As a quick follow-up to my last post about Jeff Breslin's now famous tweet comparing Alex Salmond with Nelson Mandela, here's a very brief exchange (the ending was abrupt in a rather familiar way!) I've just had with a Labour supporter called Rayleen Kelly on Twitter, who says without a trace of irony in her self-description that she "hates rude people".
Rayleen Kelly : Don't care what political persuasion it was tasteless when it was a joke, beyond it now!!
Me : What was tasteless about it? It was an honest opinion, which you're free to disagree with.
Rayleen Kelly : It was vulgar and crass, that you can't see that says everything I want to know about you
Me : You're also free to think what you like about me, I'm just struggling to understand your logic. How was it vulgar and crass?
Rayleen Kelly : If you don't know the answer to that you really need to learn about Mandela
Me : Do you have an answer to the question, Rayleen, or are you just going to sneer at people all night?
(At this point she blocks me.)
Rayleen Kelly : As I am entitled to my opinion I will be blocking any idiot seriously comparing wee Eck with Madiba!
Rayleen Kelly : Just blocked another yes fanny that thinks wee Eck is comparable to Nelson Mandela, insulting and crass
Rayleen Kelly : For those who don't quite understand Madiba united a torn people and made a country whole ... Wee Eck is he'll bent on division and hate
Well, we got there in the end, even if it was a thoroughly stupid (some might charitably say "vulgar and crass") answer. I'd be interested to see if Jeff's more thoughtful critics - for example Kenny Farquharson and Alex Massie - can come up with a more convincing explanation for why the tweet was supposedly so "offensive". As Tris points out on the previous thread, we might not think Jeff's comment entirely makes sense, particularly on the "personal sacrifices" point. But how precisely is it offensive?
Showing posts with label Nelson Mandela. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nelson Mandela. Show all posts
Friday, December 6, 2013
Alternative 'tributes' to Nelson Mandela
I discovered the news about Nelson Mandela last night in the worst possible way - I stumbled on a Twitter conversation midway through, and the sickening realisation only very gradually dawned about what it was referring to. I'll leave the tributes to those who can do it far better than me. I'm not sure if Glenda Jackson has written anything yet - I recall that back at the turn of the century, there was a programme on the BBC News channel in which Jackson, Shirley Williams and Ken Clarke were all asked to choose their 'Person of the Millennium', and Jackson had no hesitation in opting for Mandela. (Williams chose Thomas Aquinas, while Clarke bizarrely plumped for Henry II of England on the grounds that he was an "excellent Tory"!)
Unfortunately, moments like this do tend to bring out the worst in some people, and in many ways we're seeing a reverse mirror image of what happened when Mrs Thatcher died - this time it's a few extremists on the Right who are disgracing themselves by 'celebrating' the demise of a 'terrorist'. Mick Pork sent me an email earlier today to say that, predictably, the racists and bigots were out in full force at Political Betting (with, we're entitled to assume, the full blessing of the site's right-leaning Lib Dem owner Mike Smithson, because we know that he has no compunction whatever about banning or censoring people when it suits him). Mick added that it was jaw-dropping stuff even by PB standards. I had a quick look, but to be honest I couldn't bear to wade through the usual drivel (believe it or not there was still someone wittering on about "the Shetlands"!) to get to the extremist comments.
However, I'm still glad I had a peek, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there was the unintentional comic genius of Plato, the site's untouchable (and unspoofable) Queen Bee, who was earnestly comparing Mandela to the Queen Mother! And secondly, the site's notorious Tory moderator TSE reposted a tweet from Jeff Breslin that I probably would have missed otherwise.
As long-term readers know, I used to be a huge admirer of Jeff's. To some extent I still am - it's refreshing to see a highly intelligent person with no fixed loyalty to any ideology or party thinking aloud in such a straightforwardly honest way about his political views and underlying reasoning. However, I stopped following him on Twitter a few months ago. The reason was that I got the distinct impression that he was one of the ten or so people (almost all of them associated in some way with the Better Nation blog or Green politics) who had immediately unfollowed me after Better Nation supremo and former Green press officer James Mackenzie decreed on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that I am a Woman Hater. Now, don't get me wrong - I have no problem at all with people unfollowing me. But when someone does it in apparent solidarity with an individual who has just launched an unprovoked and deeply offensive personal attack on me, then it's bound to give me some pause for thought about them.
