Yesterday the licensing man from Dundee Council went down the taxi ranks ordering saltires and yes stickers removed from the taxis. (would he have ordered No stickers removed as well? We can never be sure as there weren’t any.)
Having missed the train to my Cupar meeting last night, I got in a taxi (it’s not far) and the taxi driver was giving his side of the story. He said he told the council man that “There is an argument that he was within his rights to tell me to remove the sticker, but when he told me to take off my lapel badge, I told him that he was infringing my absolute right to freedom of speech under article ten of the European Convention.”
This campaign has been the most uplifting experience imaginable. It will not be possible to put the people back in the box of media-induced apathy after this.
One of the most unexpectedly invigorating aspects of the campaign is that in packed town hall meetings, I have been sharing the platform with people who are not good public speakers. If that sounds paradoxical, it is because often they have never done any public speaking before. Yesterday in Cupar there was an excellent lady who works in the NHS who had a deep knowledge of its workings and of the threats from privatization of its services, including the mechanisms by which these privatisations were being advanced. She believed that after a No vote it would not be possible for the Scottish NHS to continue to be insulated from some of these trends, and she explained why she felt that.
There was no polish to her quiet delivery, but her heartfelt sincerity and the depth of her knowledge held the audience in intent silence. She had never spoken in public before. It was truly inspiring.
The substance of the campaign is people in local communities actually talking to each other about what is important to their communities and they way their society is organized. I have never seen anything to compare this to. No wonder the politicians have no idea how to counter it. The happy lack of hierarchical power structures in the campaign on the ground seems to relate to the fact that so many women are coming forward as speakers – for the third time, I was the only male on the panel yesterday.
Better Together have women too of course. Just in case anyone has been living under a rock and hasn’t seen it, here is the Saatchi and Saatchi produced Better Together broadcast that set the campaign on fire. The many spoofs are great, but I think nothing quite equals the sheer comic genius of the original.
I have added this picture as pro-government commenters have started to come on the site with their ridiculous propaganda claims that NATO killed very few people in its 398 bombing raids on Sirte. What you see is just one street of scores in similar condition. You can believe your eyes or the propaganda.
Dave Lawton (2 Sep, 2014 – 8:22 pm)
Thanks for that, have some admiration for submarine crews, of whatever nation.
I can’t seem to find any confirmation of a comment seen elsewhere a couple of weeks back to the effect two of the brand new ones they’d received had been lost, inexplicably. I’m sure it wasn’t referring to older subs/incidents, but I’ve no link, and have forgotten where it was. Are you suggesting they have lost one more, making just two (including HMS Token).
I’m not sure if I agree about the totem-pole, doubt it could do any harm though, but it must have been a bit of a giveaway when submerged. 🙂 I wonder if their big magic books can be interpreted whilst high on fumes, to give them dominion over the seabed too?
That aside.
These journalists captured by the US/UK/IS and apparently beheaded, are they journalists? It is not unknown for armed groups to turn against or defy their cia/mi6 babysitters, precedents amongst the Kurds spring to mind, and while it cannot be said that most spooks are journalists, it could be said most journalists (at this level with msm cover jobs) are spooks. What sort of material were these scribes putting out, fact-free and thought-free Aaronovitch/Cohen style blood-curdliing incitement to genocide, or more nuanced stuff. For their own protection honest journalists would be well-advised to out the sppoks riding on their coat tails and endangering their reputations for fairness and endangering their lives.
I think if you include the deaths and injuries caused by the groups we empowered, which Gadaffi had kept down, the arms poured in, and the many rent-a-mob jihadists and death squads for hire the NATO criminals sent in and facilitated in their killing sprees, added to the deaths by bombing, then we could maybe be looking at hundreds of thousands of Libyans not to mention other Africans, migrant workers, unrecorded victims. The resulting and intentional chaos makes any accounting impossible, which rather suits the mass-murderers book. There will be a reckoning, the ultimate perpetrators and guilty are known villains.
” I just thought it was powerful anti-gun propaganda by the US Government.”
Very perceptive Tony. Gunowners in the US are being consigned as pedophiles, or worse cigarette/cigar smokers who are beneath contempt. The effort to make geldings of us all has been a protracted campaign of propaganda.
