Cybernats – Eat your heart out!

I feel that cybernats are having their undeserved reputation for bad behaviour seriously challenged of late. Here are some of my favourites from my pre-moderation inbox of YouTube comments. PvPGodz Uk is my current favourite.  I really feel his (her?) formidably elegant powers of articulation of the Project Fear core arguments deserve a wider audience, and I commend them to Alistair Darling and Alistair Carmichael.

(Sadly, YouTube has been classifying them as spam of late, and despite their tickable boxes, I have no way of either deleting them or showcasing them to a wider public – except this.)

PvPGodz Uk

Why shouldn't we vote for independance? We are that busy thinking about we're gonna be the greatest nation in the Universe, but we are really gonna be bankrupt, we get food imported from other countrys, and some include the EU countrys we're getting the food from! We're getting threatened that if we go independant we won't be in the EU anymore, and where we gonna get half our food, eventually we'll run out and we'll be full of poverty! And if we get the 'Stirling Pound' tooken from us what we going to use, and to make factorys to produce money in scotland, or make another currency, it'll cost money to do that! Alex Salmon has no idea what we are gonna get ourselfs into, I'd borde the first train to England if they take the money! The Queen's brining in lots of money to 'Britain', and it won't be shared amoung us if we go independant, and we rely on the money we get from the Queen brining in money from tourists, and England will have the money, the currency, you name it! And we'll have nothing! 
NO TO INDEPENDANCE!

Michael Cawood

Dear Salmond, first you need to learn to run a piss-up at a brewery

Debra smith

If Scotland go independent, that means they are not British anymore, ergo they can't have our bloody currency!!! Let em have the euro and see how that works for em.
Vote for independence Scotland please, then you might stop your bitching about England , and how mean we are to you.

karezza777

How to be Scottish: 1. Eat deep fried Mars Bars. 2. Wear a skirt 3. Hunt Haggis 4. Believe in the Loch Ness Monster 5. Blame everything on England 6. Speak unintelligibly 7. Enjoy bagpipe noise 8. Say "Och aye the noo" 9. Drink nothing but whisky 10. Enjoy dreek weather

amicusalba

This is a shit video that tries to propagate the Nationalist Separatist agenda by Kim Il Salmond. Posted by an idiot for an idiot. Only 30% of Scots support this tit.

Adi B

A big part of Scotland economy is Edinburgh which is big financial city and most of the large private sector employers are financial businesses but when Scotland get independence forget AAA rating they will be a new small economy so will be counted as high risk so their rating will not be good. This will badly effect Edinburgh as financial business rely a lot on good rating like AAA but after independent most likely lot of the financial businesses will move their headquarters out of Edinburgh.

Confessions of a Cybernat.

I would have liked to title this blog I Was a Teenage Cybernat – just like the ‘B’ movies of the 1970s – but I wasn’t, because I wasn’t a nationalist back then and there was no cyberspace outside of science fiction.

But now I must acknowledge the fact – I am what I am – a nationalist who uses cyberspace to try and get the independence message across. These days just about everyone under forty-five is a cyber-something-or-other, together with an increasing percentage of the older population.

The term is used pejoratively, like separatist, to beg the question, i.e. try to induce a conclusion without advancing any evidence. It is an attempt to stereotype a group, a class – rather like racist terminology.

It has been used in many ways, but rather spectacularly this week to justify the use of racist terminology on Twitter – a kind of double whammy.

The Ian Smart Affair doesn’t have the memorable theme song of The Thomas Crown Affair, nor the charismatic, glamorous leading man (if it had, it would be The Wind Turbines that upset the Nimbys) but it has Byzantine twists and turns to the plot that would have stretched the credibility of a Hollywood scriptwriter, with unlikely critics, allies, heroes, heroines and villains. The stellar cast included a Scottish Labour Lord and former First Minister of Scotland, a radio phone-in host, the indomitable – and anonymous - Gordon of Dundee, a host of powerful women, a quite a few spear carriers like myself – bit players in the drama – and mighty BBC.

Since the protagonist is a lawyer, well-connected and a past President of the Law Society of Scotland, I must choose my words carefully in describing the events that followed a tweet by Ian Smart. I don’t intend to go over the tweet and the ones that followed it – they’re all a matter of record – other than to say Ian Smart’s intention appeared to be to suggest that attacks by fellow Scots on two ethnic groups - members of the Scottish Polish and Pakistani community - would follow if an independent Scotland did not prosper economically.

This tweet was picked up by a number of late evening tweeters, including myself, who after initial horrified astonishment, tried to persuade Ian Smart to delete the offending words, something he was patently not prepared to do at that point.