All the same, I wouldn't have wanted to miss Jeff's tweet today, mainly because of the revealing way in which certain people responded to it -
Jeff Breslin : I might as well say it since everyone knows it - in time, history will view Salmond as Scotland's paler Mandela. #LongWalkToFreedom
Now this is what Jeff does best, because there's so much potential ambiguity to it, and it forces people to stop and think. Is he being deadly serious, or only half-serious? Or is the tweet in fact dripping with irony, and intended to subtly poke fun at the regard in which some people hold Salmond? You can read it in almost any or all of those ways - or if you're less smart, you can give the game away about your own prejudices by not bothering to check, and rushing in with a knee-jerk response. Guess which course of action the chief of the anti-independence campaign decided to follow?
Blair McDougall : do you honestly not see how offensive that is?
Even if Jeff was being 100% serious, what would be "offensive" about it? It isn't in any way disrespectful towards Mandela - it might well be considered overly respectful of Alex Salmond, and therefore open to mockery, but it's not "offensive". Unless of course you find it inconceivable that the democratically-elected political leader of Scotland could ever be held in extremely high regard by any rational person - that's the only way in which comparing a recently-deceased world leader with the First Minister of Scotland could ever be considered disrespectful, insulting or offensive. And if that is indeed the way you see things, then you might want to reflect on what it says about your perception of your own country, and the credibility of your claim to be running a 'patriotic' anti-independence campaign.
For the record, here is how Jeff explained his tweet -
Wow. Mental response to earlier tweet. To clarify, only a handful of lives as remarkable as Mandela's, of which Salmond's isn't. But there are clear similarities to a lesser (i.e. paler) degree, eg personal sacrifices, which there's little point ignoring.
* * *
UPDATE : Has Jeff Breslin been harried into deleting his entire Twitter account? He suddenly seems to have completely disappeared. Absurd if so.
Unfortunately, moments like this do tend to bring out the worst in some people, and in many ways we're seeing a reverse mirror image of what happened when Mrs Thatcher died - this time it's a few extremists on the Right who are disgracing themselves by 'celebrating' the demise of a 'terrorist'. Mick Pork sent me an email earlier today to say that, predictably, the racists and bigots were out in full force at Political Betting (with, we're entitled to assume, the full blessing of the site's right-leaning Lib Dem owner Mike Smithson, because we know that he has no compunction whatever about banning or censoring people when it suits him). Mick added that it was jaw-dropping stuff even by PB standards. I had a quick look, but to be honest I couldn't bear to wade through the usual drivel (believe it or not there was still someone wittering on about "the Shetlands"!) to get to the extremist comments.
However, I'm still glad I had a peek, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there was the unintentional comic genius of Plato, the site's untouchable (and unspoofable) Queen Bee, who was earnestly comparing Mandela to the Queen Mother! And secondly, the site's notorious Tory moderator TSE reposted a tweet from Jeff Breslin that I probably would have missed otherwise.
As long-term readers know, I used to be a huge admirer of Jeff's. To some extent I still am - it's refreshing to see a highly intelligent person with no fixed loyalty to any ideology or party thinking aloud in such a straightforwardly honest way about his political views and underlying reasoning. However, I stopped following him on Twitter a few months ago. The reason was that I got the distinct impression that he was one of the ten or so people (almost all of them associated in some way with the Better Nation blog or Green politics) who had immediately unfollowed me after Better Nation supremo and former Green press officer James Mackenzie decreed on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that I am a Woman Hater. Now, don't get me wrong - I have no problem at all with people unfollowing me. But when someone does it in apparent solidarity with an individual who has just launched an unprovoked and deeply offensive personal attack on me, then it's bound to give me some pause for thought about them.
All the same, I wouldn't have wanted to miss Jeff's tweet today, mainly because of the revealing way in which certain people responded to it -
Jeff Breslin : I might as well say it since everyone knows it - in time, history will view Salmond as Scotland's paler Mandela. #LongWalkToFreedom
Now this is what Jeff does best, because there's so much potential ambiguity to it, and it forces people to stop and think. Is he being deadly serious, or only half-serious? Or is the tweet in fact dripping with irony, and intended to subtly poke fun at the regard in which some people hold Salmond? You can read it in almost any or all of those ways - or if you're less smart, you can give the game away about your own prejudices by not bothering to check, and rushing in with a knee-jerk response. Guess which course of action the chief of the anti-independence campaign decided to follow?
Blair McDougall : do you honestly not see how offensive that is?
Even if Jeff was being 100% serious, what would be "offensive" about it? It isn't in any way disrespectful towards Mandela - it might well be considered overly respectful of Alex Salmond, and therefore open to mockery, but it's not "offensive". Unless of course you find it inconceivable that the democratically-elected political leader of Scotland could ever be held in extremely high regard by any rational person - that's the only way in which comparing a recently-deceased world leader with the First Minister of Scotland could ever be considered disrespectful, insulting or offensive. And if that is indeed the way you see things, then you might want to reflect on what it says about your perception of your own country, and the credibility of your claim to be running a 'patriotic' anti-independence campaign.
