phart

What's the quotes in the Times article, behind a paywall for me.

To be fair if there is a decent chance you're about to be reamed in an election and will be needing a job , GB news is a good bet for a former Tory.

He made comments about wanting an elected second chamber in an independent Scotland. Then Cherry made a twitter post about wanting a peerage in the House of Lords. Uncritically parrotting what you read on social media isn't a good way to be informed about anything. The SNP is imploding as all empires do when they don't have leaders strong enough to remain cohesive. I'd pay little mind to the petty bickering around this rather than picking a side and amplifying their pettiness.

Good luck getting academics to come out in public in the future for anything. A lot of them are fuck. Dealing with political media and the perpetually online partisan half-wits.

The whatsapp messages is a non-story. Folk being rage-baited by the media as usual.

Hislop went in on the Tories about the post-office scandal. Always fun to see someone who knows what they are talking about take on some random just trying to deflect. Jake Berry was the other guy.

Happy new year

3606.30 There is no need to believe anything, it's a simple calculation only the innumerate cannot do it. If you're innuemerate then you should at least have the self-awareness to be silent on economic matters. I find it hard to believe this is anything else than weaponised incompetence for the purpose of trolling. However it is a reflection of our society where it is not out of the realms of possibility that someone who cannot perform the most basic maths calculations spends considerable time opining on detailed economic subjects earnestly thinking that they have any worth.

At 125k a year the difference is £3106.30 : source HMRC calculators at 75k it is 2106.30 at 49k it is just over 1300 I think one of the reasons why you have such outlandish opinions Malcolm is because all your logic is predicated on your own wild imagings instead of reality, or as they say in computer science "shite in =shite out" Different taxation rates will of course be a political topic. However it has to be framed rationally and using figures that are easily obtainable otherwise one can only conclude either utter incompetence or not a good faith argument.

It's a wild story

Got to love the Irony as well

That isn't what we are saying that doesn't address the principle at all as presented in our posts. It just shows that UK government are legally entitled to reach into Scottish politics and push the reset button and folk are happy for them to do so.

Wasn't the issue UK government blocking Scottish legislation. The law being blocked is irrelevant to process of being able to block it.

Section 30 is at the whim of whoever is primeminister.

mandate meaning legal authority to have a referendum. The main point is without a section 30 there would be no referendum. A vote in the Scottish parliament , majority of seats don't give that.

The only mandate is the section 30, everything else is just pressure to get a section 30 granted. Now we're probably all in agreement that is a shit state of affairs. It's the mechanism though. Cameron granted a section 30 to Salmonds government for the 2014 referendum to happen.

Is that even true? What "mandate"? Folk seem very confused by how the process for holding the referendum actually comes about. Parliament hadn't approved anything beyond asking for a section 30. It's funny how that pic keeps coming up, I posted it years back and thplinth then took it as his profile pic. Now it appears all the time.

absolutely not you've not differentiated anything, you just state no opinions or topics should be banned, then folk give opinions and topics as examples and you say they don't count. That's not coherent.

What about any topic which is not true and espousing it causes harm, i.e. false accusations. You said it isn't to do with this, but then make a statement where it is part of the group. It's very unclear what you are trying to say. Can you give an explanation what free speech absolutism actually means in practice. How about the opinion that someone is a criminal or fraudster when they aren't?

I defined what I meant by Freedom of speech at the beginning of the conversation and it is exactly what i said if it is in the absolute form. It's good to see you aren't a free speech absolutist then. We have no further business it seems.

It's not a case of specific subjects or beliefs, it's a case of categories for instance libel/slander, things that fall under the harm principle. Like saying this product contains no nuts when it does. Harrassment. Inciting violence. Intimidation, threats etc.