Scotland Watch

[Little John]

I don't believe a single solitary word of BBC news reportage on any topic whatsoever. To whatever shallow extent they could have ever been able to make legitimate claim to impartiality in their reporting, those days are well and truly gone, if they were ever here.

[emordnilap]

if they were ever here.

+1

[biffvernon]

Stirling? Why should England have a currency named after a Scottish town?

[Mr. Fox]

'BBC reporter caught red-handed manipulating video in Scottish indy campaign'

http://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/09/1 ... -campaign/

Robinson is a servile establishment tory toad. I love the 'categories' on that blog:

CATEGORIES
cynicism
hopeless naivety
pettiness
sarcasm
spite
vindictiveness

[RenewableCandy]

Latest Beeb news on Scottish referendum

[Tarrel]

Latest Beeb news on Scottish referendum

And apparently the Loch Ness Monster is intending to re-locate to Windermere in the event of a "Yes" vote.

[Tarrel]

Three Westminster party leaders arrive off the coast of Scotland, ready for some "Seagull Management":
- Come out of the blue
- Do a lot of squawking
- S**t on everybody

[OrraLoon]

Three Westminster party leaders arrive off the coast of Scotland, ready for some "Seagull Management":
- Come out of the blue
- Do a lot of squawking
- S**t on everybody

Guano no dae that?

[Mr. Fox]

Guard your chips (and your oil & gas)!

[RenewableCandy]

Yup in Aberdeen they have to lockthe bins (or, to use the local technical term, the middens) or else the gulls empty the lot!

[biffvernon]

There's a fascinating article by Debora MacKensie in last week's New Scientist, looking at the rather short history of the idea of the nation state and questioning whether the concept is fit for future purpose. Here's the opening bit:

Nation states cause some of our biggest problems, from civil war to climate inaction. Science suggests there are better ways to run a planet

Try, for a moment, to envisage a world without countries. Imagine a map not divided into neat, coloured patches, each with clear borders, governments, laws. Try to describe anything our society does – trade, travel, science, sport, maintaining peace and security – without mentioning countries. Try to describe yourself: you have a right to at least one nationality, and the right to change it, but not the right to have none.

Those coloured patches on the map may be democracies, dictatorships or too chaotic to be either, but virtually all claim to be one thing: a nation state, the sovereign territory of a "people" or nation who are entitled to self-determination within a self-governing state. So says the United Nations, which now numbers 193 of them.

And more and more peoples want their own state, from Scots voting for independence to jihadis declaring a new state in the Middle East. Many of the big news stories of the day, from conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine to rows over immigration and membership of the European Union, are linked to nation states in some way.

Even as our economies globalise, nation states remain the planet's premier political institution. Large votes for nationalist parties in this year's EU elections prove nationalism remains alive – even as the EU tries to transcend it.

Yet there is a growing feeling among economists, political scientists and even national governments that the nation state is not necessarily the best scale on which to run our affairs. We must manage vital matters like food supply and climate on a global scale, yet national agendas repeatedly trump the global good. At a smaller scale, city and regional administrations often seem to serve people better than national governments.

How, then, should we organise ourselves? Is the nation state a natural, inevitable institution? Or is it a dangerous anachronism in a globalised world?

And here's the rest, in which it gets interesting.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... BNUJvldXHs

(Someone tell me if it appears behind a paywall for you and I'll extract the significant bits.)

[Mr. Fox]

(Someone tell me if it appears behind a paywall for you and I'll extract the significant bits.)

Thanks, Biff - I hit a paywall, but found it here: part 1 part 2

Fascinating, indeed. There are some choice lines in it that...

One key point is that agrarian societies required little actual governing. Nine people in 10 were peasants who had to farm or starve, so were largely self-organising.

Complexity was limited by the energy a society could harness.

Well worth the read, cheers.

[I can even excuse the Hitler/Putin snipe and the misuse of the word 'anarchy', if that was what it took to get this past the editor.]

[UndercoverElephant]

I have a problem with this.

Yet there is a growing feeling among economists, political scientists and even national governments...

This stretches the definition of "scientist" to breaking point. Economists aren't scientists. National governments aren't scientists. And political scientists? They're about the least scientific scientists I can think of.

...that the nation state is not necessarily the best scale on which to run our affairs.

"Best"? This is in the New Scientist, right?

So how do we define "best", scientifically?

We must manage vital matters like food supply and climate on a global scale, yet national agendas repeatedly trump the global good. At a smaller scale, city and regional administrations often seem to serve people better than national governments.

How, then, should we organise ourselves?

"Should"? SHOULD???

These are not normally scientific questions

They aren't scientific questions at all.

Before the late 18th century there were no real nation states, says John Breuilly of the London School of Economics. If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed. People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn’t really define the political entity they lived in.

That's because before the late 18th century, there was no such thing as democracy.

