How do you predict Scotland can shine and succeed against a powerful neighbour?
I might add to your pointless pictures, how do you aim to make Scotland like them, all of which a have one supposed common factor, yet Canada and Australia are two of the biggest countries in the world with a population which cannot be called small. Clearly for you the grass is always greener somewhere else which is not a positive attitude. Glass half empty, not half full.
Once again these 'statistics' are pointless and ludicrous. I just hope someone wasn't paid a lot of money to put them together. Some of the smallest countries have the highest rates of murder, some of the smallest countries have the greatest alcoholism, some of the smallest countries have the highest suicide rates, some of the smallest countries have the highest rates of poverty, some of the smallest countries have the highest rates of corruption and crime.
As is common with the Yes Campaign they cherry pick what is perceived as 'good', and ignore the reality that there are negatives too, to create this Fool's Paradise.
Innes Newton wrote:Once again these 'statistics' are pointless and ludicrous.
I think the 'happiness' index is a good one to cherry-pick, don't you? A happier, fairer, more equal Scotland is what I want. The graphic I presented demonstrates that small countries excel in these areas.
Let's face it Innes, every single fact, figure or infographic myself or any member of the YES campaign have presented has been dismissed as 'pointless', 'ludicrous', 'meaningless' or with some similar summary dismissal, without exception.
Yet you have not, in the entire history of your peevish chunterings on here, produced a single fact, figure or infographic to back up your position.
Verily, you are that empty vessel of which the proverb speaks.
But if you want to be as happy as the Danes which is based around their geography, their politics, their lifestyle, their culture and their traditions are you going to change Scots into Danes? You aren't Danes. Some Scots will never be as happy as the Danes are perceived to be in this 'survey'. For them the grass will always be greener somewhere else. It's just the way some Scots are, and you are exhibiting all the characteristics (despite you being a displaced Englishman). If Denmark is so wonderful why not go off to Lego Happy land? Happy they be, but it's easy for some to be content if they don't set their sights too high. Do you want to be happy and dull?
Here's a summary of some of those countries where you perceive the grass is so much greener :
DENMARK
Why do the Danes score so highly on international happiness surveys? Well, they do have high levels of trust and social cohesion, and do very nicely from industrial pork products, but according to the OECD they also work fewer hours per year than most of the rest of the world. As a result, productivity is worryingly sluggish. How can they afford all those expensively foraged meals and hand-knitted woollens? Simple, the Danes also have the highest level of private debt in the world (four times as much as the Italians, to put it into context; enough to warrant a warning from the IMF), while more than half of them admit to using the black market to obtain goods and services.
Perhaps the Danes' dirtiest secret is that, according to a 2012 report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, they have the fourth largest per capita ecological footprint in the world. Even ahead of the US. Those offshore windmills may look impressive as you land at Kastrup, but Denmark burns an awful lot of coal. Worth bearing that in mind the next time a Dane wags her finger at your patio heater.
I'm afraid I have to set you straight on Danish television too. Their big new drama series, Arvingerne (The Legacy, when it comes to BBC4 later this year) is stunning, but the reality of prime-time Danish TV is day-to-day, wall-to-wall reruns of 15-year-old episodes of Midsomer Murders and documentaries on pig welfare. The Danes of course also have highest taxes in the world (though only the sixth-highest wages – hence the debt, I guess). As a spokesperson I interviewed at the Danish centre-right thinktank Cepos put it, they effectively work until Thursday lunchtime for the state's coffers, and the other day and half for themselves.
Presumably the correlative of this is that Denmark has the best public services? According to the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment rankings (Pisa), Denmark's schools lag behind even the UK's. Its health service is buckling too. (The other day, I turned up at my local A&E to be told that I had to make an appointment, which I can't help feeling rather misunderstands the nature of the service.) According to the World Cancer Research Fund, the Danes have the highest cancer rates on the planet. "But at least the trains run on time!" I hear you say. No, that was Italy under Mussolini. The Danish national rail company has skirted bankruptcy in recent years, and the trains most assuredly do not run on time. Somehow, though, the government still managed to find £2m to fund a two-year tax-scandal investigation largely concerned, as far as I can make out, with the sexual orientation of the prime minister's husband, Stephen Kinnock.
