#Saveourinternet

The EU is flawed. All acknowledge that, but for europhile nats surely this story is inconvenient in its timing. EU reforms of copyright systems are behind a threat to video freedom on the web. By making hosts like Youtube liable for copyright from the moment a video is posted, they would force then to block lots of stuff whose making certain of its content's copyright. This will stifle art. This is Youtube's campaign: www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/>www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/">www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/

Meanwhile: deal Brexit, hard Brexit, People's Vote, indyref2, vote of confidence, election - anyone asks me or you what is going to happen, next there is only one honest answer! NO IDEA !

But the polls are hardening against an indyref2, for all the anger and pressures for it that are increasingly coming from the fundamentalist nats in parliament (Patrick Harvie) and in tge comments sections on the National newspaper's site and FB page. There are No leads of 4 to 10 points at present. Not an encouragement to Sturgeon to gamble !

in bed with the Tories !

Since the indyref, nats of all their parties have repeated and repeated unto infinity their wrong accusation that Labour damaged itself by being allied to, or "in bed with", the Tories in the No campaign. Keep repeating something to generate a left wing doctrinal peer pressure to accept and believe it.

Today the now annual demo of Scottish feeling against Brexit was held at Holyrood. The speakers included Joanna Cherry, SNP, Patrick Harvie, Green, and - Struan Stevenson, Tory. The organisers the European Movement in Scotland praised cross party working for the objective of trying somehow to stop Brexit. Cherry thanked Stevenson for his participation and celebrated that she had shared a banner with him in this demo.They celebrated their working together on a single issue.

They were right to do that. But by it, they proved Labour also was right to do it in the No campaign. TO ANYONE WHO HEARD OR RECORDED WHAT THE NATS SAID AT TODAY'S DEMO, THEY HAVE EXPLODED AND FINISHED, UTTERLY REFUTED, THEIR MALICIOUS JIBE ABOUT LABOUR JOINING WITH THE TORIES IN THE INDYREF. THE SAME AS WHAT LABOUR DID, THEY ARE NOW DOING THEMSELVES BY THEIR PUBLIC ADMISSION.

taking to the hills in Russia?

Green leader Patrick Harvie is gay, and outspoken on gay equal ops. Russia has swung to a chilling explicit state anti-gay hate policy, showing that modern diplomacy does not tie dodgy states never to breach those lines. So it seems logically natural, as well as right, for Harvie to talk of "Putin's brutal regime": against the Sunday Herald's creepy story of Britain wanting to draw anti-separatist diplomatic solidarity from Russia and imagine that actually winning voters!

But Harvie leads a CND party that has always wanted us to live stripped of defences against Russia. Does he no' find the brutal regime a worry that way? It's a very unusual acknowledgement of fact from a Green. They never call Russia a brutal regime, not even back in the Soviet era did they do that, it sat so ill with the CND policy. Why does he think the good pro-gay folks in Russia are not stopping Putin's policy by means of the type of civil resistance movement that CND believers have always claimed we could beat off an invasion by? Because it doesn't work, that's why. Because populations, full of political apathy and social nastiness to each other in normal times, can't suddenly stick together in comradeship to achieve a solid mass effect whose first pain is upon themselves, and can't halt all the functioning of social services and food supplies they need for themselves too, see. As the fuel blockaders found in 2000.

This thought's noticeability goes against his own Yes side, if it persists in being intellectual-left fashionably CND and ideologically revelling in defencelessness as a great cool option. All the smaller Yes parties, including his, are pushing it that way. But looking at Putin's regime, in order to vote Yes we need to see the intellectual-left CND posturing watered down enough that de facto we will still be under the West European Bomb, allied to it and seeing that its coverage won't in fact be capable of restriction to only a part of this island and not to the whole.

rallying call?

The unionist press today are all jubilant that the rally was so small. They are bound to be, but they are probably right. The audience fitted into the close vicinity of the Ross Bandstand under Edinburgh castle, slightly overspilling the actual seating. I was there, not in the audience of supporters, but in the outer watching fringes suitable for agnostic voters.

Much as the rally was filled with typical SNP history-patriotism, it was very clearly a fearful occasion. In over 2 hours of speeches and music, never was one word said about the zionist return entitlement for all the Scottish diaspora. Instead of the historical reawakening claimed, it was a historical betrayal to watch that omission happen. It meant the rally was not addressed to the Scottish people in our full number 25 million. It had the same most serious omission as the Yes campaign as a whole has. This is even though there was a "New Scots" speaker speaking up for the racial pluralism of our new state and the adopted Scottish identity of folks who have come to us from elsewhere. That is good in itself and one way our political culture is less nasty than England's at present - but see the contradiction between this and the total omission of talking about all the Scots in exile and their opportunity to come back.

