A Voice for Scotland's Anti-Nationalist Majority
This week, John Swinney launched yet another desperate push to try to break up the UK, this time fronted by a glossy poster declaring:
“Scotland is a nation. We affirm that every nation has the right to choose its own future. We choose a future where Scotland decides its own government…This is our plea, our right, and our opportunity: To place who live here at the heart of our national opportunity: democracy.”
With the SNP’s conference now taking place, shortly after the annual Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland Report (GERS) has just been published, now is an ideal time to stop nationalists' lies and misdirections and their dismissals about the state of Scotland’s finances.
These dismissals follow the same forms:
These are followed by two self-serving arguments:
It is often said in these post-truth times, that a lie has gone half-way around the world before the truth has put its boots on. Why do lies, fake news and misinformation gain so much more political traction than evidence-based facts? The answer to that question can be found in the world of tribal epistemology.
In 2017, David Roberts of Vox news coined the term ‘tribal epistemology’ to describe a state of mind ’where you believe not what facts or reason or top experts say is true, but what your group or tribe say is true, especially its leaders’. Why bother going to all the effort of seeking the truth out for yourself, when you can hand that time-consuming, tedious task to someone in power, who you believe in and trust and then agree unquestioningly with whatever their version of the truth is instead? But, what if those leaders don’t go to the trouble of seeking out the truth. What if they abuse your trust and lie, would you still believe them because you are one of their tribe?