Wings Over Scotland

My Retropie setup is my favourite physical thing I’ve ever owned. For a total cost of under £200 (the Retropie box itself, plus a monitor and a double arcade joystick), I have instant access to just about the entire history of videogaming up to and including the original Playstation (plus some later stuff too, like the Nintendo DS).

But the physicality of it makes a huge difference. It’s hard to overstate what a complete revelation switching the Pi from a little box under my living-room TV controlled with Playstation joypads to a stand-up machine with proper joysticks was. It changed from something that was nice to have a little play on once in a while to something I use for pleasure every single day.

It’s basically become magic.

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We’ve noticed a fair few Unionists this week proudly claiming that an independent Scotland would have been too broke to survive the coronavirus pandemic. They might not listen to our many and comprehensive rebuttals, but maybe they’d heed the words of Tony Blair, from way back in October 1987:

The sliding doors of history, there, readers. When Unionists tell you Scotland is feeble, remember who made it that way, and never forget how it could have been.

I still don’t like JK Rowling, for reasons I set out earlier this week. I certainly never in a million years imagined I’d ever find myself in a position where I respected her 50 times more than I do Nicola Sturgeon.

And yet, here we are.

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We’ve often said on Wings Over Scotland that we really don’t mind if journalists are biased. Everyone is biased, including us – we’d just rather people stopped pretending to be impartial when they weren’t. But what we do really hate about the Scottish media is just how astonishingly bad at its job it is.

A particularly striking example arose recently.

Pretty much every newspaper and broadcaster in the country carried the sad story of former Labour MP Paul Sweeney‘s fall from besuited lawmaker to skint benefits claimant. And yet not a single one of them asked the question that literally every single reader of the story would have been shouting at their screen.

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More great news, right?

Except, sadly, it’s completely untrue.

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Good news, everyone – there’s been another surge.

Go back to your constituencies and prepare for indyref2! Yes, again.

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This site is not terribly inclined towards sympathy for popular children’s author Joanne Kathleen Rowling. We’re still waiting on an apology for her donating a crucial million pounds towards ensuring Scotland stayed ruled by Tories and got dragged out of the EU against its will, on the bonkers premise that voting No would magically put Scots in a position of unprecedented popularity and power within the UK.

As a smart piece of analysis it’s right up there with “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance”, and it would have been nice if at some point in the last six years she’d held her hands up and gone “Y’know what, I called that one really badly wrong. Sorry about the whole Tory/Brexit thing, everyone. We all make mistakes”.

(Wings, of course, got it exactly right at the time.)

We still don’t think she deserves seven years in prison, though.

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Oh no, someone’s let Ian Murray say words again.

There’s only one small problem with that complaint.

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We’re STILL officially on holiday, readers, and that means that for the last four months we’ve barely watched the news or looked at a newspaper, because who wants to be depressed by being lied to by a never-ending parade of scumbags when they’re on holiday? Not us, and we’ll tell you that for nothing.

So we’re grateful to alert readers who still point us to stuff like this.

EIGHT YEARS since Scottish Labour got into bed with the Tories to ensure the Tories kept ruling Scotland, and they still haven’t grasped why they don’t get the “protect us from the Tories” vote any more. Honestly, folks, if it wasn’t so tragic it’d be hilarious.

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We’ve been fobbed off again with another generic response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, which again wholly fails to answer our simple and legitimate journalistic question, and to which nobody has been prepared to sign their name.

(We should also note in passing that not a single Scottish newspaper appears to have followed up on the story in that last link except the Sunday National, btw.)

But this one is considerably more disturbing. You can read it below if you want to know what shameless, transparent corruption sounds like.

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