A song about that silly lump of monarchism the Stone of Destiny said "How can anyone wipe away the tears of 700 stolen years?" - as if the centuries of statehood we still had during the stone's captivity don't count! Far more practical to real lives is the personal question for the disapora, about growing up in exile: How can anyone wipe away the tears of 26 stolen years?

The best point was made by the Green leader Patrick Harvie, who said the Yes campaign can't expect to sell just a Scottish version of the status quo as worth voting for, as the SNP has so clearly been trying to do, it has to float more radical possibilities for why independence would make a beneficial practical difference. There won't be agreement on what these should be, so different conflicting possibilities must be floated and will be issues in future Scottish elections. Entitlement for all the diaspora to return, is one such possibility that Harvie did not mention, but is the key radical difference determining whether independence really is even nationally just at all or not.

It was an entirely left wing occasion. What is strongly part of Harvie's radical agenda, and was in all the speakers' agenda, was the Yes side's wearyingly constant assumption that its new Scotland will be against the Bomb. No contrary voice to that was heard, though a contrary view to the SNP's on NATO was heard. With Isobel Lindsay speaking too, the rally was totally dominated by CND and it gave a dismal picture of the Yes campaign itself being controlled by them.

At the back of the garden, on the Princes Street railings, there was a disturbing banner about Padania, an alleged nation in north Italy that was only invented in 1992 by the Northern League there - which has a terribly anti-immigration reputation and of being the bad type of nationalism. Was there anything official about their presence? Actually maybe not, because there was a rally speaker from the Venetian nationalists, whose territorial claim directly contradicts Padania because would just be arrogantly included in it. It shows how you have to sort out the historical authenticity of nation claims before leaping to embrace all secessionist movements as your allies.

I want some more

Margo Macdonald and Patrick Harvie are wrong. It's like we are Oliver Twist and they are taking away our second helping, our second question.

Their motives against the second question are openly to increase the stakes for their preferred side, Yes, on the first question, which they think will make them more likely to win. That they think so is only a fallacy of true faith nationalism, it is an unproven act of faith and the polls make it look just as likely their tactics will backfire. The voters are already obviously growingly unsure towards Yes, so they may feel even more unsure if they know that the Yes side is holding them to ransom to vote Yes by depriving them of a second question. they may then vote No. They may be put off Yes by this picture of the forces behind it.

The recent experience of the AV referendum showed how easily a doubt about the character of the proposed change will make voters feel safer to run back into their caves to the devil they know and vote No. Holding voters to ransom to reject the option that you think they are worst off with did not work for Labour in its hard left controlled period in the 1980s, when twice the hard left believed voters would be forced to vote for hard left policies when the alternative was Thatcher, and on a British scale at least, they voted for Thatcher.

A second question is fairer to voters. It gives us a more complete say, a complete range of options. Suspect anyone who takes it away.

Banned demo

On Saturday a demo in Glasgow which I was on, in support of refugees who are housed there, was shut down in mid rally by the police and everyone sent home. We were not even told the reason why, but that it would involve a fascist counter-threat was fairly guessable. Speakers sent away who had not yet spoken included political ones.

The demo organisers are lodging a complaint over this. It has turned out that the police threatened use of the Public Order Act to ban a hundreds strong demo on grounds of public safety, force its participants by law to run away, because just 25 members of the SDL were counter demonstrating.

Nicola Sturgeon had sent a support message to the demo, and the Green leader Patrick Harvie was among the speakers present. So what do both say about whether independence will reduce the prospects of this type of thing happening?

The demo was about how new business contracts for housing refugees have resulted in sudden evictions of them onto the streets, including them coming home to find their locks changed. Speakers cited that under human rights throwing anyone onto the streets is illegal. They will all be interested in taking up my case that rent and mortgages no longer constitutionally exist, then? As explained here to the housing policy consultation Firm Foundations in 2008.

There was some sentiment expressed that independence will enable us to stop being part of British policy to have refugees treated like this. The corruption and absurdity was highlighted, of a policy that allows them to refuse a person refugee status when the country the same person has come from is acknowledged as too dangerous to return them to !!!

If independence is going to make that humanitarian difference, they should be getting on with it, not waiting another 2 years. eh? But it is time to clarify what protections against racist policies will be built into the new state? and built in whoever wins its first election, not assuming it will begin with an SNP government? There is a discrepancy. the SNP has appeased the racist vote by saying we will stay in the British Isles travel area and not join Schengen. How will we stay in the British Isles travel area without staying in the British humanitarian disaster of the present ayslum system? On what basis does Sturgeon promise we will not stay in it?