DISGRACE

There can be few Munguin readers, I imagine, who haven't by now heard of the furore over Wings of Scotland's suggestion on Twitter that Siobhan McFadyen was a disgrace. 

Stuart was reacting to her "pack of lies" article on the possibility of a second Scottish referendum. And she in return went ballistic. 

As you can see, however, from the above Tweet, McFadyen seems to think it's OK for her to use the term "disgrace" in the same way.

You can read all about it here, here,  here, and here, on Wings (or just look at the last few Wings' posts now that Blogger has got round to fixing the side bars).

I've read the Express articles and they were, without doubt, a disgrace. They bore not even passing resemblance to the truth, and like much of the Express coverage in the run up to the European election, they could easily have been taken, particularly by the average avid Express reader, as an incitement to violence. 

(It's not any surprise that there has been a massive rise in violence towards disabled people, and foreigners of any kind, in the recent past since papers like the Express [the Daily Mail and the Sun in particular, and their Sunday issues] have run campaigns of hatred against scrounging hordes of sick, disabled and foreign people, here apparently to deprive good hard working British family folk up and down the country, of what is rightly theirs!) 

Actually, far from abuse, and this may have annoyed McFadyen more than anything else, many independentistas by way of answer posted photographs of peaceful, happy rallies, or pictures of Nicola with bairns, with captions ridiculing McFadyen's piece.

She's become a laughing stock. Then again she works for the Express! It goes with the job.

Of course, when a complaint is made against someone, I think that Twitter is quite within its rights to suspend that person's account while it investigates.

However, it seems that Twitter isn't too good at communications. It seems near to impossible to get in touch with them. They investigate in their own good time without any interference from anyone. These of course, are the benefits of being big and powerful.  I'm pretty sure that when Twitter does investigate it will reinstate Wings' account.

In fairness there have been calls from some other unionist journalists to do so. Maybe McFadyen is a disgrace even to them.

Stuart isn't well known for political correctness. He doesn't suffer fools gladly and he calls a spade a spade. I make no bones, sometime it makes me cringe.

But he is one of the real and powerful driving forces of the independence movement. In the years he has been publishing, for all the hard stuff he's handed out to people, no one has ever taken action against him.  Now one has ever sued, including lawyers who could do so at no real expense.

He backs his stuff with hard facts and links to where he got them and he appears to have an encyclopaedic memory. Perhaps that's why no one sues him.

How the unionists must hate him.

He is quite simply, irreplaceable.

PROBLEMS WITH HARD BOARDERS

A Twitter friend, Craig, (@Jahaangle) pointed out the dangers of scrolling down to the readers' comments on the Daily Express.

Sooooo, what have we?

Old Majicarpet was happy that Scotland voted to stay in the Union, but seems somewhat displeased that we are not equally content with :

i) Losing the tax office jobs we were promised would be secured by voting NO;

ii) Losing the passport office jobs we were told would be secured by voting NO;

iii) Finding out that the warning we got that pensions were unsustainable in Scotland, was actually true of the UK;

iv) Finding that the 13 Frigates promised in the weeks before the referendum weren't actually going to be built in Scotland at all because there was no money (given that £200 billion had to be found for Trident, and god knows how many billion for the English railways, and heaven only knows how much to keep the "honourable" members and the "noble" lords in the kind of luxury to which they are accustomed);

v) That the only way that we could stay in the EU (which 63% of us want) was in fact NOT to stay in the UK. Because of votes in England and Wales, we are going to be leaving. Well, maybe when the people who orchestrated it have worked out what the hell we are going to do instead.

Odd that we'd not be satisfied with that and so many other things. Still we're a funny lot, aren't we? Foreign, you see! And foreigners and Daily Express readers don't exactly get on.

In any case, if we do have another referendum, we can see what kind of conditions will be opposed upon us, should we choose to allow the Daily Express readership any input on the terms and conditions.

First of all our "Boarders" and going to have to be hard. So get ready to repel boarders, because we have enough hard cases here already. Then, and somehow it's all in the same sentence, all Scots (with a lower case "s") need to have a passport. But then most of us probably do, already, whether we are scots or Scots. An EU one for the moment. 

I'm just wondering if the 'hard boarders' will have to have passports. Whatcha think?

I'm assuming any Scot who doesn't have one wouldn't be able to go to the rUK, should they want to? But, wouldn't, equally, any rUK person also need a passport... or would they not ever want to come to Scotland, cos it's so crap?

Apparently too, we have "to" much of the country so these "boarders" have to be "reset" (isn't that taking stolen goods to sell?). It's these 'hard boarders' again, I tell ye, pinching stuff and flogging it!

Twenty per cent tariff on whisky, water, electricity, gas, not to mention haggis and shortbread..? Yep, I'll go with that. Can you afford it rUK?

The shipyard thing is sort of a done deal anyway. They stopped ordering ships when they got their desired results in 2014, and have spend the intervening time cancelling the orders they made to win shipbuilding votes.

I'm sure that we could allow the vote on Scottish independence to be UK wide, if the vote on UK independence were EU wide, don't you think?

I'm unconvinced about the oil all belonging to England though; I'm not sure that Wales or Northern Ireland would see it that way either.... but, that said, it is a huge liability, apparently, so maybe, yes. 

In return they could take their nuclear subs on day one, and to make it a decent deal they can take the Windsors and their aristocracy too, including the Moany woman, I mean lady. They could put them all together on Trident and sail them away.

INSULTS AND THREATS MORE LIKELY TO BE FROM UNIONISTS

Today Stuart Campbell has been defamed in the Scotsman.

Stuart, as we all know, is perfectly capable of taking care of himself. He has, as you will see from the link, demanded an apology and a retraction, and I have no doubt he will go to the Press Complaints Commission should one not be forthcoming. You don't mess with the Rev!

I actually wonder at the stupidity of the editor at the Scotsman. Bending the facts slightly is one thing. Lying through your teeth, another. Five minutes of research would have saved him making a fool of himself. 

But more widely the bias of the press is becoming worrying and vilification of "cybernats" but not of "britnats" is damaging the debate.

Let's be fair. Most people probably (and I'm no exception) say things in blogs or on Twitter, momentarily forgetting that they are public domains. Anyone can see an open blog and, depending on who is following whom, Twitter can have a massive impact. 

But, although from coverage you'd never have guessed it, a poll carried out for the Daily Express in March of this year showed that Pro-Independence supporters are far more likely than Unionists to receive hate mail or suffer insults for their political beliefs. 

Credit to them for publishing the poll (unfavourable as it is to their side), even though the tone of the article makes little of the findings, and is illustrated by a picture of a unionist who has been insulted. However it does include this paragraph: "In a worrying development for the Better Together campaign, 21 per cent of those planning to vote Yes have received abuse or threats compared to just eight per cent of those planning to vote No."

Not being a reader of the Express, I'd not heard of that poll until today, when I read about it on Scot Goes Pop. Can you imagine how many other papers and TV channels would have run with the story if it hadn't shown such an imbalance for their side? The BBC would have been overjoyed and dedicated a whole dumbed down programme to it.

No other mainstream media seem in the least interested in publicising some of the nonsense that emanates for the keyboards and Twitter Accounts of BT/UKOK/NO supporters. Like this little gem (above) for example. 

I read with dismay some of the words written by Jamieson yesterday, and dismissed them as trouble making ramblings. I just hope that he doesn't have a point.