Oddquine
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Posts posted by Oddquine
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30 minutes ago, Kingsmills said:
Whilst I disagree with much, although far from all, that you say, I have never done so in a disrespectful manner.
However, I would be interested to learn what on earth leads you to believe that a comment so clearly directed at the disgraceful and recent social media postings of Alex Arthur can, in any way, be taken as an attack on you or indeed anyone other than the former World boxing champion ?
Possibly because you didn't mention Alex Arthur, and Alba is being called the Alex Party on FB....but I'd likely have replied in much the same vein even if you had, because I'm not really into blanket abusing everybody for the actions of one person.
It does just go to show how easily offence can be taken online though, doesn't it? I suspect the police are going to have their work cut out coping with the volume of the "abused/offended" who claim they have been subjected to hate crime/heard someone in their living room being non-PC/was offended by reading a non-PC post on FB.
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3 hours ago, Kingsmills said:
We need to work to make the parliament more diverse and more reflective of society.
So credit to the Alex Party, the semi literate, racist, vaccine sceptical, former bover section of society had hitherto had a very limited presence at Holyrood.
Cheers for the abuse, Kingsmills. I've never considered myself semi-literate, as I got 6 highers in the days when Scottish Education was considered very good, racist, unless you think criticism of the Israeli Government is racist, vaccine sceptical, as I had my first dose a while ago, and, as far as I can see, the former bover section of society has more than enough representation in the form of trans activists, people shouting SNP1 & 2, people who think Nicola walks on water and continually abuse those of us who don't.....and unionists.
But, hey, if you don't mind being dead, as it looks as if I will, before Nicola gets round to doing something about another referendum, if you have no problem with cross-dressers, (because that is all men who self-id as women but won't have reassignment surgery are), usurping the rights of women because the Greens and SNP have decided to redefine sex/gender/ biology and if you are happy to remain perfectly PC and watch what you say in private, just to be on the safe side of the Hate Speech Bill, that's your choice. But it's not my choice....sorry.
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10 hours ago, Kingsmills said:
Leaving aside the matter of personalities, both, whatever you perceive their faults to be, are very shrewd politicians, probably the shrewdest in the country.
It will not have escaped the attention of either that two recent polls still give NS very high net approval ratings among the public whereas AS, by contrast, at the time of polling at least earlier in the month, had a strongly negative rating actually worse than either Douglas Ross or Boris Johnson which is quite an achievement in Scotland.
AS is far from daft, he will know from that that while, it might play well with s small minority of independence supporters and the majority of Unionists supportes to direct his fire at the, still popular current First Minister, that would prove toxic with the great majority of independence supporters which is the group that the Alex Party is trying to attract. AS is also well aware that an independence majority is entirely dependent on the SNP winning the very great bulk of the constituency seats and that doing or saying anything to undermine that is also undermining his own argument.
The SNP, on the other hand, probably see electoral merit in focussing on the personality and motives of an individual who is very clearly revered by some but disliked and distrusted by very many more.
Whatever the political leanings of the parties concerned, political life becomes very fractious during elections campaigns and the internecine battles are always the most cynically and brutally fought.
Just as an aside, I wonder why Angus Macneil is taking so long to announce that he will be joining the Alex Party ?
I can see what you are saying, Kingsmills..but by the same token - a lot of us pro-indy people, while maybe not being keen on Alex Salmond, as I am not....see Nicola as the toxic one...and much of that opinion is based on the way she has bad-mouthed him...just because she has the public platform to do it. How come he has been "a man behaving badly" all the time she was deputy FM, but she never noticed or heard any rumours? Sure the SNP currently is the only political party in a position to do anything about independence, and has been for seven years now, but to date has done little more about it than putting it every election manifesto since 2014..and then sitting on their hands.... bar the ridiculous "Growth Commission" report, which reads as if it was their brains they were sitting on at that time.
