Category: Politics

  • Young golden eagle flying around Cairngorms National Park with an illegal trap clamped to its leg — Raptor Persecution UK

    This is beyond what is tolerable. Police Scotland have issued the following statement this evening: Appeal to trace golden eagle in Aberdeenshire Officers are appealing for information to help locate a Golden eagle which was seen flying in the Crathie area of Deeside with what appears to be a trap attached to its leg. Concerns […]

    via Young golden eagle flying around Cairngorms National Park with an illegal trap clamped to its leg — Raptor Persecution UK

  • Comparing like with unlike — Wee Ginger Dug

    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 […]

    via Comparing like with unlike — Wee Ginger Dug

  • Time to choose — Peter A Bell

    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?

    via Time to choose — Peter A Bell

  • Disappearing eagles

    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.

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  • The revolution will (not) be televised

    The revolution will (not) be televised

    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.

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  • Cycle four and some politics

    Cycle four and some politics

    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

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  • The third cycle and rewilding the Scottish killing fields

    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

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  • Dangerously Naïve

    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.

  • The time to decide is coming

    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.”