The Free Speech Union is launching FSU Scotland next week and is attracting widespread, cross-party support, as reported in today’s Times Scotland.
A new campaign group, supported by high profile politicians, academics and religious figures, is being set up to oppose the emergence of an “intimidatory” cancel culture and the censoring of controversial views.
Joanna Cherry, the SNP MP and QC, Jenny Lindsay, the award-winning poet, Lindsay Paterson, a professor of education policy, and Murdo Fraser MSP, the former deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives, have given their support to the Free Speech Union Scotland, which will launch later this month.
Others who have joined the organisation’s inaugural advisory council are Iain Macwhirter, the journalist and former rector of the University of Edinburgh, Peter Kearney, the director of the Catholic Media Office and Jim Sillars, the former SNP deputy leader.
A number of academics, activists and politicians have been subjected to physical threats and online abuse after they expressed views on contentious issues, such as gender self-identification and the rebranding of statues and buildings named after controversial public figures.
Lindsay was advised by police not to attend events unaccompanied after she was subjected to an online hate campaign. She was vilified, ostracised and labelled a “bigot” after she raised concerns, in a tweet, about a trans rights advocate threatening violence against lesbian activists who they branded “Terfs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).
Jenny Lindsay was particularly eloquent about the difficulty of having civil conversations about the trans issue in Scotland.
Lindsay said: “I’ve had people interfere with my work by contacting people who hire me, people attempt to encourage friends and collaborators to cease contact, been dropped by writer friends who share my views but who are terrified for their careers and seen people who support me harangued on Twitter.
“I was dropped from a £2,000 commission as the client feared they might get attacked on social media, not because they thought I’d done anything wrong.
“It has upturned my entire life and was exceptionally damaging mentally. I was also an absolutely ridiculous target for all of this given I’ve both worked with and hired trans people for 20 years.” She added: “In nearly 20 years of programming events and writing and performing in Scotland I have never known an atmosphere so stifled, nor the importance of freedom of expression so disregarded by individual writers and arts organisations.
“I dearly hope for robust discussion about re-energising Scotland’s literary landscape so that writers and thinkers feel free to explore complex contemporary issues without fears of no-platforming, ostracisation, smearing and loss of livelihood.”
Worth reading in full.
I gave a quote to the Times that wasn’t used, so I’ll reproduce it here instead:
We are setting up FSU Scotland at the urging of our members and supporters north of the border. They are concerned about the lack of civility in public discourse in Scotland and the growing intolerance for people who challenge institutional orthodoxies, particularly when it comes to women’s rights. This culture of intolerance is likely to become more entrenched when the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act is activated, so the defenders of free speech need to start organising now. The fact that such an impressive group of people have joined the Advisory Council of FSU Scotland from across the political spectrum shows how deep and widespread this concern is.
Stop Press: You can read additional coverage of the launch in the Scottish Daily Express.
Stop Press 2: Any Scottish readers interested in joining the Free Speech Union can do so here.
Stop Press 3: You can see the Free Speech Union’s Scottish page here.
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Cuban missile crisis in reverse. I’d expect US politicians would freak out if Russia were intending to build bases in Mexico.
Congratulations on not differentiating between a Communist dictatorship and a free country
Perhaps you would like to ask Cubans whether they preferred Fidel Castro to the US mafia that ran the place in the 1950s?
Free country. That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard for a long time. Cheered me right up. Thanks for that. Seriously.
A “free country” is one that’s part of “the west”. Characterised by, for instance, sending protesters to prison, stealing their money and the money donated to help them, destroying their businesses, impoverishing their families and criminalising them permanently.
And forcefully innoculation them with unapproved substances
Which is which?
A free country? Where would that be found???
Right now, the only free country I know is in my head.
You never heard of the January 6th protestors being held in solitary without charge. And Russia has half the incarceration rate of the free United States.
The last 2 years have been a massive psychological strain on everyone. For the masses that has been framed for instance as Mass Formation Psychosis. I actually think it is the leaders who have been impacted the most and this has manifested itself in increasingly tyrannical and dictator like behaviour. Putin may well be suffering but so too many others like Biden (who also has severe cognitive issues due to age) and in my country Canada with Trudeau openly trying to grab totalitarian power. Unfortunately there are limited checks and balances on these leaders. Many should be changed out for fresh minds for their own benefit and the safety of the world.
Twaddle…
Ok.. I was probably being a bit harsh.. but come on.. lets not go down that soppy route of pretending that our so called leaders have been effected negatively by their actions. All of them are puppets who knew exactly what they were getting into, and the effect their actions would have on their populations..
Spot on. Most Western leaders are part of the WEF protégé training scheme. That scheme has created weak government, weak leadership, weak advisory groups and weak institutions. The only people who benefit are the very few at the top.
The legacy of these protégés and their mentors is a broken Western hemisphere with poverty, disease, emotional breakdown and disorientation.
The Strange Death of Europe is indeed going to hold historians in its grip for very many generations to come.
Early on it seemed that Putin stood as a redoubt against mounting Covid hysteria. Then he folded like a cheap tent.
Seriously? The Americans are questioning the cognitive condition and sanity of the Russian head of state? Have they listened to Brandon recently?
Chris Christie can’t be fat because Michael Moore is fat
They should focus on the cognitive decline of their own President before pointing the finger at somebody else, fat guru.
Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to find ‘creepy’ Joe Biden leaning over you.
Why?
Well only if you are a twelve year old.
Btw Emerald did you hear Her majesty is in bed with COVID-19 and Andy is in bed with Chloe14.
The Daily Sceptic calling the Russian Head of State either mental or a psychopath for defending his nation against constant Western aggression is a new low.
Such thinking reveals more about those running the DS than it does about Putin.
No more than I had already suspected though.
TPTB always infiltrate organisations that form to oppose them.
They have ways to subvert opposition.
I totally concur.
This is what I would call a gloriously improper tu quoque line of reasoning. Though it is ‘illogical’ in the sense that it is an invalid (though a somewhat/partially valid) argument, for me it is ‘perfectly proper.’
For once in my life, arbitrariness rules!
Mad? Debatable.
However, his own irrationality has probably rotted his mind, there is a lot of it around in Russia, historically.
Unlike in the US, where rationality is the oder of today and every day.
I don’t think public shaming of Putin is going to go very far.
The whole cancel culture, social media shaming thing works with poor saps in our society, but I think Putin can handle attempts to shame him.
Any country which has an arrest warrant out for Georg Soros cannot possibly have a deranged leader.
By any standards Council for Foreign Relations is deep state – another possibility is US proxies have been baiting him. Make no mistake Putin is not a particularly nice individual but perhaps you should take a look at all those US biolabs in Ukraine and ask what’s going on.
https://www.conservapedia.com/Council_on_Foreign_Relations
Found this on Twitter earlier…
I can’t vouch for this article but I do feel nausea for the way politicians and legacy media switched overnight from COVID to Ukraine – when we have not been able to trust a word for years https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/02/24/putin-goes-all-in-beyond-eastern-ukraine-tactically-appearing-to-advance-for-all-ukraine/
Now we are all supposed to be agitating for battle in Ukraine.
Thank you Phantom
My second favourite website.
Great article. Thanks for the link. I hadn’t seen that site before!
That would certainly explain the all-out attack on Ukraine beyond the Donbass region etc. Thank you for posting.
Make no mistake Putin is not a particularly nice individual but perhaps you should take a look at all those US biolabs in Ukraine and ask what’s going on.
You know Putin personally then.
I don’t think that is implied – there is no question he is a tough and ruthless man.
I mean he literally tortured people for a living. I don’t think you need to know him personally to work out he’s not very nice.
Do you have any facts to back up that assertion?
Odd, you’d have thought the famous anti-Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsn might have noticed that. But apparently you’ve spotted what eluded him:
“Vladimir Putin—yes, he was an officer of the intelligence services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag. As for service in foreign intelligence, that is not a negative in any country—sometimes it even draws praise. George Bush Sr. was not much criticized for being the ex-head of the CIA, for example.”
Putin and Solzhenitsyn
Well done!
Thanks for this – important link. I urge others, who believe they “understand” Putin, to follow it.
I agree. If the Council on Foreign Relations says A is true, you probably know B is true. It’s another of the infinite number of neocon organizations in America that always seem to support the next U.S. “Intervention” or regime change operation – but apparently don’t like Russia’s “interventions” or likely regime-change operations in Ukraine.
I read (somewhere) last week, that since the founding of the United States over 250 years ago(?) there has been only 8 years when the US has not been involved in a war.
The only person I can find today to tell the story behind the Biden Crime Syndicate and their actions in Ukraine is Tony Heller at Climaterealists.com
Naturally this story has been censored by the Fake News Media whilst they perused the Russia con to get rid of the legitimate US President and installed their marionette.
Could be. Would the US think tank the Council For Foreign relations care to give us its assessment of the mind of President Biden, insofar as it could be said to exist?
I’m not for a moment thinking that Putin is clear of all blame in this – I don’t trust Western Governments or Western media. There’s always some other agenda at play. That said – why is it that most of the main countries leaders are just utter cnuts? Why can’t we get leaders that are decent people, think of all people and have the interests of the people rather than their own despotic ideals?
Could it just be that to be a leader of a country, you have to be a psychopath in the first place?
The levels of ruthlessness in politics the world over means that decency just gets you s**t all over. I saw it in consultancy, FFS.
Beautifully worded. And spot on.
Yes. The system only allows those who are ruthless enough to get to the top. It may in many cases be more sociopathic than psychopathic – but if you really care about not harming others it’s going to be hard. Not sure about Mandela or Havel?
Or a sociopath at least. Sociopaths, in contrast to psychopaths, are brutalised by their enviroment and have their empathy beaten out of them. You’ll notice that most leaders that go against the socio-economic grain but simultaneously uphold some ethical or political principles (whether Allende, Thomas Sankara or Jean Bertrand Aristide) end up dead or overthrown.
Having said that, i don’t think this comes down to Putin’s character. NATO is literaly on Russia’s borders and has been planning to incorporate Ukraine into its alliance. The US wouldn’t have tolerated this in Mexico for even one week, let alone 8 years as the Russians have done.
That’s a theory that has been put forward before so there’s probably some truth in it.
Is this the level of insight DS has stooped to? Regurgitating CFR propaganda. Have you listened to any of Putin’s addresses over the last couple of years? Do they strike you as the ramblings of a madman?
Why not question the timeliness of moving to a war economy after 2 years of prolonged economic strangulation and money printing? How does this fit into the broader aims of our global masters to get us to own nothing, be happy and eat bugs by 2030?