As you say Alex Salmond is not daft and realises that the SNP is the only game in town, and could get a majority on constituency votes alone - hence the call for Alba members like me to vote SNP1 Alba2 (and I'm thinking of buying a clothes peg for my nose to make my constituency vote)..but it rather looks as if Nicola'd rather be held to ransom by the Greens to get the GRA done and dusted than be held to ransom by Salmond to make some real effort to get independence. Me...I'm hoping that, even if Alba don't get a lot of list seats this time, that they get enough to make an impact and form an opposition who will actually oppose the SNP in the next parliamentary term, while preparing to challenge the SNP for the consituency vote in the following election. And before you say that would split the vote and let unionists in...I'd rather that, after 52 years voting and working for independence, than live in a Scotland made by the SNP and Greens to suit their joint gender identity ideology.
Maybe Nicola might get less votes in May, if she decided to scrap the computer/tablet freebie for children in Scotland and put that money to better use by making gender re-alignment easier to access....and telling cross-dressers that if they don't want to have the operation, then they are not women with penises but men with problems and stopping any idea of allowing them to usurp the women's spaces, jobs and rights that generations of women fought hard to get.
Re Angus MacNeil...who knows...but there's a couple of days yet before list candidates have to be nominated, isn't there? .
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18 hours ago, Yngwie said:
Sturgeon today: “I know Alex Salmond very well. He makes big claims which often don't stand up to scrutiny."
It’s all coming out now, eh? No mention of this in 2014!
A big difference in attitude to Alex Salmond who has not resorted to personal abuse and has accepted the deliberations of both the committee and Hamilton without using them as an excuse to bad-mouth Nicola for her actions.
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3 hours ago, Kingsmills said:
Assuming the SNP constituency vote is as the polls currently predict, they are unlikely to have more than one or two MSPs from the regional lists anyway.
Assuming this party, which was actually registered with the Electoral Commission back in January, and has effectively been taken over by AS, gains any sort of traction, the party which may be the most likely to lose out are the Greens.
The Greens losing out might well be the one thing that will encourage me to vote SNP 1st vote after all, whilst holding my nose firmly, seeing that Alba recommends that....and purely by dint of AS being the public face of it, it is likely to get more votes than either of the other list options....but I'll make up my mind about both my votes nearer the time.Only thing I'm certain about right now is that I wouldn't vote Green if you paid me.
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4 hours ago, Kingsmills said:
Not withstanding AS's assertion that he is 'moving on', I predict that at some point during the election campaign he will make at least one further statement designed to undermine the SNP and his successor as party leader and First Minister. This will be particularly the case if his perception is that the campaign appears to be going well from her point of view.
Convince me that "going well from her point of view" doesn't mean coming up with more excuses to put independence off again and again and again.
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1 hour ago, snorbens_caleyman said:
Taking the government to court seems to be a funny way of "moving on".
As someone who has admitted that some of his behaviour was "unacceptable", he does seem to be making a meal of this. I know I would want justice for myself, but I would also be conscious of what started everything off.
Whilst the women involved tend to be forgotten.
Odd that he should endanger his life's work - the SNP and the prospect of independence. Perhaps he simply can'r accept that anyone else could be the first FM of an independent Scotland.
I can't blame him, tbh, and at least he is not playing tit for tat and specifically targetting Nicola Sturgeon, which in his place, I would have done, given her public comments about his actions, despite the verdict of the court.
Unacceptable behaviour is not necessarily criminal behaviour...and certainly wasn't in the 20th century despite FB abounding with grown women "metoo"ing because they got their bra straps pinged in school. This whole PC stuff has gone from the reasonably sensible to the absolutely insanely ridiculous, culminating in the GRA which redefines biology and the Hate Crime bill which airbrushes women out of protection from hate crime in much the same way as Alex Salmond was airbrushed out of SNP history.
If the women involved have been forgotten, it hasn't been for want of them reminding us about their plight.
Nicola has already endangered his life's work...I suspect a lot of women won't be voting SNP in May, I know I won't be, after 52 years of voting for them, and I also suspect if she had put the GRA and Hate Crime propositions in her manifesto last time round, she wouldn't have managed a majority even with Green help and we would have been spared all this angst.
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2 hours ago, Robert said:
Apparently Alec Salmond is to take court action against her. Will learn more on the news shortly.
Having listened to the news, the action is against the Scottish Government, taking the two reports into account.
He is also complaining to the Police about the original leak.
He accepts both reports and says it is “time to move on”.
Maybe if Nicola Sturgeon and the Alphabet Women had done the same, and accepted the trial jury's verdict, instead of trashing the judge, jury and/or Alex Salmond at every opportunity the whole thing might not have been as divisive as it has become.