Peacewisher,
Must be true then. He’s held in the highest esteem at the BBC (I don’t watch that)
Craig Murray:”“The patent absence of any genuine Islamic terrorism in the UK to fight is an obvious threat to the funding of this huge industry. Hence the current hype about the threat from Birmingham school governors or British residents fighting in Iraq and Syria. We have the usual propagandists for this threat thrust upon the airwaves again – Frank “Goebbels” Gardner and even the utterly discredited “Quilliam Foundation” who have been back on the BBC. At the moment they are peddling the utterly untrue line that 9% of those who travel from the UK to participate in fighting abroad, on return get involved in terrorist activity in the UK. Frank Gardner has been repeating this ad nauseam””
“employed at manager level at the BBC between 2004 and 2007.”
Which department?
What the matter Habba-Clown, is your clown face losing its maniacal smile ! 😀
Your troll tag-team mate ResDes seems to be struggling with a very simple question, so why don’t you be a real pal & help him out with it ! Surely you have the “debating capacities” for it ? 😀
Ah Dreolin, last seen with her tail between her legs after a couple of posts from me ! 😀
“I’m not quite getting you here. So because it is wrong to kill one person it is ok to invent 15,000 dead for the purpose of pursuading Scots to divorce themselves from the UK?”
Makes sense to me.
@Al
Reading that I can see it can be interpreted two ways.
I meant you are making sense.
Regarding tobacco; did I mention Mary Jane? Life itself, for me would be impossible without it. 🙂 🙁
BTW, FWITW This is my vote on the referendum… 🙂 🙁
I hope that helps. 🙂
Peacewisher – Cordoba that sets me off thinking. I need to read and learn more about that. Scotland is a difficult decision (though I don’t have a vote), but if I think romantically about its history and how it was once in the C14 a safe haven for Templars and a country entirely excommunicated by the pope well perhaps I may concede it could have some romantic justification. I asked my speculative question about the lodges in scotland and if they were divided or united over the vote and whether they gave any direction, but no one answered that – perhaps not surprisingly really.
(of course Wales has a very romantic muse for independence, but once what we now call Welsh was spoken in England and Scotland and so I still tend to prefer to keep the current union.)
Al Milliner: you have one question and I have another: you ask for proof that it was 15,000 dead in Libya and I don’t have the proof. I ask why we killed even one in Libya? No one answers that either.
“Al Milliner: you have one question and I have another: you ask for proof that it was 15,000 dead in Libya and I don’t have the proof. I ask why we killed even one in Libya? No one answers that either.”
Nobody’s asking for proof.
Just some sort of indication as to how the figure was arrived at.
It’s a reasonable enough question.
Maybe not so dismal. When COMECON and the Warsaw Pact blew up, some of the flinders made out quite well. Prague is idyllic, and Lithuania has the world’s most favorable attitude toward recreational sex. Russia’s own decline was so sharp largely because its US enemy was there to pick the bones. When the US government gets dismantled it will be the UN picking up the pieces, and they’re quite good at bringing fucked-up wastelands back in step with the civilized world.
First the Warsaw Pact, then the Soviet Union; first NATO, then the USSA.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2014/09/ukraine-war-for-now-over-and-nato-still-in-decline.html
Good Take on indyreff By George Monbiot in the Guardian –
” Imagine the question posed the other way round. An independent nation is asked to decide whether to surrender its sovereignty to a larger union. It would be allowed a measure of autonomy, but key aspects of its governance would be handed to another nation. It would be used as a military base by the dominant power and yoked to an economy over which it had no control.
It would have to be bloody desperate. Only a nation in which the institutions of governance had collapsed, which had been ruined economically, which was threatened by invasion or civil war or famine might contemplate this drastic step. Most nations faced even with such catastrophes choose to retain their independence – in fact, will fight to preserve it – rather than surrender to a dominant foreign power.
So what would you say about a country that sacrificed its sovereignty without collapse or compulsion; that had no obvious enemies, a basically sound economy and a broadly functional democracy, yet chose to swap it for remote governance by the hereditary elite of another nation, beholden to a corrupt financial centre?
What would you say about a country that exchanged an economy based on enterprise and distribution for one based on speculation and rent? That chose obeisance to a government that spies on its own citizens, uses the planet as its dustbin, governs on behalf of a transnational elite that owes loyalty to no nation, cedes public services to corporations, forces terminally ill people to work and can’t be trusted with a box of fireworks, let alone a fleet of nuclear submarines? You would conclude that it had lost its senses…
” Independence, as more Scots are beginning to see, offers people an opportunity to rewrite the political rules. To create a written constitution, the very process of which is engaging and transformative. To build an economy of benefit to everyone. To promote cohesion, social justice, the defence of the living planet and an end to wars of choice.
