The “argument” that there is any similarity between Scotland in the UK and the UK in the EU is here thoroughly blown out of the water. Thanks to the Wee Ginger Dug.
On Saturday night, I had the misfortune to watch the press review on Sky News. One of the guests was a Brexit supporting writer, a woman whose name escapes me, which is a pity because it means that it will be harder to avoid her nonsense in future. It was the usual ill informed guff […]
Does anyone else entertain niggling doubts about their own mental state as they listen to the increasingly brazen lies and the ever more fantastical claims? Do you, betimes, catch yourself thinking, is it me?
Even under the influence of testosterone suppressing medication, the disappearance of two satellite tagged eagles within a few hours of each other at the same location snaps my twig, and briefly I get the urge to hurt somebody or damage stuff. Thankfully I am aware of this, but there is evidently something quite visceral, yet cold and calculating about the reactions I observe in myself. Apart from the sheer rage associated with cruelty and killing animals for fun, there is more a general fury penetrating deep into the bit of me that identifies as Scottish. Even without the natural motivation of hormones, I want to act now, decisively, to bring an end to this wickedness, see the perpetrators punished severely.
Less than two weeks into the fifth cycle I felt healthy again, prepared to be infused for the last time with poison, in fact I wanted to get it over with, to bring forward my appointment a week.
For the last four or five years great changes have been underway in this country. These began to make their presence felt at the end of 2014 in the aftermath of the Scottish independence referendum, as there arose again, especially but not exclusively in England, a familiar strain of nationalism, which confuses the meanings of the words British and English and believes it is naturally superior to others and therefore entitled to special treatment.
At bottom, the problem of political decision-making only redoubles and displaces to a collective scale what is already an illusion in the individual: the belief that our actions, our thoughts, our gestures, our words, and our behaviours result from decisions emanating from a central, conscious, and sovereign entity – the Self.
Being on the left or on the right is to choose among one of the countless ways afforded to humans to be imbeciles.
This is the big lie, and the great disaster of politics: to place politics on one side and life on the other, on one side what is said but isn’t real and on the other what is lived but can no longer be said. […] Hell is really the place where all speech is rendered meaningless.
What is revealed in every political eruption is the irreducible human plurality, the unsinkable heterogeneity of ways of being and doing – the impossibility of the slightest totalization.
The Invisible Committee, Now, Semiotext(e), 2017
Munros since diagnosis #178 and #179
12:30 – Beinn Udlamain (M119), 3314ft, 1010m
14:30 – Sgearnaich Mhor (155), 3251ft, 991m
Munros since diagnosis #176 and #177
12:00 – Geal-charn (M278), 3009ft, 917m
14:15 – A’ Mharconaich (M179), 3199ft, 975m (more…)
