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Paulgacus
@PaulWal89079178
Scottish Democrat,
Joined February 2022
1K Following
109 Followers
43 Posts
This should concern everyone.
A Freedom of Information request shows a NatureScot board member acted as a go between for a hyperscale AI data centre developer arranging private meetings with NatureScot’s Chair and CEO before the public even knew the site existed.
Here’s the timeline
19 Jan: Developer files plans for 212 hectares of green belt.
20 Jan
A NatureScot board member emails leadership “highly confidential,”
saying a government announcement is coming.
29 Jan UK Government announces the North Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone the first time the public hears about it.
2 March A follow up meeting reveals a second “future phase” in South Lanarkshire. Communities only learn this through FOI.
That’s the problem.
The developer and the regulator were already in confidential contact nine days before the public announcement.
Communities were kept in the dark.
NatureScot is meant to scrutinise projects like this on nature’s behalf not act as a private gateway for developers.
Whatever you think of the project itself, the sequencing is the issue
developer knows
regulator knows
government know
public finds out months later through FOI
That’s not good governance.
That’s not transparency.
And it’s not how Scotland should be making decisions about massive projects on green belt land.
🏴 The public deserves to know what’s happening before deals are lined up behind closed doors.
🌎☮️🤞🏴🤔⚖️🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴
‼️Something is becoming clearer as this debate develops.
‼️Every argument made in favour of the current approach to data centre development in Scotland however thoughtful, however nuanced ends up making the case for better planning safeguards, not against them.
‼️Digital sovereignty matters.
Correct.
So ask who owns the proposed infrastructure.
Soben at Auchtertool is owned by Accenture (UK) Limited.
A US multinational subsidiary.
‼️Digital sovereignty requires asking that question before approving anything.
The current framework doesn’t ask it.
‼️Scotland must not be a passive landlord.
Correct.
So require firm power commitments, enforceable local benefits, and community upside as planning conditions.
‼️The current framework cannot enforce any of them.
‼️NPF4 ND12 has no enforceable green definition.
‼️There is no finalised energy strategy.
‼️There are no mandatory EIA requirements regardless of scale.
‼️Risks must not fall on working class communities.
‼️Correct.
So explain how 200 diesel generators next to a children’s nursery, a care home, houses, and a hospital as proposed at Larbert is acceptable under current guidance.
It is.
Nothing in the current framework prevents it.
‼️Every honest pro-development voice is describing conditions for acceptable data centres that the current planning framework cannot guarantee.
‼️A moratorium is not anti-development.
‼️It is the only mechanism that creates space to establish the conditions that even the pro-development voices say are necessary.
‼️The Scottish Government’s position is not that the framework is adequate.
It cannot be.
‼️The framework has no green definition, no cumulative impact assessment, no EIA requirement, no firm power condition, and no enforceable community benefit mechanism.
‼️Its position is that councils should decide case by case while guidance arrives in 2027.
‼️Meanwhile communities have 21 days to object.
‼️Developers have years of preparation and professional teams.
‼️The River Eden recorded its lowest spring flows since 1973 last year.
‼️Six thousand two hundred megawatts are in active planning.
‼️The position is indefensible. And every argument sent out to defend it proves the point.
Britain is not the same.
The lockdowns in 2020-2021 did not merely pause life; they rewrote its rules. What began as a 3 week ‘flatten the curve’ shield against a virus became a slow, grinding experiment in how much freedom, community and common sense a nation could surrender before something essential broke. And something broke.
Children spent the Covid era incarcerated away from education and friends, robbing them of early learning and social skills.
The elderly were often isolated alone behind closed doors.
The economy did not bounce back; it collapsed. Small shops and pubs that defined high streets vanished, replaced by the cold efficiency of multinational corporation platforms that never close and never employ or circulate money locally.
Debt piled upon debt while the government discovered new appetites for control and new excuses for spending.
The cost of living has continued since the Covid era. This is restricting the ability of millions people live their lives with fulfilment and prosperity.