What followed over subsequent days served to highlight the complexities of the great independence debate, and in particular, differences of opinion on how those committed to independence should react to the Smart tweets. I would identify three main strands in this – those who felt that it was a significant event and must be countered forcefully, those who felt that it should be ignored so as not to frighten the horses, and voices from Women for Independence who felt that acrimonious exchanges that were predominantly – but not exclusively – male (there was talk of testosterone in the air!) served as a turn-off to the female demographic among the Scottish electorate, a group that is vital to a YES vote.

(The little that’s left of my testosterone was pumping as best it could, and I was – and am – firmly in the counter forcefully brigade.)

By any normal journalistic standards, this was a story, and a story with legs. But normal journalistic standards rarely prevail in the pre-independence Scottish media, and I and others feared the worst. It was pretty evident that a dilemma existed for the Better Together media, or at least those embedded within in it in various roles ranging from proprietors through producers and editors to media presenters and journalists, namely, that the villains in cyberspace were firmly cast as nationalists – independence supporters – the cybernats – and Unionist Central Casting would be reluctant to induct a prominent member of the No Campaign into the plot as a villain. Quite simply, it didn’t fit the script …

So, fending off as best I could suggestions and mini-attacks from what I had thought of as my own side, I waited for the media. In one sense, I was pleasantly surprised!

Four newspapers carried the story – on 7th May, the Scottish Sun, the Scottish Express and eventually today the Herald  and The Scotsman. Last night, Scotland Tonight carried the item in a discussion between Ian Smart and Natalie McGarry. Most bizarrely, Call Kaye carried the item inadvertently, to the evident horror of Kaye Adams, thanks to the formidable Gordon of Dundee, a caller who intended to do what he thought he had been invited on air to do – talk about the implications of prominent figures in Scottish Society behaving badly.

Kaye Adams, who has been presenting her BBC phone-in programme five days a week for many years, and is a presumably a weel-kent frequenter of BBC studios, said she didn’t know Ian Smart - a prominent lawyer, former President of the Scottish Law Society, Labour activist and frequent presence on BBC programmes such as Newsnight Scotland.

BBC Scotland, astonishingly to me, but all too predictably to its many critics, appears to have considered the story as either being beneath its notice, or beyond the pale for some other reason. I could, of course, have missed some vital news item of discussion …

O the naughty cybernats in the Scotsman!

Interesting comments float in the stagnant sea of bile in today’s Scotsman, alleged swimming ground of the nasty cybernats. Here’s one comment on the item -

Westminster may hand over control of referendum

- from a loyal supporter of the UK and all that makes Britain great.

52 B Cole

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 03:55 PM

You Scots don't know how lucky you are , We English have been successfully neutered by the Scotch Raj sitting in the English Parliament. Give us a referendum and England will ditch the United Kingdom and with it the whingeing Scots. Voila, Scotch independence by default As to starting wars, correct me if I'm wrong but the last two wars were started by the Scotch. But then again if things go wrong blame the English. Sadly the English now consider Scotland a bit of an irrelevance so get on with it and get out.

A true cybernat, Trogg, was immediately outraged by this comment – a Trogg feeding a Troll – but his complaint of foul abuse was rather blunted by his calling B. Cole a “a nasty, racist, xenophobic pig! “

Lads, lads, please … (surely not lassies?)

The Scotsman, needless to say, loves this kind of thing, and as befits a responsible national newspaper, justifies it on the grounds of it being the voice of the people, rather than poor editorial standards and sloppy moderation policies.

Unionist politicians manage to avert their eyes from the UKnats and see only the cybernats, allowing them to tut-tut periodically

A pastiche of Iain Gray – cybernatophobic

“Look, there’s an example of just what I’ve been saying – that vicious, anonymous cybernat on Twitter, Strathearnrose! Scotsman I can reveal exclusively who she is, because her name’s right at the side of her Twitter ID – Roseanna Cunningham. You can’t fool me – oh, no!

And just look at what she says – she mentions Scotland, and Crieff – blatant Nationalist propaganda. No mention of England, or London, naw, that would never dae! And fireworks – that’s cybernat code for causing trouble, anybody can see that. And the very fact that she doesn’t mention me just goes to show the contempt with which cybernats treat an ex-leader like me.”

 

strathearnrose Roseanna Cunningham

RT @outdoorscotland: Crieff Fireworks saturday 7pm for 7.30. Please come along. https://www.facebook.com/crieffroundtable

THE REAL IAIN GRAY - Scotsman EXTRACT

"For those that doubt the connections between the SNP and some of the cybernats, how about “Strathearnrose” who on 5 October tweeted: “At SNP mtg 2 encourage more social media uptake” then signed off “#evenmorecybernats”. Strathearnrose is of course Roseanna Cunningham, the minister currently taking through new legislation against offensive behaviour on the internet. There is that delicious irony again."