For the record, here is how Jeff explained his tweet -
Wow. Mental response to earlier tweet. To clarify, only a handful of lives as remarkable as Mandela's, of which Salmond's isn't. But there are clear similarities to a lesser (i.e. paler) degree, eg personal sacrifices, which there's little point ignoring.
* * *
UPDATE : Has Jeff Breslin been harried into deleting his entire Twitter account? He suddenly seems to have completely disappeared. Absurd if so.
Friday, October 8, 2010
But, alas, democracy still has its critics...
The other day, I suggested that Ian Hamilton was wrong to talk as if Scotland was an occupied country, with the need for some kind of 'revolutionary' activity to secure independence. I was of course basing my comment on the fact that every British Prime Minister since Harold Wilson has acknowledged that Scotland has a right to self-determination. In the case of Mrs Thatcher and John Major, that didn't extend to a right to choose devolution, but nevertheless those leaders did accept that the country could, if it wished, opt for full independence. So that democratic bottom line is a very long-established principle - but, depressingly, it seems there are some out there who still hanker after the antiquated notion that the sovereignty of the state trumps the sovereignty of the people.
Early this morning, in response to a trademark wind-up from my old Political Betting sparring-partner ChristinaD on the subject of David Cameron's criticism of the Megrahi release, I left a brief comment linking to my previous post. It provoked an extraordinary (and largely tangential) response from another PB poster, "HD2" - it's now on a very old thread, so I might as well respond to it here instead...
"Scotland used the Lockerbie release to snub Gordon, Westminster and the USA as the Soviet-style mindset up there meant ‘wee ek’ (sic) wanted to posture on a wider stage (poor little man).
It’s all gone horribly wrong for him, as it’s disgraced Scotland throughout the world and won no friends, anywhere."
Now, that would be leaving aside the utterly trifling figure of Nelson Mandela, who praised the decision to the skies, would it? Well, of course it would, we all know that the "International Community" (aka "Everywhere" or "The Whole Wide World") consists solely of the US and that highly select band of Britons who Mrs Thatcher used to call "sound".
"It also means England and the English have even less sympathy and tolerance for Holyrood."
Ah, yes, I think I'm starting to see where HD2 is going astray here. It's the familiar Anglocentric assumption that every decision Alex Salmond and his government make must by definition be calibrated to impact upon the English psyche in some way. So, depending on what day of the week it is, Salmond is either a malevolent genius intentionally driving hard-pressed English tax-payers to distraction in order to force them to demand an end to the Union, or alternatively he is a pitiful, cack-handed buffoon who yearns for the respect of polite London society, but fails lamentably with his every effort to win it.
The truth, of course, is rather more prosaic. Alex Salmond is primarily interested in what the Scottish electorate think of his actions, because it is the Scottish electorate alone to which he is accountable. But, oh, how HD2 longs for it to be otherwise...
"The assumption, for far too long, is that the Scots, and the Scots alone, have the right to determine their own future within the UK. That was always wrong, as it ignores the fact that, at the start of 1997 each and every person living in the UK was electorally equal, having a single MP in Westminster.
So...any putative ‘independence referendum’ for Scotland has to be carried out throughout the whole UK and not just in Scotland - which should have been the position in all devolution referenda to date."
Hmmm. A sentiment of which Abraham Lincoln would heartily approve, no doubt, but this is 2010. It wasn't that long ago that a woman needed her husband's permission to obtain a divorce - perhaps HD2 would like to turn the clock back on the right of individuals to control their own destiny, as well as the right of nations to do so? In fact, I'm starting to wonder if he thinks it would also be appropriate for residents of England (on the grounds of being "equal citizens of the UK") to be allowed to vote in elections to the devolved parliaments and assemblies - that was, after all, the de facto position prior to 1999, with the Westminster parliament (consisting of 90% non-Scottish MPs) voting regularly on Scotland-only laws.
"The logical extension to the ‘Scots only get to vote’ position is to ask where the international border should be and should every single person be able to declare themselves independent and their home a separate State?"