Young people who should have been building their lives instead watched house prices and rents climb beyond reach, their wages eaten by inflation that the same institutions that locked them down now lecture them to accept as normal.
Most quietly devastating was the loss of something harder to measure: the unthinking assumption that Britain was still a free country in the old, stubborn sense. That an individual could decide for themselves whether to open their business, hug their loved ones, or send their child to school. That the state existed to serve the people, not to rule them or decide freedoms.
The habit of deference to authority, once a quiet British strength, became a dangerous reflex. Dissent was reframed as danger. Questions were treated as something to be cancelled or punished. And when the restrictions finally lifted, the psychological damage remained, like scaffolding left standing long after the building had collapsed because of unnecessary repairs.
Britain survived the Blitz. It endured rationing, deindustrialisation, recessions, and every political crisis of the modern era. But the lockdowns were different. They did not ask for national pride, courage or endurance. They asked for obedience and isolation, and they received both in abundance. The Britain that emerged since the Covid era is more anxious, more divided, more dependent, and less certain of what it still believes.
The question is not whether we can go back. We cannot. The question is whether we will remember what was taken and refuse to let it happen again, or whether we will grow tragically conditioned to a less confident, subdued, more frightened version of ourselves that the lockdowns left behind.
Britain is not the same.
The only choice left is what we decide to become instead - and ideally, reboot our national confidence. But I’m not hopeful of this. The Covid era broke something in Britain. You can feel it still lingering. And ultimately, only we can try and resolve this. We need to rebuild our national confidence and stand up to the governments who continue to try and keep us in forms of restrictive confinement under their control. No one voted for this. And it’s time to do something about it before it’s too late.
In addiction policy, you are in recovery if you say you are, even if you are still actively using drugs.
In gender politics, you are a woman if you say you are, even if you are biologically male.
In nationality debates, you are Scottish/British if you say you are, regardless of ancestry, history, culture or upbringing.
The details change. The logic remains the same.
Across large parts of modern public life, we have quietly moved from describing reality to declaring it.
The old-fashioned view was that words described things that existed independently of us. Recovery meant recovering. A woman was an adult human female. Scottish referred to a people, a history, a culture and a nation.
The modern view appears to be that reality should politely adjust itself to whatever people say it is.
The really fascinating part is what happens when you decline to join in. You are rarely told that you are wrong. You are told that you are wicked.
Question whether someone still using drugs is actually in recovery and you are accused of stigmatising people.
Question whether a man is a woman and you are accused of bigotry.
Question whether national identity is more than a personal preference and you are accused of racism.
The accusation changes. The mechanism remains identical.
The argument is never answered. It is simply declared closed.
The heresy is not being mistaken. The heresy is noticing.
Of course, every person should be treated with dignity and respect. But dignity does not require us to abandon truth, and compassion is not the same thing as pretending words no longer have meanings.
The defining question of our age may be whether reality is something we discover or something we declare.
Increasingly, our institutions seem to believe it is the latter.
This was the statement released by Police Scotland after the footage of the incident in Dundee went viral last year. It seems that everything was done to give the impression that the young girl was the aggressor and the migrant couple the victims. A court decided yesterday that it was the other way round. Blatant disinformation. Police Scotland owe everyone an explanation.
I have no sympathy for Ayatollah's who slaughter 30,000 of their people in a weekend or their useful western idiots. I have no sympathy for Venezuelan cartels or those who oppress their people in any context hence I want a laser focus on my country.
One purpose only. When you broaden things to be part of your global intifada you leave many who would have been interested out. You extrapolated a lot from my post and illustrated my point. We don't need to agree on Venezuela or Cuba or anything other than the right to self determination for Scotland. One goal without the histrionics and the Citizen Smith style pish that's all.
@LiberationScot @SeannachaidhS All I want is an independent Scotland. I am not with the Ayatollah's , not Hamas nor anything else those who should have one goal seem to be determined to tack on to that.
