Any rational assessment of Scottish (or indeed UK or world) politics at the moment tends to be negative and depressing, so since it’s a new year we thought we’d make an extra-special effort at writing something positive.
Unfortunately that does require us to enter the realm of fantasy. But hey, everybody needs a little holiday from time to time, right?
As a lifelong political geek and former SNP and Alba Party member, I’ve spent years supporting Scotland’s independence movement. However, over the last few years, I’ve watched the campaign (as opposed to support for independence) wither away. Being a Scottish nationalist has become increasingly disheartening, like watching someone you love succumb to a slow, debilitating illness. In frustration, I switched off from my homeland and turned my focus to the drama of US politics.
Over the last three years I immersed myself in it, watching both left and right-wing outlets. I became so hooked and invested that I jumped on a plane to Washington DC for the 2024 election. I canvassed with DC Democrats in rural Pennsylvania (that’s me third from the left in the pic below), attended Kamala Harris’s concession rally, and went to Trump’s only watch party in DC.
My journey led me to believe that Scotland’s independence campaign could learn a great deal from Trump’s victory and the Democrats’ failure.
So it looks like the USA has elected a mad orange rapist convicted of 34 felonies who could yet be in jail by the time of his inauguration. (He would remain President even if that happened, which would be really funny.) And we can’t even blame them for it, because the alternative they were offered was, remarkably and stupendously, worse.
Wings called it like we called Trump’s first victory (and most other things). We tweeted this last year when thinking about the upcoming election. It’s a variant on something we wrote about on Wings eight and a half years ago. We’re posting it again now in the desperate hope that one day, maybe, far in the future, someone will actually listen.
But, y’know, we’re not holding our breath or anything.
In the 1990s, Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon at Falkirk Royal Infirmary, performed a pair of amputations on two men. Neither of the men involved had anything physically wrong with them, but both were suffering from apotemnophilia – a rare psychiatric condition involving the desire to have healthy limbs amputated.
Sufferers, counterintuitively, claim not to feel “whole” with four limbs and obsess over having their unwanted body parts chopped off. Smith argued the surgeries were life-saving, claiming the patients would commit suicide otherwise.
Apotemnophiles, like autogynephiles, insist that there is no erotic element, but it was later discovered that one of the men Smith operated on ran an amputee fetish website.
Upon investigation, the hospital deemed the procedures unethical. Smith was banned from mutilating healthy bodies (although he was found not to have breached any of the hospital’s rules at the time and not sanctioned), and the dubious experiment ended.
But let’s imagine for a moment an alternate reality.
In many ways, the fabricated, hysterical furore of Humza Yousaf Vs Elon Musk is the ultimate in summer-silly-season politics stories.
Absurdly plainly, the former First Minister ISN’T going to take any legal action against the billionaire owner of Twitter. He only likes bullying small nurseries, and even then he doesn’t follow through. He didn’t even sue us for calling him racist a few months ago, so there’s zero chance he’s going to square up to the world’s richest man.
(And Get Away With It)
You’d have to be living in a pretty strict prison not to have heard the big story from today’s Olympics in Paris, in which male Algerian cheat Imane Khelefi was put in a boxing ring with young Italian woman Angela Carini and allowed to hit her in the head for 46 seconds until she retired, in tears and in fear for her safety, saying “I had to preserve my life”.
Sound like your kind of fun, men? It’s surprisingly easy!
Yesterday was “Transgender Day Of Remembrance”, which was the 41st “special” day of 2023 so far for trans people.
(Including but not limited to International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia; International Pronouns Day; International Transgender Day Of Visibility; Transgender Awareness Week and of course the whole of “Pride Month”, which is now an almost entirely trans-focused event).
Citizens of Scotland and the UK were solemnly instructed to “remember the many trans people whose lives have been tragically cut short by violence”, although weirdly none of the politicians issuing the orders actually named any.
However, since we’re endlessly being told that trans people are the most marginalised, oppressed and vulnerable members of our society, and that an actual “trans genocide” is currently in progress, we expect there have been loads.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