This last risible rejoinder is rather akin to insisting that, because newborn babies are unable to hold a pencil, we might as well forget about our commitment to the 'unattainable ideal' of universal suffrage. Of course, there's a (miniscule) grain of a serious point there - the criteria for determining which groups have a right to self-determination are rather fuzzy and subjective. But if only we could finally move on from this Victorian notion of the absolute sovereignty of existing nation states, it ought to be possible to easily remedy that problem by allowing an international body to adjudicate - and it could also be charged with ensuring that the rights of minority groups in any aspiring new nation are fully protected. But we're fortunate in Scotland that there's quite simply no credible dispute to our status - by any criteria that could conceivably be set down (long history as a distinct jurisdiction, clearly-defined boundaries) we undoubtedly qualify for self-determination if anyone does.
And to anticipate one of the predictable retorts at this point - "ah, but you don't believe in self-determination for Shetland, do you?" - well, actually, I do. I don't see the slightest grounds for believing that Shetland would want to secede from Scotland if independence occurred, but they would have every right to make that choice without hindrance.
Early this morning, in response to a trademark wind-up from my old Political Betting sparring-partner ChristinaD on the subject of David Cameron's criticism of the Megrahi release, I left a brief comment linking to my previous post. It provoked an extraordinary (and largely tangential) response from another PB poster, "HD2" - it's now on a very old thread, so I might as well respond to it here instead...
"Scotland used the Lockerbie release to snub Gordon, Westminster and the USA as the Soviet-style mindset up there meant ‘wee ek’ (sic) wanted to posture on a wider stage (poor little man).
It’s all gone horribly wrong for him, as it’s disgraced Scotland throughout the world and won no friends, anywhere."
Now, that would be leaving aside the utterly trifling figure of Nelson Mandela, who praised the decision to the skies, would it? Well, of course it would, we all know that the "International Community" (aka "Everywhere" or "The Whole Wide World") consists solely of the US and that highly select band of Britons who Mrs Thatcher used to call "sound".
"It also means England and the English have even less sympathy and tolerance for Holyrood."
Ah, yes, I think I'm starting to see where HD2 is going astray here. It's the familiar Anglocentric assumption that every decision Alex Salmond and his government make must by definition be calibrated to impact upon the English psyche in some way. So, depending on what day of the week it is, Salmond is either a malevolent genius intentionally driving hard-pressed English tax-payers to distraction in order to force them to demand an end to the Union, or alternatively he is a pitiful, cack-handed buffoon who yearns for the respect of polite London society, but fails lamentably with his every effort to win it.
The truth, of course, is rather more prosaic. Alex Salmond is primarily interested in what the Scottish electorate think of his actions, because it is the Scottish electorate alone to which he is accountable. But, oh, how HD2 longs for it to be otherwise...
"The assumption, for far too long, is that the Scots, and the Scots alone, have the right to determine their own future within the UK. That was always wrong, as it ignores the fact that, at the start of 1997 each and every person living in the UK was electorally equal, having a single MP in Westminster.
So...any putative ‘independence referendum’ for Scotland has to be carried out throughout the whole UK and not just in Scotland - which should have been the position in all devolution referenda to date."
Hmmm. A sentiment of which Abraham Lincoln would heartily approve, no doubt, but this is 2010. It wasn't that long ago that a woman needed her husband's permission to obtain a divorce - perhaps HD2 would like to turn the clock back on the right of individuals to control their own destiny, as well as the right of nations to do so? In fact, I'm starting to wonder if he thinks it would also be appropriate for residents of England (on the grounds of being "equal citizens of the UK") to be allowed to vote in elections to the devolved parliaments and assemblies - that was, after all, the de facto position prior to 1999, with the Westminster parliament (consisting of 90% non-Scottish MPs) voting regularly on Scotland-only laws.
"The logical extension to the ‘Scots only get to vote’ position is to ask where the international border should be and should every single person be able to declare themselves independent and their home a separate State?"
This last risible rejoinder is rather akin to insisting that, because newborn babies are unable to hold a pencil, we might as well forget about our commitment to the 'unattainable ideal' of universal suffrage. Of course, there's a (miniscule) grain of a serious point there - the criteria for determining which groups have a right to self-determination are rather fuzzy and subjective. But if only we could finally move on from this Victorian notion of the absolute sovereignty of existing nation states, it ought to be possible to easily remedy that problem by allowing an international body to adjudicate - and it could also be charged with ensuring that the rights of minority groups in any aspiring new nation are fully protected. But we're fortunate in Scotland that there's quite simply no credible dispute to our status - by any criteria that could conceivably be set down (long history as a distinct jurisdiction, clearly-defined boundaries) we undoubtedly qualify for self-determination if anyone does.
And to anticipate one of the predictable retorts at this point - "ah, but you don't believe in self-determination for Shetland, do you?" - well, actually, I do. I don't see the slightest grounds for believing that Shetland would want to secede from Scotland if independence occurred, but they would have every right to make that choice without hindrance.
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