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7 hours ago, Kingsmills said:
Clearly, someone is to blame. The whole benighted affair was overseen by Leslie Evens, the Permanent Secretary and Scotland's most senior civil servant on a salary much greater than that of many including the First Minister and why she remains in post remains a mystery to many.
However, to say that both reports were a whitewash does a great disservice to James Hamilton who is a highly respected lawyer of great integrity, somewhat ironically appointed to the role by Alec Salmond when he was First Minister due to his high level of integrity and complete neutrality when it comes to Scottish politics.
He took over over two years to compile a very comprehensive and detailed report including interviewing both AS and NS at length. I appreciate that you are somewhat bitter at the terms of the report but to impugn Mr Hamilton as you seek to do is disgraceful anf wholly unjustified.
And despite the committee report, Leslie Evans has Nicola's full confidence and will not be resigning. Quelle surprise!
My problem with Hamilton's report is the level of redactions which make it difficult, if not impossible, to come to any definite conclusion as to his thinking and it all boils down, on his remit regarding misleading Parliament over the 29th March-18th April meetings, to the he said/she said part of the evidence, particularly that from Aberdein that we are not allowed to see anywhere. As Hamilton comments in clause 6.11. I find it very hard to know what to make of this story about the birthday party. Mr Aberdein’s account to me was very convincing. Equally the First Minister seemed both convinced by and convincing in her account. It may be that [Redacted ] It may simply have been [Redacted ] However, this is speculation and it would probably not be right to place too much significance on the matter.
I'd have thought more of Hamilton if he had qualified his decision as "on the balance of probabilities" as opposed to a definite "nothing to see here" report. That wouldn't have diminished the gloating on FB by the pro-Sturgeonites, but may have made those of us who don't think Nicola walks on water feel less let down at the whole debacle...and less worried as to what independence, with the SNP probably in charge initially (if they ever get round to doing anything but talk about getting independence just before elections) is going to mean if they can't even be honest and transparent when devolved, even knowing that Westminster/the MSM will pounce on anything that shows them in a bad light.
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Both reports were the whitewashes I expected, though the committee one did, albeit without the support of the SNP members (though I didn't expect the four turkeys with no backbones to vote for Christmas anyway) find she did mislead them, but without the courage to say whether it was deliberate or inadvertent.... (though I struggle to see how so many redactions of information on submitted evidence, and acts of non-co-operation in providing evidence could be inadvertent.) . The report did however, in clauses 731-734, say that it did not have enough powers to hold the SG to account and recommended the establishment of a commission to review the relationship between the executive and the legislature and make recommendations for change. Luckily the SNP lost their ex-green swing vote, or the report wouldn't even have contained the word mislead, and certainly not the clauses complaining about SG reluctance to co-operate. I won't, however, hold my breath waiting for either independence or a commission to make the oversight committees less weak. .
But, as usual with this SNP Government, nobody is to blame for anything...so no highly paid heads roll. Job done as planned!
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Given everything in AS's submission to the Committee which cites Aberdein and his trial evidence, and confirms Nicola lied to the Scottish Parliament has been redacted......we are still on course for the whitewash of the SG's actions they have been frantically working towards, as AS can't speak to anything the Committee hasn't published... because if it hasn't been published by the Committee, the evidence is not deemed to exist, however many times it appears on the internet in other places. Nothing to do with protecting "vulnerable women" as far as I can see, (having a copy of both the submission and the SG redacted version)....much more to do with protecting Nicola.
I noted with interest that the FM who has previously refused to answer non-covid oriented questions at Covid Briefings was quite happy to use yesterday's Covid Briefing to say regarding AS that he was “Found not guilty but that doesn’t mean the behaviour they complained of didn’t happen” and also pretty much said that AS wants to make claims without ever subjecting them to the proper scrutiny of the inquiry..when she knows damn well that anything which could finger her in any dubious actions has been removed from that scrutiny altogether.
The whole "inquiry" is a farce for show, with the outcome, as far as I can see, decided in advance, given that, as far as Nicola is concerned, "co-operating fully" with the inquiry into the SG's handling of the allegations against AS has translated into between 58 and 71 separate obstructions to the work of that committee.
