Alert and intrepid reader Dougie Grant gets among Her Majesty’s most loyal subjects.
(Alternative title: “A Journey Towards Unity”.)
So everyone’s fighting about Gaelic again. Provoked by a minor story about a Gaelic dictionary MSM and alt-media pundits are flying at each other with daggers over a language spoken by almost nobody on Earth and on which the government spends a few measly and irrelevant pennies, trying to turn it into a proxy war over politics and the constitution and fascism and genocide and goodness knows what else.
We’ve covered the political nonsense around the issue numerous times on this site, and we’re not about to do so again here. This, as befits the Soapbox section, is a purely personal view, which will doubtless attract more furious shrieking from the sort of people who long ago lost the ability to listen to a counterpoint – or indeed tolerate the mere concept of one – let alone consider it or debate it without abuse.
But hey ho. After a while you just learn to tune that stuff out, so let’s go.
With regard to this, some important commentary:
(And some more.)
The text in the image below might be the scariest words we’ve ever read.
If you’re not sure why, read a little closer.
We could all do with some cheering up at the moment, so it’s with great pleasure that we can announce fantastic news for Scotland – the ancient plague of sectarianism has finally been defeated once and for all!
At least, we assume it MUST have been, because this week the Scottish Parliament is set to give its final assent – thanks to Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the all-important Scottish Greens – to abolishing the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish population.
And as we can plainly observe from events yesterday, they would only be doing that if sectarianism was no longer a problem and it was safe to send out an encouraging message to the bigots that their worldview is now acceptable in Scotland again.
Which we were yesterday, we couldn’t help noticing this:
And that reminded us that we still had some more poll results to reveal.
We’re a bit annoyed about this, because we were going to give the Absolute Fanny Of The Week award to Anas Sarwar every week as a joke, but now it seems we can’t.
So that’s a professional journalist who’s studied the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, or OBFA, so intently and diligently that he keeps calling it “OBAF” instead. But that’s not the stupidest of it.
An alert reader this weekend linked us to a 1963 speech by the famed American civil rights and racial equality campaigner Malcolm X.
We’d never heard of it before, which is probably to our shame, but as we read it we were overcome by an inexplicable sense of incredible familiarity.
We present it to you below for your interest, without further comment or editing, but we’ve included a few pictures just to break up the block of text.
As if we hadn’t had enough controversy this week, it’s time to tackle the big issues.
The Scottish Sun’s been running stories for the last couple of days about the heresy that’s shortly going to be committed against Scotland’s most legendary iconic brand.
Penny-pinching Cumbernauld drinks giant AG Barr – which carefully avoided getting involved in the independence referendum so as not to upset anyone – is about to slash most of the sugar out of Irn-Bru despite there already being two low-sugar versions of it available, and the paper has called in a few consumers to decry the move.
But how does the wider public feel? Well, as it happens we’ve got poll data on that too.
In our latest Panelbase poll, as usual we took the opportunity to ask various social-attitudes questions as well as political ones, and some which span both categories. One of the most controversial posts ever on Wings addressed the subject of Gaelic, and having given everyone two-and-a-bit years to calm the hell down we thought we’d see what the Scottish electorate thought.
That’s a pretty tight call. Let’s have a wee delve in the data depths.
Scotland’s favourite Scottish movie is still Braveheart, folks.
But the devil, as always, is in the detail.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
