All show, no game 68
Posted on
December 01, 2018 by
Chris Cairns
Quick context check 174
Posted on
November 30, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The front page lead of today’s Scottish Daily Mail:
As alert readers of this site will know, the Mail has a particular fondness for presenting statistics bereft of any context so that people have no idea how big or small they really are. So is 1,600 passengers a week receiving compensation for delays a lot or a little? Let’s find out.
Something smells fishy 275
Posted on
November 29, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Pretending to be stupid 797
Posted on
November 25, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
All political discourse is plagued with genuine imbeciles, of course. But what’s far more depressing is when educated and normally perceptive people merely act like imbeciles for money, such as the case of Alex Massie in the Sunday Times today.
Because for the last two years, commentators who ought to know better have insisted in presenting Scotland’s choice as between Brexit or Brexit plus independence, and solemnly concluding that the uncertainties and risks of the latter being piled on top of those of the former prove that independence is no solution.
And we don’t care to have our intelligence insulted in that way.
Helping out Murdo 250
Posted on
November 23, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A surprising convert 93
Posted on
November 22, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
A different kind of beat 105
Posted on
November 22, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So this was in the Times football section today:
And you find yourself thinking, “Well gee, why might THAT be, Alex?”
Britain really is this stupid 136
Posted on
November 21, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
And we’re sure these guys are at least partly to blame.
The dust of the sawdust 269
Posted on
November 20, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re so far beyond mere “scraping the barrel” now.
Unhappy with polls based on asking the simple and clear question “Should Scotland be an independent country?”, and which have been stubbornly refusing to show any movement against independence, our dear old pals at Scotland In Union recently commissioned one of their own seeking to muddy the waters.
Their brainwave was to try to confuse respondents by tangling up the usual indyref responses (firmly and consistently set in people’s minds over the last seven years as “Yes” and “No”) with the responses associated with the EU referendum (“Remain” and “Leave”), in the hope that Scots – who of course are heavily in favour of Remain – would be fooled and/or brainwashed into saying something different.
And it very very slightly worked, right up to the point where it fell apart.
The staunch defenders 281
Posted on
November 19, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
If we were to write an article every time Murdo Fraser said something moronic, we’d have to rename this site Wings Over Murdo Fraser, and drink an awful lot of Red Bull to be able to cover it all.
Stuff like this, for example, is almost too easy.
43% (actually 45.3% excluding Don’t Knows) is considerably more than Murdo Fraser has ever achieved in an election, either himself or as part of a party. His average over the seven elections he’s contested and lost since 1999 is just 30.1%, and until a blip in 2016 it had been falling lower and lower each time, as people have watched how he performed as an MSP and got less and less keen on the idea.
That’s still actually slightly more than the 28.6% his party secured in Scotland at the last election, though, in what was nevertheless generally regarded as an unusually impressive performance. Two years earlier they gathered just 14.9% of the votes cast.
Yet neither Fraser nor the Tories disappear for a generation every time Scotland tells them to go and get stuffed. Fraser keeps trousering an MSP’s fat salary despite two decades of unbroken and unequivocal personal rejection from the electorate, even as he demands that the independence movement gives up after losing ONE vote.
But in his defence, his leader’s not setting him much of an example.