What is she trying to hide?
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Kingsmills, I'm not holding my breath waiting for indyref2, because on current SNP enthusiasm for independence, bar as the occasional sound-bite to remind us they are entitled to all the pro-indy votes, being the only show in town (much in the way that Labour felt entitled to all the working-class vote..and see where taking their vote for granted has got them now).....I don't see indy2 happening in my lifetime. If the SNP decide to make the 2021 election a plebiscite on independence...then I will vote SNP in the constituency....but if not, I won't cast a first vote at all.
I was never keen on Alex Salmond, but did think Nicola, when she was a teenager at annual Conference, was a rising star, so was happy enough when she was anointed SNP leader. Seven years on, and I have gained the impression that her star has risen as far as she wants it to go and she is now all about consolidating power as the big fish in the Scottish devolutionary pool, with full control over what used to be a member focused party.
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It isn't AS doing "this" whatever "this" is "now"...it was NS and the SG doing it in 2017/18 and it only came to court in 2020. Given AS was found not guilty on all but one of the charges, and not proven on another at his trial, the logical person would have assumed he was not guilty of the charges, or at the very least, that the police, despite putting a LOT of men onto digging up dirt on him for a long time and despite Moorov's Doctrine, which encourages women to come forward by making the name of the accused public, while offering anonymity to the accusers, couldn't come up with a decent prosecution .....but ever since, the women, and the SG funded Rape Crisis Centre, have been, given half a chance, more or less proclaiming the judge and jury were asses for not finding him guilty, the SG "investigation" into the Scottish government's handling of the original complaints against Mr Salmond has turned into an embarrassing farce to the extent that it has simply become yet another way to attack AS. What is he meant to do? Just stand there and take it? Really? His situation just confirms the reason that I think that if the accusers get anoymity forever..then so should the accused until he/she is found guilty...that is equality. after all.
For the first time since I was old enough to vote in 1969, and despite having been an active SNP branch member/office-bearer for nearly forty years after that, I won't be voting SNP in my constituency this time round....not because I don't want independence.....but because I don't want independence at any cost.....and too big a cost in my opinion, given the cult of Nicola which exists, is the distinct possibility of the SNP being in charge of negotiations with Westminster( bearing in mind that farcical "Growth Commission" production) and of forming the first independent Scottish Government, if we use the currebt electoral system, allowing them to continue with their biology denying social engineering by implementing any idiotic brainfart they can term "progessive".
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How are the numbers particularly high for Scotland? The headline death statistics in the UK are only for deaths among confirmed cases, usually hospital deaths and by that yardstick, Scotland has fewer deaths per 100,000 to date than the UK as a whole does, doesn't it?
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2 hours ago, Kingsmills said:
Steady on. I doubt that we will end up with as many as 55 seats and we certainly won't gain 50% of the vote but we will win the election in Scotland even more overwhelmingly than the Tories in the rest of the UK. Scotland is an increasingly different place and, although this is in the short term, an appalling result, it does, without doubt, bring independence a step closer and re entry to the European Union which the UK will now inevitably leave and probably on the most damaging WTO terms.
As long as the SNP get 36 seats and Moray loses Douglas Ross as a result, I can't say I'm overly bothered about the 55, though it would be ace!
I'm ambivalent about the full EU membership espoused by the SNP. Didn't see, in 1975, when I voted no to staying in the EU, what was wrong with EFTA and the ability to opt in to stuff we wanted to be involved in, but voted remain this time, 40 years later, because I could see that the leavers were talking out of their backsides, and because, over all, Scotland gets more from the EU than it does from Westminster for stuff that we think important but Westminster doesn't.....so I do think, post-independence, we should have another EU referendum once we see the results of negotiations, with the option of EFTA or the EuU..
The only good thing about this Brexit omni-bourach is the gradual edging towards independence...however maybe I'm pessimistic, but given the "I'm all right, jack" and the "blaming immigrants for reducing wages below legal limits, and not blaming their own laziness/self importance and/or wanting more money than the job is worth because the heid bummers and "celebrities" get paid more than their job is worth" crowd are still wedded to the English concept of exceptionalism, entitlement and importance, and are still voting unionist in big numbers...I am not convinced that we'd win a referendum in 2020, any more than I thought we would in 2014.
