On the eve of Wings Over Scotland’s 2000th post, we thought we’d celebrate.
Because today we learned something strange.
Because if you don’t, your brain sort of refuses to acknowledge that certain things happened, and won’t let you dwell on them lest you lose your grip on reality.
So when we watched Douglas Alexander interviewed on Sunday Politics Scotland today, and heard an answer so bizarre and so spectacularly, flagrantly unrelated to the question he was asked that we briefly thought there might have been a slow-acting hallucinogenic in the cinnamon-and-vanilla cider we were drinking last night, we figured we better get it down in print so we could study it properly and check our sanity.
(Click the image to watch and listen for yourselves.) See what you think.
When someone sent us a collection of tweets in the immediate aftermath of the Clutha tragedy late last year, we decided not to use them. It wasn’t for any great moral reason – we’ve previously highlighted despicable No-camp scumbags making political capital out of the deaths of innocent people – but we were just too sickened and sad (as most Scots were) to waste a moment’s thought on such human dregs.
As the Daily Mail ploughs on with its crusade against “vile cybernats”, though, it seemed worth pointing out for the record just what sort of a place the internet really is, and how pathetic its catalogue of mild swearwords and distaste is in that context.
Stop reading now if you’re easily upset.
The Daily Mail is proving an even more consistent source of comedy than usual of late, nowhere more so than its superb “Cybernat Watch” column (which we were delighted to find ourselves in this morning, on only its second day). Today the collection of partial, out-of-context quotes from random tweets was nestled into a bizarre piece about Labour’s shadow something, Jim Murphy.
As with most articles from the Mail’s Scottish edition it isn’t available online, but we’ve attached the text below so you can digest the full disturbing madness.
So, Ruth Davidson’s been digging herself a big hole on Twitter since yesterday.
We’ve been trying unsuccessfully since last night to find any of these “cabernats” [sic] who’ve supposedly been “outraged” by Mr Hague’s comments. As yet we haven’t managed to locate a single tweet complaining about them. But Davidson’s remarks piqued our curiosity about what Hague had actually said, since we hadn’t yet seen the speech he’ll be giving in Scotland today.
So we went and tracked it down, and suddenly we found ourselves outraged.
Very many years ago, in a previous life, we wrote a short article about the widely misunderstood and endlessly-misapplied principle of “Godwin’s Law”. Regularly cited by idiots who claim that mentioning Hitler or the Nazis in an argument means you automatically lose, it actually says no such thing, and such usage is in fact a wildly irresponsible act consigning the most important lessons of history to the dustbin.
The dangers of arbitratily excluding the Third Reich from mankind’s collective memory in order to be a smartarse on the internet have been illustrated several times by the current UK government as it seeks for ideological reasons to portray whole swathes of British society as subhuman underclasses, but perhaps the most startlingly overt demonstration to date appeared in yesterday’s Independent.
We’re starting to think that we might need to see a medical professional, readers. Things keep happening that we have no recollection of whatsoever. First there was this (still-unsolved) mystery yesterday, and now there’s this:
Wait, what?
This is from today’s Guardian (our emphasis):
Now that’s odd. How would this spokesman know that, given that the UK government refuses to release details of what it’s spending on the anti-independence campaign? If we send in another FOI request claiming to be a No supporter, will we get an answer this time? Maybe we should give it a try.
We know we’ve been talking recently about how the No campaign’s been getting nastier, but it looks like they’re about to ramp things up another notch.
Yikes!
Last night’s edition of Scotland Tonight saw a clearly nervous, rambling and seemingly well-refreshed ex-Labour spin doctor Simon Pia called upon to defend “Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling (“as good a frontman as I can imagine to save Britain”, said the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson in that extraordinary accent of his) from a series of attacks by his own side over his stewardship of the No campaign.
Pia played the usual cards that Labour types do when called upon to defend a man who is now distrusted by a majority of Labour voters. Darling was “substance not style”, a serious man with “cross-party appeal” (if you exclude Labour, the SNP and now seemingly a lot of Tories) who had “filleted” the White Paper (without reading it or understanding the one page he did look at) and saved the nation in 2008 “when we looked into the void”.
But not everyone shares Pia’s view of Darling’s integrity and competence.
We apologise both for the slightly uncouth language in that headline and the mangling of an infamous phrase from the 1995 OJ Simpson murder trial.
But it’s hard to reasonably appraise the conduct of Scotland’s two supposed “quality” newspapers this weekend with regard to the Yes Scotland email hacking incident without using expletives, and that’s just about the mildest level of comment we could muster about the naked lies both have told the Scottish public.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
