Your weekly roundup of mostly-Scottish-related links.
Scottish Green Party crowdfunder
The Scottish Green party has a crowdfunder for the party election broadcast:
Like other parties, we are entitled to a Party Election Broadcast which will be shown on the main television channels, helping to spread our message to every home in the country.
Producing great videos costs money and as a people-powered party we don't rely on big corporate donors to foot the bill. We need to raise £10,000 in just two weeks.
Alba Party crowdfunder
The Alba party has a crowdfunder:
Help secure the Independence #Supermajority
The ALBA Party needs your help to secure the Independence #Supermajority in the Scottish Parliament this May 6th.
The Alba Party is dedicated to restoring Scotland’s independence. As we are a new party, every donation, no matter the size will be crucial to our success.
SNP crowdfunders
The Scottish National Party has several crowdfunders, and I'm not going to list them all here as it would take up too much space; follow the link you you want to donate.
TLDR on Scottish election
TLDR news has a summary of the Scottish parliamentary election:
New Statesman on Alba
The New Statesman thinks Alba is an anti-woke independence party. Why? Alba has ties with Wings:
The idea of maximising pro-independence representation via the list vote is not new. It began to make waves within the independence movement some time in 2019, promoted in particular on Wings Over Scotland, the blog of the activist Stuart Campbell. “Wings”, as Campbell is now generally known, is a former video-games journalist who made his political name with tabloid-esque, attack-dog interventions in the 2014 independence referendum campaign.
It’s not clear if Salmond and Campbell are cooperating on plans for Alba, but in 2019 they were close enough for Salmond to fawn over Campbell in a 40-minute segment for his talk show on Russia Today. Key supporters of Alba, such as the former SNP politicians Kenny MacAskill and Neale Hanvey, have written guest blogs for Wings Over Scotland.
Wings thinks SNP has gone woke and has reduced indy to a lower priority:
Campbell has become chief peddler of the theory that the SNP has been taken over by what he has called the “wokerati”, meaning young party activists who support, for example, easier self-definition for trans people and a more inclusive approach to disabled and BAME members and candidates. This, he and his supporters argue, has distracted the party from the pursuit of independence, and explains the lack of any solution to Westminster’s refusal to grant a new referendum.
A "more inclusive approach to disabled and BAME candidates" is a reference to the SNP's policy of reserving the top list spot to self identified disabled people in 4 regions and non-white people in the other 4 regions. I've nothing against disabled or non-white people being elected to the Scottish parliament, but they should get there on merit (i.e. because the voters want them), not by favouritism.
Many Alba candidates seem to agree that the SNP is too woke:
Many of Alba's first batch of election candidates were recruited from disgruntled nationalists who remained focused on the SNP, and whose seizure of several seats on the party's ruling NEC last year was celebrated as a defeat of “woke ideology”. They include some of the most prominent critics of the SNP leadership’s (now “paused”) proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act, but this is combined with a more general demonisation of “social” concerns, which many of Salmond’s more left-leaning backers view as a cover for economic conservatism.
On this last point I note that the SNP reserves seats for non-whites and disabled people, and Labour and the Scottish Green Party have reserved seats for women. But none of these parties have ever, to my knowledge, reserved seats for people educated at state schools or from a working class background.
It's almost as if they have deliberately ignored class in their analysis of under-represented groups, which is consistent with the idea that wokeness is in some cases "a cover for economic conservatism". Of course, wokeness is more prominent in the (economically advantaged) professional class than it is in the working class, so it would be hardly surprising if the woke favour their own class over a more marginalised class.
Unsatisfied by Scotland’s thin, cautious, postmodern national identity, an increasingly loud minority of the Yes movement now openly yearns for something more honest, substantial and majoritarian. Where the alt-right claim to be “red-pilled”, these alt-nats are saltire-pilled.
LOL
This is the only way of understanding Alba’s existence, its potential appeal, and its likely function in Scottish politics. If all that’s needed is another pro-independence party on the list, more left-wing and internally democratic than the SNP, why not support the Scottish Greens? The answer is that the Scottish Greens are too woke; Alba is the new vanguard party of Scotland’s “war on woke”, a bekilted ally, whether its supporters like it or not, of Faragism and the right-wing gutter press.
Of course, Farage wants Scotland out of the EU, and most independence supporters want Scotland in the EU.
Salmond may have made the modern SNP, but he was also made by it, kept sensible and serious by the requirements of a big-tent, pragmatic electoral strategy.
Many Alba supporters would no doubt say it was the SNP's abandoning of the big tent in favour of wokeness that led them to support Alba. That and the peculiarities of AMS, of course.
Scottish women moving towards independence
The Economist notes that Scottish women are moving towards independence:
in the referendum of 2014, the cause had become a rather more male affair. Nicola Sturgeon, whom Mrs Ewing mentored, played second fiddle to Alex Salmond, then the first minister and party leader. The campaign was, in the words of a female nationalist, “dominated by shouty men”. And male supporters of independence outnumbered female ones. A narrow majority of men (51%) and only 42% of women voted for independence, according to YouGov. “The women’s vote effectively lost the referendum,” says Elaine C. Smith, a comedian and nationalist campaigner.
Since the referendum, the gender gap has narrowed sharply. Most polls now either report a negligible gap or suggest independence is more popular among women than men (see chart).
Why have women moved towards independence?
Mr Salmond resigned the day after the referendum. His successor, Ms Sturgeon, is popular with a majority of men but even more so among women.
Women tend to be more risk-averse than men. That may account for their lack of enthusiasm for constitutional change in other parts of the UK (see chart). Scottish independence is as risky as ever, but Brexit and the economic uncertainty induced by the pandemic mean that the status quo appears less predictable than it was in 2014
China is the wolf
According to the Chinese embassy in Ireland, at any rate:
Enjeti contra China
Rising's Saagar Enjeti notes that China is using economic pressure to get Western companies to kowtow to them:
Westerners thought that commerciasl engagement with China would help China to politically libveralise.
But no, what's actually happening is the opposite way around: commercial engagement with China is giving China leverage on Western governments, helping them to control us.
It's clear that a confrontation with China isd on its way. The West can either:
(1) confront China now
(2) confront China later
(3) not confront China at all
If we do (3), we'll wake up sometime in the mid 2030s and China will have delivered a fait accompli, they will be in control of the world and there won't be much we can do about it.
If we confront them later, they will be relatively stronger, as the Chinese economy is growing faster than the Western economy.
So our best choice is to confront them now.
To effectively confront China it helps if the West is united. That's one big reason why Brexit was a big mistake. The best thing Scotland could do to repair the damage of Brexit is to leave the UK and rejoin the EU. Independent Scotland should also join NATO, to make the West more united.
China contra Taiwan
Caspian report suggests China may invade Taiwan by 2027:
This is entirely possible given increased Chinese sabre-rattling in recent years.
Right-to-repair considered insufficient
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes that right-to-repair legislation is insufficient:
It might shock some people to know that while I'm a supporter of the Right to Repair, the movement pressing for government legislation to allow consumers and businesses to repair and modify their stuff, I don't think that it will help consumers that much in the long run.
The solution? Mandatory warranties:
Here's my idea for making products more reliable and keep things out of recycling centers for longer -- mandatory 3-year parts and labor warranty on gadgets.
Don't think that goes far enough? Make it a 5-year warranty then.
One problem with this might be if the manufacturer (or shop that sold the good) went bankrupt during the 5-year period.
Spectator favours reparations
The Spectator thinks there should be reparations for a group that has suffered war, invasion, oppression and genocide:
To those who suggest we might be better spending our time righting the injustices of today rather than of the distant past I say: shame on you. If these wrongs are not righted through compensation they will live on in our collective shame and the descendants of the victims will continue to suffer. Far from abandoning the principle of restorative justice we should be expanding it and exploring what other injustices might be put right through financial compensation.