I'm in my seventies, but am still hoping that Scotland will see sense before I die without being able to get a Scottish passport.
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20 minutes ago, IBM said:
If it's right we're fecked
Via every available orifice! If the exit poll is right (and I was watching the Channel 4 Alternative Election programme on my 'puter and thought it was part of the comedy of it it) and if the SNP has got 55 seats, fingers crossed that they also have more than 50% of the vote..because then we have options if another indyref is "requested" but refused.
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I think that's me paid my two.
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14 minutes ago, Yngwie said:
I look forward to seeing all that printed on the side of a big red bus!
Don't need all that... "Scotland government competent - UK Government gibbering lunatic spendthrifts" would do fine, don't you think?
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On 2/1/2019 at 10:34 PM, Yngwie said:
Good god! Those figures are garbage. Even the SNP acknowledge Scotland is very heavily subsidised by the rest of the UK.
Yngwie, when did the SNP ever acknowledge that, out of interest? But I agree the £120bn a year figure is garbage.
If you actually bother to look at the GERS figures, which are based on those produced by the ONS/HMRC guesstimates and re-guesstimated by The Scottish Governmment economists to more accurately reflect the Scottish Income and expenditure (figures which, incidentally have been accepted as national statistics)...and bear in mind the FACT that the Scottish Government is, by law, not ALLOWED to overspend their income....perhaps you could explain which bit of the UK is producing the enormous deficit...because, sure as hades, it isn't Scotland.
It is being in the Union that gives us a big deficit...because the bulk of the deficit is money spent for Scotland, whether we want/need it or not...money which heads down to Westminster departments to enter the English economy, mostly in London, and boosts the English tax take. When was the last time Scotland got a chunk of money out of the UK borrowing, which costs us £3+ billion a year, to spend as WE want (that would be never, I suspect). Why should we pay for (or trust) a bloated and inefficient Westminster Government parked in London, doing stuff like producing 2000+ pages of tax laws, with built in loopholes that accountants get rich from finding and exploiting, to do things for us that we could easily do for ourselves and probably do better, if we were independent?.
Out of our limited income, we fund the administration and spending of the devolved government departments,the staffing and maintenance of the Holyrood building, the salaries/expenses of MSPs etc, AND the Scottish Office and around 90 Scottish National bodies, NDPBs, NMDs NGOs etc...like the Crofting Commission, National Records, National Galleries etc. We mitigate, as far as we can, the austerity brainfarts Westminster Governments impose upon us..we pay for Education, housing and the NHS.and we still manage free prescriptions, free uni tuition, free bus passes etc.
If we allow that, whatever else we have to do in an independent Scotland in the short/medium term, is pay social protection, at at least the same level as it currently is being paid in the UK...then what was spent IN Scotland FOR Scotland, is the total of what the SG spent from the block grant, the devolved taxes raised and Local Government input via business rates etc. plus the social protection payment from Westminster. The SG spent £42,848 million and adding the Social Protection of £18,199 million, sent direct from Westminster to individuals..gives a grand total, (including accounting adjustments) of £61,047 million, against an income of £59,957 million....so a deficit of £1,090 million we know DID come from Scotland. Therefore the bulk of our deficit was made by Westminster charging us £12,251 million (nearly as much as we spent on the NHS in Scotland last year) to do things for us that we could just as easily, and probably more efficiently and effectively, do for ourselves as an independent country.
Anyone who thinks that, after Independence Scotland is going to have a Westminster style bloated Government with over 400,000 civil servants, 650 elected legislators and 800 unelected ones, 25 Ministerial Government departments and 20 Non-ministerial ones, with up to 109 paid ministers between them, and about 520 agencies, public bodies, high profile groups and public corporations and with military services, including Trident, geared up for offence rather than defence and a national debt approaching anything like £2 trillion is looking at independence through very heavily tinted red,white and blue specs. The £12+ billion we sent to Westminster would have paid last year's administration costs for all the Westminster Government Departments with a couple or three billion £ to spare. (and we are paying for our own Scottish equivalents of most of them already.)
