It's not your influence I want to distance myself from, nor Semper's, or HoL's, or any of our other English members here. It's not about the influence of 'the English' at all, since they don't have any - they may even have less than us at the moment, since at least we have a devolved Parliament now, and Westminster pols are frantically paying us a brief bit of attention due to the "crisis."
I blame the UK press (and some politicians) for encouraging it to be perceived in that way, as if a Yes vote was a rejection of England or English values (sometimes Wales and Northern Ireland are mentioned too, but not often.)
This is about the Union, as a political power structure... as a state. Under the Union, you have no more influence than I do, and it was designed to make sure you never get any.
coffin_dodger » Sat Sep 06, 2014 4:46 am wrote:but everything seems a bit messy world-wise at the moment, making the timing of it now appear a bit... uncanny. I dunno. Just a feeling.
I know what you mean. Things are certainly heating up. Putin's going to come for our all our oil (skipping Norway for whatever reason, and after he quits being stalled on/over the border of Ukraine) and ISIS will set up an operational HQ in Dalmarnock post-Yes, etc.
But the world has always been messy. If you wait for the right time to do something, it'll never get done, because there'll always be another war, pandemic, terror threat or economic collapse on the horizon - especially if we remain part of the UK.
We've been having this debate up here for over 80 years now, and looking at the issues very, very intensely for the last three - it might seem shocking and unexpected to people in the rest of Britain that we might actually still opt for independence, maybe even nonsensical or malevolent depending on the newspaper you read, but once again the press and UK pols are to blame for that perception (imo), and there's not much I can do about it.
The Better Together mob, and UK Government, are proven liars on so many issues now - pensions, EU membership, oil and subsidies, even mobile phone roaming charges - that I will never again support the UK in anything, regardless of the outcome on the 18th.
I believed in the Union once. I believed in it for most of my life. They could've kept me and millions of others on board with a bit of honesty, a meaningful admission of past failings, even with a believably fudged and compromised British-style federal solution. Not now though.
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
….in the 2nd debate – which is totally missing the point about central banks, lenders of last resort, fiscal rules etc but who the flip can wrap their heads round that shit anyway….
If Better Together, Osborne, Balls, Scottish Labour, etc. hadn't tried so hard to portray the denial of a currency union as the complete loss of the pound itself in Scotland, then Darling's admission would not have been so damaging to the unionist cause.
It was the familiar old No campaign routine - they had a believable (in fact, unarguable) angle to play, which they hoped would be an unanswerable game-changer, but they over-inflated the scare until it exploded with a comical pop, leaving the audience amused and baffled.
Wouldn't be surprised if Galloway himself thought this.
He was comparing us all to Nazis again the other night, on the Big Debate.
However, there are some very serious implications in the case of Scotland, if its people choose to break away from Britain and stake their own national claim to the region's resources. There are no international legal precedents for the secession of a resource-rich region in a democracy, Collier writes.
The man has a point. Maybe the oil revenues should be split 50/50 between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK, like what was supposed to happen between North and South Sudan. That would be a much better deal than we get now, since presently only 9% of the oil and gas money taken out of Scotland returns here. It's a lot of cash when you include corp. tax, income tax from oil workers and executives, supply chain revenue, etc.
Could do wonders here, especially helping to fund the ongoing transition to renewables.
EDIT: Cheers for the Imgur recommendation Semper, can't believe I stuck with ImageShack for so long, I now realise they were godawful.
Last edited by AhabsOtherLeg on Sat Sep 13, 2014 10:29 am, edited 2 times in total.
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
After the 51% for Yes poll, the Labour Party rushed 100 of it's MPs north on the train to remind us that we are Better Together. An appropriate welcoming ceremony was arranged.
Alex Salmond reassures the public over social media:
A true ManOfKnowledge gives us the benefit of his wisdom:
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
I love Kevin Bridges. Here he imagines an independent Scotland having its own currency (and names it), its own language ("no' just an accent") and its own Royal Family (elected by lottery). Jimmy Savile gets a brief look-in too.
That whole closing sequence, from the Ribena in the lift to the tourists in the taxi, had me in tears.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966
Hope the vote goes in favor of independence - the UK is an anachronistic heap of shite. The individual communities are far more charming in their own local context. The UK is all that's left of hundreds of years of mass murder and resource grabbing - the ill effects of which that are still reverberating around the globe today. It is the miserable, atrophied tumor that is left after all the other healthy body parts cut themselves free. Toxic and beyond repair, the Westminster goveenment should be abandoned by all those who have the ability to get away.
Wales should angle to go next - then Northern Ireland and then the North of England, Cornwall and the West, until all there is left is a filthy little enclave of Tory bastardry, to be walled in to starve to die.
All the component parts of the UK are worth saving, but united, they represent a blight on humanity which must be destroyed.
