Edinburgh Council election: SNP critics face interrogation
There's an election to Edinburgh Council (and all other Scottish local authorities) in May this year. The SNP have forced three of their sitting councillors -- all of whom are critics of the SNP leadership -- to face interrogations in order to be re-selected:
Edinburgh council elections: SNP makes three leadership critics go through extra vetting
Cllr Ross, Alison Dickie – who has now resigned from the SNP group – and planning convener Neil Gardiner all had to be interviewed by a party vetting panel which decides who goes on the list of approved candidates, while many other sitting SNP councillors were approved with no interview.
Insiders said both Cllr Ross and Cllr Gardiner were also called back for second interviews.
Sources said the vetting process was now "complete". But with the full list of approved candidates yet to be made available and selections still to take place, it is still not clear which councillors will go forward as candidates.
Looks like the council elections will be eventful! I'll be following them closely and posting to my blog.
de Boer contra Voldemorting
Freddie de Boer comes out against Voldemorting:
Some months back I asked, quite earnestly, what we should call a particular school of politics, given that those who practice it hate every name it’s given - political correctness, identity politics, SJW, woke. Every time a new term is devised, those who fall under its umbrella quickly declare that it’s a slur. So a large, complex, and profoundly influential element in our political debate lacks a name that anyone within that element will answer to.
Well, at some point in the discussion of that post I saw the term “Voldemorting” used to describe this practice, a reference to Harry Potter and the evil wizard who you must not name. I find it a very apt phrase.
Voldemorting has an obvious political purpose: that which you cannot name is made that much harder to discuss, and that which is harder to discuss is harder to criticize. That they would hide within these discursive tricks does not say good things about the content of their politics or their ability to defend them.
Wokists do this deliberately to shut off debate. Thus they expose themselves as being intellectually dishonest.
China changes Fight Club ending
The ending to cult 1999 US film Fight Club has been removed for viewers in China, and replaced by a screen with a message saying the authorities won.
The original ending saw Edward Norton's narrator killing his imaginary alter-ego Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, before bombs destroyed buildings in the climax to a subversive plot to reorder society, dubbed Project Mayhem.
In China, before the explosions, a message now says the police foiled the plot, arrested the criminals and sent Durden to a "lunatic asylum".
The new finale tells viewers: "Through the clue provided by Tyler, the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.
In other news, China has issued a re-write of 1984, where Big Brother Xi Jinping is the hero.
1984 is thoughtcrime!
University of Northampton slaps a trigger warning on George Orwell's 1984:
As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.
Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.
Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.
In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.
I'm disappointed that Northampton University missed the opportunity to call 1984 doubleplusungood.
The difference between the Labour and Conservative parties
Seen on Twitter:
Canada copies China's Social Credit system
David Sacks writes that Justin Trudeau is copying Canada's social credit system by denying access to the economy to those he considers thought criminals:
Last summer, I warned readers of Common Sense that financial deplatforming would be the next wave of online censorship. Big Tech companies like PayPal were already working with left-wing groups like the ADL and SPLC to define lists of individuals and groups who should be denied service. As more and more similarly minded tech companies followed suit (as happened with social media censorship), these deplorables would be deplatformed, debanked, and eventually denied access to the modern economy altogether, as punishment for their unacceptable views.
That prediction has become reality.
[...] Trudeau escalated things further on Tuesday night, when he issued a new directive called the Emergency Economic Measures Order. Invoking a War on Terror law called the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act, the order requires financial institutions—including banks, credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts, and even cryptocurrency wallets—to stop “providing any financial or related services” to anyone associated with the protests
Taking away dissidents' ability to spend money is something that no liberal, democratic country would do, but it is the sort of thing China and Russia do. Indeed, any country that do such a thing is by definition neither liberal nor democratic.
The 2nd Cold War, between the West and the Beijing-Moscow Axis, will be as much a war of words and ideas as it will be a war of weapons. If the West wants to win it needs to up its game, by being pro freedom/openness/democracy, in order to differentiate itself from its enemies. That way, popular opinion around the world will see us as better than China/Russia.
Trudeau's actions are thus not only deeply immoral, they are also very much against Canada's and the West's long term geopolitical interests.
How did things get to this point? For years, ideologues have used accusations of bigotry to hound people from their jobs, kick them off social media, and rescind their right to participate in the online economy. However, many observers shrugged off these cases as outliers—fringe examples that could be ignored because they affected unsympathetic individuals. But now we have a wide-ranging group of working-class people [my emphasis] and their supporters who are being financially deplatformed for civil disobedience.