Larger hierarchies not only won more wars but also fed more people through economies of scale, which enabled technical and social innovations such as irrigation, food storage, record- keeping and a unifying religion. Cities, kingdoms and empires followed. But these were not nation states. A conquered city or region could be subsumed into an empire regardless of its inhabitants’ “national” identity.

See: Crimea

Before the modern era, says Breuilly, people defined themselves “vertically” by who their rulers were.

Yes.

Such systems are very different from today’s states,

And also utterly different from the utopian dreams of John Lennon and Biff Vernon. Who is your ruler, Biff?

In a system of vertical loyalties, says Breuilly, power peaks where the overlord lives and peters out in frontier territories that shade into neighbouring regions. Ancient empires are coloured on modern maps as if they had firm borders, but they didn’t. Moreover, people and territories often came under different jurisdictions for different purposes.

Yes.

Sociologist Sinisa Malesevic of University College Dublin in Ireland believes that this “nation building” was a key step in the evolution of modern nation states. It required the creation of an ideology of nationalism that emotionally equated the nation with people’s Dunbar circle of family and friends.

Yes.

Natural state of affairs?

Once Europe had established the nation state model and prospered, says Breuilly, everyone wanted to follow suit. In fact it’s hard now to imagine that there could be another way. But is a structure that grew spontaneously out of the complexity of the industrial revolution really the best way to manage our affairs?

BEST???

This is supposed to be science, is it?

The scientist doesn't talk about "best", unless s/he's talking about the "best" way to build a bridge. This is nonsense. The author is talking about "best" as if it is obvious what "best" means in this case. It is not obvious, for the simple reason that we haven't defined "our", either. And that is what the whole article is about: which "our" is ours? Which "we" is we?

“The future structure and exercise of political power will resemble the medieval model more than the Westphalian one,” Zielonka says. “The latter is about concentration of power, sovereignty and clear-cut identity.” Neo-medievalism, on the other hand, means overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, multiple identities and governing institutions, and fuzzy borders.

Ah. But not "vertical loyalties."

UN agencies and the World Bank are structurally unable to deal with problems that emerge from global interrelatedness, such as economic instability, pandemics, climate change and cybersecurity – partly because they are hierarchies of member states which themselves cannot deal with these global problems. He quotes Slaughter: “Networked problems require a networked response.”

A "networked response"??

Compare:

"A networked response" and "vertical loyalties".

See the problem yet?

Again, the underlying behaviour of systems and the limits of the human brain explain why. Bar-Yam notes that in any hierarchy, the person at the top has to be able to get their head around the whole system. When systems are too complex for one human mind to grasp, he argues that they must evolve from hierarchies into networks where no one person is in charge.

Vladimir Putin.

Where does this leave nation states?

Vladimir Putin.

Vertical loyalties.

Oh...were we talking science?

...sorry!

Imagine there's no countries...it isn't hard to do...

Collapse, say some, is the creative destruction that allows new structures to emerge.

Like it or not, our societies may already be undergoing this transition. We cannot yet imagine there are no countries. But recognising that they were temporary solutions to specific historical situations can only help us manage a transition to whatever we need next. Whether or not our nations endure, the structures through which we govern our affairs are due for a change. Time to start imagining.

Some interesting ideas, but the author has singularly failed to grasp what is actually going on here. The problem is not a lack of imagination, but a lack of possible outcomes. The nation state, as described, is a somewhat "artificial" or "unnatural" extension of our tribal psychological identity, which was and remains suited to hierarchy and "vertical loyalties". But it is the best we can do. GOT ANY BETTER IDEAS? Neither has the author of that article.

And yes, collapse is sometimes required to create the space to build something new, just as the extinction of the dinosaurs opened up the possibility for the rise of the mammals.

This is not a failure of imagination. The problem is not that we are not creative enough to imagine a world where human societies work. The problem is that it isn't possible to resolve the realities that human political systems have evolved to deal with in a way that is morally satisfactory.

But that's philosophy, not science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_%28Huxley_novel%29

[kenneal - lagger]

I mentioned this before but no one, especially Biff, commented on it. Ask the Palestinians what they think of unrestricted immigration. Or the original tribes of South Africa who used to live there before the Zulus, Bantu, Boers and British immigrated to take over land that didn't belong to a recognised state. Ask the North American Aboriginal people or the Australian Aboriginal people what they think of life now that Europeans have moved into their living space. Ask the two million or so residents of Amazonia who died when the Spanish and Portuguese swept in and gave them a load of diseases which they hadn't seen before. You can't ask the Neanderthals because Homo Sapiens wiped them out of their home range.

If you don't have the wherewithal to protect your borders you can very soon find yourself either dead or swamped by people who don't share you values or your living standards or ethics. People who don't worry about killing you because they want, and think they deserve, their own Lebensraum.