To deny this to yourself, to remain subject to the whims of a distant and uncaring elite, to succumb to the bleak, deferential negativity of the no campaign, to accept other people’s myths in place of your own story: that would be an astonishing act of self-repudiation and self-harm. Consider yourselves independent and work backwards from there; then ask why you would sacrifice that freedom ”
Full piece @ –
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/scots-independence-england-scotland
Yes, I am familiar with b and the article you link.
” they’re quite good at bringing fucked-up wastelands back in step with the civilized world.”
I would love to see some evidence of success from a bureaucracy, but that sentence is a big jump.
@Fool: Cordoba is easily reachable by fast train from Seville. It takes you back 1000 years to a city where Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived and worked together in peace and harmony… until some Pope decided it should be “Christian”.
It would have been nice to think that the proposed “New Jerusalem” of 1948 could have a similar status to the original Cordoba, which I think was at that time the capital of Spain.
1. Sierra Leone: highly successful capacity-building only partially undermined by frenzied British looting
2. Uganda: very successful for a long time until US holy-rollers infested it
3. Guinea-Bissau: Remember that awful holocaust? No? Exactly.
4. Lebanon: That it exists at all is an awesome achievement, considering US and Israeli extermination campaigns
5. Nepal: the jury’s out, but they’re hard at work
You can’t piss on them with any credibility until you’ve seen them at work. It’s not an easy job.
Monbiot “So what would you say about a country that sacrificed its sovereignty without collapse or compulsion; that had no obvious enemies, a basically sound economy and a broadly functional democracy, yet chose to swap it for remote governance by the hereditary elite of another nation, beholden to a corrupt financial centre?”
A welcome piece from Monbiot, but doesn’t excuse his capitulation to the nuclear power lobby.
Monbiot omits that Scotland was under military occupation pre-union, was blockaded and our, even then considerable trade with the continent was being blocked right up to signing the Act of Union. Hence our determination to remain in the economic zone of Europe, even if, in its present form, which cannot be sustained: the EU Mk 1, is far from ideal. It must not be forgotten too, that we are not diluting our combined British bloc at the EU top table, with RUK and Scotland, we double it, with distinct England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Welsh countries, we multiply it by four, enough to vote down the Russophobic Balts, Poles and Banderistanis or get decisions which favour us and not French farmers or German industry.
Threat of violence and economic blackmail don’t suggest the Union decision was made entirely freely. It was not a democracy as the vote such as it was, was restricted to 227 ‘nobles’ most of whom were bribed with cancellation of debts, their personal debts, not Scotland’s, pots of cash and with land and titles in England.
Thanks KoP; I’m going to follow up. That’s something I can get my teeth into.
NATO airstrikes killed 60,000 Libyan civilians
http://ltv1.co.uk/uncategorized/nato-airstrikes-killed-60000-libyan-civilians/
After some 8,000 bombing raids, with estimates of 4 bombs used per attack NATO has already dropped over 30,000 bombs on Libya. That’s almost 200 bombs per day for 6 months, some tens of thousands of tons of high explosives. With an estimated 2 Libyans killed per bomb and without a single NATO casualty the Western regimes have massacred over 60,000 Libyans in the past half year with the rebels themselves having said there have been 50,000 Libyan deaths. One hell of a humanitarian intervention isn’t it?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/02/30000-bombs-over-libya/
It is estimated that at least 60,000 people were killed by the NATO attack and fighting on the ground and injured zahlose. NATO admits himself to have carried out 26,000 missions with 9,600 attacks in six months. Thousands of tons of bombs were dropped this case
After the official end to the fighting investigations show further brutal acts against prisoners who are beaten, tortured and executed en masse. The rebels went from house to house and arrested all the men whom they regarded as enemies. There are witnesses, Libyan soldiers were pulled the nails out of revenge and then cut his throat.