No, let’s just take the CFR’s word for it. The world’s mad, everything’s mad, everyone’s mad. Told you it was one big cockupspiracy. David Rockefeller’s CFR told us.
Exactly.. well said..
Putin doesn’t normally ramble like a madman, no, but his speech before the invasion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APPjVlUA-gs was basically just rhetoric, saying that Ukraine shouldn’t exist. That’s what says to me that this is WEF-inspired puppet theatre; it’s like when Andrew Neil broke character and denounced the unvaccinated before retiring to France.
Interesting that just as Putin makes two super impressive speeches, which were translated into English on the Kremlin website that the UK blocks all access so the direct transcripts can no longer be accessed.
It’s the deepest of dishonorable, unprincipled, disreputable behaviour to ban the right of a leader to be heard verbatim and then say that he is either mad, a psychopath or both.
the legacy meeeja here’s translation the other week when he was with the German guy were well wide of the mark. He was less than kind about Mr Macron for instance.
^^^^^^^
How peculiar! You would think they would want us all to see how irrational he is.
It sickens me that Young should be using this platform to spout globalist propaganda.
The CFR is a globalist war machine hell bent on using its rape of Ukraine as a stepping stone to the destruction of the only nation left offering any sort of resistance to the nest of vipers that constitute the real rulers of America.
Members of the CFR, are up to their necks in Ukraine-based corruption. None more so than Biden who bragged at a CFR meeting that he got the Ukrainian prosecutor-general sacked for daring to investigate the crimes of that swindling, drug-addled, low life, sewer-rat son of his.
‘Question Everything’ eh Toby?
Except when it comes from NWO psychopaths.
https://nationalfile.com/ukraine-corruption-obama-biden-soros-schiff-bolton-pelosi-kerry-romney-clinton/
Yes, it’s rather surprising, even shocking, definitely disappointing.
For a very long time, Russia has been defined as a savage, barbaric place where evil abounded.
The land that has given the world magnificent literature and music was dismissed as an uncivilised place, where worthless people lived submissively under the rule of tyrants.
Old prejudices die hard.
This is all part of the plan concocted with China pre covid – create a virus that’s just about new enough to send the west into a nappy wetting panic ( but not deadly enough that it actually DOES wipe out huge swathes of your own population) then when they’ve managed to completely divide and weaken themselves with the ridiculous politics of the whole situation, start a war. A – They won’t have a f**king clue on how nor the energy to respond and B – it’ll distract from the awakening of many that the whole thing has been a complete scam. Or something like that lol
Yeh sure.
Not sure why the downvotes: it’s what I’m seeing too.
Ditto.
Or maybe, America’s woke Corona apostles are just suffering from PTTD[*], a mental illness which causes obsessive remote-psychoanalyzing of others in the hope to regain a foothold in reality one believes to had had in the past aka What’s going on here? I don’t understand anything! Can some expert pleeaase heeeelp!!!
[*] Post-Traumatic-Trump-Disorder, also known as Unexpected-Contact-With-Observable-Reality-And-It-Ain’t-No-Safe-Space !!!
Psychopath? Possibly. If he is, he is in good company.
Excellent piece by Spiked’s ONeill today.
This sort of article has no place in DS, sorry Mr Young, but its true.
Yup. It’s a surprisingly poor, cheap ugly smear job. Seriously odd, and off, and sticks out like a sore thumb on this otherwise rather thoughtful and well-informed site.
I honestly can’t say I think Putin is being a psychopath – he’s as much within his rights to invade (providing he accepts the consequences) as the US were to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.
Leaders do some things we ordinary folk cant comprehend. This website is testament to that.
You forgot the apostrophe in ‘can’t’
Oh well its 10 past 5 on a Friday, high time I stopped pretending to be working and started pretending to be happy!
You forgot the full stop
.
A report by the CIA & Globalist-funded ‘Council for Foreign Relations’….. worth reading in full? How about worth rolling eyes and moving onto the next article.
I suppose it could be argued that it’s worth reading in full just to see what some people are thinking (or what they want you to think they’re thinking).
I haven’t watched Putin’s speech, but I wouldn’t put it past him to do something just to confuse the opposing side. (Is he compos mentis? Dare we call his bluff on this? etc).
It was actually better to read the English transcript than watch the speech (unless you are a Russian speaker), because the translation is inevitably a bit jerky and doesn’t flow. The speech was very, very impressive even if you don’t agree with it all. I heard Enoch Powell speak at Cambridge as an undergrad and even though I didn’t agree with a word he said, the quality of his rhetoric was levels above most of what you heard there.
Yes, I was astonished listening to part of the simultaneously translated speech and then reading the transcript of it by how intelligent it was, how demanding of intelligence in its audience/the public, including how long it was. Can’t remember ever hearing a western leader speak to us like that, as if we had functioning brains, adult/mature attention spans, etc.
Mad, maybe. But why not have a go when your enemies are so weak and incapable of doing anything. My concern is how China will react on observing how the west has responded to the Ukraine. Will China say to Taiwan return to the fold as nobody is going to support you?
Time will tell.
THIS is absolutely the issue now.
And I very much fear that our society is so completely lost that it is going to be incapable of putting some actual grown ups in charge.
Ours is a society that is preoccupied with gender fluidity, barely perceptible racism, not very dangerous diseases, an imaginary climate emergency.
