It seems that it’s fine to farm important judgments out to mysterious shadowy figures who just make important chunks of them up out of thin air, and then issue them in your own name. Back in your boxes, plebs.
This clip was broadcast on ITV News Wales this week.
It’s a staggeringly obvious mess for a whole raft of reasons – a number of completely spurious, illogical and unsupported claims are accepted as facts without any sort of challenge or balancing voice (which has been standard practice on ITV News for a while now across almost any contentious political topic) – but it led us to somewhere magnitudes of crazier still.
My first ever real experience of politics was playing Dictator.
Originally written by Don Priestley for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1982, it was a simple text-based game which subsequently came to other formats including the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Elan Enterprise and the ZX Spectrum, which is where I encountered it.
It’s almost – almost – worth voting SNP in May because of this:
Because it would be at least momentarily absolutely hilarious watching Swinney try to explain why his “100% guaranteed” second indyref didn’t happen if the SNP actually did get a majority on 30% of the vote (which is narrowly feasible on current polling).
This week The National published a poll it commissioned from Find Out Now for this May’s Scottish Parliament election, alongside a seat projection from Sir John Curtice. Here are the list-vote figures from the poll.
The seat projection calculated that the election would result in 59 SNP MSPs (six short of the number John Swinney says is the minimum needed to force a second indyref), 25 for Reform, 13 for the Greens, 12 each for Labour and the Tories and eight for the Lib Dems.
It didn’t specify how many of the seats were constituency ones and how many were list ones, so we dropped Sir John a line and asked him.
Yesterday we noted in passing that independence support now outstrips that of the SNP by more than 20 points, making the party into a gigantic liability as the vehicle for enabling Scots to leave the UK. Put simply, even when voters want independence (as most now do), they’re not willing to vote SNP to get it.
(Not, of course, that they WOULD get it if they voted SNP – the party still having no coherent or credible strategy to achieve it – but more than 40% of would-be Yes voters are no longer prepared to even try giving them the benefit of yet another mandate.)
And since what everyone loves most of all on New Year’s Day is a good old wade in some political stats, we thought we’d take a little more detail on that.
With Reform now pretty consistently miles in front in polling for the next UK election, logically this is brilliant news for the Scottish independence movement, isn’t it?
So can anyone explain why the SNP is so desperate to stop them?
Captain Caveman on The Land Of No Laws: ““Dictionaries are useful for correct spellings, but often lack the depth and full meaning behind the words they define.” Oh…” May 21, 08:15
Aidan on The Land Of No Laws: “Will you one day, Geri, share your sources for all of this apparent wisdom and knowledge you have which is…” May 21, 07:36
sarah on The Queer Parliament: “Someone btl said that India doesn’t permit its citizens to stand in another country’s elections. Can we ask the Indian…” May 20, 23:59
Geri on The Queer Parliament: “Exactly. I wrote a post saying basically the same but the gremlins ran away with it. Holyrood is an English…” May 20, 23:31
Alf Baird on The Queer Parliament: “Northcode is right, the only remedy for colonisation is liberation. Everything else is just ‘noise’.” May 20, 22:40
Geri on The Land Of No Laws: “The UK is becoming Totalitarian on two fronts & they’re both connected. Gender ideology & Z ideology. Permeating into every…” May 20, 22:21
jock on The Queer Parliament: “Dugdale, chair of Stonewall, is married to the depute FM. Surely a conflict of interest?” May 20, 22:15
Mark Beggan on The Queer Parliament: “Aye Hatey. Northy’s Brave New World. Even the martians got sick of listening to it.” May 20, 22:04
Rob on The Queer Parliament: “Folk are missing the main point with the two main dodgy characters the greens put in. It is not their…” May 20, 22:01
Red on The Queer Parliament: “We need mass deportations of the Green Party and their idiot supporters. No reason at all why Scots should tolerate…” May 20, 21:39
Northcode on The Land Of No Laws: “What utter piss poor sophistry. Laughable. It’s probably a good idea to take a look at the formal dictionary definition…” May 20, 21:30
Hatey McHateface on The Queer Parliament: “That final sentence. Harsh but fair. Anybody think this new HR 5-year sentence just commenced will impoverish Scots to such…” May 20, 21:10
Alf Baird on The Queer Parliament: ““the UN should step in to break up the UK” That may be wishful thinking, tho international laws on ‘a…” May 20, 21:08
Lorncal on The Queer Parliament: “Twathater: that was always my own misgiving, that views such as Craig Murray’s and others’ would undermine the ‘independence only’…” May 20, 21:06
sam on The Queer Parliament: “Since you ask, Alf, (you probably know already) the answer is yes. Funding education in schools, supporting conversion therapy ban” May 20, 21:05
Hatey McHateface on The Queer Parliament: “Didn’t he live in a hole in the ground too? But please cut Northy some slack. He’s provided us with…” May 20, 21:05
Hatey McHateface on The Queer Parliament: “You forgot to say that only you can see them, Geri. Oh, and the biolabs. You forgot them too.” May 20, 20:58
Hatey McHateface on The Queer Parliament: “@Lorncal I’m afraid you’re wrong and CC is right. We need our own Trump to move fast and break things.…” May 20, 20:48
Geri on The Queer Parliament: “They’re there working in the background. The Clinton’s established a network of disrupters from all over the world that are…” May 20, 20:44
Mark Beggan on The Queer Parliament: “You remind me of the infantry man in Jeff Waynes War of the Worlds.” May 20, 20:34
Geri on The Land Of No Laws: “AI Dan Get over yersel. The GCC, that you apparently love, are authoritarian monarchies, have awful human rights records &…” May 20, 20:23
Captain Caveman on The Land Of No Laws: ““It’s something we see often with you lot… must be an English thing to gang up thegither and bully folk…” May 20, 19:59
John McNab on The Queer Parliament: “The reference in the opening excerpt from ‘Trainspotting’ to no more guys or girls, just wankers, was first aired in…” May 20, 19:51
Geri on The Queer Parliament: “The death cult brings censorship, sweeping changes to the law, population control & snoopers charter. Colonisers love division. It takes…” May 20, 19:37
Northcode on The Queer Parliament: “Here’s a plan… Scotland and the indigenous Scots can’t change a single thing about their government, their country, or their…” May 20, 19:27
Captain Caveman on The Queer Parliament: ““However, let’s not crow too soon, because far right is just as bad as far left, so we need the…” May 20, 19:20
Northcode on The Land Of No Laws: ““Well that’s interesting Northcode, because above Geri stated that this country was in fact a democracy.” Yes, Geri did state…” May 20, 19:17
Mark Beggan on The Queer Parliament: “Aye Sven. I need to know more about this 77 Brigade. What’s their mandate, who funds them, who is the…” May 20, 19:14
twathater on The Queer Parliament: “As you are more than probably aware Lorna I was on WOS repeatedly urging and begging Stuart Campbell to at…” May 20, 19:06
