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.

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The mainstream is running out:

In the broadcast media in particular, there is an implied assumption that “the Scotland moment” is something confined to that country. But the reality across the UK suggests something much deeper and wider, and a simple enough fact: that what is happening north of the border is the most spectacular manifestation of a phenomenon taking root all over – indeed, if the splintering of politics and the rise of new forces on both left and right across Europe are anything to go by, a set of developments not defined by specific national circumstances, but profound social and economic ruptures.

Here, Labour and the Conservatives have recently been scoring their lowest combined share of support. Organisationally, they are both hollowed out and increasingly staffed by wet-behind-the-ears apparatchiks who only compound the parties’ distance from the public. Whether justifiably or not, millions of British people have passed through holding politicians in contempt and now treat them with cold indifference. Let’s face it: the only thing keeping all this alive is the electoral system.

(The whole opinion piece is well worth reading, on panic-socialist Colin Crouch’s ‘post-democracy’ observations in particular. You know things are really beginning to get desperate when the Left begins to have interesting thoughts.)

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).

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(Open thread, with a little purely-decorative herding.)

Subsequent to the Matthew Opitz post at LW (linked yesterday), Leon Niemoczynski asks: “I am wondering if there is room for ‘bleak theology’ within the NRx framework, or whether theological NRx would just be ‘bleak theology.’ (See HERE and HERE.)”

A memetic analogy: “… burning children alive was an effective means of making people into Canaanites. The Canaanite memetic system reproduced, while Canaanites did not, just as progressivism reproduces, while progressives do not.

Arnold Kling on Gregory Clark.

Beyond the spectrum.

Occidental religion — we’ve come a long way baby.

Kristor on moral hazard.

Decline goes mainstream.

ISIS’s enemy is Saudi (and boredom).

Go Scotland.

Do we really have to talk about ‘gamergate‘? (Given that it’s so obviously an engineered distraction from this stuff.)

The nine timelines of the Primer plot. (Even if you don’t think you give a damn about Primer yet, you do in the future.)

(Open thread + free random prodding.)

I’m Rotheramed out, but anybody looking for substantial relevant reading material would probably be interested in this. Some of the ethnic-insider commentary is interesting too. (Plus, an Aljazeera perspective.)
+ Scruton on Rotherham, concluding with this instant classic: “After a few weeks all will have been swept under the carpet, and the work of destruction can resume”.
+ Dampier (whose conclusion is pure gold).

The torrential Dugin current continues. Alt-Righters should sympathize, suggests Radix. That’s probably true, and more evidence of the fundamental divergence between the ENR and NRx. There’s a substantial article at The Fourth Political Theory blog. Two older pieces (both fascinating, NIO suggestions). And also this. Related: Scary Strelkov, and (for comedy time) blame the MRAs for Putin.

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Mark Yuray on the disintegration of Atlantis:

The collapse of the U.S. government and balkanization of North America will provide many great opportunities, if not a decent amount of strife. Nationalist and separatist sentiments previously suppressed by the Harvard clerisy will be unleashed. Whole regions will fragment into localized and decentralized rule. The new borders crisscrossing North America will conform much more closely to the natural geography of the continent than they did until now. It is in this moment, when trust in centralized authority is low, desire for autonomy is high, that a neoreactionary “patchwork” of small city-and-otherwise-states can come to exist. The United States’ high deposits of human and natural capital will make for a particularly vibrant new quilt of Singapores and Hong Kongs. As the original forging of the American superpower was largely a quirk of history and political suppression (suppose 1776 failed? or 1812? or 1848? or 1865?), it is unlikely that an emergent patchwork would turn back into the massive state that America is today.

The North American continent would, ideally, become a South America of the Northern Hemisphere in terms of geopolitics — benign and stable — and also an East Asia of the Western Hemisphere in terms of economics and government — technologically advanced and governmentally diverse.

In the spiral search for ‘Neoreactionary consensus’ — will the desirability of this outcome do?

(There is much else of interest in Yuray’s post — read it all.)

As argued here before, Outside in firmly maintains that the distinctive structural feature of NRx analysis is escalation by a logical level. It could be described as ‘meta-politics’ if that term had not already been adopted, by thinkers in the ENR tradition, to mean something quite different (i.e. the ascent from politics to culture). There’s an alternative definition at Wikipedia that also seems quite different. This congested linguistic territory drives NRx to talk about Neocameralism, or Meta-Neocameralism — the analysis of Patchwork regimes.