We have become soft and flaccid. We are the Eloi to China and Russia’s Morlocks.
Unless we step up – and I doubt we will – China will take advantage of the situation and make a move on Taiwan in some way.
Ours is a society that is preoccupied with gender fluidity, barely perceptible racism, not very dangerous diseases, an imaginary climate emergency.
The problem with these distractions is that they end up distracting everybody – even those who use and abuse them in the most cynical fashion.
I did hear they went into their airspace yesterday.
People may care to look at the first few minutes of this (the site may be offline some of this weekend while they upgrade)
https://www.ukcolumn.org/ukcolumn-news/uk-column-news-25th-february-2022
Four possible scenarios, there could be more:
1. The line we are being given by our government and media. Putin baddy, the West and NATO goodies, Ukraine innocent victims
2. The line explained by UK Column. The West (especially US and UK) baddies. Putin doing what he needs to do. Ukraine government and other groups in the country very dodgy.
3. The Trump supporters’ view. Putin is a good guy trying to deal with the perpetrators of the Great Reset etc, who figure greatly in Ukraine.
4. The bigger conspiracy theory. The whole situation has been deliberately created to cause massive disruption to energy, food and other trade. Putin, along with many other people of influence have been schooled as part of the World Economic Forum young leaders programme – all geared up to speed along the Great Reset.
I propose its a basket case of; West – overtly going against accords and agreements not to expand, irritating Putin. Ukraine – corrupt officials, dodgy dealings, poor government with poor backing, innocents not really at fault but being put over a barrel by their leaders. Drained of funds by the American first family hegemony. Russia – again the poor innocent Russian in their hut not really their fault, Putin sensed an opportunity to realise a poltical dream of his (he’s not made it a secret) not sure he’s even broken international law at this stage. Probably will be responsible for some innocent blood being spilled. Has the potential to escalate because the West will toy with the idea of supporting Ukraine (which keeps being referred to as THE Ukraine, euphemistically suggesting it is little more than a region of Russia anyway) but ultimately will leave Ukraine with its piece in it’s hand wanting more but not getting it.
Not only did the West reneged on agreements regarding the expansion of NATO, they and Ukraine have deliberately and repeatedly violated the Minsk accord.
Number 4..
Ditto.
No. 2
I’m a big fan of UK Column, but I must say that I have noticed on more than one occasion their analysis has been more than a little biased re Putin. Getting very middle of the road on lots of other stuff too. Almost as if they’re afraid to go too far on certain issues.. especially geopolitics..
Pat Heningson who is a guest speaker is often on Russia Today, He has rightly been critical of the blue helmets.
I like the fact they don’t march to the beat of the main stream media, they are happy to reveal things not shown in MSM.
One has to love the elegance with which our dear conspiracy theorists have switched from COVID to war in Ukraine as engine of their stories without missing a beat. :->
That’s the mark of the common political agitator, BTW: Whatever happens, it always proves that he was right all the time.
There was always going to be a war once the covid scare wound down. There’s no way people were going to be given the time to reflect on what just happened and stumble upon the truth. It’s totally pre-planned 100%
The COVID scare was supposed to be permanent.
Putin was mad to trust the US and it’s poodles to keep their word. That’s where any instability in his psyche ends.
I remember writing in 2014 that Putin showed considerable restraint in not entering Ukraine up to the Dnieper river to protect the Russian Ukrainians from the US backed fascists.
It took him 8 years to realize the US/EU cannot be trusted.
Here is a good referenced timeline of what happened which you won’t read in the msm.
https://off-guardian.org/2022/02/24/timeline-euromaidan-the-original-ukraine-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR2yRa1dV_PQaLK7aAl_VjyfCuprWn3rilhKInFywrvI5YkbJkr8Pe3ocTc
It’s possible that what he was doing was building Russia’s military capacity to a level that the current operation was feasible and unlikely to lead to bad outcomes.
It was always feasible with Russia’s existing military capacity.
Putin has spent the last 8 years hoping the US and it’s poodles would stop arming Ukraine.
Diplomacy didn’t work for Putin and when the Western backed fascists increased it’s bombardment of the Donbass Putin was left with little option but to protect the Russian Ukrainians from future slaughter.
The West’s goading also forced his hand.
A convenient distraction from the mRNA experimental jab disaster.
Perhaps the reason he bided his time was because he hoped the West would act sensibly or more to the point he wasn’t in a position to do anything then, now he is.
If there’s one thing that rumours like, it’s a good swirl.
There’s another doing the rounds that Biden is senile. I find that one rather more credible.
So the forced covid isolation had a negative effect on the populations, who would have thought it.
How about no
War starts on the day news breaks of moderna having patented a genetic code crucial to the viruses spread in 2016 . Ahem..let’s bury that one shall we? Lol
The CFR says… I stopped right there.. the globalist think tank supreme..
As for Putin and Ukraine.. why didn’t he do this in 2014 after the Western led coup. Thousands of lives could have been saved in Donetsk and Luhansk, whose innocent civilians have suffered years of shelling by the likes of the Avoz battalions.
The timing of this all seems to be a little too convenient, after the covid debacle, and ties in nicely with the Klaus Slob’s Great Reset, especially with all the talk of cyber attacks, high oil/gas prices, and supply shortages. Crazy..??? have a read of what Brandon Smith says below. He’s someone whose always seemed to get it right over many years..