Most seriously of all, economic equality – which many believe is the foundation of societal success – is decreasing. According to a report in Politiken this month, the proportion of people below the poverty line has doubled over the last decade. Denmark is becoming a nation divided, essentially, between the places which have a branch of Sticks'n'Sushi (Copenhagen) and the rest. Denmark's provinces have become a social dumping ground for non-western immigrants, the elderly, the unemployed and the unemployable who live alongside Denmark's 22m intensively farmed pigs, raised 10 to a pen and pumped full of antibiotics (the pigs, that is).
Other awkward truths? There is more than a whiff of the police state about the fact that Danish policeman refuse to display ID numbers and can refuse to give their names. The Danes are aggressively jingoistic, waving their red-and-white dannebrog at the slightest provocation. Like the Swedes, they embraced privatisation with great enthusiasm (even the ambulance service is privatised); and can seem spectacularly unsophisticated in their race relations (cartoon depictions of black people with big lips and bones through their noses are not uncommon in the national press). And if you think a move across the North Sea would help you escape the paedophiles, racists, crooks and tax-dodging corporations one reads about in the British media on a daily basis, I'm afraid I must disabuse you of that too. Got plenty of them.
Plus side? No one talks about cricket.
NORWAY
The dignity and resolve of the Norwegian people in the wake of the attacks by Anders Behring Breivik in July 2011 was deeply impressive, but in September the rightwing, anti-Islamist Progress party – of which Breivik had been an active member for many years – won 16.3% of the vote in the general election, enough to elevate it into coalition government for the first time in its history. There remains a disturbing Islamophobic sub-subculture in Norway. Ask the Danes, and they will tell you that the Norwegians are the most insular and xenophobic of all the Scandinavians, and it is true that since they came into a bit of money in the 1970s the Norwegians have become increasingly Scrooge-like, hoarding their gold, fearful of outsiders.
Though 2013 saw a record number of asylum applications to Norway, it granted asylum to fewer than half of them (around 5,000 people), a third of the number that less wealthy Sweden admits (Sweden accepted over 9,000 from Syria alone). In his book Petromania, journalist Simon Sætre warns that the powerful oil lobby is "isolating us and making the country asocial". According to him, his countrymen have been corrupted by their oil money, are working less, retiring earlier, and calling in sick more frequently. And while previous governments have controlled the spending of oil revenues, the new bunch are threatening a splurge which many warn could lead to full-blown Dutch disease.
Like the dealer who never touches his own supply, those dirty frackers the Norwegians boast of using only renewable energy sources, all the while amassing the world's largest sovereign wealth fund selling fossil fuels to the rest of us. As Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen put it to me when I visited his office in Oslo University: "We've always been used to thinking of ourselves as part of the solution, and with the oil we suddenly became part of the problem. Most people are really in denial."
ICELAND
We need not detain ourselves here too long. Only 320,000 – it would appear rather greedy and irresponsible – people cling to this breathtaking, yet borderline uninhabitable rock in the North Atlantic. Further attention will only encourage them.
FINLAND
I am very fond of the Finns, a most pragmatic, redoubtable people with a Sahara-dry sense of humour. But would I want to live in Finland? In summer, you'll be plagued by mosquitos, in winter, you'll freeze – that's assuming no one shoots you, or you don't shoot yourself. Finland ranks third in global gun ownership behind only America and Yemen; has the highest murder rate in western Europe, double that of the UK; and by far the highest suicide rate in the Nordic countries.
The Finns are epic Friday-night bingers and alcohol is now the leading cause of death for Finnish men. "At some point in the evening around 11.30pm, people start behaving aggressively, throwing punches, wrestling," Heikki Aittokoski, foreign editor of Helsingin Sanomat, told me. "The next day, people laugh about it. In the US, they'd have an intervention."
