Foucault, often viewed as the father of the Queer Theory which underpins the issues around gender we now grapple with, didn’t believe in anything as mundane as actual lemonade seas, he didn’t believe in any sort of objective reality at all. No, if you think the sea is made of lemonade — then, for you, the sea is lemonade. This atomised and idiosyncratic truth is actually all that matters, and anyone telling you that it’s nonsense is oppressing you by forcing their own version of reality on you.
‘Who am I to Judge?’
Over the past forty-eight hours a great many people on social media reacted to my thoughts on this subject with a great deal of anger and frustration. Many of those who replied to me were perfectly sincere, believing that what I had done endangered the rights of ‘real women.’ Others were more extreme; many of whom branded me a misogynist, as a man who supported violence against women, as someone who would subject women and girls to ‘rapists,’ ‘predators,’ ‘perverts,’ ‘peeping Toms,’ ‘men in dresses,’ and ‘abusers’ in ladies’ toilets and other female-only spaces.
Converting the Converted
Independence justified is an entire package of political, social, and economic assertions which we must make and have been making not only to the unconverted, but also to the converted. We must make the effort to instil in each member of the movement that England’s politics are foreign politics, that they are inimical to our interests. Austerity imposed on Scotland – and on England – by Westminster not only breaks down the individual. It attacks the fabric of the family and the community, all of the necessary supports the individual requires to thrive and to be a productive member of society.
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.
National Pride
Cat Boyd – writer and “internationalist” – gave us another horrifying example of this pitiful self-loathing attitude at the weekend when she posted to her Twitter page a short video featuring an ad by the Scotland Is Now campaign, a campaign designed to attract tourism and foreign investment to the country, with her own comment: “peak nationalism.” As small-minded, xenophobic, and potentially violent supporters of Brexit were marching through the streets of London trailing effigies of hanged politicians behind them, Boyd was doing her best to smear an effort to project Scotland...
Brace Yourself, Effie
Her depiction of the European Union as a new threat from the continent; as an existential battle against Euro-Nazism, is no exaggeration. The featured image of the blog post is nothing less than an updated version of the Dad’s Army map – the one with little union jack arrows being chased out of Europe by swastika arrows. In her map Great Britain (Mmm)TM is surrounded by the evil EU empire on all sides, forever dug-in in its perennially entrenched salient. Her monomaniacal representation of Europe, however, betrays her vast ignorance of history.
Answering the Westminster Question
More Scots than ever are of the opinion that, so long as Scotland is a member of the British union state, pro-secessionist parties should follow a policy of abstentionism – having our elected MPs refuse to take up their seats in the House of Commons, until we have secured our independence. Yesterday on the blog I made my own position on the Westminster question clear; writing that “we cannot – as a nation – hope for democracy at Westminster.”
On the Reader-Censor
Thanks in large part to the way the internet and social media work we have been herded into tribes of opinion, rarely coming face-to-face – or “interfacing” – with people of radically differing opinions. Trends in the development of identity politics have perceptively homogenised our tribal opinions, making us less independent thinkers than subscribers to our chosen tribal groupthink. What this means is that people are increasingly finding themselves pressured into adopting a package of positions so as to conform to the expectations of the collective.
Random Public Journal 