Essex Police pauses use of live facial recognition cameras due to racial bias concerns
https://t.co/WN5PNwMSRp
For some years now I have puzzled how it was that children so easily became harmed and weaponised within the transactivist discourse. How intuitions set up to protect them not only failed in that task but actively encouraged harm. How established developmental and safeguarding norms in childhood were tossed aside on a whim. Here are some of my thoughts.
"How transactivism prevailed over decades of empirical child development science"
Transactivism didn’t prevail by defeating child development science with evidence and high quality research. It triumphed by changing the frame in a way that made normal safeguarding instincts look immoral.
A few key mechanisms made it possible:
1) A new story replaced an old developmental model
Child development shows developing an identity is gradual, staged, and shaped by cognition, embodiment, and social learning.
Transactivism introduced a simpler narrative: the child already knows who they are, and adults must affirm it.
That story is emotionally powerful and importantly requires almost no developmental literacy to accept.
2) Moral reframing: disagreement became “harm”
Once the framework became “affirmation equals care,” then:
- uncertainty looked like cruelty
- exploration looked like rejection
- watchful waiting looked like neglect
- therapy looked like “conversion”
So clinicians and schools were pushed into compliance, not because the evidence was strong, but because the moral framing was.
3) The language was strategically medicalised
Terms like “gender identity,” “incongruence,” and “life saving care” created the impression of a settled condition with a settled treatment.
This allowed a contested theory to be treated like the treatment for childhood diabetes. One that bypassed the usual evidentiary burden.
4) Children are uniquely vulnerable to social scripts
Developmental psychology already explains why this spread:
- children model authority (Bandura)
- identity concepts are socially mediated (Vygotsky)
- early categories are concrete and cue based (Piaget, Kohlberg)
- adolescents are highly status and belonging driven (Erikson, Marcia)
So once the idea entered schools and clinics, it had the ideal conditions to propagate.
5) Institutions were captured through risk and fear
Schools and clinicians faced:
- reputational risk
- professional complaints
- legal threats
- “suicide” narratives
In that climate, the safest career move was often to affirm, even if privately unsure.
6) The child became the moral shield
Once children were placed at the centre, any critique could be dismissed as “attacking trans kids.”
That effectively shut down normal scientific dispute.
TL;DR:
Transactivism incorporated children into its narrative by replacing developmental humility with moral certainty, and by turning a contested theory into an ethical litmus test. As a result a contested clinical approach gained near hegemonic status in many institutions, not through superior empirical demonstration, but through superior narrative, moral, and institutional leverage.
Puberty blockers are given to prepubescent kids to prevent them going through something that they have no experience of, so they can make a more informed decision about something they never get to experience due to puberty blockers.
It doesn’t get much more insane.
“I need to start with a confession. Not many things bug me, but if there’s one thing that does, it’s the idea that my story is a football fairy tale.
I know when people say I’m some sort of Cinderella Man that it’s meant as a compliment. I appreciate that, but to be totally honest, it doesn’t feel like one, because it isn’t true.
No magic wands have been waved in my direction, I didn’t win some kind of lottery to land a spot on one of the biggest clubs in the world. The reason why I’m a Liverpool player is the same reason why I’m captain of my country: I’ve worked my bollocks off to get where I am, and by doing that, I’ve been able to make the most of whatever talent I have.
Why does this matter? In truth, it doesn’t matter to me as an individual. It probably doesn’t matter to my family, either. It only matters because there are God knows how many little Andy Robertsons out there. Kids who are struggling to convince people that their talent deserves an opportunity. Kids who just need a break to get to wherever they deserve to be.
Kids who might give up if they start believing that only a fairy tale can save them.
I’ve never wanted to be a poster boy, but if I’m going to be a poster boy for anything, it should be this ― if you don’t give up, and if you carry on believing in yourself when others are doubting you, you can make it. You can show that you are good enough.
Now I’ve got two kids of my own, that message is more important than ever. I don’t want them to think that their dad got a lucky break. I need them to understand that whatever potential they have can only be fulfilled if they put their minds to it. Fairy tales? That’s bedtime stuff.”
