Wings Over Scotland

In the modern world, presentation and packaging is absolutely central to how we experience (and sell) everything. When videogame arcades tried to break that rule, it almost led them to disaster.

If you went to a shop to buy the latest blockbuster videogame, handed over your £50 and were given in return a blank unboxed disc with the name scrawled on it in marker pen, you’d be really unhappy about it – even though the disc would contain the exact same game code and play exactly the way it does when it comes in a pretty case.

It’d be like ordering a cup of tea in a cafe and have them bring you a cup of cold water, a teabag and a kettle – you’ve technically got everything that you need, but it’s not the experience you were hoping for.

And yet, for many years – and to some extent even today – that’s exactly the way we treated arcade games.

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For a number of years now, Twitter has been an unmitigated force for evil – a barely-disguised attempt at mass social engineering on a scale unprecedented since the Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels, undertaken by an unelected, unaccountable global corporation (it doesn’t even have a published address in the UK, either physical or digital, something I can’t believe is legal).

Attempts have been made at creating an alternative, including Parler and various branches of a protocol called Mastodon, but they’ve all been terrible. The latest effort, Gettr, looks a lot more promising. Available on the web or as free iOS and Android apps, it works exactly like Twitter, except that you get 777 characters instead of 280 – the interfaces are so similar you could easily forget which you were using.

It has roots in the American right, so has immediately been attacked in apocalyptic terms by woke activists, but is open to anyone and many on the left who’ve been silenced by Twitter – mostly for defending women’s rights – have signed up. I made an account yesterday, and despite not mentioning it to anyone anywhere I had over 200 followers by this morning, most of them UK feminist and LGB campaigners.

(Because communications platforms are neutral by default, even if people you don’t agree with are allowed to use them too. Hitler loved trains, that doesn’t make you a Nazi if you get on one. We don’t boycott the seaside just because Stalin had a beach house and you don’t have to follow or listen to any of the right-wing people on Gettr just because they’re there.)

It plainly doesn’t yet have the breadth of Twitter – because most of those signing up so far have specific political agendas of various sorts, rather than being people who just like posting cute pictures of their cats and whatnot – but it’s hit 1.5m users in 11 days, something that took Twitter more than two years, so that could change quickly.

There’s also no guarantee that it won’t become just as evil as Twitter, of course, but for now it seems worth giving it the benefit of the doubt if you like the idea of social media but don’t want to get instantly banned and/or witch-hunted to death if any of your views diverge in the tiniest possible way from those of the hyper-intolerant Twitler Youth who have somehow captured most of Scottish and UK politics. Maybe see you there.

We’ve had no takers from any Nicola Sturgeon loyalists for this yet, so let’s narrow our focus a bit and see if we can get some joy from the payroll vote.

The quote pictured below is an absolutely unequivocal statement, with no qualifiers or conditions, made during and with full knowledge of a major peak in the COVID-19 pandemic. The halfway point of the current Scottish Parliament is 9 November 2023.

So: I bet Pete Wishart £5,000 that he’s a liar.

I have the money, and on the £100K-a-year-plus-expenses wage he’s been stealing for most of the last 20 years (and let’s not forget the juicy £50,000-a-year Westminster pension he’s built up over two decades of totally failing to deliver the only thing he’s ever been elected to do), we damn sure know that HE has the money.

My bet is simply that there will NOT be a second indyref on or before that date.

Please, everyone reading this with a Twitter account, tweet this to Pete Wishart until he takes five seconds off from attacking real independence campaigners and gives us all his answer, and let’s see if he’s prepared to put a tiny little fraction of his money where his endlessly bloviating mouth is.

Because if he isn’t, we’ll all know why.

This is the last piece of data from our recent Panelbase poll.

Click image to enlarge. Full data tables here.

I’ve just remembered that I meant to leave this pinned to the front page when I shut Wings down as a blog, so here it is. It’s just a short one.

I am willing to bet anyone in the UK any amount of money of their choosing that there will NOT be a second independence referendum in Scotland while Nicola Sturgeon is First Minister.

If you still believe she’ll deliver one, now’s your chance to demonstrate your faith in public AND get yourself some free cash. (It’s a matter of public record that I’ve never failed to pay up on a losing wager.)

So come on, SNP loyalists and true believers, let’s see you. Put your name and the amount you want to bet in the comments below* and let’s find out how much you really trust her. This is an entirely genuine, serious offer and remains open to anyone** until such times as Nicola Sturgeon stands down as First Minister, even if that’s 20 years from now. Any amount you like. I’m waiting keenly for your responses.

.

*PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT EXCEPT TO TAKE THE BET.

**WAGERS FROM GERRY “THE WELCHER” HASSAN NOT ACCEPTED.

Craig Murray is due to be released from HMP Edinburgh a week tomorrow, having served half of an eight-month sentence for contempt of court via “jigsaw identification”. Our latest poll data from Panelbase, surveying 2000 Scottish voters last week, reveals that just a quarter of Scots think that such an offence merits imprisonment.

Readers may find the figures for male and female respondents of note. The full data tables can be downloaded here.

So, in accordance with the wishes of the readership (and despite rather peculiar claims on some sites that all polls in Scotland are now commissioned by Unionists), Wings has its first polling data for you in its present form, relayed without comment.

In association with Panelbase, this month we surveyed 2000 Scottish voters (double the normal sample size) on a couple of subjects. The first question was this:

“Barring unforeseen events, next year Nicola Sturgeon will overtake Alex Salmond as Scotland’s longest-serving First Minister. She took office in November 2014, in a Scotland which was evenly split on the constitution. (Average support for independence in polling was at 50%, compared to the current 48%.)

Which of the following, if any, do you personally regard as her greatest achievement in office?”

The results are below. Click images to enlarge.

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Right, as promised, one last piece of admin. (This post will be removed in due time.)

We left yesterday’s piece and the associated poll up for two full days to make sure the people who don’t read Wings at weekends saw it and had the chance to vote in it too. But in truth it was pretty obvious how the vote would go from about 20 minutes in.

Like, that’s not even a little bit close.

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When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.

Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.

Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.

But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.

And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.

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For many years now, whenever I’ve done one of those “Which Political Party Should You Be In?” online quiz things, it always says that I’m a Green, which is weird because I really hate cyclists. Nevertheless, it was still the result when I did one most recently, just last month.

So I decided that for the first time in my life it was finally time to join a political party.

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