Ask the bloke who can't afford to pay his rent because he either can't get a job or because it now pays less than a living wage because dozens of people have suddenly arrived who are willing to "hot bed", four or five to a room, to keep their costs down, and have undercut his wages, what he thinks about unrestricted immigration. Ask the person who has had his wallet pick pocketed by a bunch of criminals who have moved in because the pickings are richer here than in Eastern Europe where they came from.

Unrestricted immigration may be a very "nice" idea for an educated, middle class bloke in his own home with a decent income and a police force with the backup from an army, if necessary , to protect his rights to that property from any incomers. His safety depends on the trappings of the nation state to safeguard him and his property.

OK, you say, if we had a world government we wouldn't need nation states. But how the f**k are you going to get a world government when we can't even live together on our tiny group of islands without one tribe wanting independence from the union with half a dozen other tribes because their culture is different and they can't get what they want in life when dominated by the other tribes? The western tribe will be next in line, followed by the south western tribe and maybe by the north eastern tribe in demanding independence.

The next door island to us is split into two separate recently warring factions because one lot doesn't like the Pope and the other lot don't like the way the Pope haters bang their drums. The Pope haters wouldn't have been there in the first place if they hadn't emigrated from the land of the tribe that can't get on with those tribes to the south! There's warfare in the Pope haters home country because the people displaced by the Pope haters emigrating to the other island emigrated to the country to the north of us where the invading Pope haters came from and can't get on with their new neighbours because those Pope hating neighbours don't like their green flags and their papist ways.

We are now seeing people from the east expanding across the less developed world because they have filled their own country with people and they have the economic power to buy up the competition. They are sending some of the many spare men they have as a result of their one child policy to "help" countries develop their infrastructure rather than just paying local people to do the work. They are also buying up nice bits of very fertile land to grow crops for themselves rather than feed the local people who are being displaced. Will they send their own labour over to do the work rather then employ local people? We do not know the answer to that question yet.

They have the military power to take what they want from whomever they want now and they are in the process of claiming almost the whole of the sea to the south of them from their former communist brothers, their former hated colonists and anyone else bordering that benighted water simply because they can (and it might have a significant amount of the beloved black stuff, to which we are all addicted, beneath it)

How do you stop people from grouping together into tribes of differing beliefs and then stop them taking over the land of people of different beliefs, for whom and which they have no respect? All over the world nations are fragmenting into smaller and smaller tribal units in the face of future resource scarcity while others are taking, or at least looking avariciously at, the resources of other less powerful peoples. Other people are simply voting with their feet and travelling to a Shangri La the other side of the world to sample "the streets paved with gold" before it's too late.

As I said above when mass migrations have occurred in the past the "host" nation has has been overwhelmed by force of numbers or disease and sunk without trace unless they have fought back. I agree that some of the cases quoted could equally be made against my position. But for them to be valid in that case would require a huge re-education of millions of people; it would require people to change their religious beliefs or even to adhere to the true tenates of their own religion. In short you would have to change the way that humans have evolved to behave over the millions of years we have existed. Tribalism is in our genes, unfortunately.

Rant over.

[Little John]

I have a problem with this.........Some interesting ideas, but the author has singularly failed to grasp what is actually going on here. The problem is not a lack of imagination, but a lack of possible outcomes. The nation state, as described, is a somewhat "artificial" or "unnatural" extension of our tribal psychological identity, which was and remains suited to hierarchy and "vertical loyalties". But it is the best we can do. GOT ANY BETTER IDEAS? Neither has the author of that article.

And yes, collapse is sometimes required to create the space to build something new, just as the extinction of the dinosaurs opened up the possibility for the rise of the mammals.

This is not a failure of imagination. The problem is not that we are not creative enough to imagine a world where human societies work. The problem is that it isn't possible to resolve the realities that human political systems have evolved to deal with in a way that is morally satisfactory.

But that's philosophy, not science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_%28Huxley_novel%29

I pretty much agree with your analysis UE. Though, I think that the nation state as we know it today is facing major pressure and will become ever more so so as times get tougher on the resources front. But, when and where such states fail, this will not lead to a borderless utopia. It will lead, instead, to smaller nation states, that's all. Eventually retreating back, even, to the city state. Nation states are, as you said, an somewhat unnatural extension of our natural tribal instincts and the only way this extension is manageable is with good communications and logistics, both of which require vast amounts of energy. All of which is why, in terms of how we organise ourselves, the future will be a re-run of the past. Speaking of which, the only example I can come up with of human organisation which does not involve borders would be nomads. In other words, as soon as people put down roots in one place and so invest time and energy in infrastructure, then they are compelled to defend it against somebody else nicking it off them. Which, of course, requires borders. In short, as nation states contract in size, the sense of national identity of its citizens is going to get stronger.

All that's left to discuss, then, is what size of nation is it practicable to organise and defend in a post-peak-resource world.