Andy Robertson, Scotland captain. 🏴
Just a reminder. While #Mandelson enjoys tax payers' money for a job which comes with a luxury lifestyle, I was 'investigated' for 13 months, kept from promotion, and excluded by @UKLabour for liking tweets by @Glinner and expressing my view that only women can have a cervix...
Peggie v NHS Fife & Dr Upton
🔪Closing Argument: Cunningham on Sex, Privacy and the Delusion at NHS Fife
Naomi Cunningham’s closing argument in Peggie v NHS Fife and Dr Upton was not delivered with rhetorical flourish but with the precision of a scalpel. Having spent days cross-examining witnesses, exposing gaps in evidence, and dissecting contradictions, she now gathered the strands into a single conclusion: this was not a case about Sandie Peggie’s “manner,” nor about patient safety, but about the right of women to state biological truth in their own spaces.
Cunningham began with law, grounding the tribunal firmly in the Equality Act and the For Women Scotland judgments. Single-sex exceptions, she reminded the panel, exist only if “sex” is given its biological meaning. Remove that anchor and the statute collapses into incoherence. The respondents’ claim - that Article 8 rights entitled Upton to strip alongside female colleagues - was “ambitious tending to unrealistic.” Women’s privacy rights, she said, would be more likely upheld in Strasbourg than Upton’s asserted right to undress in their company.
From there she addressed the late-breaking argument that Peggie had harassed Upton by her “manner.” The case of Higgs v Farmor’s School shows belief can be manifested in objectionable ways, but the respondents had failed to show this applied here. Peggie’s supposed aggression, Cunningham argued, was nothing more than a woman frightened and angry to find a man in a room where no man should be. The board’s witnesses admitted Upton was physically larger and socially higher in the hospital hierarchy. Peggie’s refusal to capitulate - telling him calmly he was a man and did not belong there - was not harassment but the protected manifestation of her belief.
That, Cunningham pressed, was the heart of the matter. If Peggie could not say “you are a man” without career-ending consequence, then her belief was stripped of protection altogether. The relentless disputes over language - Upton objecting to every word, Russell interrupting even in court - were not pedantic diversions but the mechanism by which belief was suppressed.
She turned then to credibility. The respondents had ransacked Peggie’s social media history, unearthing a single off-colour joke in seven years, to smear her as racist. They dredged up peripheral witnesses at the last minute. Meanwhile, central figures like Jamie Doyle or Angela Sheppard were never called. Kate Searle’s emails, Maggie Currer’s muddled testimony, and Isla Bumba’s extraordinary claim that she could not say with certainty whether she herself was a woman - all revealed a service in thrall to ideology. The board, Cunningham suggested, had no consistent account of what it was investigating: patient-safety concerns appeared, disappeared, and reappeared according to strategic convenience.
Her closing cadence was deliberately unsentimental. “Even if Sandie Peggie were a racist - she is not - even racist women should not be forced to undress in front of a man.” That line, spare and unsparing, captured her point. Rights are not contingent on virtue. A woman’s dignity is not forfeited because colleagues dislike her politics.
In her final words Cunningham called the respondents’ conduct “a heresy hunt.” NHS Fife, she said, was “in the grip of a delusion” - the belief that men can be women, and that this fiction must be enforced at all costs. Delusions can only be maintained through bullying, and Peggie’s suspension, the prolonged investigation, the character assassination, were the punishments for her refusal to join in the pretence.
The tribunal, she urged, should see the pattern for what it was: not a safeguarding exercise, not a proportionate response, but the institutional enforcement of an ideological orthodoxy against a nurse whose only transgression was to insist that sex is real.
Respondent's closing argument to follow later today/tomorrow.
Protest footage blocked as online safety act comes into force...
"What appears to be emerging isn’t just a two-tier internet, but something subtler and more insidious: a default-off model of speech and expression, where access to lawful content is no longer presumed but withheld until certain hurdles are cleared..."
https://t.co/9eH9NnW71r
Now then middle class ladies
Every single one of you, and there are a great many of you, who have deemed yourself entitled to impose YOUR manner and TONE standards on other adults, no matter what.... LOOK WHAT YOU FUCKING DID!
