This blog is severely hampered by flu. I hate flu. In a globe-trotting life I have had a number of illnesses that became life threatening – peritonitis, typhoid, cholera, cerebral malaria, pulmonary embolism, pulmonary hypertension (thankfully misdiagnosed) severe arrhythmia. I was once declared dead and awoken by a cockroach eating my nostril as I lay naked on a corpse trolley in Kaduna. I refuse to die because of the thought of the people – Jack Straw, Islam Karimov, Alisher Usmanov, Tony Blair, John Reid etc – whose day I know would be momentarily brightened by news of my demise. But for sustained misery and feeling really, really awful and uncomfortable, a week with the flu, while not nearly as dangerous, is pretty well as unpleasant, at least to me.
As I lie in a sweaty bed, my thought are perhaps unsurprisingly not happy and light. I am paying keen attention to all the proposals for how to move forward the Independence movement after that check, and am struck by all the calls to reach out to No voters and bring them in.
I have no idea how to reach out to No voters because I find the majority of them stupid beyond my understanding. This is not because they desired an end result different to that I desired. That is a perfectly legitimate choice. It is because, by voting No, they are going to get an end result which is not what they wanted at all, and that was very obvious. Asking me to reach out to these unbelievably thick people is like asking me to go for a drive with someone who, against my advice, drove the wrong way down a motorway, causing a lot of people to get hurt as a result.
Through their No vote they are going to get five more years of Tory rule – which most of them absolutely did not want. And it is going to be Tory rule that lurches further and further to the right. It seems no proposition was too right wing to be applauded to the rafters by the Tory Conference.
Tax cuts for the rich. Benefit cuts for the poor. Openly declared government in the interests of multinational corporations. Censorship of the internet and severe restrictions on freedom of speech. The government intercepting all communications. Even more detention without trial. Permanent war in the Middle East. Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and in consequence the Council of Europe – the first country to leave the body set up in 1946 to prevent the rise again in Europe of just the sort of proto-fascist measures the Tories wish to impose. To be followed by leaving the European Union.
All of these are direct consequences for Scotland of the No vote. This is much more profound than the entirely predictable and immediate dishonouring of the pledges on Devo-Max by Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Brown. Brown’s call for a petition to request him to work for what he assured the electorate was already “a done deal” is beyond contempt. It should do for his reputation what the tuition fee betrayal did for Nick Clegg.
Frankly I have no interest in any devolution measures that do not give Scotland control of its oil and whisky revenues, and those are not on offer. But there were people who voted No – 23% of No voters them according to Ashcroft – because they wanted the promised pretend “powers”. Well, you are not going to get those either.
Mostly, of course, those stupid No voters acted under the crass assumption, against all modern precedent, that the opposition could win a general election from a position of just 2 per cent ahead, eight months out. And the even more incredible belief that the Labour Party was still in some significant way different from the Conservative Party.
The consequences of what is coming will fall disproportionately on the poor, with even greater escalation of the UK’s astonishing wealth gap. There will be still more damage to the social fabric that Scots hold dear.
Now there are hard-hearted right wingers in Scotland, in the Tory Party and the leadership of the Labour Party, who wanted everything that is coming in terms of neo-con policy prescription. Those No voters who are wealthy and successful and want to get ahead further on the backs of the poor, made the correct intellectual choice to achieve their ends. They are deeply unpleasant sociopaths, but they are not stupid.
But those No voters who voted No because they believed a fair and caring society was achievable within the present structures of the UK, are so stupid I am astonished that their cerebral cortex can transmit a signal that sparks respiration. They are probably not capable of ever noticing their error.
I am not going to reach out to you, No voter. You are either evil, or quite extraordinarily thick. You will forever be a long way beneath my notice. This will be the last thought I ever give you. To quote a great line from Casablanca:
Peter Lorre: You despise me, don’t you Rick?
Humphrey Bogart: If I gave you any thought, I probably would.
Also worth noting how our so called lovers of democracy have failed to say anything at all in support of those standing up for democracy in Hong Kong against the regime in Beijing.
Top-down tweaking from Nick Clegg, and of course the BBC makes it the top story as that’s the only model it and the politicians count as legitimate.
The Yes Movement is the reverse of that – bottom-up change. Which is why the BBC joined forces with the Westminster establishment and big business to block it.
Most voters are sick of the austerity managers; many can now see through exactly what a statist force the corporate media are.
I would add fracking to your list, Craig. And if the Tories do indeed repeal the Human Rights Act and take us out of the EU – while offering Scotland new powers over the size and consistency of haggis – then No voters had better keep their complaints to themselves.
Did they actually think it would be any different?
Evil is too strong, Craig. Thick and selfish are more accurate.
“For the past several years, the United Nations has served as a platform for Syria’s enemies to air allegations of human rights abuses and even attempts to use such allegations to justify military aggression against Syria itself. Tales of “barrel bombs” being used against civilians, the bombardment of enemy positions at the cost of civilian lives and the destruction of vital infrastructure have all been constructs in the West’s narrative against the Syrian government.