Its also worth remembering that Putin is ‘supposedly’ linked to the WEF through the global young leaders club..
https://alt-market.us/order-out-of-chaos-how-the-ukraine-conflict-is-designed-to-benefit-globalists/
There is a school of thought that Putin backed off in 2014 after being threatened with exposure of embezzlement. There’s a YouTube video of Putin at a 2014 press conference with Didier Burkhalter, president of Switzerland and OSCE leader, showing a lot of awkward body language https://youtu.be/WJGIa-rbGXk The video is quite heavily cut and maybe he was just desperate for a pee, but the suggestion is that this was just after he was threatened.
I don’t know if anyone’s noticed but this is the only thing dominating the news now – now being the moment that reckoning should be happening to those who have caused the death of thousands via lockdowns and vaccine propaganda. Funny that
Yes, extremely amusing ….. as you say, the coincidence of timing is quite … funny.
It’s fascinating to see how many Coronavirus “experts” have switched to also being experts on Ukraine/Russia.
The parallels between severity of lockdown and severity of sanctions on Putin are also uncanny. Those who would want total lockdown are also the same ones who are calling for maximum punishment for Putin/Russia.
Keir Starmer unsurprisingly is calling for more severe sanctions and whatever he thinks Biden would like to hear him to say.
Well, Keir Starmer knows what the US/Israeli axis expects him to say, doesn’t he?
He doesn’t give a monkeys what the UK public want him to say….
Spot on…
LOL! Someone beat you to it….
Is this from the Babylon Bee?
Back in 2020 I tried to voice concerns about freedom of speech to David Kaye ‘UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression’ and was serially blanked
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/for-the-attention-of-david-kaye-on-freedom-of-opinion-and-expression/
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/intimidation-and-suppression-of-inconvenient-knowledge/
Kaye is also CFR.
Alternatively, he may be behaving quite rationally. We have breached the Budapest and Minsk accords, and started to pressure Russian border countries into joining the EU and NATO. This is seen as a major threat by Russia, and they have told us this repeatedly over the past 10 years.
Finally, they have done something about it. We can’t say that we were not warned…
Joining the EU is one thing but joining NATO is quite another so Russia might be entitled to object.
It appears that five EU countries are already neutral – Austria, Finland, Ireland, Malta, Sweden.
One more doesn’t seem to set a worrying precedent.
The difference is the Russians don’t really care much about Austria, Finland, Ireland, Malta, and Sweden moving into the US sphere. The Ukraine, on the other hand, is at the heart of Russia.
A lot of Finns are getting worried that Finland will be the next country that Russia ‘wants back’.
There is talk about Putin having ‘gone mad’ but you could equally apply that to 99% of the population of Finland wearing their stupid face masks.
Finland hasn’t been under Russian control for over a century. Why would Putin “want it back”?
Regardless, if Finland were to choose to join NATO I doubt the Russians would do more than grumble, given the Baltic States are already in NATO.
Ukraine is fundamentally different on almost every relevant count.
As Putin famously said to your President (iirc): the only difference would be that now when he looks across the border he sees Finnish friends. If Finland were to join NATO he would see enemies. Seems legitimate enough.
Alternatively, he is neither mad nor a psychopath, but a leader of a country treated with utter contempt for 30 years.
Mr Young needs to get out of his London-centric group think and stop believing that the USA is run by kindly people, that the UK plays fair and the NATO is a purely defensive organisation.
Everything the West has done since 1991 has been solely to benefit the hyper-rich and the US MIC. We have committed absolutely horrific genocides in multiple theatres and yet the media, of whom Mr Young has been a committed part, salivated like psychopaths when bombing innocent civilians to smithereens.
Oh, but when Putin is considerably less violent than Operation Shock N Awe, he is suddenly either mad or a psychopath.
What, pray, were Mike Pompeo, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Brezinski, Tony Blair etc etc etc?
They sure as heck weren’t Good Samaritans, they have left death and destruction wherever they went and what they did to Libya is the textbook definition of unprovoked genocide.
Were you saying all that at the time, Mr Young?
Because if you think that what went on in Libya was acceptable, then you need to ask whether it is you that is a psychopath….
You need to question everything Mr Young, including your loyalty to your Uni chums who thought that bombing 1 million plus innocent people to death was ‘worth it’…..
Spot on
+1.. ^^^
^^^^^^^^ this!!!!
I saw a photo of massive queues leaving the capital. They would be the vaccinated sheep fleeing and leaving the real man behind to face the bloodshed. They will come back when it’s over and hopefully you have defended their kids’ future even if it killed you.
That’s the way it’s always been; only three percent took up arms against the British in the American revolution.
“We’re-all-in-this-together” Boris is heading right now to Ukraine in his private jet to help out with the fighting.
Oh no, he’s got back in the fridge.
That lump of lard couldn’t crush a grape..
Only an Asian boy!
Stopped reading there….
As for what’s happening… remember Kosovo anyone?
Not my quote…, but I agree with every word.
Fairly obvious propaganda. More likely he saw the failure of leadership and institutional cowardice of the west manifested in two years of hiding under the bed over a nasty cold and reckoned he could take Ukraine and we’d do nothing to stop him. And he was right. And China will take Taiwan within the year as well.
Perhaps we could punish Putin by misgendering him? Words are real violence, remember.
