Blessings are conditional. However we think of them, and wherever we think they originate, blessings are gifts – special graces – which we can accept and discard. That is in our gift. We have the right of refusal. Blessed with love, we cannot take our lovers and loved ones for granted. We cannot take without giving in return. The gift of love is not a certificate of ownership. Likewise, the blessing and gift of life is conditional. Its continuation and renewal always and everywhere depend on our generous acceptance of the gift and our loving care for the blessing.
Convenient Fiction
This is the extraordinary power we are handing to these soft Noes. We are casting aside the independence and the new state that could be in favour of an empty IOU from soft Noes who, we may well suspect, we have simply imagined and reified. Yes, you read that right: It is my conviction that these soft Noes are phantasms. Figments of our imaginations. Ghosts. Sure, in a nation of 5.4 million people with 3,925,800 registered voters there are bound to be some ditherers – some.
Two Independence Movements
Gaining statehood, therefore, must not be seen as the end of the independence project. Independence is a process that begins in dependence and continues on to the very end of the life of the state. The problems we have now under British rule will for the most part remain after independence, with the only real difference being that we ourselves will have the freedom to provide Scottish solutions to Scottish problems – and the adversary then will be the same as we have now: International capitalism, neoliberalism, and the limitless avarice of the globalised plutocracy they have birthed.
Economic Treason …by Appointment of Her Majesty
What Mrs Windsor and her pals haven’t been investing in retail fronts for class warfare on a high street near you they have been offshoring away from the revenue people in the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, and other paradise island tax havens. Truly vast sums of money are removed from the British economy – sums earned off the backs of ordinary working people – forcing the government to raise taxes to cover the basics of the safety net we all depend on from time to time.
Welcome to the Catalan Republic Part Two
Catalonia will become an independent state. That much is now a historical certainty. Scotland too will break away from the United Kingdom. Forces have been unleashed that have refused to go away, and as the neoliberal project continues to unravel the conditions are being created for greater state instability. Italy, Belgium, France, and to some extent Germany will face the same movements in the next decade.
Hamburg: Welcome to Hell
Contrary to the majority of the coverage coming from Hamburg black bloc is not a movement or a specific group or gang. It is an anarchistic tactic that has been in development since the squatter riots of the 1970s in West Berlin, allowing protesters of various leftist politics to participate in common action against the police and the state without fear of personal identification, reprisals, arrest, and harassment.
What’s all this about Nationalism?
Not one of the pro-independence political groupings or parties in Scotland has explicitly described their ambition as nationalism, and neither does the wider movement speak of itself as nationalistic.
Scotland and the Whole Wide World
By demanding a fairer deal for Scotland we’re terrifying them, just as Bernie Sanders and DeRay Mckesson have sent the wind up the US establishment. Social justice is like kryptonite to supermen capitalists.
Random Public Journal 