All of you. OWN IT!
@wanyeburkett Metrics are a reflection in a pool of water. The more you aggravate or discolor the water, the less recognizable the reflection.
We are at a point where GDP is rising but quality of life is falling. Manipulating a metric makes it useless, and GDP is heavily manipulated.
In light of recent open letters from academia and the arts criticising the UK's Supreme Court ruling on sex-based rights, it's possibly worth remembering that nobody sane believes, or has ever believed, that humans can change sex, or that binary sex isn't a material fact. These letters do nothing but remind us of what we know only too well: that pretending to believe these things has become an elitist badge of virtue.
I often wonder whether the signatories of such letters have to quieten their consciences before publicly boosting a movement intent on removing women's and girls' rights, which bullies gay people who admit openly they don't want opposite sex partners, and campaigns for the continued sterilisation of vulnerable and troubled kids. Do they feel any qualms at all while chanting the foundational lie of their religion: Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men?
I have no idea. All I know for sure is that it's a complete waste of time telling a gender activist that their favourite slogan is self-contradictory nonsense, because the lie is the whole point. They're not repeating it because it's true - they know full well it's not true - but because they believe they can make it true, sort of, if they force everyone else to agree. The foundational lie functions as both catechism and crucifix: the set form of words that obviates the tedious necessity of coming up with your own explanation of why you're one of the Godly, and an exorcist's weapon which will defeat demonic facts and reason, and promote the advance of righteous pseudoscience and sophistry.
Some argue that signatories of these sorts of letters are motivated by fear: fear for their careers, of course, but also fear of their co-religionists, who include angry, narcissistic men who threaten and sometimes enact violence on non-believers; back-stabbing colleagues ever ready to report wrongthink; the online shamers and doxxers and rape threateners, and, of course, the influential zealots in the upper echelons of liberal professions (though we can quibble whether they're actually liberal at all, given the draconian authoritarianism that seems to have engulfed so many). Gender ideology could give medieval Catholicism a run for its money when it comes to punishing heretics, so isn't it common sense to keep your head down and recite your Hail Mulvaneys?
But before we start feeling too sorry for any cowed and fearful TWAWites who're TERFy on the sly, let's not forget what a high proportion of them have willingly snatched up pitchforks and torches to join the inquisitional purges. Call me lacking in proper womanly sympathy, but I find the harm they've enabled and in some cases directly championed or funded - the hounding and shaming of vulnerable women, the forced loss of livelihoods, the unregulated medical experiment on minors - tends to dry up my tears at source.
History is littered with the debris of irrational and harmful belief systems that once seemed unassailable. As Orwell said, 'Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.' Gender ideology may have embedded itself deeply into our institutions, where it's been imposed, top-down, on the supposedly unenlightened, but it is not invulnerable.
Court losses are starting to stack up. The condescension, overreach, entitlement and aggression of gender activists is eroding public support daily. Women are fighting back and winning significant victories. Sporting bodies have miraculously awoken from their slumber and remembered that males tend to be larger, stronger and faster than females. Parts of the medical establishment are questioning cutting healthy breasts off teenaged girls is really the best way to fix their mental health problems.
One seemingly harmless little white lie - Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men - uttered in most cases without any real thought at all, and a few short years later, people who think of themselves as supremely virtuous are typing 'yes, rapists' pronouns are absolutely the hill I'll die on,' rubbing shoulders with those who call for women to be hanged and decapitated for wanting all-female rape crisis centres, and furiously denying clear and mounting evidence of the greatest medical scandal in a century.
I wonder if they ever ask themselves how they got here, and I wonder whether any of them will ever feel shame.
Can I ask anyone of the 14000 people who have signed up to the Scottish Liberation Movement to share this post and hashtag it with #Liberation4Scotland
Today's the day that everything changes.
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