Woodstock Jag

Owing to an exam I missed Doolan's goal by about 30 seconds. Great result from a moderate performance. Fraser looked really promising and Flannigan's goal was a howitzer. Only the word "telt" can do it justice.

It doesn't become a loss. It's just that our actual losses were bigger than the transfer fees.

If there's one thing worse than slimebag politicians it's inherited claim to sovereignty along bloodlines at the taxpayers' expense. Both waste the money that is stolen from the taxpayer for negligible benefit in return.

At least three Dundee players should have been sent off, and two of them should have been arrested for assault.

They wanted 400 press passes. They got told to jump off a bridge.

Completely unnecessary changes. Should be more transparency not less. Not that the public purse should be funding them anyway...

Au contraire, you were in full control of the mouse and adequately capable of rolling over the link before clicking. To trick is to use deceit and to exploit weakness without force. To coerce is to subvert the established will through force. Clearly there is no need for state intervention, but merely this incident to serve as an intuitive lesson to the individual. This is, of course, unless you are to propose that you are inherently incapable as an individual of equalling and detecting my guile and deception, which I am sure you aren't suggesting.

There's plenty here Blackpool Jags

Rumour was if he left they'd be after Goodwillie at Dundee United. Their price tag was supposed to be over a million, so if they hold true to that, Rangers might have to look a little lower... perhaps they'd be interested in a certain Aston Martin driver?

Odds on Buchanan moving to Dunfermline for a pittance, scoring 20 goals in half a season including a hat-trick against the Jags and securing them promotion and confirming our relegation? Edit: in case no one has seen, McCall is quoted in The Glaswegian rubbishing the claims Buchanan has been told to find a new club.

Shrek's a good guy, so I'll take that as a compliment.

What a thoroughly unpleasant individual you are.

It's not callous in the slightest. I find states forcing people into cycles of dependency callous. I find increasing the benefits system to such an extent that social mobility is actually reduced callous. I find bailing out the banks, shifting the burden from bondholders onto the general taxpayer callous. I find states telling people what they can and can't do callous and unnecessary. Again, this is absolute bullshit. You and BCJ Jag have both made this point without a shred of evidence in support of it. Ah, so you think that the nanny state which destroys our fundamental freedoms and creates and preserves elites is a good thing? Thanks for making it abundantly clear where you stand. We don't have a free market. We have state aligned protectionist capitalism. It has caused unavoidable damage, and the issue that our politicians are debating is whether to make that pain happen now, or make it more acute later. Libertarianism seeks to transform the way we try to deal with the problems of poverty, worklessness and oppression, since the statist way we have tried before has clearly failed catastrophically. The intervention of state in our lives has done more bad than good, creating as many problems as it solves and undermining basic freedoms which we should be fighting to protect. And again the ridiculous caricature. I would like to think that as a species we value individual responsibility and freedom: two things that the very presence of state attacks with venom. Conservatism is vile. It believes in social hierarchies. It holds hugely anti-immigration instincts. It is instinctively economically protectionist. On social issues, it wrangles with issues such as homosexuality and abortion. It is often highly militaristic and oppressive and undermines a lot of freedoms it purports to wish to preserve. People in this country often don't understand what it means to be a "liberal" because years of social democratic influence on the Lib Dems have often made them anything but. Liberal economics BELIEVE in the free market. Liberal economics believe in a reduction in the role of the state. Liberal economics is anti-protectionist with every bone in its body. To be a liberal is to be economically right wing! Look at the Free Democrats in Germany: they are the most economically right wing of the main parties! Being economically right wing is not a bad thing in the slightest. Libertarianism combines liberal economics (such as that shared by the Orange Book sector of the Lib Dems and the bulk of the Tories) with liberal social policy (which I would argue exists out of the main parties only with the Liberal Democrats). I'm absolutely astonished anyone could think that I don't sympathise with the difficulties described by Dragon and others. That doesn't mean that I have to Kotow to the fanciful claims that this suffering is realistically avoidable or that more government spending is the answer. What I propose is a different solution to the problem; I do not disagree that there is a problem itself. This "life's about more than political theories in books" is getting tiresome. Of course experience shapes people's political views. It doesn't mean that they are prima facie any more right, any more enlightened or any more worthy of respect than those who are younger who have the sheer audacity to disagree with them.

