Dependency Culture …
… proves yet again that it’s a reliable vote winner.
Probably not, but the chance isn’t negligible. There’s a poll tracker for the final phase here. This historical overview of independence plebiscites is encouraging.
My favorite article on the topic so far is too odd too easily classify. Quality hedginess from Sailer, and (ratcheting down a few notches) David Miles at the Huffington Post.
Reason does the right thing. Steve Forbes makes an even stronger case for a break, while trying to do the opposite. Here‘s some deeply retarded propaganda, that happens to be pointing in the right direction. Round-up coverage from The Scotsman.
As should be expected, various flavors of hostility and condescension to secession from the (smug-through-to-foaming) Left. (We splittists will take whatever we can get.) Paul Krugman, who has never been right about anything, is against independence, which should settle the question conclusively.
Tribal politics excites the autobiographical impulse, which I’ll pander to for just a moment (without pretending to any particular excitement). My immediate ancestry is a quarter Scottish, and — here’s the thing — those grandparents were Wallaces. Seriously, they were these guys:
… but it’s my remaining three-quarters of mongrelized Brit that is leading this post to its destination. In particular, the 37.5% of English blood coursing through my veins is the part murmuring most enthusiastically for Scotland to vote ‘Yes!’ to departure this week.
Scotland is hugely over-represented in the UK Parliament, shifting the country’s politics substantially to the Left. While Scottish exit wouldn’t necessarily ensure a permanent conservative government — electoral democracy simply doesn’t work like that — it’s hard to argue that the result could be anything other than an ideological rebound of sorts, with the rump UK’s entire political spectrum shunting right. Since such an outcome would almost certainly prolong the viability of liberal democracy, perhaps even worldwide (due to contagion effects), it would be unseemly for any neoreactionary to get adrenalized about it. England would nevertheless undergo a minor restoration, conceivably broadening the political imagination in a modestly positive way.
Every increment of dynamic Anglo capitalism adds resources that will eventually be of great use — especially now, with public ledger crypto-commerce coming online. It is a grave error to become so fixated upon the death of the demotic power structure that positive techno-commercial advances are simply written off, or worse, derided as life-support apparatus for the enemy. Even a minor Anglo-capitalist revitalization would produce some deep value (as early, or creative destruction-phase Thatcherism did, amid its manifold failures).