Wings Over Scotland

The Scotsman presents a deeply twisted spin on the latest Scottish constitutional poll today as their headline story. Under the headline "SNP under pressure as Scots back change", they report the TNS poll for the BBC which shows the results of a three-option either-or question asking voters to pick their favourite from the status quo, devo max and independence. The poll essentially shows a three-way tie, but the paper reports it highly misleadingly, particularly in this passage:

"…independence, support for which, according to the poll, has fallen 11 percentage points from the 39 per cent backing in a survey published in September."

The September poll being referenced, however, asked a radically different question – it offered respondents just two options, independence or the status quo, with no devo-max. It's hardly surprising that independence scored higher in a two-option poll than a three-option one (the status quo did too), and as such the Scotsman's interpretation borders on an outright lie. Even by their normal standards, it's an unusually clumsy and blatant effort at misrepresenting the reality.

In fact, as quietly noted by the Herald in the middle of a piece on new Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, "The nearest comparison with the latest poll was a three question one by Ipsos-Mori a year ago which had 22% for independence, 44% for more powers and 32% for no change." In other words, the BBC survey represented support for independence growing significantly, at the expense of both devo max and the status quo – the exact opposite of the Scotsman's spin.

It's also interesting that a poll showing devo max as – albeit narrowly – the most popular option is described by the paper as putting the SNP under pressure. The SNP have repeatedly expressed their willingness to include a question on devo max in the forthcoming referendum, while all the opposition Unionist parties oppose one. It is they, not the SNP, who are refusing to countenance offering the people the thing they continue to favour the most, and one might imagine that it would be they rather than the nats who would therefore be placed under pressure by this poll.

Iain Macwhirter in the Herald with a much-needed skewering of the "cybernat myth" that Labour have doggedly been trying to make stick for a few years now, and which was escalated dramatically with Iain Gray's vitriolic and bitter farewell speech to the Scottish Labour conference. There is, of course, poison aplenty on both sides of the SNP-Labour divide, but the most immediately noticeable difference is that nationalist bile and trolling comes from a few anonymous nutjobs on messageboards, whereas in Labour's case it comes from elected members and official representatives. We don't recall any SNP MSP comparing the Labour leader to Hitler, Mussolini or Mugabe, nor calling the entire party "neo-fascists", yet those insults and more have all been made in full public view by taxpayer-funded Labour politicians. Gray and Labour's attempt to claim the moral high ground is an extraordinary piece of brass neck, and it's good to see a grown-up journalist calling it out.

WoSland’s weekly roundup of the stories you might have missed over the last seven days of the 21st Century’s non-stop media tsunami.

Is below.

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This page lists the various contract tariffs for the imminent iPhone 4S on O2. If you add them up, you get some pretty strange results.

(For the purposes of these calculations, we've worked out the total cost for the term of a 12-month contract, including a £6 "Bolt-On" for 500MB of data, and based on purchasing the 64GB model.)

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In September 2011, a group of US state employees took a man called Troy Davis from his prison cell in Atlanta, Georgia to a small room and strapped him to a gurney. They inserted a needle into one of his veins, hooked it up to some tubes connected to a machine and pressed a button on the machine, knowing that it would cause lethal chemicals to be pumped into his bloodstream until he died of asphyxiation.

These people – every one of whom doubtless considered themselves an ordinary, decent, caring member of society – participated willingly in the killing despite knowing that there was an enormous degree of doubt as to whether Davis was in any way responsible for the death of the man in whose name he was being executed.

Bafflingly, very few people found this behaviour at all odd.

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Videogame critics are a slightly different breed of people to gamers. The latter, partly because of the investment they've made in a product, will often be prepared to overlook a number of flaws and focus on the balanced pros-versus-cons merits of a game. Critics tend to be less concerned with such earthly matters and much more perfectionist, because they're focused on the game's place in the pantheon of artistic posterity rather than its instant here-and-now worth. The ponces.

As such, they (or I should say, we) can often be a lot angrier at games that are nearly brilliant than those that are just plain mediocre. This week's case in point: VS Racing.

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There’s been some truly horrible stuff passing for videogames journalism in recent times. Whether it’s reviewers telling people to hand over £25 for a shoddy, lazy cash-in because it comes in a cardboard box or writers arguing with each other over the precise manner in which gamers should be gouged for more money, it’s a depressing picture. (And having the president of IGN tell MCV last week that the recipe for the future was “getting celebrities involved“ didn’t paint it any prettier.)

I’ve always believed that writers are there to serve their readers, not their subjects. But as I was bemoaning the last case in a cloud of gloom and shame-by-proxy last month, I had a bit of an epiphany, and it wasn’t a particularly cheering one. Because the truth of the matter is that readers are getting the videogames journalism (indeed, the journalism generally) that they deserve.

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As a Scot who’s made their life happily in England for the last 20 years, and also as someone on the liberal half of the political spectrum with friends and acquaintances of a predominantly similar persuasion, there’s a sentence I hear more frequently than any other with regard to politics: “I wish we could vote for the SNP too”.

But it’s not just the material things – the free tuition, the free prescriptions, the free care for the elderly (and the abundance of lovely natural resources) – that my much-beloved and cherished English pals envy.

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If there's one thing we all love here at WoSland, it's a good old-fashioned All-Time Top 100. And from a critic's standpoint, we've long thought the gold standard was the 1991 Your Sinclair chart for the ZX Spectrum. Not for its writing, or even (so much) the games themselves, but because the list showcased an incredible breadth of game types, such as we never thought we'd see again in mainstream commercial gaming.

That was until iOS arrived, of course. Now, for the first time in 20 years, it's once again possible to create a legitimate one-format Top 100 in which there are barely any two games in the same genre. And to prove it, that's just what we've done. But there's something even more special about this particular list.

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There are two groups of videogamers in the UK (and perhaps the world) whose Venn diagram has a surprisingly small intersection. In Group A we have "People who own a Nintendo DS", and in Group B there's "People interested in buying a Nintendo 3DS".

In fairness, this may be because Group B is so small it'd be a tiny intersection even if it was entirely contained within Group B, but that's neither here nor there. In any event, because WoSland loves Nintendo so much, we're going to try to help increase it a bit.

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We need a new word for videogames. The term was coined back in the 1970s to describe something that at the time was a completely new and revolutionary artform (it must be barely conceivable to today’s gamers that there was a time in living memory when such things as games played on a TV screen simply didn’t exist), and the image it conjured up was a straightforward one of Asteroids, Pac-Man and Space Invaders – that is, an abstract, magical, ultra-modern type of entertainment, born in technology and totally unrelated to any kind of leisure pursuit that had ever gone before it.

The very word “videogame” inherently depicted something that was exciting, glamorous and – because most games were located in arcades, places where under-18s weren’t allowed – slightly forbidden and dangerous too.

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[80] European Commission: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook80

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[93] Holyrood Magazine: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook93

[94] The Northern Echo: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook94

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[131] YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook131

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[140] Write To Them: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook140