Be Excellent To Each Other

Well, seems we can finally call an end to the 20 year long competition for "Most Naive thing that will ever be said online"

"You wont share this photo of my tits with anybody will you?" will be so disappointed. Multiple entries that led for so, so long - only to finish second.

While this is true, it's also true that Salmond and the party he leads will lead the bulk of negotiation that defines what statehood for Scotland looks like, so a lack of faith in his competence or plans isn't an unsound reason for voting No as far as I can see.

I just popped in here to say hello to you all, and to say that it's faintly surreal seeing an offshoot of the same blog that once criticised all of us become a place of massive import in the way that it has. "Gosh", I often think, up here in Scotland where I live.

While this is true, it's also true that Salmond and the party he leads will lead the bulk of negotiation that defines what statehood for Scotland looks like, so a lack of faith in his competence or plans isn't an unsound reason for voting No as far as I can see.

I just popped in here to say hello to you all, and to say that it's faintly surreal seeing an offshoot of the same blog that once criticised all of us become a place of massive import in the way that it has. "Gosh", I often think, up here in Scotland where I live.

Yay!!!!

Vegetables is back!!!

And confused as to how posting works, it would seem.

I may not be back for very long, though, I don't know. I just remembered you all when reading about the recent adventures of the man who in a way founded this forum, and thought it might be nice to pop back for a bit.

Grow up. Of course Salmond's a glory-seeking egomaniac who wants to enter history as some kind of 'father of a nation' figure - that's as obvious as saying water is wet. A politician wouldn't get that high up in the food chain without being a special kind of sociopath. The point is, to the average Scottish person, that element of the equation doesn't matter to them, what matters is whether their particular part of the UK becomes a separate nation-state in the near future, and how that will affect their lives. People and political parties come and go (the SNP may well be stone dead in ten years time), what kind of situation they leave people in is what matters in the day to day scheme of things. This is too important an issue to simplify down to an 'us versus them' battle of personalities and shit, whether we're Scottish or not, as it affects us all even if we live in the rUK. I'll admit that I've never seen the need for a Scottish independence referendum basically ever, but that's the situation has occurred, and has to be dealt with.

(FWIW, I actually agree with Cavey on his points - the SNP government obviously haven't gotten their shit together, the currency union issue is a fudge at best, laughable at worst, this whole debate literally has created huge divisions that needn't exist, and that Salmond is terrible. I just don't like the way he frames his arguments at times, including getting the wrong end of the stick too often.)

Anyway, perhaps anti-independence side in Scotland should look to the positive side of things, and see it as an opportunity to defeat separatism from mainstream Scottish politics for a generation or so? That's something to think about.

Genuine question, why don't the English, welsh an Northern Irish get to vote on this?

It will, after all, affect us too. Leads to lots of interesting questions such as what if England overwhelming votes to evict Scotland
but the poll is far too close in Scotland? Instinctively, I think the reason we haven't a say in this is that it makes most sense to let the area under dispute (for want of a better term) decide for itself. Self-determination and all that.

There is the related question of whether a part of Scotland that doesn't wish to leave, such as the Orkneys, should be forced out with the rest, or if they can form their own arrangement.

I think that the best time for a UK wide poll would be once the final outcome of the negotiations had been agreed. After all, we are all going to be bound by the decisions, and any deal should be acceptable to all of us. And I wonder how many Scots might change their vote once the deal is known?

If you think that any election, least of all this one, is determined solely by the matter in hand, and not the personality of the lead campaigners then it is you who needs to grow up. Especially when the election in this case is led on the one hand by, at best, a politician with an exceptionally divisive personality against an opposition where there are no personalities at all.

If, as some opinion polls will lead us to believe, the actual vote on people with strong opinions on independence itself are very close, then the campaign will absolutely be won or lost by marginal voters with no big view on independence either way, but who vote on the basis wheher or not they like the idea of 'President elect' Salmond (although, should the Yes campaign win, you still can't ignore the 1945 General Election result).

Wikipedia - but on the 2011 PR vote:



I speak as someone living in London - where the Mayor vote is quite clearly a personality contest, but still, policy should play a part, no? In four votes so far, the mayoral vote hasn't followed a comparable analysis of the assembly vote taken on the same day (although in 2000, sticking it to Tony Blair was a factor when they excluded Livingstone from the candidacy). The tories got stuffed in 2012 but we still voted for Boris. Instead, the choice of Mayor has come down to who was the best performer on Have I got News for you recently (a terrifying thought, as this implies we'll get Lembit Opik next).

It would get very tedious if Scotland became Britain's Quebec and regularly held polls on the subject. All depends on the margin and the turnout. A wide margin against would probably kill it; if it's close (which I am inclined to think it will be, but much depends on turnout), we'll probably go through the whole farrago again in 2020. 'Just one more push, boys!'

I emailed Yes Scotland back in April, asking if they had any advance on their last quoted figure for people signing up to the Independence Declaration.

The Declaration, as a reminder, was Salmond's big thing saying that if he could get a million people signed up to it, the battle would be won.

The last reported total was 372,103 in May 2013 - still a long way off. A week ago they reckoned it was up to 789,191.

I distrust this figure greatly, not least because I don't believe they have any way of validating that the alleged sign-up is a real person, is on the electoral register, or even lives in Scotland. You need a only name, email address, and postcode. I can't imagine how many cybernats have signed this thing 10 times.

One thing that is very real is the psychological impact of the Bandwagon effect. It's absolutely in their interests to fudge this number as high as they possibly can to create the impression that all support is with them. Lots of pins would fall if they believed the result was a foregone conclusion. Yet another cheap tactic that might well pay off, and another judgement on those who are so impressionable that they'd vote like a sheep.

I do wonder what the real figure is - unquestionably much lower. Remember that they originally had this declaration total as a counter on the website, but it was removed when the initial uptake was pathetically poor.

Ooooo..... an interim constitution ....

Stu's influence has grown and now people have started to look at him in detail. And of course his history of being a massive bellend has started to emerge. He's mentioned here and the subject of this longer piece. The idea of Stu with actual influence is disturbing, so I rather hope there's more of this to come.

Oh, if he comes under increased scrutiny it would be hilarious. His staggering lack of knowledge as to how language and legal standing works is one thing, but his continued campaign against the Hillsbrough victims is surely something that would alienate people.

Another piece on Stu - ahdinnaeken

Where's his flat top gone?

Oh. My.

I thought the no-nukes clause was interesting. While I'm sure its a crowd pleaser (and many of us here would take it, either in the UK or rUK) it didn't seem to fit as anything other than that. It made me wonder why there aren't any other crowd pleasing pledges in there.

I probably won't be making any friends when I say this, but I can't believe you lot are still banging on about Stuart Campbell after all these years. Whatever you think of him, no-one was forced to use his forum so most of us ended up here instead.

I had a quick look at that dinnaeken thing out of curiosity and to me it reeks of obsession/stalking.

This thread is about Scottish independence and he's become a prominent feature of that debate. I find it quite interesting to read about how his rantings are going down with a wider audience, if that's alright by you.

Yeah, I think that if it were general snarkiness about Stu in general and his old video games forum, etc, then it would be one thing. Instead it's about the Scottish independence thing, which he is a part of. I think there'd be heightened interest, just as there tends to be in anyone we tend to know.

Fair enough, but there did seem to be a fair bit of snarkiness in that dinnaeken blog. Also, if it's all about Scottish independence, why the need to point out Campbell's views on Hillsborough, for example? I don't agree with him as it happens, but "campaign to blame the victims" is a bit harsh.

One would expect that if one is holding other people's views and attitudes up to the light, their own will receive similar judgement.

Of course it's alright by me, I find it interesting too, but if you're going to reply like that I'll say I just find it more interesting to read his and other people's arguments on the subject of independence rather than, for example, whether he has a flattop or not.

What about that he now appears to have a terrifying beard?

I need to re-read. When I skimmed it last night, I got the feeling it was phrased so it could be quietly dropped as part of the negotiation ('well, we tried to get them removed and negotiated in that spirit, but we ended up keeping them anyway').

Probably better that the interim document leaves out the nice stuff and only deals with the very basic question of who shall govern Scotland until a proper constitution is ratified.

Sure, it's just important that the thing you hold up to the light is what the person actually said. I might be wrong, but the way I understood it was that Campbell said that some of the other fans were partly to blame by pushing from behind. Whether you agree with that or not, it's not the same as "blaming the victims". It's the misrepresentation that bothers me.

Jesus fucking christ, it was just a joke you sanctimonious tit.

My opinion that Stu is a prat precedes the creation of this forum by at least half a decade. Using his forum or this forum has nothing to do with it. It's because he's a prat.

It just felt unusual in that it isn't 'the very basic question' on that clause, and I think it was alone in that (I only skimmed myself). Although I suppose that if 'our' nuke base is in the middle of scotland, it is a question of territorial sovereignty.