With its tarnished crown jewel, Nokia, devoured by Microsoft, Finland's hitherto robust economy is more dependent than ever on selling paper – mostly I was told, to Russian porn barons. Luckily, judging by a recent journey I took with my eldest son the length of the country by train, the place appears to be 99% trees. The view was a bit samey.
The nation once dubbed "the west's reigning educational superpower" (the Atlantic) has slipped in the latest Pisa rankings. This follows some unfortunate incidents involving Finnish students – the burning of Porvoo cathedral by an 18-year-old in 2006; the Jokela shootings (another disgruntled 18-year-old) in 2007, and the shooting of 10 more students by a peer in 2008 – which led some to speculate whether Finnish schools were quite as wonderful as their reputation would have us believe.
If you do decide to move there, don't expect scintillating conversation. Finland's is a reactive, listening culture, burdened by taboos too many to mention (civil war, second world war and cold war-related, mostly). They're not big on chat. Look up the word "reticent" in the dictionary and you won't find a picture of an awkward Finn standing in a corner looking at his shoelaces, but you should.
"We would always prefer to be alone," a Finnish woman once admitted to me. She worked for the tourist board.
Sweden
Anything I say about the Swedes will pale in comparison to their own excoriating self-image. A few years ago, the Swedish Institute of Public Opinion Research asked young Swedes to describe their compatriots. The top eight adjectives they chose were: envious, stiff, industrious, nature loving, quiet, honest, dishonest, xenophobic.
I met with Åke Daun, Sweden's most venerable ethnologist. "Swedes seem not to 'feel as strongly' as certain other people", Daun writes in his excellent book, Swedish Mentality. "Swedish women try to moan as little as possible during childbirth and they often ask, when it is all over, whether they screamed very much. They are very pleased to be told they did not." Apparently, crying at funerals is frowned upon and "remembered long afterwards". The Swedes are, he says, "highly adept at insulating themselves from each other". They will do anything to avoid sharing a lift with a stranger, as I found out during a day-long experiment behaving as un-Swedishly as possible in Stockholm.
Effectively a one-party state – albeit supported by a couple of shadowy industrialist families – for much of the 20th century, "neutral" Sweden (one of the world largest arms exporters) continues to thrive economically thanks to its distinctive brand of totalitarian modernism, which curbs freedoms, suppresses dissent in the name of consensus, and seems hell-bent on severing the bonds between wife and husband, children and parents, and elderly on their children. Think of it as the China of the north.
Youth unemployment is higher than the UK's and higher than the EU average; integration is an ongoing challenge; and as with Norway and Denmark, the Swedish right is on the rise. A spokesman for the Sweden Democrats (currently at an all-time high of close to 10% in the polls) insisted to me that immigrants were "more prone to violence". I pointed out that Sweden was one of the most bloodthirsty nations on earth for much of the last millennium. I was told we'd run out of time.
Ask the Finns and they will tell you that Swedish ultra-feminism has emasculated their men, but they will struggle to drown their sorrows. Their state-run alcohol monopoly stores, the dreaded Systembolaget, were described by Susan Sontag as "part funeral parlour, part back-room abortionist".
The myriad successes of the Nordic countries are no miracle, they were born of a combination of Lutheran modesty, peasant parsimony, geographical determinism and ruthless pragmatism ("The Russians are attacking? Join the Nazis! The Nazis are losing? Join the Allies!"). These societies function well for those who conform to the collective median, but they aren't much fun for tall poppies. Schools rein in higher achievers for the sake of the less gifted; "elite" is a dirty word; displays of success, ambition or wealth are frowned upon. If you can cope with this, and the cost, and the cold (both metaphorical and inter-personal), then by all means join me in my adopted hyggelige home. I've rustled up a sorrel salad and there's some expensive, weak beer in the fridge. Pull up an Egg. I hear Taggart's on again
Elaine, I just worry that far too many people are being suckered in to follow the Pied Piper. I've never touched drugs but if you want to you can tell us what they do to you.
