Wings Over Scotland

We’ve closed two comment threads today, both of them coincidentally at the 250-comment mark, which we think is the highest ever. Both had descended into pointlessness, with small groups repeating themselves at each other and everyone complaining that everyone else was being rude. By internet argument standards they were very mild indeed, but it seemed a good time to reiterate our moderation policy.

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We had a conversation on Twitter with a fan of The Rangers this evening (though he was terribly upset at the use of the term for some reason). It was sparked by Charles Green’s latest piece of box-office wizardry, in which he gave an interview – watchable for just 99p on the club’s website – professing his fury at the Ibrox side’s apparent exclusion from league reconstruction talks and vowing to remove Rangers International Football Club PLC from Scottish football at the first available opportunity.

And on the face of it, Green has a legitimate complaint. Rule 19 (above) of the SFL Constitution expressly notes that Associate Members such as TRFC are entitled to “attend and speak at” any meeting of the League, though not to vote, and according to Green his club have in fact been completely ignored in the discussions. But beyond that, it’s extremely hard to actually work out what his beef is.

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A short time ago we received an angry message from someone purporting to be a representative of the anti-independence “Better Together” campaign. It read as follows:

Dear Sir,

“Mars is in fact the only place that the Trident weapons system definitely WON’T be going”

I presume you have a link to back that up? It’s absolutely, 100% certain it won’t and can’t go to Mars? Have you taken legal advice, and if so was that general or specific advice, and was the legal adviser a Martian or a universe expert on Martian law?

Perhaps Trident will stay and Scotland in its entirety may have to be sent to Mars! Have you considered that, huh? Huh? No I bet not because you stupid separatist Yes types have never considered these kinds of questions, despite having over 300 years to do it!”

Yours,
Bet R. Together (Mrs),
BRITAIN, THE BRITISH EMPIRE

Wings Over Scotland would like to take this opportunity to retract our earlier assertion. It is entirely possible that either Trident or all of Scotland might be transported to Mars – a situation which would unquestionably result in the safeguarding of thousands, perhaps millions, of jobs, and a much-needed end to the disastrous fear, doubt and uncertainty being experienced by businesses both in Scotland and on the Red Planet.

Such a prospect is, indeed, at least as plausible as that of a UK government granting the Scottish Parliament extra powers in the event of a No vote. We apologise if we have misled readers in any way. Thank you for your attention.

Wait, sorry. We got confused. As far as we can establish from some recent official statements by the UK Government, the No campaign and the media, Mars is in fact the only place that the Trident weapons system definitely WON’T be going if Scotland votes for independence. Let’s have a quick recap on where we’re up to.

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You can click to make the picture bigger, if you can’t already see the big picture.

Four Lib Dems. Fucking FOUR. Fuck all of you. Really. Just fucking die.

I’m a fairly placid chap, readers. I really am. I’ve been around a bit, seen a few things. It takes a lot to raise my blood pressure. You’ve been reading this site for over a year and you know the only thing that’s really got under my skin is Craig sodding Levein.

But tonight I’m just about boiling over with rage. When it came down to it, four Liberal Democrat MPs – including the one I’ve voted for for the last 20 years – rebelled against pretty much the most evil thing any UK government’s done for about a century. Four. They couldn’t even be bothered to try to make it look good.

I’ve already got my most upbeat Spotify playlist running just to stop myself screaming profanities into the night out of the window. I should probably delete the last hour’s tweets. (But won’t.) So post cute pictures of kittens. Tell a few jokes or heartwarming stories. Anything, anything at all that’s nice and beautiful and good and suggests maybe this entire country isn’t just a stinking, rancid sewer full of subhuman scum.

I hate these people so much – these vicious, monstrous Tories, these treacherous Lib Dems, these grubby, cynical Labour hypocrites – that I’m scaring myself a little.

Oh dear, BBC.

That’s a very poor effort at impartiality indeed.

This site’s primary purpose is the provision of facts. We want to persuade people of the merits of independence, but we want to do it with the truth, which is why we have a conspicuous policy of providing links whenever we make factual assertions. That often means criticising other media when it adopts a more lax approach to upholding proper journalistic standards, whether we like that media or not.

Last night’s Scotland Tonight repeatedly made a casual assertion about opinion polls on independence which, as we’ll see in a moment, was simply untrue. We make, and intend, no suggestion that they did so from malice or bias. We’re just pointing out that they got it wrong, so that people will be armed with the correct facts.

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The Scotsman’s last attempt at a live webchat didn’t go too well. In fact it didn’t happen at all, and the page has now vanished entirely. So we were pleased to see them having another go today, in the shape of a well-trailed Q&A session with “Better Together” campaign head Alistair Darling. We tuned in to see how it went.

We submitted a question of our own a few hours in advance of the event, on the subject of this. It wasn’t selected. We also made a few comments during the “chat”, but none were printed. Indeed, nothing at all was published which wasn’t a prepared question – there were no apparent responses to anything Darling said, and no discussion at all, just question followed by answer followed by new question.

You can see a full transcript below (verbatim – we haven’t corrected any typos), along with our analysis of Darling’s responses in red. Did he engage in full and informative answers, or did he just dodge his way to the end? See if you can guess.

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John Harris in the Guardian today:

“[six years ago] to be living on an estate, and in receipt of benefits, and possibly out of work, was to not just to be fair game for Oxford undergraduates, the future king and a certain kind of TV comedian, but the butt of a huge national joke. Some of us wondered where exactly what was briefly known as ‘The New Snobbery’ was headed.

We now know. Its cultural aspects were merely the tip of the iceberg – as the Labour party engaged in the rebranding of social security as ‘welfare’ and its ministers raged against ‘benefit cheats’, something poisonous was being embedded at the core of our national life.

While the Conservative party grimaced through a fleeting modernisation, it sat there, ready to be picked up by a Tory-led administration and taken to its logical conclusion.”

And, of course, by Scottish Labour.

The Scottish football media has apparently become suddenly convinced that the SPL’s proposed 12-12-18 league reconstruction plan is going to happen, and very possibly as soon as next year. Today’s papers are full of analysis of the story, but as usual it’s pretty shallow stuff which appears to miss all the main implications in favour of a simplistic “is it confusing for the fans and where would it leave Rangers?” dual angle.

So with the usual apologies to the football-hating politics fans, let’s have a wee delve.

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