That's genius.

Do you need corrected again? I'm not taking a politics degree.

If ever I care much for what middle aged men think of my appearance, I'll be sure to let you know

Except that's not what anyone on this thread has advocated at all.

Agree to disagree. No, freedom of speech is a negative freedom and a negative freedom only. I hold completely the opposite view from you. Freedom of speech is innate to the liberty man has in the state of nature. Western Governments do not "possess" the right to free speech from the outset. They take from the individual's unadulterated freedom. Being born into a society is involuntary, hence it must be fully dissociated from state. No, that's not a positive freedom. If it is a positive freedom then the negative freedom does not exist. I hold that the negative freedom exists because of the basic principles of private property, so the latter does not exist. Fair point... I hold the view that it is only historical positioning that prevents Locke from being a philosophical anarchist. His attempt to dilute the threshold in consent theory is the one major gripe I have. I hold that the state of nature and civil society are one and the same and that to enter a state requires express and unanimous consent, and it must only be logical for one to vest that consent in as far as that state can better protect one's life, liberty and property. I take the view that society will evolve rather than revolutionise out of statist subjection. For that to happen, though, it needs people like me who believe in the market anarchist end to make the arguments and persuade the undecided to consider the possibility of moving beyond the expressly internally political assumptions of the current discourse. Ah, sorry, I misunderstood what you were driving at. All I was saying is that I don't particularly desire to participate in subsistence farming or squatting because I live in a nice flat and I don't do early mornings, let alone to dig up dirt! Believing in market anarchism is not inconsistent with full participation in present society. Embarrassing your captors with reason and ridicule into unlocking the handcuffs is a more satisfactory solution, though In the truly free market they just wouldn't get a job because they'd provide no value to an employer. Problem solved.

A job is not a job for life. That might not be fair, but it's reality. Three points. Firstly employers will use government cuts as an excuse to trim their workforce with the general economic climate proving less favourable. Labour is for many sectors the most expensive cost and if an employee's net worth is under threat, the harsh reality is that their job is under threat. Secondly the example of private contracts is a prime example of companies being too reliant on individual clients instead of spreading their business interests. Is that really any different from a company which relies on one big private sector contract which falls through because the client cannot secure the finance? Thirdly why do you assume that it is somehow the Coalition's fault that government is pulling out of contracts with private sector companies? Labour wrecked the public finances leaving a huge deficit to be plugged. It's like blaming the Dundee administrator for making players redundant when it was the Dundeee BOD who were responsible for the shortfall accumulating in the first place. Please don't take this personally, but right to stay in a house being rented only exists on the precondition that rent is paid continuously. I'm astonished anyone could think anything else... Life's not easy. Resources are finite. Sometimes people have to suffer. Sometimes some will suffer more than others. Sometimes that won't seem fair. That's just life. No one's saying they're the best thing since sliced bread. People need to face up to the reality, however, that these cuts have come out of necessity to safeguard the jobs of 5-10 years time. Failure to deal with public sector debt over the next 3-4 years would mean recession becomes depression, and depression becomes default, long-term unemployment would rocket, government wouldn't be able to afford to help those struggling, and there would be no obvious way out as the government tries desperately to pay off a debt that behaves like a neglected credit card. People also need to face up to the reality that it was under Labour's watch, not the Tories' or the Lib Dems' that these economic problems were allowed to ferment. Labour were going to make £53 BILLION of cuts over the course of the next Parliament. They now go around opposing every cut saying that it will hurt group x, y or z, blithely ignoring the fact that most, if not all of the pain being seen with (thus far, very small) cuts would have also had to happen if they were still in power. Labour also wanted to increase National Insurance, putting thousands of jobs at risk and making it harder for small businesses to grow their way out of the recession. Let's be completely clear about this: these cuts are not the fault of the Coalition. They are the FAULT of their predecessors who made unrealistic spending commitments off the back of a fag-packet, especially from 2007 onwards in a desperate act of political electioneering without any consideration of the consequences. Can't say I disagree with that. I'm sorry if you found that condescending and it certainly wasn't the intention. I just fundamentally do not agree that someone has an unqualified and indefinite right to the house they live in if they do so whilst under a standard security or if they rent.