Yeah, I know it was a joke, all I was saying is that if my post was not relevant to the thread subject, neither was yours. "Sanctimonious tit" is a bit over the top.

Now you've gone too far.

Maybe if you just mullet over?

Beehive yourself, otherwise I'll have to comb over to your place.

When I saw that my first thought was 'Paedo-beard'. So terribly ad-hominem of me.

Stuart is an egomaniac whose self-belief is only reinforced by the like-minded morons that share his bigoted views. When his analytics reported that he'd had 1 million unique sessions, he declared that he'd reached 1/5th of the Scottish people which wasn't bad going for a humble (ha) startup of one man.

Of course, that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how analytics work in calculating uniqueness, and also assumes that every visitor was someone living in Scotland. The accuracy of the statement didn't matter though, the basic message was 'I get lots of hits and this only shows how right I am'.

You may have also missed the Twitter thing a while back where he forcefully stated that he wouldn't be told what sex Transsexuals were. I believe the basic message there was, it didn't matter what sex they identified as, you wouldn't change his mind on what sex they 'really' were. Sub please check specifics.

The fact he's far more the 'mentalist' than Stephen accused me of earlier in this thread doesn't matter to, as one of those articles put it, the 'vehement acolytes' who will believe everything he says and hand over as much cash as they've got spare to keep him representing their small-minded views.

The thing that struck me about the original WoS forums was how much of a twat he was, oddly juxtapositioned against how nice and helpful everyone else seemed by comparison. The fact everyone loved him so much because he used to write for Amiga Power always baffled me since I didn't rate his writing at all. When the good old schism happened I popped back up from the ban-list to point out that everything which made his forum worth visiting had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with you - the original forumites. That you then picked up and left pretty much en-masse was an event of great schadenfreude.

I do not lightly forget that back when I sold retro games, many people here bought them, and gave helpful advice when someone cybersquatted my business name (*eight* bloody years ago). I also kindly remember all of the support at the original time of the giant snacks (You especially MrC) and I think if *whoever* it was that submitted my original article to the Beta newsletter had never done so, it would probably have never been a thing. All of that had less than nothing to do with Stu, although I remember with more than a little smugness that his response to my original Pimped Snack post was 'This is the best forum ever', and the record for hits to his forum was set as a result of hits coming from that Beta newsletter plug to my post. /snark.

Whinge over Scotland indeed.

Can you help me out here EBG? If you mean me as the MrC in that post I genuinely can't remember, but I'm old and my memory isn't what it was.

Maybe Mr Chris?

Indeed, that MrC. What his username these days?

Ah right, thought it might be something like that. Maybe my memory isn't that bad after all.

Mr Kissyfur, I think.

To be fair, he wrote an extremely long blog post a while back where he said the entirety of the problem was the Liverpool fans knowingly pushing their fellow supporters against the fences and crushing them to death. It wasn't a throwaway comment; he genuinely believes and publicises that he believes every death at Hillsbrough was the fault of the Liverpool fans.

Don't bother him with facts. He'll invent his own

I suggest you read it again. It doesn't say that at all. http://wosland.podgamer.com/no-justice-for-the-96/

Just read through it all again myself, he bounces between blaming some people pushing at the back, to blaming people for not pushing back against them. His summary also seems to lay the blame solely on the crowd.



He lacks any evidence based on crowd dynamics and decides to post this a day after the Hillsborough Independent Panel report conclusively exonerated Liverpool fans of any blame in the disaster is the act of a troll looking to get some cheap publicity. imo the guy is a total @%nt.

Also I am a welsh guy who doesn't like football so I am not a Liverpool fan who has



Anyway we seem to have been derailing the Scotland independence thread...oops. Carry on.

Yeah, he really does blame the fans. I don't think he's as stupid as the argument is, so I assume he was just looking for attention when he wrote it.

Now now.

I remember when you had opinions too.

No need for any mod intervention - I stuck my head above the parapet, there's bound to be a few shots (sanctimonious tit is a new one for me though. Who knows, Mark might even be right).

Whether it's Lara Croft or crowd dynamics, Stu has often had an issue with physics and bodies in motion.

Waiting for someone to bring up the cover of AP that showed ['disrespect to our war dead' - Daily Star]

I'm rather impressed by his campaigning skills and dedication to this cause. If only he used them for a more reasonable mission.

Mod intervention is in blue. That was a Grim...tervention