I apologise in advance to readers for the personal indulgence of this post.
Some months ago, quite coincidentally, I happened to avail myself of Twitter’s archive function, which allows users to download their entire tweet history. For various reasons I’ve been looking at it recently, and until I did I’d been unaware that it records not just a user’s own tweets, but also the tweets from other people that they’ve retweeted.
I’ve collected some of Wings’ tweets and retweets – in reverse chronological order – below. (Famously, of course, RTs aren’t necessarily endorsements, but you can decide on the underlying tone for yourself. Each of them links to the original tweet so you can see the whole conversation, or click on the links being referenced.)
They’re all on one subject, by way of illustration, because Twitter is a transient medium full of people all too eager to jump at the slightest excuse to make spurious and hateful allegations about everything (and anyone) under the sun to serve their own agendas, and for the sake of the future of human discourse it’s worth remembering that nothing exists in isolation or free of context, and we shouldn’t jump too easily to conclusions.
Wings had just over 300,000 unique readers in June, despite taking the last couple of weeks off ourselves, bringing the monthly average readership for the first half of 2017 to 346,226. That’s 55,532 up on the same period last year, or a 19% increase.
Normally the amateur blogger, unqualified would-be economist and unsuccessful dog-food salesman that BBC Scotland and the Daily Record employ on a regular basis to openly troll Yes voters restricts himself, when attacking this site, to crude abuse or smear and innuendo like the below, tweeted on Holocaust Memorial Day last year:
You very rarely get useful stats about online newspaper readership, so we were quite intrigued by this snippet on tonight’s BBC2 Scotland documentary “Paper Thistle”, about the 200th anniversary of The Scotsman.
We don’t know what the numbers are or how brief the period was, but Wings’ average traffic is higher now than it was in 2014, while we suspect The Scotsman is moving in the opposite direction. For a single-issue website to be anywhere even in the same ballpark as a two-centuries-old broadsheet news brand with scores of full-time writers and production staff and a daily newsstand presence is a remarkable thing indeed.
We might start doing classifieds and sport just to see what happens.
Just a brief update on some legal shenanigans. Having received no response to TWO lawyers’ letters, I’ve filed a court claim against Express Newspapers over false and defamatory claims made in an article by Siobhan McFadyen (sourced by JK Rowling) on the Sunday Express website of 30 October, as detailed in this Wings article.
The court fee was partly funded by popular politics pundit John McTernan.
I wasn’t going to mention this on the site because it’s basically a personal matter, but as most readers don’t use Twitter or Facebook it probably ought to be briefly filed for the record, given the amount of media coverage there’s been.
And since we don’t generally do stat posts any more (the last proper one was a year ago), we hope you’ll forgive us a small indulgence to mark the milestone with a light sprinkling of facts and figures.
The popular children’s author and litigious bully JK Rowling, whose personal wealth is measured in hundreds of millions of pounds, has been devoting her time to the tricky task of finding people being rude on Twitter again.
In an attempt to prove that the independence referendum (described by the Scottish Police Federation as “robust but overwhelmingly good-natured”) had been every bit as grotesque as the Brexit one which has seen an enormous rise in serious hate crimes in England and Wales – comprising thousands of incidents up to and including murder – Rowling had cherry-picked out a few unpleasant-sounding social-media comments and compiled them into a series of delightful collages.
One of the comments (visible in the top-right corner of Rowling’s composite image) came from the Twitter account of this site. And we thought it sounded a bit off, so we had a quick check to see if we’d really said something so mean.
Geri on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “– American bases. Legitimate targets. That’s where they attacked from. They’ve a right to render them destroyed. – Targeting blow…” Mar 26, 11:09
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Sorry to break the news Northy. They were all hanged last Wednesday or was that the athletes. It’s hard to…” Mar 26, 10:57
Captain Caveman on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “@Aidan Well, quite. 🙂 Even if it is the case that the US has acted “illegally” in its war with…” Mar 26, 10:52
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Why don’t we all chip in and get Alison Johnston a big box of crayons for her/his/it’s retirement.” Mar 26, 10:44
Geri on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Would you just look at all those women & you girls not being dragged out & beaten for not wearing…” Mar 26, 10:37
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Nothing like a threat to the gravy boat to bring the Snats crawling out of the woodwork.” Mar 26, 10:37
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “For all the good it will do them. They would be as well to. Seriously. A big leap from the…” Mar 26, 10:35
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “I tried to use words you could understand. I’m your conscious Geri. You know that nagging feeling somethings wrong. That…” Mar 26, 10:31
Red on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: ““Are you not describing a catastrophe that culminated under two centuries ago, after a process stretching back over centuries?” No,…” Mar 26, 10:27
Aidan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Whereas I suppose; – Bombing the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman; – murdering your own citizens engaging in a peaceful…” Mar 26, 10:10
Northcode on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “If the link below don’t work just search yatube for: “Real IRAN : What Western Media Won’t Tell You About…” Mar 26, 09:58
Geri on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “I think you’re on the wrong forum. The Daily Fail is that way —— > You’ll find far more fannies…” Mar 26, 09:30
Cynicus on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Mark Beggan says: 25 March, 2026 at 11:32 pm “WOW! Just seen the SNP advert on Tube.” ======= Seriously? Is…” Mar 26, 09:10
Northcode on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: ““Areswipe…” A brilliant comment, Geri. Insightful, informed, and expertly decorated with ‘rude’. I never tire of reading your stuff.” Mar 26, 08:29
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Amongst the many reasons Nazi Germany lost the war was their policy on women. Unlike the allies German women were…” Mar 26, 08:20
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Leftwing ideology is the lunatics way of getting back at society. A nobody’s way to try and become become a…” Mar 26, 08:09
Geri on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Areswipe, Let’s remind the group this is an illegal war. Every single one of those attacks is a war crime.…” Mar 26, 08:08
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “What age are you. You spout like an angry teenager who has Just read animal farm. Scotlands very own Greta.…” Mar 26, 07:31
Aidan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Having your entire leadership wiped out, your navy destroyed, your army weakened severely and significant damage to your oil exporting…” Mar 26, 06:39
Aidan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “I’d be surprised if 4% of people earn over £100k in Scotland, I’d suggest it’s probably lower than that. But…” Mar 26, 06:27
twathater on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Geri your demolition of the yoonionists on here is something to behold , so much so that Corporal Cave dweller…” Mar 26, 03:41
Cynicus on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Red says: 25 March, 2026 at 5:20 pm “…the Scots will be reduced to a powerless, hated and poor minority…” Mar 26, 02:01
Anthem on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “What do you expect when it’s filled with English unionist parties?” Mar 26, 00:17
Geri on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “Not a bad ad. Punchy with facts & to the point. & TBF, yoons do have a low attention span.…” Mar 26, 00:17
Mark Beggan on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “WOW! Just seen the SNP advert on Tube. Not a party political broadcast but an advert with very colourful and…” Mar 25, 23:32
100%Yes on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “He’s just a bitter and twisted individual. I ignore his site and everything about him. He just attacks anyone who…” Mar 25, 22:37
alan scott on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “And jist lolz at a unionist lecturing on Scotland wasting monies, whilst not being critical of the much more significant…” Mar 25, 22:19
alan scott on Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off: “I know the vast majority on here want Holyrood to be replaced by an independent Scotland. I’m just suggesting Holyrood…” Mar 25, 22:12