Cutting civil servant numbers isn't a false economy. Excess bureaucrats should get themselves to You eulogise about Marx and dialectic materialism. If you can't call that Commy, then there's no such thing as a communist. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Self-assessment has hugely decreased the cost of tax collection and hasn't made it any less efficient. The only difference is that instead of wasting valuable hours on routine tax returns, civil servants instead EXAMINE the completed accounts of those who self-assess and flag up anything that is obviously wrong. More civil servants would not necessarily increase the amount of dosh brought in. It would have to be in conjunction with a (probably very expensive) overhaul of HMRC procedure and practices to have an effect worthy of the additional resources. As I recall, the Coalition actually ARE putting more money back into anti-tax-avoidance measures (£6 billion IIRC) to mitigate the culture that was bred of tolerating tax avoidance by Labour in the last 13 years. And to say "you are talking shite" is not designed to discredit the person. It is a judgment on the evident lack of logic and reason in their argument. When the Commies all team up, market anarchists have to fight their corner. It would be profoundly hypocritical to slunk off and surrender to the coercive evil of statist "you want to trample on the poor and then piss on their face" propaganda.

Like they already do? If you seriously think that promoting and recruiting a few hundred more civil servants is going to make billions magically appear out of thin air, then you're deluded. Do you actually know what "ad hominem abuse" means? Saying that someone is "talking shite" is not ad hominem abuse. Saying that someone "is a shite" is ad hominem abuse.

For someone who claims to be a man of the world and open minded, you're tremendously dogmatic. I'd suggest a swatch of Murray Rothbard's work. Three publications I found particularly insightful are: The Ethics of Liberty - he destroys the legitimacy of state Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature - he examines the reality of state-led attempts to engineer equality inevitably leading to coercion and consolidation of elites Perhaps most pertinently in today's environment, The Mystery of Banking - in 1983 he shows huge foresight predicting that state-assisted fractional-reserve-banking has devastating effects on the populus And a cursory glance of the following 3 works wouldn't go a miss either: Milton Friedman - Capitalism and Freedom Friedrich Hayek - The Road to Serfdom Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

It should gradually decrease as the economy recovers. Slowly but steadily. Their life, liberty and property aren't being violated by government cuts. No one is inherently entitled to a job. They must earn it. No one is inherently entitled to a house. They must earn it and pay for it (if you have a mortgage, you have not yet earned it... that's the whole point of a security on a loan). They shouldn't expect everything to be handed to them on a plate by the taxpayer. The world has finite resources and sometimes people have to suffer because there simply isn't the money to sustain their lifestyle.

I have never met a right wing woman. Shame really. But the consequences would be so utterly ridiculous that it shouldn't be taken seriously. By concentrating on tax alone you would force all wealth creators abroad, stifle business' ability to grow and piss off the population when a trade deficit balloons. Mervyn King is an economically illiterate moron who doesn't know his arse from his elbow. Tax avoidance is virtually impossible to close down. By closing one loophole you create another, such as is the nature of the hideously complex tax law. Some tax avoidance is DELIBERATE: indeed government often create tax avoidance schemes to encourage certain types of behaviour (see ISAs and employee registered pension schemes as prime examples). Tax collection has always and will always be chronically inefficient. Saying you can improve tax collection is like saying you can cut government waste by billions. It's a nice idea in theory but in practice it just doesn't work. And if tax collection was so horrifically inefficient under a Labour Government, what makes you think that the Coalition can suddenly wave a magic wand and close all the gaps? When a gap is being estimated between two such huge figures it rather suggests that a ) the tax system is simply too complicated b ) they have been concocted using artistic licence c ) it's such a meaningless hypothetical as to be of no practical tangible use. Because you are!