Wokism is a hate ideology which originated in the professional and managerial classes and sees working class people as an outgroup. Thus, wokists are always ready to turn on an authentically working class movement that doesn't fit in with their ideology, such as truck drivers. Wokism wears the skin of a left wing movement, but they are not of the left, they cannot be because they are not of the working class and thus do not share the class interests of the working class.
A year and a half ago, during the BLM riots, woke-aligned big corporations were all falling over themselves to donate money to BLM. Obviously big corporations don't want money and power to be transferred away from big corporations, since that would be against their class interest. So why did they donate to BLM? Because they realised that BLM was never going to be a threat to the class interest of the ruling class.
It's about time that white working class people and black working class people across North America realised that the elites, ruling classes, and giant corporations are the common enemy, and that wokism is at best a distraction, and at worst is an enemy of working class people.
UK to abolish Scotland?
Paul Kavanagh writes that the UK government is planning to rip up the devolution settlement and drastically reduce the Scottish Parliament's powers, effectively castrating it:
There can no be absolutely no doubt that the choices facing Scotland are either independence or the rolling back of devolution and the integration of Scotland into an increasingly centralised UK
Writing in the Telegraph on Sunday, David Frost, the Tory lord and Brexit negotiator, , laid out his plan to save Johnson’s premiership, and “unite the UK”. Frost wrote in The Telegraph that Johnson needs to “unite the kingdom” in order to ensure that he keeps his job as Prime Minister.
I can easily imagine Johnson going ahead with this.
The plan would in fact destroy the UK, as it boils down to stripping Scotland and Wales of many of the existing powers of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd.
This would of course be unacceptable to Scots.
Without a shred of self-awareness, Frost opined while defending the Conservatives’ hard Brexit which he was instrumental in bringing about : “A country with self-respect cannot have its laws set by others.”
Yes, and that's the case for Scottish independence in a nutshell. We need to set ourselves free from Westminster.
China accidentally reveals they intend to invade Taiwan
China accidentally reveals they plan to invade Taiwan:
Chinese media accidentally posts CCP rules on Russia-Ukraine coverage, hint at Taiwan takeover
Chinese news media posted instructions to social platforms about how to approach coverage on Ukraine, including a note of China’s need for Russian "support" with Taiwan.
Ming Jinwei, senior editor at Xinhua News Agency, wrote in his WeChat blog about how his outlet needed to walk a tight line on its Ukraine coverage, noting that China "has to back Russia up with emotional and moral support while refraining from treading on the toes of the United States and European Union."
"In the future, China will also need Russia’s understanding and support when wrestling with America to solve the Taiwan issue once and for all," his post read.
China has evidently decided that because the West wouldn't put up a fight for Ukraine, they won't for Taiwan either.
Thanks for that, Joe Biden. When you were elected I thought "You're crap, but at least you're not as bad as Trump". But you seem to be determined to prove me wrong!
Big shift in German foreign and defence policy
Chancellor Olaf Scholz announces a major shift in German defence and foreign policy:
Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday announced a "historic" shift in Germany's foreign and defence policy, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine forces Europe's biggest economy to ditch decades of reluctance in raising its military profile.
Scholz said: "With the invasion of Ukraine, we are now in a new era."
He's sending weapons to Ukraine:
Germany said it was delivering 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 "Stinger" surface-to-air missiles from its Bundeswehr stocks to Ukraine.
Beefing up the German armed forces:
Hours after Germany dramatically reversed its ban on lethal weapons exports to conflict zones by announcing huge shipments to Ukraine, Scholz said 100 billion euros ($113 billion) will be earmarked for investments for the army in 2022 alone.
Europe's biggest economy will also "from now on -- year after year -- invest more than two percent of gross domestic product in our defence," said Scholz.
He even wants to write higher defence spending into the constitution:
The financial bazooka for the Bundeswehr should be written in the German constitution, [Scholz] said.
Scholz also wants to not be dependent on Russian gas:
Scholz also announced the construction of two new terminals for liquefied natural gas in response to what some critics said was Germany’s over-reliance on Russian gas. The terminals are to be located in Brunsbuttel and Wilhelmshaven in northern Germany, he said.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany put on hold the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project designed to bring Russian natural gas directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea.
Congratulations Putin, you appear to have achieved a united Europe. One united against you.