about 2004 or 2005 or so. kept on messing up and whinging and moaning about it. apparently his granddad had just died and he was taking his poor performance to heart. there was some positive banter coming from the audience but he just couldn't pull it together and started getting testy and rude. i left after the third attempt at playing the same song. at first i gave him the benefit due to him grieving, but then i remembered that when my granddad died, i went to work and sucked it up because i had to pay my rent. but then, i'm not a tortured artist, so what do i know.

just got back from my visit which the missus and i did on all public transit. suggestions based on what we did: - some nice beaches in East Lothian, and Edinburgh is always worth a visit, imo - walk around Byres rd. in Glasgow - Oban (underrated town in my opinion with a fantastic distillery) and the ferry out to Mull (another good distillery there) - Fort William (disagree with it being better than Inverness), which is nice enough as a base for outdoor pursuits. you can splash out and take the steam train to Mallaig over the Glenfinnan viaduct for something like 60 quid for two, or you can buy a cheap day return to Glenfinnan for 6 pounds a piece, hike down to the Glenfinnan monument and then position yourself to take some quality pictures of the steamtrain going over the viaduct, if that is your thing. also, anytime spent on the Isle of Skye is time well spent. and, for what it's worth, we found citylink bus to be pretty fantastic. if anyone has ever taken Greyhound in the US or Canada, citylink is like taking the concorde.

well, so far Ashoka is pulling the better reviews from posters...it may just have to be the destination. cheers. much appreciated.

going to be "in country" in a week or so for a wedding/holiday. taking the mrs. to glasgow and was wondering if anyone could recommend a good indian place on or around byres road. recommendations?

to any and all Canadian Jags

who cares about England? Bob Bradley's Red, White and Blue Army!

do loan signings count? if so, i'd give di giacomo a shout. me no likey. there should be a sub-category for players who are looked upon fondly, were characters, or generally well intentioned, but ultimately kind of useless (in a loving way)...jakup mikkelson or quentin jacobs maybe?

bob bradley's red, white and blue army

i like both League and Union depending on the competition. tri-nations or the six nations for Union and NRL and State of Origins for League. harder to get to watch the latter two in the States than it used to be. i like the six tackle rule in League, it's like downs in American and Canadian football, but used to speed up the game. thing is, League is so staunchly working class and that market has been spoken for in Scotland for 150 years that it seems too tough a market to crack. could you really expect to generate the same passion football experiences for a sport with no strong history north of the border?

nice to see some representation from Oceana, and all with some stories of fandom similar to mine. that said, i'm giving a shout from the wilds of the great Pacific Northwest, specifically the noble Peoples Republic of Cascadia