GERS Data is produced for Scotland as part of the UK, It does not model scenarios for an independent Scotland in which the Scottish Government would be able to make ALL its own choices..including not to run the economy for the benefit of London (though I would hope we wouldn't do it for the benefit only of Edinburgh and the central belt either) We probably will have some level of austerity in Scotland until we get up and running, but it will be, I hope, an austerity not wholly paid for by the poorest and most disadvantaged of us, while the better off get tax cuts....but we are equally probably facing worse austerity in a post-Brexit UK...and what looks like Tory Governments forever, given the voting tendencies in England.We are almost undoubtedly going to be facing drastic change soon...so there is going to be uncertainty whichever way we jump...so why not independence, if for no other reason than that the uncertainty won't last as long as the infighting within the Tory and Labour parties before they get down to doing anything useful, if measured by their incompetence in the past two years. It makes more sense to discard the crumbling security blanket of the Union and join all the other small countries who seem to manage well enough...like New Zealand,Denmark, Finland, Norway and Ireland for example......if they can succeed, why would anybody think we Scots couldn't?
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42 minutes ago, Scarlet Pimple said:
Well, from my point of view it's ….wait for it.....about accepting people for what they are without them being stereotyped, put-down, hurt or shunned. In the Deep South of America prejudice against black folk still remains but the majority of people in America proper are sane enough to get along with everybody else, regardless of colour or creed.
But aren't the LBGT community deliberately stereotyping themselves by having gay marches? Are they not just human beings like all the rest of us, despite sexual orientation.or in other cases, race, religion, political leanings etc? Why do we need to celebrate diversity when it is a fact of life and, in a global society, quite unremarkable as far as the majority are concerned?
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Thought long and hard before replying to your post, Scotty....but it isn't doing it for me........there is as little point to a celebratory week as there is to a celebratory march.
I don't think celebrating being gay warrants a march or parade any more than being heterosexual warrants a march or parade. If people want to be treated like everybody else, they don't march to celebrate being different to everybody else, imo.
The protest marches I understood....the"look at me I'm gay" marches I just don't.....any more than I understand the reasoning behind the OO type sectarian marches in Glasgow....or Inverness....or anywhere else over something that happened over three centuries ago.
I often wondered, the only year I attended the Bannockburn rally, back in the day, what the reaction would be if there was a Culloden March and rally every year organised by a Scottish-based English group to celebrate beating the clans and subduing the Highlands.
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4 hours ago, Kingsmills said:
So Oddquine, as I thought, you took part in a parade which caused at least as much disruption as the one proposed but you do not care for the LGBT community having the same privilege.
Are you entirely sure that it's the inconvenience and disruption you object to ?
I don't much care for the kirking of the council parade which causes some disruption and in which Inverness civic society pays homage to a supposed deity in which incressingly few of us believe but I would not object to those who have that rather bizarre belief celebrating it publicly as they do.
As I said before, if it's not for you, don't go but don't invent spurious grounds for objection either.
Tbh, I didn't actually think about pro-indy marches in that light until I took part in one...but I have always been against the OO kind of pointless marches, and it doesn't seem to me that the pro-indy ones are any less pointless, in the great scheme of changing attitudes, just by our presence....in fact is as likely to polarise attitudes than change them.
The kirking of the council is a modern continuation of a historical event, attended by those of any and no religion, nowadays AND it's on a Sunday mid-morning, so less people about to disrupt.
But maybe you can tell me what the point of the LGBT march is....I might change my mind if there is a point to it. I kinda get the impression with your Are you entirely sure that it's the inconvenience and disruption you object to ? that you are insinuating that maybe I'm homophobic. I'm not, btw, but I would say that, wouldn't I? I don't dislike anybody because of how they define themselves , I do dislike people, however they define themselves, if they give me good reason to dislike them, but I don't extrapolate that dislike to all those who define themselves in the same way. I always thought that's what normal people did.
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7 hours ago, robbylad said:
Can't really comment regarding lgbt or oo, but if the media and pro union supporters keep telling me there's no appetite for independence, I'm going to challenge that at every opportunity.
But marches don't show there is an appetite for indy...they just show there is an appetite for indy by some people, who bus in from all over to swell the crowds in one particular place at one particular time. Polls are a better indication if there is an appetite for indy, because they don't double count the people who turn up at every march.
