Yet, we have such an éminence grise. Dumfries and Galloway MSP Joan McAlpine exploded on social media last night when one “Jordon, Duke of Edinburgh” – the partner of Alyn Smith, allegedly – revealed to his Twitter followers the full details of a Scottish government announcement to Holyrood scheduled for tomorrow. Like my hypothetical example above, he had all the details; the position of the government, details of the consultation process and the working group, and the timeline of the bill going before parliament.
Nicola Sturgeon won’t be Meeting Trump
When “the most powerful man in the world” is routinely snubbed, laughed at, and dismissed by leaders of small nations the likes of Scotland, there can be no argument the US’ soft power – the only power the US can really use when dealing with friends and allies – has taken a serious hit. If Donald were a mafia don this treatment is il bacio della morte – the kiss of death, the sign by which a member of the family has been marked for assassinio. For the purposes of international relations, the man Donald Trump sleeps with the fishes and everyone knows it.
Hugging the Hateful
Gillian Martin MSP published an article on her personal blog eleven years ago that has returned, as these things often do, to bite her on the bum. She described transgender students – people over whom she was in a position of power – in the most disgusting way imaginable. She reduced some of the most personal and treasured truths of their beings to worthlessness and shame. Since then she has deleted this horrible post and two years ago she made a full and unreserved apology for what she had written.
We Need Safe Spaces
One response to this has been the creation of the “safe space,” a concept that routinely excites these right wing vloggers into apoplectic frothiness. What right, they ask, do these “snowflakes” have to a space of their own where they do not need to put up with our constant stream of vitriol and bile? They have presented the safe space as some sort of spatial free pass within the academy, the college, and the university, where the delicate can ride through towards graduation without anything they might find upsetting, offensive, or “triggering.”
Random Public Journal 