Losing the plot 158
This is beyond insane.
Like, obviously Rangers aren’t better than Celtic.
This is beyond insane.
Like, obviously Rangers aren’t better than Celtic.
Yesterday, readers, we warned you that “online newspaper polls are self-selecting and vulnerable to manipulation”. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
Below are two news reports from the Scottish Sun this week:
Both of the people arrested were male-bodied individuals who identify as women. As far as we’re aware, neither of them has a Gender Recognition Certificate. They are both the same sex, biologically and legally, and both describe themselves as female.
Yet in giving statements about their respective arrests, Police Scotland called one of them a man and one of them a woman. And we’re having no luck finding out why.
On January 22nd the violent, abusive transgender activist Jack Douglas, who now uses the name Beth and the Twitter username “pickle_bee” (slang for “somebody who likes dick”), threatened that feminist campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen’s imminent “Standing For Women” event in Glasgow was going to be disrupted by the “furry” community, who happen to be hosting a gathering at the Crowne Plaza that same weekend.
The intimidatory protest was also publicised by SNP MSP Christina McKelvie, who led the standing ovation the Scottish Parliament gave Beth and his creepy friends the day it passed the Gender Recognition Reform bill.
“Why? What possible grudge could furries have against women?”, a friend giggled, as I related this news to her. But to answer that we have to know who these people are.
It’s been a rough old week for the First Minister.
And next week’s not looking much better.
This is incredible.
We couldn’t put it better than Alba MP Neale Hanvey, who said:
The SNP are a flailing shambles of incompetence, under a leader fast losing her iron grip on her own party as they watch her turning it into a laughing stock with growing horror. More and more disquiet reaches our ears from within her increasingly leaky and nervous Parliamentary groups. Who will be the first to tie their courage to a flagpole and make the move to mutiny? We can only wait and see.
Last night we couldn’t help chuckling at this.
Because as someone else on Twitter mocked, what’s actually laughable is the idea that criminals would never engage in any kind of deception in order to commit crimes, and that someone like Peter Tatchell would be so idiotic as to suggest such a thing.
But tonight it’s not even blackly comic.
…by which we mean “IQs in the history of the Scottish Parliament”.
Put a cushion on your desk before you start listening to this, gang, or you might hurt your jaw. Because surely nobody quite as paralysingly, catastrophically thick as this clueless, bumbling, deranged and dangerous imbecile has ever been allowed to make the laws of Scotland before. We wouldn’t let her make orange squash, to be honest.
And yes, we’re including Kezia Dugdale and Jamie Greene in that reckoning.
(If you weren’t aware, the UK government HAS now decided to use a Section 35 order to block the appalling Gender Recognition Reform bill. We support it wholeheartedly.)
The response to our post of last night has been astonishing.
(Although we’re not sure how “new followers” is being calculated there. We actually have more than 500 extra followers since 8pm – we can only assume that it’s only counting those who right-clicked and followed from that specific tweet.)
And part of the reason is that it’s plain that almost nobody knew about the report, even though it came out three months ago (when Wings was still in retirement). We had to dig deep to find any media coverage of it at all, and what there was was cursory at best, and sometimes a lot worse.
As a journalist, readers, sometimes you want to pep a story up a bit. From time to time, it’s perfectly legitimate to sensationalise a relatively minor aspect of something in order to draw attention to a worthwhile but intrinsically dull subject.
At other times, you find yourself in the strange position of having to talk a subject down as much as you can, because if you simply report the facts calmly and neutrally it’ll sound so outrageous and ridiculous and deranged that everyone will think you’ve gone full-on, tinfoil-hat, pencils-up-the-nose insane.
Today is the second kind of day.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.