Social media is the problem. I don’t blame ‘Politicalicious,’ ‘A Douglas,’ ‘Mel,’ or any of the other Twitter users who, without knowing anything about me, have made it their business to discredit me and manufacture an image of me as a child abusing woman hater — these are not intelligent people. There is no shortage of useful idiots on the internet. They believe, as bad thinkers, that they are achieving something. They’re not. They are merely adding to the conditions in which they too can be so easily dismissed — and always the advantage is to the bad actors...
This Is Not Good Enough
Right-wing populist governments with designs on capturing the state and fascism, such as Donald Trump’s and Boris Johnson’s are, are bringing home the shock doctrine consecutive US and British governments have employed on their foreign interventionist adventures since the US-backed coup and military takeover of Chile in 1973. This is the neoliberal dream; to see powerful and cohesive democracies softened up by truncheons, rent asunder by socio-economic division, and fractured into thousands of squabbling factions of the oppressed.
Scotland: The Case for Agitation
Agitation is the self-affirmation of our political will in such a way that it forces those who impose the contradiction to show themselves fully. There is no shortage of examples, but let us focus on one: The Faslane nuclear-submarine base. Our event is of course the union which compels us to be the dumping ground of these diabolical weapons of mass destruction and murder. The contradiction is that this is foisted upon us – a people who are a peaceful people and a people who have time and again said in no uncertain terms that we do not want this nightmare in our country.
Open Letter to the SNP
Yesterday the decision was made by the Disciplinary Committee of the Scottish National Party to rescind the party membership of Gareth Wardell, the well-known and much respected author of The Grouse Beater blog. This decision was made as a result of an article he published addressing the issue of the GMB, a London-based trade union, acting in Scotland to deny people their democratic rights. Owing to the author’s reference in the blog to the Nazis’ attitude to trade unions in the 1930s and 40s and his quotation of the term “the Jew” – in the context of citing Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf...
Independence and Internal Conflict
Scottish independence, as a political aspiration, is not an ideology. It is an idea shared by adherents of a number of political ideologies. The independence movement is a broad church; a political spectrum that stretches from one lunatic fringe on the far-right, with such blood-and-soil nationalists as Sìol nan Gàidheal and its ilk, to the other on the far-left, with the pseudo-academic disco of Marxists, Trotskyists, and Bakuninists. This is a movement that is as politically colourful...
In Uncertain Times
In 2018 Brexit and the disaster capitalism of the British establishment is also all about thieft. This is the latest development in a class war project designed to transfer the wealth of our society to the very top. The reduction in rights, the deregulation, and the tax benefits for the wealthy that will come from Britain’s departure from the European Union will make the wealthiest people in the UK even wealthier – and more powerful. The last thing these robbers want is a class based solidarity emerging in the class they are despoiling. A distraction has to be found.
At the End of our Tether
Brexit and Westminster’s predictable arrogance have brought us here – to the end of our tether. This is the last chance the British government has to listen to us and to respect our sovereign democratic will. This is the limit of the chain holding us to the kennels of Britain, and that chain is just about to snap. When those bonds break London will be faced with a creature it has not seen since Bannockburn, a Scotland that will not be brought back to heel no matter the cost.
Indivisible: Understanding the Terms of Reference
Our first order of business is to accept the reality of the situation in which we now find ourselves. The threat we are facing is a concrete reality and only by staying firmly grounded in the world of concrete reality can we mount an effective challenge to the agenda of Trumpism.
Random Public Journal 