One glaring example is the great evil visited on the Anglo-Saxon population by the Norman Conquest of 1066. By any standard, the effect on indigenous English society was enduring devastation. The Conquest continues to have lasting effects. In his study of surnames and social mobility, economic historian Gregory Clark concluded that Norman surnames continue to be 25 percent over-represented at Oxbridge to this day relative to other indigenous English surnames. As Clark put it: ‘The fact that Norman surnames had not been completely average in their social distribution by 1300, by 1600, or even by 1900 implies astonishingly slow rates of social mobility during every epoch of English history.’ Not for nothing did Nonconformists and Whigs loudly oppose ‘the Norman yoke’ during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Cambridge University, which still drips with Norman money and influence, should now consider to what extent it needs to compensate its Anglo-Saxon victims. The Sutton Trust estimates that Oxbridge graduates earn £400,000 more during their lifetimes than graduates from other UK universities. These figures imply that descendants of the rapacious Norman invader class could be earning tens of thousands of pounds more than other graduates — an undeserved lifetime premium that has survived 31 generations.
Quite right too!
Sturgeon investigated over missing donations?
Stuart Campbell writes that the SNP is being investigated by the police over missing referendum fund donations:
We were also informed last night, by a different source, that on Tuesday of this week, 30 March, officers visited the home of the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and her husband Peter Murrell in connection with their investigation
This site makes no allegations of criminality against anyone. But it is a matter of public recorded fact, undisputed by the SNP, that it raised almost £600,000 for what it calls the “Referendum Appeal Fund”, and it is also a matter of public recorded fact that in the party’s last published accounts it did not have even half that much money at its disposal, either in cash or net assets.
Alba polls
A poll puts Alex Salmond's new Alba Party on only 3%:
A Survation poll, commissioned The Courier and Press & Journal newspapers, saw Alba trailing behind all five of Scotland’s major parties, with just a three per cent share of the list vote.
A more recent Panelbase poll however puts Alba on 6%:
Today’s Panelbase poll for The Sunday Times provides Alex Salmond’s Alba Party with some good news. It suggests the party might win 6 per cent of the list vote, which could mean securing six Holyrood seats.
At 6 per cent support, the poll suggests Alba might just be above the threshold needed in most of Scotland’s eight parliamentary regions to pick up a list seat.
It may well be that the earlier poll, so soon after Alba's launch, underestimated their support.
Stokes thinks AGI more likely
Jon Stokes now thinks early AGI is more likely than he had previously thought, because just making neural networks bigger makes them much more capable:
In listening to practitioners in different corners of the machine learning (ML) world describe this scale-based phenomenon to me, it almost sounds like they’re describing a kind of phase transition, like when water goes from a liquid to a gas at a certain temperature. Neural networks in particular seem to have this phase transition ability in a way that other types of machine learning systems do not.
That there essentially two “states” of neural networks (continuing on the analogy of states of matter) — “bigger” and “smaller” — is probably under-appreciated because right now, there are only a handful of these large models in existence at a handful of companies big enough to build them. And the circle of people in those companies that are working closely with those models is small.
Stokes gives GPT-2 and GPT-3 as an example:
In particular, there was a sudden, scaling-induced jump in output quality from GPT-2 to GPT-3 that even people working in LLMs were not quite expecting.
[GPT-2 was limited,] but when OpenAI announced GPT-3 — based on the same algorithm, just run on a larger dataset with 10X the parameters and more computing resources — it was so good that its output can fool college professors. Some of its essays certainly fooled me; I read them as they circulated on Twitter and then later learned they had been written by GPT-3.
Indeed, this essay about GPT-3, written by GPT-3, is better than what most undergrads in the US could produce on this topic:
I agree with Stokes here. Back in 2010 I would have said the possibility of AGI within 10 years is pure fantasy. Now I think AGI within 10 years is plausible (if unlikely). I still think it will probably happen in the 2nd half of this century, but an early AGI looks a lot more likely now than it did 10 or even 5 years ago.
Alba and A4U pick up anti-woke vote?
Andrew McFadyen notes that Alex Salmond's Alba party and George Galloway's All For Unity appeal to similar voters:
Alex Salmond's new Alba Party are forecast to win six [seats]. While Labour and the Conservatives look likely to fall back, maverick former MP George Galloway could be elected in the South of Scotland as a unionist for All for Unity.
Some Conservative activists have picked up leakage of their support to Mr Galloway's robust unionism and, wait for it, Alba. In both cases, it is what one insider described as the "angry white men of a certain age vote". One of the most bitter dividing lines in the SNP has been over trans rights, with those who support Mr Salmond tending to be sceptical of what they see as "the wokerati".
That’s all for this week’s Links post. If you have any links you want to add for next weeks’, leave them in the comments.