The unmarked dead, and thoughts from the back line of human pain.

It has seemed to me for a while that there is no-one that stands up for our charnelled dead. I doubt they ever wanted to be dead. I doubt they would have ever seen themselves as a political statement, red in tooth, blood type and flat line. Their voices, their ideas are largely subsumed by the political actor in the play, the man with the bomb, the woman with the commitment, the other side.

For killing us, we are just the convenient punch bags for publicity. We try to remember the people that died in Oklahoma, or Mumbai or London or now Oslo and we can't.

We cannot see the victims as more important than the message. All these messages that these people share with us, via blood and death? Why are they more important that the telegram:

Dear Mrs Ali,

Private Ali has not returned from an expeditionary force tasked with approaching the borders os Afghanistan.

You have my regrets. 

Would they want us to be impressed that their deaths were to be allowed, trapped by the horror that was done to them, into what?

An idea?

What?   

Folk that cry out at the evil that men do, simply justify the evil that men do. It is kind of important that we are not  cowed by the wolf, or the fox or whatever other scary creature we encounter.

It was wrong to pander to the spectacular, the deliberate assault  on  the fairly transparent idea that you and I should live on this fucked up planet until we leave it as something better than the victims of an advertising campaign for the mad, the bad and the completely insane. Which, it seems to me, is what an aweful lot of us basic humans do.

Ho hum.

Newsnet Scotland? Nutters or not?

No, no... it's nothing any of you fine people have done. The Facebook page was reported maliciously as fake. We're working to try and get that resolved too. Hopefully we'll be back with a shiny new Facebook page for you all to enjoy in the not-too-distant future :)

Err, no you are not.

You let cheats and liars away with my money, your money too.

And you are so craven that you can't even talk to me. It is all supposed to be a secret. I am a filthy little secret because I say someone is a liar. It is you folk that are a disgrace to the whole idea of Scottish Independence. It is pretty obvious what side you\'d have been on back then.

By the way, you have asked for and obtained my real home address. Let's see you pull up your skirts and provide us with yours.

Otherwise I will see you as a coward and a liar. Perhaps others will too.

Desperately Seeking Sanity - The Newsnet Scotland Fiasco

Apparently you are no longer allowed to have an aggressive point of view amongst nationalists. We have all got to be a party to a love in.

It is very odd, to say the least, to watch Newsnet Scotland jump through hoops about it's embarrassments. Embarrassments? Well, more than one anyway.

To reflect. Newsnet wants to be the go to place for neutral - some might say unbiased - journalism on Scottish Politics. I welcome that. Indeed, in a very small way, I contributed money towards that.

So, what happened?

Newsnet Scotland owned the .com and the .org tags. Someone took exception to their strategy and took over the .net tag. To the extent of rivalling them.

When push came to shove, Newsnet Scotland - the .org version - has released information in a piecemeal and frankly grudging manner.

Mainly through the method of adding a postscript to articles that have nothing whatsoever to do with these 'issues'.

It is an odd way to conduct business.

I do not think a site that recieves money from the public - you and me - has any right to pretend that their finances are a matter of privacy. Some brainless morons seem to see it otherwise. You should just accept that £15,000 has gone missing / been misspent and bend over for the soap in the shower. All SNP supporters are as pure as the driven snow. Well, no, they are not. And those shouting for a cover up are either stupid or duplicitous. Anyway, these moral giants have banned me. What a victory for petty minded stupidity!

Frankly I am more than a little disgusted about this.

The Royal Wedding, aftermath

I am not completely convinced that many of those that watched the Kate and Wills fiasco aren't completely deluded.

It is pretty obvious to me that, as with any other healthy couple, they have been bonking away for a few years now. For the nation to get into a geriatric orgasm over two people making it legal says more about us than them.

We should chant:

" Are we stupid, yes we are!"

Is this controversial?

Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't.

I do think that what has happened in the Middle East is a horizontal splitting of nation states legitimacy. By that I mean that we are not here on this planet to be governed, we are capable of governing ourselves. And I think that is how Arabs are seeing it. The hierarchy is a busted flush. And, so, they see the last post imperial legacy, the idea that strong government is a necessary means, as perhaps a bankrupt idea.

They do not need that and neither do we.