Now that the US is itself bombing Syria, killing Syrians including innocent men, women and children, as well as vital infrastructure local populations depend on for their survival, the UN has grown suddenly quiet. The Western press too seems to have reverted to its observance of the notion of “collateral damage.” Suddenly, the very terrorists the Syrian government has tried to warn the world about for years as it fought them in its city streets and countrysides, are now bad enough for the end of defeating them to justify the means of occasionally killing civilians, so long as they are killed with US rather than Syrian weapons.
The startling hypocrisy combines with the fact that Syria’s military is operating within its territory, conducting security operations to secure its own borders and all territory within it, while the US is operating thousands of miles from its own shores, in a foreign country, with both a doubtful pretext and an even more doubtful agenda in mind as it does so.
Where is the United Nations? The airstrikes in Syria carried out by the US, Persian Gulf states, and several European nations are done so without the Syrian government’s approval, no recognized opposition party has approved of them, and certainly no UN resolution has provided the West with a mandate to exercise military force inside of Syria. On this point alone, the UN should be standing up in vocal protest, leveling sanctions against those participating in this act of unilateral, illegal military aggression. Additionally, the UN should be speaking out against the loss of civilian lives, just as it did during the past several years of chaos in Syria’s ongoing conflict, as well as preparing monitoring teams and investigations into the impact of these attacks.
Aside from Syria, there is another battlefield the UN is suspiciously absent from. Ukraine. In Ukraine, Kiev has been carrying out increasingly atrocious campaigns of violence against its own people. As it steadily loses control over territory in the east of Ukraine, grisly scenes of mass murder, torture, and extrajudicial executions are being uncovered. Yet there is no protest voiced within the UN, no teams being mobilized to investigate unearthed crime scenes and no measures taken against the perpetrators which include ultra-right wing militant groups espousing modern-day Nazism like the notorious Right Sector.
While some may claim such accusations are merely “Kremlin propaganda,” it is the West’s own Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) which provides daily reports from its own monitors on the ground inside Ukraine, that have mentioned the presence of right-wing militants, their destruction of Ukraine’s historical heritage, their attacking and harassing of their political opponents and violence they are carrying out across the country, from eastern Ukraine to the capital of Kiev itself.
Recently OSCE reported that the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which literally flies a flag featuring Adolf Hitler’s SS Wolfsangel insignia on it, led mobs in the dismantling of a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Another OSCE report noted that Right Sector was leading mobs in Odessa. An earlier OSCE report from August would admit another Kiev “volunteer battalion” similar to Azov and Right Sector, the so-called “Aidar Battalion,” was at the center of several human rights abuses and in particular, the abduction, torture, and holding for ransom of eastern Ukrainians.
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2014/10/05/from-ukraine-to-syria-un-s-selective-defense-of-human-rights/
If an English person [although his father was born in Scotland} had said “some Scots are thick/or evil” that may be true, on the other hand if he had said “the majority of Scots are thick/or evil” that would not be true, but it could well constitute a criminal offence as defined by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. If a member of the BNP or UKIP had said that, someone could have made a criminal complaint, which may well have been upheld,if it could be proved that the intention of that person was to insult the Scots, as defined as a National group in the legislation. Of course in Craig’s case I am sure no such insult was intended.
Yes. No one anywhere is talking about human rights in Hong Kong. So it’s up to you to lead the charget, Mr Integrity.
The focus now should be to get rid of as many self-aggrandising troughers as possible in next year’s election, starting in North Queensferry.
Most people combine support for democracy – the idea that people have a right to be governed as they wish to be governed – with an idealistic assumption that through the wisdom of crowds, the way people wish to be governed will be rational and progressive.
I find that lazy thinking. I absolutely believe in democracy – people have the right to be governed as they wish to be governed, certainly not as I or anyone else would like them to be governed. But what the people wish is often very unwise and founded on prejudice, bigotry or the consequence of absorbing propaganda. Having lived for five years amid majority UKIP supporters, in the constituency where Farage is to stand, I have no romantic illusions about the nobility of the masses.
The people are absolutely entitled to the government they want. To believe they are equipped to make informed and wise choices is maudlin nonsense.
“But what the people wish is often very unwise and founded on prejudice, bigotry or the consequence of absorbing propaganda.”
This is the exact problem Plato had with democracy. Isn’t it time we looked at alternatives short of dictatorship or even a benevolent dictatorship?
@Ben: Good article. People need reminding that the world is going nuts partly because they just seem to accept that its going nuts without saying STOP!!! The only people who are truly free from this nuttiness are those being invaded and bombed for their own good, but have to collective purpose to see it through anyway. Scotland may have to go through that (at least psychologically) and maybe that’s what the “Nos” are afraid of. If the revolutionaries prevail, hopefully these people will show the currently brainwashed & quiet ones a better way for people to live together in a proper democracy, for technology offers the opportunity to achieve that. We seem to have forgotten what democracy is… technology and economics definitely come first in the current zeitgeist.
“Also worth noting how our so called lovers of democracy have failed to say anything at all in support of those standing up for democracy in Hong Kong against the regime in Beijing.”
