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Darren McGarvey 94

Posted on February 18, 2021 by

It would be improper not to note that in addition to this:

Darren McGarvey has contacted me directly by email this evening with what I take to be a sincere apology, which I’ve accepted as such.

(It was a private communication and won’t be reproduced here.)

I have no problem at all with people disliking me and saying so – I’m hardly a shrinking violet – but I can’t abide hypocrisy, which is what the massive pile-on from friends of Neil Mackay yesterday amounted to, and while I couldn’t give the slightest toss about the opinions of the people involved, even one person doing the decent thing over what was said deserves to be acknowledged. While I’m sure that we’ll continue to disagree profoundly and strongly on many or most things, what’s right is right.

The voice of reason speaks 220

Posted on February 17, 2021 by

You give these BBC types a bit of money and fame and oh dear.

Not sure what the poor horse did, mind you.

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Freudian slippage 173

Posted on February 17, 2021 by

Yeah, that sounds about right.

(Thanks to an alert reader for that one.)

The best a man can get 190

Posted on February 16, 2021 by

You can’t ask for more from a day than making this sleazy wee sexual pervert weep.

But be assured we’ll keep reaching for the prize time and again, folks.

Oh, and never, ever forget this true fact – Wings Over Scotland wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t for James Mackenzie. We hope he’s in tears about that forever.

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More wasted days 146

Posted on February 16, 2021 by

Lady Dorrian’s full judgement and reasoning in respect of last week’s hearing involving The Spectator has been published on the Scottish Courts website.

It contains nothing that those who listened in on the case by telephone last week didn’t hear for themselves – it’s simply an 11-page summary of what was debated in court and casts no new light on what Lady Dorrian said at the time.

We’ll be very interested to see whether or not The Spectator – or perhaps more to the point its lawyers, who we must presume had vetted and cleared the initial publication just as Alex Salmond’s lawyers had – now feels able to restore the redacted paragraph that it removed after what it can now be publicly revealed was a threat from the Crown Office (a threat also received by this website).

The magazine’s response today is non-committal on the subject.

While it is this site’s belief that the paragraph in question DOES NOT identify anyone as a complainer – the Crown Office has not communicated which “other evidence” it feels could be combined with the paragraph, which makes no reference whatsoever to the criminal case, to provide identification – the restoration of the missing paragraph would certainly appear to provide circumstantial evidence to that effect, something which would be entirely due to the intervention of the Crown Office.

But overall, the needless delay in publishing this document has merely run down the clock on the inquiry by another week – time that it can ill afford – without providing any real additional clarity.

(We’re a bit puzzled as to why The Spectator’s counsel appears to have given up so easily on the second element of their application, which sought to specifically permit the publication of both Salmond and Geoff Aberdein’s written evidence.)

The fact that the judgement wasn’t released yesterday probably means, at a minimum, no more evidence sessions until next week, as the committee generally only meets on Tuesdays. We hope that doesn’t become a crucial issue, but we fear that the written judgement is sufficiently tepid that the crooked SNP members of the committee, and the spineless Andy Wightman, will use it to justify rejecting Salmond’s evidence and therefore hearing from him in person, rendering the entire undertaking moot anyway.

Agents of disinformation 154

Posted on February 16, 2021 by

Ulster-bred (specifically the ultra-Loyalist stronghold of Antrim) columnist Neil Mackay, a man who’s been systematically undermining and dividing the Yes movement since at least 2015 while claiming to be part of it, has an opinion piece in the Herald today.

In its own way it’s an exemplar of the infiltrator’s craft. Let’s take a look.

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In defence of Glenn Campbell 254

Posted on February 15, 2021 by

Okay, we’re trolling a bit with the title there. But fair’s fair.

Because some REALLY shonky, and very obviously co-ordinated, shenanigans went on this past weekend, but at least the above is the truth.

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Striking a blow for equality 172

Posted on February 14, 2021 by

The SNP have plumbed some real depths recently, but this is a new low.

Although we suppose on one level you could spin it as a positive, namely that disabled people really are just like everyone else – they can be despicable scumbags too.

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Differences of ability 121

Posted on February 14, 2021 by

Colette Walker is leader of the Independence for Scotland Party, and registered blind.

“There exists a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’

To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'” – GK Chesterton

I started writing this post two weeks ago, incensed at the behaviour of the SNP NEC and their proposals to introduce self-ID for disability. Then they sacked Joanna Cherry from the front bench.

Joanna Cherry is probably one of the few people left in the SNP exec that even knows what Chesterton’s Fence is, and its importance in lawmaking. As a gay woman, she understands on a practical level the issues round equality legislation.

It also means that she’s a particular target for certain groups. Ye shall know a genius by this sign; all the dunces of the world are in confederacy against her.

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Representing Scotland 244

Posted on February 14, 2021 by

Two weeks ago a Wings scoop caused quite a furore to erupt around the SNP’s ham-fisted and corruptly-motivated attempts to increase BAME and disabled representation at this year’s Holyrood election.

We’ve always been opposed to what were until recently known as “quotas”, and prior to that “positive discrimination”, but have now been cunningly rebranded as “diversity and inclusion” because that’s a much more difficult thing to say you object to.

It’s easy to make an honourable-sounding case against any form of “discrimination”, because decent and civilised people are taught to automatically think of discrimination as a bad thing, even if you put “positive” in front of it.

So the word “quotas” was adopted to move the concept from a pejorative term to a neutral noun – objecting to “quotas” doesn’t sound intolerant, any more than objecting to (say) “procedures” does. So that’s fine, because you can still discuss it like adults without too much unpleasantness.

But those pushing the agenda got smarter still by changing the name again. If you say you object to “diversity and inclusion”, you sound like a monster and a racist, because diversity and inclusion are plainly good things – no decent person wants to live in a monoculture, or to exclude anybody from society – and so the debate is immediately drowned out by self-righteous tossers screaming “BIGOT!” and “NAZI!” at everyone.

And yet in the context of social policy the three phrases mean the exact same thing. They’re all systems for overriding raw democracy so as to increase the representation of selected groups at the expense of other groups, for one reason or another.

(Sometimes it’s ostensibly just penance for historical wrongs, while at other times it’s supposedly for economic benefits, and so on.)

And while the proponents of those systems will openly argue that the only group being disadvantaged is straight white men so it’s all fine (because nobody likes straight white men and anyone standing up for them can be easily dismissed as a “gammon” for lots of woke points and Twitter likes), it isn’t even remotely close to the truth.

Because in “diversity and inclusion”, some groups are a lot more included than others.

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The Other Alphabet Gang 221

Posted on February 13, 2021 by

The two main centres of infection for the woke entryist poison currently disfiguring the SNP are Stirling and Aberdeen, where they coalesce around two Westminster MPs – Twitler Youth gauleiter Alyn Smith and the worryingly unhinged Kirsty Blackman.

In recent months Wings has documented numerous attempts by the faction (which is chiefly characterised by its hyper-extremist and fundamentalist version of transgender ideology) to gerrymander and fix the party’s internal election processes to ensure that its disciples – who are enormously unpopular among the grassroots membership and have repeatedly failed to win by playing fair – get selected as candidates.

But now they’re really scraping the barrel.

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The illusion of choice 156

Posted on February 13, 2021 by

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