Wouldn’t that be nice, if that was the explanation? But no, he arrived at that station a long time ago.
Or maybe be he is the only sane intelligent person in a world gone mad with western leaders gone crazy with the pursuit of absolute power over their citizens. He has done what he needed to do to secure the Russian federation and it’s citizens. His address to the Russian nation was historic ando given by a true international statesman. The USA, Canada and The UK and NATO have been shown to be the power mad bullies and psychopaths that the really are.
Yes – poor ickle NATO – only trying to expand its sphere of influence. So innocent.
Asking if Putin is “mad” because he’s done something we don’t like is on the same intellectual level as accusing those who suggested a cost/benefit test before locking down of being “monsters” who “put money ahead of lives”.
The sad thing is that many (like Toby Young) who grasped that in the earlier case seem completely unable to grasp it in the current one. Jingoism baffles brains, I suppose.
It’s far more plausible to argue that anyone going to the CFR and expecting honest and impartial advice is literally mad, because that organisation is self-evidently and systematically biased and dishonest on geopolitics.
The Russians are invading Ukraine for the obviously rational purpose of grasping the nettle created by the ongoing drawing of that country into the US sphere, and the use of war to achieve that goal, faut de mieux, will either work, or it won’t.
Either Putin has judged the situation correctly, or the western elites have done so. Let’s just recall that those same western elites by and large thought that invading Iraq, murdering Gaddafi and destabilising Syria were all great ideas. So their track record is abysmal.
Only time will tell if this is a wise move by Russia. It’s clearly rational.
For those who are new to the Ukraine situation, here are the two best brief guides to why the situation there is such that Putin evidently felt that war was necessary (as I noted, only time – not the bloviations of US sphere jingoists and propagandists – can tell us if he was correct in that). First, Solzhenitsyn’s words in 2007:
“SPIEGEL: But Russia often finds itself alone. Recently relations between Russia and the West have gotten somewhat colder, and this includes Russian-European relations. What is the reason? What are the West’s difficulties in understanding modern Russia?
Solzhenitsyn: I can name many reasons, but the most interesting ones are psychological, i.e. the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.
This mood started changing with the cruel NATO bombings of Serbia. It’s fair to say that all layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when NATO started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.
So, the perception of the West as mostly a “knight of democracy” has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/world/europe/23spiegel.html
Second, Prof John Mearsheimer’s excellent 2015 lecture explaining how the current situation, which Putin’s actions are his way of trying to resolve, arose:
Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer
[Sp – that’s “faute de mieux”, obviously!]
Thank you! Hear hear!!!
One could also argue that the so-called West’s conclusive demonstation that it doesn’t give one jot for its supposedly most sacred values and the dedication with which Western governments have wrecked their economies and societies was probably a factor when Putin decided that now would be a good time to continue where he left off in 2014.
Maybe so. Putin has been trying to make the best of the bad situation created by US backing of Ukrainian maximalists in their open defiance of the agreed Minsk solution for years now. Eventually Russia was going to have to face up to that avenue of stability having been closed off. Who knows what the particular triggers were for their deciding to grasp that nettle now.
It’s pretty obvious that war was the consequence of the point blank refusal of the US sphere to address the issue honestly.
“Who knows what the particular triggers were for their deciding to grasp that nettle now.”
Biden.
The West reneged on the agreement not to encroach eastwards so Putin’s actions to defend his backyard are not the actions of a madman, afterall the USA in partnership with the UK have only been too keen to encroach on other countries’ sovereignty in the name of ‘democracy’ but only if they can sell billions of $ in armaments.
Interesting enough that nobody mentions Sleepy Joe who suffers from some sort of dementia, or Justin Trudeau completely delussional syndrome, Macron obsessive disorder…. But as always humans are very good pointing fingers to outside world and most of time forget to point their own fingers to their own selves and sincerely take the responsibility that is needed from all of us.
The Council For Foreign Relations
On May 30th 1919, prominent British and American businessmen established the Royal institute of international affairs in England and the institute of international affairs in the US at a meeting arranged by Col Edward Mandel House (one of the most Machiavellian characters in world history) This organisation would become the Council For Foreign Relations! This organisation coined the term New World Order. They, along with their UK counterpart are at the very epicenter of the global technocracy that want’s the “Great Reset”…Anything this insidious organisation has to say on any subject is absolutely toxic. They would have been instrumental in NATOs push to the borders of Russia! They’ve had an agenda since 1919, and that agenda is global domination!
Good informative post..
Probably not, although Brandon’s cognitive decline is unquestionable and probably more dangerous. But Putin’s actions will serve to highlight the importance of the UK’s fuel security and current lack of it and may drive the search for the means of fuel independence. And hopefully pave the way for the ‘net zero’ hysteria to be quietly shelved.
Didn’t even bother reading that. Is this just another way to scare us now that the pandemic is petering out? We must stay vigilant for “Long Covid”, you know, just in case we go mad and all become Vladimir Putins! People are claiming that they can’t return a phone call because of Covid, now one of the ever-growing list of “blame it on the long-covid” symptoms is that you may become a Russian tyrant.
Give me strength.
Maybe they should also take a look at Joe Biden…
Yes, of course. That’s what it is.
Beautiful attempt by the CFR to segue from some bullshit to some other bullshit.