Irony seems to be another concept you don't 'get', Innes
Nick you really have gone sour. I thought we were allowed to cut and paste like you do all the time in huge big blocks. I added this tongue in cheek, because I do have a sense of humour and I thought this was quite amusing but there really are some facts in there too that may surprise people who think all Nordic/Scandinavian countries (who independent Scotland alludes to being like) are so perfect. In this context it is worth highlighting the downsides such as the rates of depression, alcoholism, suicide, murder, debt, corruption, and environmental pollution.
People vote with their feet, and that's why so many come from all over the world to the UK, because it provides such a comprehensive package of beneficial factors to people's lives. As always the Yes Campaign take for granted what they already have, and simply do not appreciate how lucky they are compared to the rest of the world.
And whilst we are on the Happy chart, just to show how ridiculous it is, Nick, you are confident of a Yes vote, yes? Presumably you are deliriously happy at the prospect of an independent country. Yes? According to the chart Denmark is the happiest country in the world. rUK is a miserable place which is why the Yes Campaign wish to separate. Yes? Scotland could be so much happier. Surely, yes?
Or could it? How do we know that Yes Campaigners are not already the happiest people on Earth, and they are going to hug all the No voters to make them happy too? How do we know the UK's ranking is as a result of so many people being miserable down south?
Where are the facts that show that Scotland is not already the happiest country in the world? Not that it really matters. I suspect that if Scotland was given the title of Happiest country in the world that wouldn't be good enough for some Scots.
Where is the chart that shows the Best country in the world, the one that takes all these factors into account. Because, like it or not, you can't be in two places at the same time (although I suspect some Scots might wish to complain about that too). People vote with their feet and there is hardly a country which is more cosmopolitan than the UK because people want to come here.
And that is also why foreigners are totally baffled as to why Scotland should wish to separate.
I'm sorry, I don't care if you are a Yes or a No, I doubt most people will tolerate listening to for more than a couple of minutes. It's not much different from an Abu Hamza rant. It's disgusting on many levels, not least the base swearing. I'm surprised you lower your website to including this sort of material. He's entitled to his opinion but I don't think you'll find it is representative, and the number of views it might get on social media is more likely because some people think the more often you say the f-word, the funnier something is in a Roy Chubby Brown sort of way.
Once again you pass over my comments, to reply with something ridiculous, ignoring the point that so far we have no measure of how happy Scots are compared to the rest of the world, and nothing to prove, apart from the actions of some, that they are anything other than deliriously happy. Can you argue with that?
No we are sinking to even lower levels of depravity if that scurrilous diatribe by someone with a miniscule vocabulary, is supposed to influence us to vote Yes - come September.
If Nick B thinks that is effective for his cause, then he is really scraping the barrel, and I despair for the audience who find it in any way instructive, edifying, or productive.
jimcee wrote:No we are sinking to even lower levels of depravity if that scurrilous diatribe by someone with a miniscule vocabulary, is supposed to influence us to vote Yes - come September.
If Nick B thinks that is effective for his cause, then he is really scraping the barrel, and I despair for the audience who find it in any way instructive, edifying, or productive.
That video was posted nearly two weeks ago.
I think it is hilarious . . . particularly in the context of the 'lovebombing' campaign that Cameron was promising us at the time.
Jim, as I said before, you do not have to watch videos I post here.
In fact, you do not have to visit this site at all if it upsets you.
Well Nick, if you think that foul mouthed diatribe was "hilarious", then I despair for your sense of values.
You are perfectly right in saying that I do not have to avail myself of the some of the filth that you choose to put on the website.
But I feel it my bounden duty as an outside observer to try and draw attention to the distaste that some of the offerings you put on the forum, must engender in a number of your viewers.
You may say that I am very easily offended and that I should have a thicker skin, but I think that of you did one of your polls of your readers, you would find that I am not alone in these thoughts.
Anyway, I shall continue to take exception to some of your more outrageous postings until I am banned from the site.
jimcee wrote:I feel it my bounden duty as an outside observer to try and draw attention to the distaste that some of the offerings you put on the forum, must engender in a number of your viewers.
