Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers may have noticed that this site is once more under attack from Twitter. Following the suspension of the main Wings account last December, and one we set up for the prospective political party – suspensions which Twitter has never justified, because the Wings account did not break any of its rules – it has now suspended my personal account (@RevStu) and the account of old spinoff site The Sealand Gazette, both supposedly for evading the ban on the @WingsScotland account.

This allegation is clearly a nonsense, because the RevStu account predated the Wings one by years and was in constant use from its creation up until this morning, and the Gazette account was only used briefly as an emergency backup for the RevStu one when it was temporarily locked at the weekend for unspecified “suspicious activity”, which is a technical security issue rather than a suspension for supposed wrongdoing.

The actual reason for the suspension of all four accounts is this site’s opposition to controversial and massively unpopular transgender ideology, which Twitter supports and which is currently the subject of some hotly-contested and important lawmaking.

(It’s the same reason why Twitter has banned scores, probably hundreds of feminists for the most absurdly innocuous of tweets perceived as challenging trans ideology.)

In other words, these actions are direct censorship and deliberate interference in the political affairs of a country by an unaccountable and unelected foreign corporation serving the interests of a massive right-wing pharmacological lobby.

And even people who despise Wings Over Scotland should be alarmed by that.

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This site used to have a running joke about the number of times the Scottish media screamed “SNP CIVIL WAR!” whenever any two people in the party – one of whom would invariably be either Jim Sillars or Gordon Wilson – disagreed with each other about whether you should put the milk or the boiling water in a cup of tea first.

Well, here’s what a real one looks like.

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We’re so underwhelmed and nonplussed by this information that to be honest it barely even occurred to us to write it up, but here we go anyway:

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Anyone up for their taxes being used to bail out Scottish newspapers?

No, we didn’t think so.

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Yeah, we know we said we weren’t going to say anything else about the COVID-19 crisis, but sometimes there’s just too much stupid going around to stay silent.

A disturbing number of people appear to have interpreted the undoubted seriousness of the pandemic to mean that nobody is ever allowed to be even slightly happy for the briefest of moments until it’s all over.

As a result, while half the country is full of people just trying to cope as best they can while acting sensibly and responsibly within both the letter and spirit of the emergency restrictions, the other half has elected itself officers of the Lockdown Gestapo, pointing fingers and shrieking at anyone deemed not to be miserable enough.

Please, please, can we stop doing that, folks?

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Scotland’s media is still unable to contain its outpouring of bitter, resentful rage over Alex Salmond’s exoneration by a jury on trumped-up sexual assault charges.

Flailing blindly in all directions it’s achieving little other than to embarrass itself, such as last night when Scotland On Sunday had to change its front page in a late panic. But the media’s toxic fury at being denied Salmond’s head on a pole has also led it to do something far, far more serious and reckless.

And every one of them knows exactly what they’ve done.

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It will come as little surprise to any observer of the Scottish media for the last decade that the trial of Alex Salmond is to continue indefinitely after the actual court case that cleared him of all charges.

With very occasional honourable exceptions, including some from rather unexpected sources, the Scottish press has been – even by its own spectacularly low standards – an absolute sewer for the past week. Wings has taken the decision not to link to any of the most disgusting articles, even as archives, because frankly in the current stressful situation none of us needs any extra poison in our headspace.

Scotland’s political journalists have been unable to contain their seething fury at being robbed of the head on a pike that they were all expecting and salivating about like Pavlov’s dogs. But scumbags are gonna scumbag, and that’s not news. What’s far more alarming is something in today’s papers that they didn’t write.

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