Rory » Sun Sep 14, 2014 2:36 pm wrote:Hope the vote goes in favor of independence - the UK is an anachronistic heap of shite. [...] The UK is all that's left of hundreds of years of mass murder and resource grabbing - the ill effects of which that are still reverberating around the globe today.[...]
Vote yes, for independence.
Amen. For independence. For autonomy. For a real move towards real democracy. And against nationalism of all stripes, but especially against the stinking dead weight of British Nationalism.
In everything I've read and heard over the last year (and that's a lot), all the energy, all the wit, all the insight, all the sharp understanding, all the righteous indignation and anger at entrenched injustice, all the genuine fellow-feeling, all the funny mockery of bullshit and bullshitters, all the un-deceivedness, everything historically aware and therefore both outward- and forward-looking, all the good stuff, has been in the Yes campaign. All the brains and all the heart.
Think global, act local. Vote YES to Scottish independence, and threaten a good example, worldwide.
Among the Atavists By bellacaledonia on September 14, 2014 • ( 4 )
By Jamie Allinson (republished with thanks from The Disorder of Things)
If there is one especially lazy characterization among the many about Scotland’s independence referendum, it is the description of the Yes movement as motivated by ‘atavistic ethnic tribalism’ or the like. Toss a pebble at the UK commentariat and you will come across it soon enough: from the Guardian to the Financial Times, the argument is the same. Britain is the outward-looking future, an independent Scotland a reversion to the barbaric past.
Taken literally, the idea of reverting to a period before Scot and Englishman jointly exported the apparatus of colonial power and racial supremacy they forged in Ireland to the rest of the world does not seem at all regressive. One can scarcely imagine an Indian or Ghanaian, for example, objecting to the move on these grounds. In the same breath as condemning the Yes campaign’s alleged ethnic tribalism, Unionist commentators give as their prime reason for retaining the UK its 300 years of success. Of what, in large part, does that success consist? Why, expanding into other territories and enforcing a hierarchy by which the indigenous inhabitants were plundered of their resources and denied self-government on the grounds of their alleged genetic or cultural inferiority. A textbook case of ethnic nationalism, you might say. One might think that someone celebrating centuries of such behaviour would baulk at condemning the ‘tribalism’ of others.
There is no insincerity in such condemnations. We can have no doubt that when Sir Jeremy Greenstock says of the referendum:
Sir Jeremy Greenstock wrote:in this complex, unpredictable and sometimes threatening environment, the instinct to return to the tribe is understandable. Yet it is creating momentum for global chaos.
he believes it. So profound a substratum is British nationalism that men such as these, its prime beneficiaries, cannot see that their tribe – easily identified by its common modes of dress, speech and rituals of adolescent sequestration – dominate all the institutions of the British state and therefore articulate their interests as universal. Were a Kenyan of Gikuyu heritage, or a Syrian of the Alawite faith to do the same, we can imagine what would be made of her.
The contradiction becomes most evident when discussion turns to the potential post-independence status of Scots. Thus John Major (apologies to younger readers who will have no idea who this person is) is shocked, simply shocked, at the notion that Scots – his friends and relatives – would suddenly become foreigners. This leaves us in no doubt that being a foreigner is Very Bad Thing. Aside from being patent nonsense, the notion that Scots and English people would be subject to border controls at the Tweed reveals an unspeakable status anxiety: that Britain treats those it perceives as foreigners very badly. Major and others are terrified of falling into the category of those British citizens whose friends and relatives are already treated with disdain, bureaucratic suspicion and institutional racism. It is a strange internationalist, such as Ed Miliband, who can at once invoke global working class solidarity to defend the UK and threaten armed border guards should an independent Scotland adopt a more humane immigration policy. For those Britons whose colour of skin and choice of travel destination threaten their very status as nationals, the response to arguments such as Major’s will surely be a hearty shrug. But in the eyes of the defenders of the British state these are the wrong kind of foreigners. After all, there are foreigners and then there are, you know, foreigners.
Once one uncovers the banalized ethnic nationalism at the heart of Unionism, the entire framing of the debate appears bizarre. UK politicians and their media chums, having convinced themselves that independence is a battle of ‘heart versus head’ – parse that dichotomy when you have a free weekend – accost themselves for not being atavistic and emotional enough. The result is the spectacle of the ‘No’ campaign being the Saltire-waving loons, and every Unionist address beginning with an unbidden affirmation of how patriotic a Scot the speaker is.
To be sure, the Yes campaign has its smattering of the woad-daubed and the monomaniacal. What the No campaign miss is that the ‘head’, by which they mean rational economic calculation, can think about more than how much shopping at Waitrose costs, or the effect on mortgages. It might, for example, linger on the question of why it is better to remain in a state where a few are grossly over-endowed with property assets in which to consume their Waitrose goods, while many trudge home from Aldi to accommodation not fit for humans.