Well RD, now you mention it I was going to post something but felt off topic.
It’s been good to follow, and very important. But why do the same press ect, who go on about it totally bloody ignore (or grossly misrepresent) our democratic protests of late? The disparity begs belief really.
If Craig was Chinese they’d have him held above the rooftops in the UK.
The Greeks had the right foundation for democracy, but it lacked the will to enforce laws requiring the qualifying members to vote. They had many restrictions on who qualified, and that was another mistake, but what the hell, they were the first FFS.
I think not only requiring the populace to vote, they also had mandatory Civics classes which could be compensated according to income criteria.
I hope that’s the start of a constructive discussion.
Ben,
No, I don’t think so. Democracy means the people are entitled to get what they want. It is irrelevant if the intellectually arrogant like Plato or Craig Murray believe they know better.
“o. Democracy means the people are entitled to get what they want”
I think educating those people so they understand ‘what they want’ as to their responsibilities as citizens and the features/benefits of voting for their own interests would assist.
RepublicOfWildRavings
“Habb
After your rather cold and heartless reply with regards (sic) to terminally ill people, how could anyone take you seriously, are you IDS in disguise.”
___________________
Merely factual, dear boy – terminally ill people usually die soon, even very soon. That’s what “terminally” means.
Have you invested in that dictionary yet? I recommend the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 2 volumes. Mr Scorgie followed my advice and bought it and it’s done wonders for his comments! 🙂
Damn right, Craig. Exactly what I was thinking. You are spot on, and thank you for saying it.
I, and not without ability, explained and proved to voters, patiently over months, what the consequences of a No vote would be, and some voted No fully aware with that knowledge.
I have lived among the interminally thick for my whole life, and it can be suffocating. Irrelevant, but on my 40th birthday thank you for having the sincerity and integrity to highlight this side of Scottish society, indicating that it exists.
Here is an alternative look at some Hong Kong protests I came across. Has some nice videos and pictures if you ignore the other Spiel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bsIkwQVvnw
A big part of the problem is that people don’t see connectivity between what they see and hear and vote, and the way the sailboat tacks.
If they understand some of the mechanics of government, other than what it costs them personally, they could have ombudsmen responds to suggestions for improvement.
Efficient organization and rapid responses would be necessary, especially in the beginning.
A somewhat muffled “reply” from Ben (California Nazi) to the excellent Resident Dissident:
“He’s back, unabashed on this Gossamer thread.”
__________________
And you’re back from Squonk as well, Ben, welcome back!
Just a friendly word of advice – take the Gossamer off your head before writing.
(Durex refers)
In spite of the apparent contradiction, I am consistently saying that voting in one’s own interests knowledgeably, will result in a re-distribution of wealth throughout each of the classes.
Water seeks it’s own level if not damned at the source.
Ben (California Nazi)
“This is the exact problem Plato had with democracy. Isn’t it time we looked at alternatives short of dictatorship or even a benevolent dictatorship?”
_________________
Benevolent for whom, Ben?
The dumbasshab is back.
Roger Fluck, of the famous puppets fame, puts it rather well…
“We’ve become like Orwell’s 1984, but a Conservative version.”
(may have slightly misquoted)
Whoops… Roger Law.
And on the lighter side:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZntXyindCs
Clearly a big issue is the go betweens. I favour an administration that facilities some kind of open door policy to government. Any person should be able to walk in and adjust things as they see fit. To take part.
We have more like an old boys club where your in or out. And it becomes all about getting in, staying in, and working as hard as you can to keep most people out?
In this light I think the nobility of even ‘ukip supporters’ would do a better job. But yea, what they support and what they would get from a go between, night and day. imo
The devolution of powers to community’s is clearly the way forward, why I don’t think many who knowingly supported the no campaign are in favour of democracy. I am because for one the notability of individuals without to much power is more, and I think given good information and involvement most would make far better choices than those connected to the very rich or who see it all as some kind of ego trip.
As a Yes voter myself, having come through all the hideous propaganda war waged on us by the British state for two years unrelenting and resisted it, it is hard not to feel betrayed by the No voters. What the hell were they thinking?
Its non stop. Zionist propaganda show.
.http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/02/homeland-is-the-most-bigoted-show-on-television/
“I have no idea how to reach out to No voters because I find the majority of them stupid beyond my understanding. ”
You have to laugh at the sheer cheek of this carpet-bagging mentally ill English joker.
The fact is people voted No because they don’t want to live in some wanky socialist utopia ran by people like Murray.
“I think given good information and involvement”
Just to clarify. I don’t mean ‘good information’ like a “How to do good democracy”, some kind of green book or vanguard etc.
I mean the sort of individual information one gets through involvement. And yea that will not be universal, But with more involvement broadly extreme ideas will be more fairly represented (less so than now imo). Power being more evenly distributed.
I am not going to reach out to you, No voter. You are either evil, or quite extraordinarily thick. You will forever be a long way beneath my notice.
If CM is hallucinating, I wish him an early recovery. But it sounds more like the default reaction of a liberal loser: hatred expressed with utter contempt. So much for the tolerance of liberals.