When I write about politics I do so from the perspective of history, philosophy or psychology rather than as an activist or campaigner.
(more…)Category: Politics
-
The great betrayal
When the anthropologist Mary Douglas was asked what she thought was the first sign of human civilisation, she answered without hesitation; the oldest fossil of a healed human femur. Here was evidence that while one of their number lay injured, the other humans offered shelter and protection; a wild animal under these circumstances would quickly succumb to predators. Here is the fundamental distinction upon which all society is based, that society is in some sense superior, or different from, more powerful than the brute forces of nature that would compel an individual with a broken femur to lie down and die. Society is something much greater than the individuals who happen at any moment to inhabit it; a civilised society is one which does not allow its members to die just because they have a broken femur.
(more…) -
An old boring argument
Another letter in the paper. This one is quite important.
Too many otherwise intelligent and reasonable people are taken in by simplistic classism because they have never been able to understand the reality of being Scottish.
-
The mess got messier very quickly — Wee Ginger Dug
The mess got messier very quickly. Yesterday the British Government was mired in a political mess, today it’s mired in a legal mess as well. Today all three judges in the highest Scottish court, the Court of Session, have ruled that the prorogation of parliament was unlawful. The case was brought by a group of […]
-
Robert the Bruce, historical accuracy and being Scottish
We can no longer ask what political action to undertake […] because the question takes for granted what is at stake: it assumes we are capable of acting. But isn’t that precisely the problem? Isn’t the problem first of all becoming capable of acting politically? Of producing the capacity in ourselves? We don’t act based on the mere fact that it is possible or because we have the capacity, and still less because we have the will. The problem is not knowing how to act but first of all making ourselves capable of acting.
David Lapoujade, Aberrant Movements: the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Semiotext(e), 2017.