Indeed, this is the kind of public reasoning that the referendum has called forth. The No campaign is relying on the fear and weariness with democratic engagement that springs from a particular neo-liberal subjectivity. The referendum is not a battle of atavism against progress: it is one of politics – of the salience of the political – against post-politics. The great advantage of the No campaign is precisely the idea that the notion that politics, rather than being a matter of public reason, is a business of technical management of the day-to-day affairs of a society. No major party now questions the proposition that those affairs are to be left to appropriately skilled persons paying close attention to the holders of economic power: or to put it in the words of the Better Together campaign material itself, ‘it’s too early to talk politics, eat your cereal…if you don’t know, vote No’.
After spending a long lunchtime in Scotland offering what was supposed to be a positive case for No (Scotland receiving the right to vary income tax upwards, and having greater control over attendance allowance benefits) the leaders of the UK main parties quickly reverted to type, relying again on financiers and retailers to frighten voters with the prospect of expensive supermarkets becoming more expensive or banks headquartered in London moving their headquarters to London. The Yes movement is certainly not an anti-capitalist one, although its ethos is broadly social democratic. Its gains, however, come from face-to-face argument with voters, especially in poorer areas: not Full Communism, but something like a bourgeois democracy with an active citizenry. One would have thought that intellectuals who mourn the hollowing-out of liberal democracy would be in favour of this, but very few have caught on so far.
What a desperately glum place a post-No UK would be. The constitutional principle that businessmen’s opinions about their own profits matter more than a democratic movement would have been explicitly established. Scotland would join the bestiary of threats to the true-born Englishman’s national jouissance: like Muslims, foreigners, benefits claimants, people of whom any slander can be claimed without riposte. The headlines that UK politicians care about would demand revenge, and get it. Scotland would wallow again in self-deluded torpor: nobody would take responsibility for voting ‘no’ and 2014 be remembered not as a surge of democratic possibility, but as the low-point in a mawkish catalogue of grievance. Who would risk that?“
"Now that the assertive, the self-aggrandising, the arrogant and the self-opinionated have allowed their obnoxious foolishness to beggar us all I see no reason in listening to their drivelling nonsense any more." Stanilic
MacCruiskeen » Sat Sep 13, 2014 7:09 pm wrote:I love Kevin Bridges. Here he imagines an independent Scotland having its own currency (and names it), its own language ("no' just an accent") and its own Royal Family (elected by lottery). Jimmy Savile gets a brief look-in too.
That whole closing sequence, from the Ribena in the lift to the tourists in the taxi, had me in tears.
OTish but you have to listen to this:
funny as hell, or funny for R4 (which isn't a high bar admittedly)
BUT ANYWAY
No matter what the outcome in Scotland, it's going to lead to increased regionalism in the rest of the "U"K, or hopefully at least this part next to Hadrian's wall. Northumberland flags are proliferating, London is increasingly a totally different country and UKIP aren't the force up here that they are in the rest of the country. Personally speaking I'm trying to revive worship of this deity based on the simple premis that nobody knows anything about him so we could say he's "god" of the north and add that to any sort of nascient lever to pry us out of the Londinium's diabolical clutches. It just might work
Thanks for the video, Mr. Heresy! I'll listen to it tomorrow.*
gnosticheresy_2 wrote:London is increasingly a totally different country
Right. And the City of London is a totally different country even within London.
These fuckers are not going to go down without a fight.
Good luck with your Antenociticus campaign. An independent Scotland will of course elect its own god, or choose one at random by lottery.
Say Yesh to Ganesh!
* On Edit: Thanks, gnostic, really enjoyed the interview. Boyle makes a great point when he says that most bourgeois Scots -- the bankers, the businessmen, the functionaries, the political routiniers, the timeservers and careerists in all fields, the Capitalist Realists -- actually hate Scottish culture and Scottish art, or anything in it that's vital, vibrant, intelligent, imaginative or funny. It's no accident that these tadgers have absolutely no sense of humour, or else a totally cringe-inducing one. Their natural habitat is the dead zone, the suspended animation of a permanently-neoliberal United Kingdom. So they'll be voting No, prudently and discreetly (and discretely).
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966
Scottish actor, director and humanitarian David Hayman reads the Radical Independence Declaration. The Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) brought together over 1000 people in Scotland to discuss a vision for another Scotland.
Imagine Film is documenting the radical ideas coming out of Scotland about a different type of society that could be created. Follow RIC at radicalindependence.org
24.12.2013 Trade union organiser and activist Cat Boyd addresses the Radical Independence Conference, 23rd November, Marriott Hotel, Glasgow.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966
The whole thing's spot-on, and the last half-minute's mental.