For NATO is responsible because she has brought this criminal gang to power. Worst fared Black, whether migrants or Libyans. They were collected … … … slaughtered … and their bodies thrown somewhere into the field:
http://alles-schallundrauch.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/die-kriegsverbrechen-der-nato-in-libyen.html
Tony
indeed a good piece by G.M…
i couldn’t quite get Monbiot with the nuclear thing… i follow Dr Helen Caldicot, and she thinks its a BAD idea…And she should Know.
But i Liked his Arrest Blair Project 🙂
” estimates of 4 bombs used per attack NATO has already dropped over 30,000 bombs on Libya…. With an estimated 2 Libyans killed per bomb ”
That’s rubbish isn’t it? A guess built upon a guess.
Come back with some facts.
“Ah Dreolin, last seen with her tail between her legs after a couple of posts from me !”
Poor simple-minded Macky is incapable of seeing her empty rhetoric as anything other than point-scoring miracles.
No Macky, I decided that I neither wanted nor needed to spend my time or my energy on (what would have had to be) a long and detailed rebuttal of your rubbish. You clearly hadn’t read the thread I posted about Irish Travellers. If you had you wouldn’t have wasted time with all this, “Maybe Mary this” and “Maybe Mary that”. Or your silly suggestion that I had been brooding on that instance of Mary’s rudeness for the past number of years. Obviously, ‘stuff’ had happened in the meantime. What I had said was that my irritation (I didn’t say animosity) HAD BEGUN with that episode.
I do wish you’d go away and grow up, Macky. You and a couple of others here (including Fedup) produce nothing only a lot of repetitive hot air.
Could you please leave my name out of your posts Dreoilin. It is getting on my nerves.
To be or not to be (in the gilded cage), that is the question for the Scots on the 18th.
From now until the 18th that should be the focus, everything else is digress and expired supermarket haggis like habba!
How about that revolting Cameron bringing in the memory of his dead child into the story about the little boy in a Spanish hospital? What a hypocrite. All of those 500 children blown to shreds in Gaza and not a word from our Zionist PM.
His fascist outfit oversees the system that set the manhunt for the parents going.
Why was Theresa May wearing camouflage yesterday when answering questions about Rotherham? Cannot find a photo.
When is she getting the abandoned Butler-Sloss inquiry restarted?
kempe
NOT ALL OF THE killing came from the sky…and not all of the killing required BOMBS…Or even Bullets… But whatever… NATO provided ALL means to Murder… And that means the criminal U,K Maybe not the Machete Kills..i could be wrong on that…cos we provide everything else..to kill.
you show what you are made of Kempe…Trying to squabbling over Numbers. Fucking Disgusting
Peacewisher – Cordoba and Alhambra is an incredible period of history. Its astonishing how we have forgotten that so much western civilization came through that melting pot and that the knowledge was translated first into the Romance languages and only then into Latin. Where are our troubadours today with their songs of love.
Re Libya: 15,000 or 60,000 or one: why did we do it? What was the reason for carpet bombing a country far weaker than our selves who were incapable of defending themselves. I do want to hear the reasons. Even if those reasons are simply geo political I would like to hear them. At the moment I can’t see a reason and supporters of the bombing only want to talk about numbers.
Speculatives: still wondering if lodges in Scotland are Hanoverian and pro union or pre Hanoverian and pro independence or divided or whether this question is generally deemed to be of historical relevance only and of no consequence in 2014?
Cymru & NATO: is Carwyn chairing?
What does Plaid say about the summit?
Yup my (virtual) vote is now with the Yes campaign. I’m in Oz, so can’t actually vote, mind. I’m not big on nationalism, but simply no longer wish to be part of the UK. It’s actually the Labour party that finally persuaded me. Their collusion with the Better Together campaign has been ridiculous. All they really had to do was to state their position – for the union – but add that it was up to the Scots. Simple. Alas, they sided wholly with the Better Together campaign, for reasons that elude me. This for me is just more evidence of the total irrelevance of the Labour Party. In turn, one can only conclude that there is no opposition worth the name in the UK, so the question becomes: why stay?
Craig has been discussing this, as Moonbot’s article is also good. Everything about neoliberalism is wrong. It doesn’t smell or feel right, and it comes with an endless supply of bullshit. One doesn’t have to be an ardent socialist to look at these neoliberals and think, ‘they are absolutely nuts’.
As to being part of the UK, it looks like we are going to join the US\NATO in yet another disaster. I hope the Scots leave NATO. I want no part of that mess.