It’s blindingly obvious to me that this is a rather weak propaganda attempt to make yer man in Russia look feeble. It doesn’t really matter what syndromes he has (“hubris syndrome”?!). You kind of have to have a syndrome or too and a bucket load of hubris to even be where he is for so long and I’m sure many western leaders are envious of him. Did they try to explain Stalin away with his syndromes? Did it make any difference?
No! (Betteridge’s Law of Headlines)
Fortunately the POTUS is all there, oh wait a minute
If only POTUS could remember where ‘there’ was.
If you believe Putin wasn’t partying and socialising as he wished during the lockdowns you probably believe Boris only attended work events.
Watch Brendon O Connell for a deep understanding of who is really running the show with his take on Putin who Brendon has been saying for a long time is a Kissinger & Associates-Rothschild stooge. They got rid of General Lebed in a helicopter crash – the Russian nationalist who was going to get rid of all the oligarchs – and installed Putin. This tallies with what Schwab said recently and shows Brendon knows what hes talking about. Its critical to understand his info.
Brendon O’Connell III-17.3K subscribers
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDtDeNQhWST7EnDtx-DSfug
That statement would also very correctly describe the leaders of the UK, Canada, US and France, and also quite a few other countries. As for grounded or level headed, try Biden, Johnson, Trudeau or Macron.
By the way, did you notice all the lying propaganda the highly stupid Daily Mail Online is churning out.
The Daily Mail Online publishes a photograph showing a military pointsman directing an armoured column, and claims this pointsman is a brave Ukrainian citizen single-handedly taking on and attempting to stop an invading Russian armoured column.
It’s what you do, isn’t it? You see a mile-long column of tanks invading your country and you rush out, stand in front of them and wave your fist, and this sends them back where they came from. (The Daily Mail Online thinks everyone is like their own “journalists”, i.e., very stupid.)
The Daily Mail Online publishes another photograph showing soldiers lying on their bellies on a bridge. The lying and highly stupid Daily Mail Online wants us to believe that these are Ukrainian soldiers and they are lying openly on the bridge with the intention of halting an advancing Russian ARMOURED COLUMN!
Yes, men on their bellies with rifles will be able to stop an invading column of Russian tanks. They’ll shoot at the steel tracks on the approaching tanks and deflate them!
Obviously, the lying barely able to write cretins in the Daily Mail Online don’t do shame.
What a risible, infantile article. Maybe lockdown, maybe witches, maybe goblins.
Me think TY has gone and partaken of the MSM Koolaid.
Daddy is right about you Mummy, some things you just shouldn’t believe
I don’t know about Putin but lockdowns have driven me bloody bonkers. But I haven’t invaded a country.
There was no lockdown when he took Crimea.
Who voted 96% in a referendum to be part of Russia……….
I can’t see why people are mocking this article.
I think it’s very relevant for the Daily Sceptic to highlight the utter fatuity of the cretins that staff the Council for Foreign Relations in the United States.
“Putin invaded a neighbouring country because Long Covid and isolation drove him crazy.” How ridiculous can you get? And this from a country that just the other day had its imbecilic halfwitted Vice President stuttering around Europe talking the type of indecipherable rubbish that you’d normally never hear outside of a lunatic asylum day-room.
A Vice President with an IQ that is most likely definitely under 85.
Instead of ridiculing articles like this, people should digest them and learn that it really matters who they vote for and who runs their institutions.
I’m going to adopt the same policy for Ukraine that I adopted after about 4 weeks of the “pandemic”, which was to disbelieve everything I read in the mainstream media.
Ditto
I am minded of the saying that “just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you”
In this case anyone who follows international goings on knows that the USA has been trying to engineer a ‘falling out’ with the Russian Federation since Putin got it into a semblance of a country and threw out a number of carpet-bagging yanks who were busily stripping the country hollow.
The fault for the deaths and destruction in The Ukraine lie squarely with Eisenhower’s USA military industrial complex in all its many guises.
Why?
Because they pushed Russia too far and the result is to, to quote Victoria Nuland – who is still there causing trouble – “fuck the EU”, not to mention thousands of Russians and Ukrainians and millions around the World who will suffer starvation if The Ukraine and The Russian Federation fail to continue producing a large percentage of the food and energy they rely on.
Putin may be mad but Biden’s lot are plain stupid.
“carpet-bagging yanks”
Strange way of describing Ashkenazi Jews.
Foggy Groper stumbles his way through press conferences, craps himself in public, and tells blatant lies about his bravery in the past.
But Putin’s the crazy one.
Riiiiight.
Whoops, sorry I should have read all the comments.
And Biden has complete command of his faculties………
I’m not saying anything:
Stop the presses.
Despite The Ukraine not being in NATO, the idiot Stoltenberg is sending NATO troops into The Ukraine.
Have we missed something?
Doesn’t the Ukrainian Parliament have to ask for help first?
And since NATO is not an actual country, nor is The Ukraine a part of NATO, so there is no avenue for NATO to be asked for help under their charter.
So, who exactly can they ask for help who can then instruct Stoltenberg to send NATO troops into the Ukraine to start WW3 with Russia?
Is Kuwait part of NATO?
I wonder if the peaceful protesters in Moscow have been beaten, arrested and had their bank accounts frozen?
‘The US think tank the Council For Foreign relations has speculated that, after behaviour and statements that are “off” and “not right”, he is suffering brain fog induced by Long Covid.’