Incidentally, I am an SNP supporter. And we still live under imperial rule, not the post imperial sink of Arab dictatorships that were left around the planet by HMG. We are almost certainly worse off than them.

A New Direction

First point.

I quite like people. Surprisingly enough I quite like you. So, I'd like to get to know you better.

I have decided that I am not interested in instant rebuttals, instant opinions. If anyone is reading this I am not interested in your instant reaction, I am interested in what you thought,  after a while. And I'll certainly guest other opinions.

I want to practice what I am preaching, so I will leave this site alone for a week or so and let you get your teeth into the - deliberately controversial  - points I make below.

So, take a chill pill, walk your dog, go on a holiday, circumnavigate the globe. Then, when you are quite sure you have something to say, say it.

I am of the AGW tendancy. Do you have the faintest idea how hard it is to refute the denialists? The point is that I had to put an immense amount of effort and time  into arguing against just one of their ideas. By which time: marshalling arguements, finding facts, etc, the entire agenda has moved on. If you are interested I learned that the glacier of which they spoke was the furthest from the sea of any glacier. If  I could remember, or be bothered where it actually was - central China I think - I would be a Mastermind contender.

(If anyone is really interested, and we slow down a lot, I can probably find that original thread on Liberal Conspiracy. But it is probably not the point.)


I have a proposition for you, dear reader. The point of this is perhaps wider than you might originally assume, though maybe you do:

Wikileaks:

I can understand the fear that big government will simply retrench and make it more difficult for this sort of material to come out.

But we are many and they are few.

It seems to me that state level diplomats already know what the other side thinks or can do. If they don’t, then what the hell are they for?

So, for example, if the political class in Israel knows what the political class in Palestine thinks, and vice versa, then they are on a level playing field.

It is perhaps useful for the two parties to these negotiations to be able to say things like, ‘I don’t know what they’ll say on the streets of Haifa / Gaza’, as added leverage to their position.
But, by keeping their populations in the dark, they are playing a propoganda game with their own constituents.

It strikes me as treating folk like cannon fodder, to be easily manipulated when the time comes.

I think that is a huge democratic deficit. One that must be addressed. It is a levers of power game that mandarins play on the poor bloody infantry, who are you and I.

Open negotiations and leaks, yes leaks, would benefit everyone.

Wish I hadn’t used the I/P conflict as an example as it seems to me it is probably a global issue.
The democratic or even pre-democratic compact between rulers and ruled is in dire need of a serious re-examination. Else we will all kill each other.

From a slow meal point of view is that interesting or is it just daft?

 Well, at least walk the dog.

Slow arguement - the antithesis of blogs

I have recently joined a disussion here:

http://tinyurl.com/6c97xm8


Interesting, not just for the way arguements tend to fractionalise and split away from what the original author thought they were talking about. A comparison of muslims and sharks ends up discussing stuff like scientific Linnaean taxonomy,  via contested stuff about the Israel / Palestine conflict and, frankly, whether there can be a genuine and neutral 'history of the world'.

I find it quite interesting, in the sense that you may wish to stay away from both sharks and muslims, which was the original precept, on the grounds of nearly certain death.

Or not.

And then you think.

Maybe not a lot. Maybe you say to yourself that someone, whose monicker is Iron Mike - how sad is that - is completely right? Do you think that sharks and muslims are a synonym?


Or perhaps Iron Mike is right? Perhaps his happy comparison between some sharks and some people is just the way of the world?


I am not convinced that alienating muslims from christians from jews is ever done in the best of faiths. And I say that as an atheist.

But that is not all of it, is it?


There is a huge cultural capital being spent on being right, or offended about stuff, isn't there?

It is enough to make people fight. It is this demonisation of 'the other' that seems to be something that activates some of us to violent solutions, and depending where we are in a society, we throw rocks, we sniper, we cavalry charge, we drop agent orange, or we nuke folk.

It seems to me that 'being offended' is a convenient way for jews and christians and muslims to see street violence and repressive states and all the rest of it as normal.

I think this idea that fighting each other, seen as usual, is actually pretty stupid. It is up to the Abrahamic Religions - the whole lot of you - to tell the rest of us why you are relevant to the 21st C.

For, it seems to me that none of you are relevant or useful.