Author: Duncan Spence

Mountaineer, retired bicycle messenger, philosopher, wordsmith.

The third cycle and rewilding the Scottish killing fields

Munros since diagnosis #178 and #179

12:30 – Beinn Udlamain (M119), 3314ft, 1010m

14:30 – Sgearnaich Mhor (155), 3251ft, 991m

Continue reading “The third cycle and rewilding the Scottish killing fields”

Scholia

avoiding becoming embittered by interminable debates going nowhere

Regular readers tell me they have difficulty sometimes with my philosophical jargon and all these isms. Some have suggested I provide notes, a glossary or some other explanatory device.

Since my retirement and with the complex incapacitations of chemotherapy, I have had time on my hands, so I have been writing this story about my journey, which I thought might help readers understand a little better where I am coming from.

It is a little longer than I anticipated and a wee bit more detailed, but if you are sitting comfortably, I shall begin. Continue reading “Scholia”

Dangerously Naïve

Adding a bit of hard reality to the politics of our times.

I have never been in any doubt that the British State is capable of any act that will ensure its preservation. Now is the time to hold this in mind, to remember that the road to independence is not about asking permission to hold another referendum, that democracy is a complex game we play to pretend power is benevolent.

Random Public Journal

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By Jason Michael

NIETZSCHE NEVER FAILS to unnerve his readers. His nihilistic philosophy of the human condition and the will to power do not make for easy reading. “Uncle Friedrich,” said my Ethics professor, “spells out for us what drives us when we are unencumbered by the gods.” Man, as the final arbiter of his own morality is a monster. He is capable of anything; no achievement and no depth of depravity is beyond him. This was precisely what Dostoyevsky meant in The Brothers Karamazov when he wrote: “Without God, without an afterlife, in the end, it will be that everything is allowed, anything can be done?” In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Nietzsche writes of the soul gazing into the darkness and the darkness looking back – not the most pleasant thought for anyone afraid of the dark, but his point is simple; the abyss of the…

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The time to decide is coming

On the button again:

“Brexit has taught us that the precious union is a lie, that there is no partnership, no family of nations, within the UK. The failure of the Brexit process has taught us that the UK that Scotland was told it could be a part of in 2014 was a fiction.”

Wee Ginger Dug

definition
So how’s that security and stability of the United Kingdom working out for everyone? The UK is a state which makes a mass temper tantrum at a toddler’s party seem like a plan for order and calm. Actually, anything at all that could pass for a plan would be a vast improvement on what’s happening in the UK right now. When the UK narrowly voted for Brexit in 2016, everyone in Scotland who isn’t one of those spittle flecked anti-indy posters in the comments sections of Scottish newspapers knew that this was going to end badly. But no one expected that it would go as spectacularly badly as it has done.

What is happening now is worse than even the direst expectations of 2016. Brexit was expected to be bad, but no one seriously expected the prospect of crashing out without a deal, the alienation and exasperation of the entire…

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