What’s Biden’s excuse?
According to the Council for Foreign Relations in the U.S., Vladimir Putin may have lost his marbles due to a combination of Long Covid and prolonged bouts of isolation during lockdown. MailOnline has more.
Firstly I have issues with DS using DM content, i can accept it once or twice.
Please tell me about the other lonely Billionaires, as i need a date.
What’s more, the isolation caused by the pandemic itself could have left the 69 year-old even further detached from reality, with one neuropsychologist claiming the ‘progressive isolation’ could have led to hubris syndrome, which “diminished his ability to weigh up risk”.
Huge, huge dose of begging the question here. What proof does this neuropsychologist have that Putin is diminished in his ability to weigh up risk? Perhaps he has very well weighed up the risk and concluded that it is a risk worth taking. History will prove whether his judgment is right or wrong on that, not some neuropsychologist begging the question.
There’s no easy way to say this, but to be perfectly honest I really don’t care about Russia or the Ukraine – in fact they can blow each other to kingdom come for all I care because right now I hate our very own political leadership far more than I hate Putin – this governments covid policies for the last two years have wreaked more harm and more pain on this country than any foreign dictator could have have inflicted – policies and reponses to a virus that were so completely insane at times that they make Putin’s military exploits in the Ukraine look balanced and rational.
My goodness…..do those socialists and globalists ever give up with their depressing gaslighting. First it wasPresident Trump who was deranged and now it’s President Putin.
When will we rid ourselves of these Globalists. Someone once said Socialism was a disease of the brain. I am now believing we can widen that to the Globalists and indeed most of the Western world.
I’m not sure why you’re assuming these are Toby’s thoughts? He is merely quoting a MailOnline article and linking to it. He does make the comment at the end that alternatively Putin may be just a psychopath! Perhaps that is what he believes.
Putin believes that forcibly enslaving millions of people under the banner of the USSR was a good thing. That’s the belief of a sane person?
I think you will find that the USSR ceased to exist in 1991.
A quote from Putin:
‘Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.’
If nothing else he recognises the realpolitik.
A much more likely diagnosis.
Why is he being classed as a psychopath for protecting his country’s defences? Its the West who has broken the agreement made several years ago that Nato would not encroach eastwards, and the West broke that promise!
I should also have said that this totally aggravated potential war will be to distract us from what will be going on elsewhere (eg cyber attacks, economy collapse, evil laws, etc).
Is it more likely to be about the pipelines running through Ukraine and the feeling he is losing control of them as the Ukraine moves away from Russia and towards the West?
Here we go again with another saga of misinformation and misdirection, aimed not at an insipid virus but now attempting to alienate everyone against Russia, specifically Putin. Many populations have already been primed in how to behave in group think due to the coronavirus debacle.
Are we now to look forward to another motley crew being assembled to steer the government and people through this pre planned emergency, similar to SAGE, known as WAGE – Warmongers Advisory Group for Emergencies?
It is disappointing that Toby would write this. Has he forgotten 2 years worth of lockdown sceptics articles?
1) long covid does not drive people mad, it was primarily an invention of the MSM to make covid more scary than it is:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/17/french-study-suggests-that-long-covid-is-mostly-psychosomatic/
2) it is impossible that Putin went mad while in isolation. Gavin Newsom, Brian Pallister, Boris Johnson, Biden- none of these followed their rules, proving they did not believe covid was serious or isolation necessary. And shall we for 1 second accept that Putin believed the lies of the covid narrative and locked himself away? Not a chance.
If Putin is mad (which proposition is soundly refuted by many of the previous comments), it was NOT caused by covid or lockdown. How unspeakably sad to find such a ludicrous suggestion on this site.
I believe the article originated from the Daily Mail – whose role in our lives is to publish fake news .
good to see so much (rightly) pushback against the usual MSM narratives. It’s what they do.
Luckily t’internet has resources that counter the psyops.
https://therealslog.com/2022/02/25/bear-status-update-poked/ (this one, google the author for her Russia creds)
https://thesaker.is/russian-operation-in-the-ukraine-end-of-day-2/
the second link cemented some of the rumours I had heard regarding neo-Nazis running the show in the Ukraine – possible backed by the usual Three Letter Agencies.
Maidan anyone?
And what does the “think tank “ say about Biden
because once the hubris syndrome takes hold in the brain, the personal and the national are identical because the leader is the nation and its destiny”.
Did not Fauci say that an attack on him was an attack on the Science?
Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer
https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4
Over an hour long but an insightful analysis.
That is well worth reading rather than various news papers this morning.
Nato is to blame – and who runs Nato? The USA !
Why was this article even included in today’s LS? Padding out the newsletter? Has the ‘madness’ of lockdowns got to the editors of LS….seems like it sometimes!
Putin has not gone ‘full tonto’. Check out the history of this situation and it is obvious that his responses have been appropriate and well considered.
Maybe the Chinese have whispered in his ear about what the west are doing in those Ukraine biolabs. Iran and China both had large early breakouts of covid just saying.
Or, alternatively, it’s been made worth his while to provide a distraction (provided the Chinese games were over) just at the right time.
Putin suffering from brain fog? FFS The news about Putin goes from bad to worse, if that’s at all possible!
Sounds like a load of hooey. Or should I say, KHUY?
I predict that he has made a massive miscalculation that will result in his demise before long.