People coming into in the YES shop I worked in in 2014 were getting all excited at the numbers of people who were members of pro-indy FB Groups ...and were convinced that we were going to win based on adding up the hundreds, thousands/hundreds of thousands who had liked pro-indy pages/joined pro-indy groups. I disagreed...because I knew I was being counted twenty or more times in those pages/groups...and I was sure I wasn't the only one, going by the numbers of my FB friends who were members of the same groups/following the same pages. .
Pro-indy marches are for pro-indy people to make them feel they are doing something in the long hiatus beween 2014 and whenever the next referendum takes place. I'd have thought a better way of showing the appetite for independence would have been NOT disbanding all the YES groups on the ground post 2014, and a periodic lower key continuation of appropriate leafleting as a drip-drip counteraction to the drip-drip of media propaganda..even if it was only the Chris Cairns "driving instructor " cartoon shoved through doors after every annual GERS production as the media is going ballistic about the Scottish deficit.
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3 hours ago, robbylad said:
Oddquine, as someone else who attended the Indy march, I thought the idea was to let people know that we aren't going away. No matter how much certain sections of the public would like the independence question to go away, it isn't going to happen. Perhaps the lgbt community feel people like Mr. Morrison needs to understand that no matter his feelings, they're not going away. He and the folk that agree with him need to get used to it.
Does anybody really think we are going away? Honestly? And truthfully, does anybody looking on as we march think to themselves...well if all those folk think independence is a good thing, maybe I should change my mind and join them...and vote YES next time. The people marching would have been much better and more productively used leafleting Inverness. If the politicians really thought we were going away, why would they keep on harping about no indyref2 any time a microphone is waved in front of their faces?
A march on the lines of the indy ones, the LBGT ones or the OO ones are completely pointless and are no more than an ego-massaging exercise. We all know that the pro-indy people exist and have done since the date of the Treaty of Union...we all know that LBGT people exist probably since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and we all know that the OO exists (though I've never understood why)...why do they need to march to rub everyone's faces in 2018, in the fact that they aren't quite the same as the majority....given we all KNOW that...the equality act tells us that, if nothing else does?
I never meet people and introduce myself by citing my political leanings, my religion(or lack of it) or my sexuality...but I have met people who proclaim, as they shake my hand, that they are born-again Christian, or when being driven by a mutual friend, and sharing the back seat of a car for a few miles, telling me, appropos of nothing at all, that they are gay, or relations telling me that they voted NO in 2014 (and after I had been at pains not to talk politics at them, because I knew it would be a waste of time and lead to arguments) and I wonder what is it about people that they think anybody but them gives a toss about how they define themselves.
The FB petition post to which I originally responded talked about Scotland being a progressive country and marches were a sign of that.....but marches for no obvious reason, bar they are allowed, are anything BUT a sign of a progressive country......a progressive country doesn't need marches just because some needy groups want and think they deserve attention and/or advantages more than any other group ....because in a progressive country everyone is equal under the law, nobody should care what sex/religion/political outlook etc anybody has and no religion/political outlook/sexuality is more worthy of approval/diapproval than any other.
Ergo....as long as we allow LBGT marches, OO marches and pro-indy marches to disrupt communities at public taxpayer cost...where DO you draw the line, because going by the nuimber of days in a year allocated to remembering this event or that disadvantaged group or the next sufferer from this that or the other, we could fill our whole year with costly to the taxpayer, ego-massaging marches...and for what, exactly?
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The Election
in Serious Discussion
Posted
Be fair....that 3% was for a party 3/4 days old at the time....the field work was done on on 29th/30th March, and Alba with Alex Salmond was only announced on 26th. Seems to me that 3% is a good start.
Why wouldn't Douglas Ross be in the H&I list? Most of Moray was put in the Highlands & Islands region on devolution, bar the Keith/Cullen end which is in Banffshire and Buchan Coast and on NE Scotland list for Scottish Elections.
If Douglas Ross hadn't been top of the Tory list, I maybe would have voted Tory1 to try and elect Tim Eagle and maybe help lose Douglas his list seat..but that is unlikely particularly given the numbers of Tories in Moray....so it looks as if I'll have to do as I'm told by Alba and go for SNP1 (firmly holding my nose) and Alba2..and hope that the SNP don't get their top list candidate elected as she's an SNP placeperson, not the person voted to be top of the list by the membership.