What viewers?
I am not entirely convinced that anyone looks at this site any more. If they do then they are a pretty lily-livered bunch, too scared to post under their own names.
jimcee wrote:I shall continue to take exception to some of your more outrageous postings until I am banned from the site.
I'm not going to ban you, why would I? Your inability to grasp any point I make is always expressed in the politest of tones.
Having just watched the video clip featuring the gobby cabbie I can appreciate that his method of delivery won't be to everybody's taste, but it IS very effective and none of the points he raises can be questioned as they are all quite factual.
His call for the Scots to "run for their lives" also indicates a deep uneasiness by the average person south of the border about how we are governed by Westminster, This is backed up by the rumblings of discontent by folk in places like Cornwall, Northumberland and Cumbria, who appear be perfectly aware that we are being duped by the "Establishment" in exactly the way the cabbie describes (and they would also like seek autonomy).
Do we really want to be ruled by people like "Boris" who wants to put water cannons on the streets of London to keep the great unwashed under the establishment thumb when we have the chance to "Run for our lives"?. All we need to do is VOTE YES!! in September.
Surely Nick you do not think that the 293 visits to this particular thread, have all been by yourself, and Innes Newton, with very brief appearances from myself, Bill McD, and ER.
No there have been other visitors to your outpourings, and it was on their behalf that I was raising the questionable value to your cause of some of the language being used.
If the standard of debate is being reduced to the lowest common denominator, then you will lose any tentative support you might achieve from a good section of the public.
And after all, why would you continue with your daily outpourings, if it was just for the benefit of needling Innes Newton, or bolstering the morale of Bill McD, ER, and old pointy ears.
And a wee message to Bill McD - It would appear that if anyone utters anything that he agrees with, the language used for the delivery is entirely acceptable and above reproach - maybe you agree with Nick that it was "hilarious".
I may not manage to raise the tone of this debate, considering the opposition, but will assume the mantle of Mrs Whitehouse (remember her?).
jimcee wrote:Surely Nick you do not think that the 293 visits to this particular thread, have all been by yourself, and Innes Newton, with very brief appearances from myself, Bill McD, and ER.
The majority of those visits are bots, I am afraid to say.
I should get round to banning most of them and just allow Google and Yahoo to index the site.
There's a whole new world of jargon out there - someone should compile a dictionary.
What on earth is a "bot"- and is it infectious?
Anyway, I can assure you Nick that there are a number of people who access your propaganda, with no intention of contributing, but purely to pass the time of day, reading stuff that might make them warm to your cause, but unfortunately most of the ones I have spoken to, have been rather more negative, which is not surprising when you put stuff like the gabby cabby into the forum.
I realise that you are not going to take heed of anything I say, but it is a legitimate point of view, and we are not all dunderheads out here, lapping up your stuff like pearls of wisdom
jimcee wrote: . . . we are not all dunderheads out here, lapping up your stuff like pearls of wisdom
Did I ever say you were ?
I am astounded that - according to you - so many people who find my views repellent bother reading this.
Guests online as I make this post are shown below. Note that two of the four are Ahrefsbot, two separate instances of this particular crawler. The other two IP addresses belong to BT, so probably are people browsing this forum for 'pearls of wisdom' - or perhaps just to irritate themselves.
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IP: 81.153.144.128 » Whois
03 May 2014 01:19 pm
So typically I would estimate 50% of the recorded visits as being bots.
Googlebot is the best known of the bots , or spides as they are sometimes known. It is an autonomous software routine that trawls the web and discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. There are a lot of different bots - this site gets crawled regularly by East European bots, Chinese bots and many others. It would probably make sense, as I said before, to ban them all except for Googlebot and Yahoo's spider.
The WWW has a lot going on behind the scenes - you only see a tiny part of it through your browser window.
Jim. I didn't say it was hilarious. I said it was factual and the delivery was effective. i.e. he got his message across.
and, as for unacceptable language, who is "old pointy ears"?