From this perspective, all discussion of concrete social ideals and first-order political preferences, while often entertaining, locally clarifying, and practical for purposes of group construction, is ultimately trivial and distracting. The fundamental question does not concern the kind of society we might like, but rather the differentiation of societies, such that distinctive social models are able — in the first place — to be possible. The rigorous NRx position is lodged at the level of disintegration as such, rather than within a specific disintegrated fragment. This is because, first of all, there will not be agreement about social ideals. To be stuck in an argument about them is, finally, a trap.

Is this not simply Dynamic Geography, of the Patri Friedman type? As a parallel post-libertarian ‘meta-political’ framework, it is indeed close. The thing still missing from Dynamic Geography (as currently intellectually instantiated), however, is Real Politik (or Machiavellianism). It assumes an environment of goodwill, in which rational experimentation in government will be permitted. The Startup Cities model, as well as its close relative Charter Cities, have similar problems. These are all post-libertarian analyses of governance, at a high logical level, but — unlike NRx — they are not rooted in a social conflict theory. They expect to formulate themselves to the point of execution without the necessity of a theoretical and practical encounter with an implacable enemy. ‘Irrational’ obstruction tends to confuse them. By talking about the Cathedral, from the beginning, NRx spares itself from such naivety. (Sophisticated conflict theory within the libertarian tradition has to be sought elsewhere.)

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It’s happening.

If this sort of assortative mating continues, Civil War II is all but guaranteed. http://t.co/BsmwZgOSwb

— heartiste (@heartiste) July 22, 2014

(Bring it on.)

With all coherent productivity sucked into a knotty accelerationism essay at the moment, some fragments:

Fission update — apparently the geniuses in the NRx peanut gallery are now convinced that Justine Tunney has usurped Michael Anissimov in his universally-acknowledged holy office as God-Emperor of the New Reaction. Anissimov, to his great credit, is bemused. Is this stuff going to burn out in its own radiant insanity, or amplify to some yet unimagined level of crazy? The responsible option would be to abandon the ship of fools now, but it’s way too entertaining for that. Signalling some distance is becoming absolutely imperative, however.

One point that has to be emphasized with renewed fervor is the absolute priority of territorial fragmentation to any line of NRx discussion which begins to imagine itself ‘political’. Universalist models of the good society are entirely inconsistent with NRx at its foundations, and to turn such differences into political argument is to have wandered hopelessly off script. The whole point of neoreactionary social arrangements is to eliminate political argument, replacing it with practical problems of micro-migration. Facilitating homelands for one’s antagonists is even more important than designing them for one’s friends. (Even the old Republic of South Africa knew that — although it botched the execution.) Geographical sorting dispels dialectics.

***

Brett Stevens (of the Amerika blog, @amerika_blog)  has gone super-nova on Twitter in a way that screams impending burn-out, but for the moment he’s a source of superb commentary and linkage. Among very recent gems, these two pieces, raising questions about the restoration of sophisticated teleological ideas within natural science.

Why does life resist disorder? #entropy http://t.co/GGMrjqv4bq

— Brett Stevens (@amerika_blog) May 1, 2014

Also, another two on the Cathedralization of SF literary institutions, unfolding in public.

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Pat Buchanan asks: Is Europe Cracking Up? His tour of disintegration takes in Ukraine, France, Britain, Belgium and Spain, but …

… the most startling news on the nationalist front last week came in Venice and the Veneto region, where 89 percent of a large turnout in a non-binding referendum voted to secede from Italy and re-establish the Venetian republic that vanished in 1866.

The proposed “Repubblica Veneta” would embrace five million inhabitants of Veneto. Should it succeed in seceding, Lombardy and Trentino would likely follow, bringing about a partition of Italy. Sardinia is also reportedly looking for an exit.

Buchanan’s preferred term ‘nationalism’ is ambiguous in this context, since it can mean either integration or disintegration. After all, it was Italian ‘nationalism’ that built this self-dismantling monster. Increasingly, it’s the fissile aspect — nationality as ethnic splintering and escape from something larger — that’s driving the process. How many micro-nationalities remain as yet undiscovered?

ADDED: A (libertarian-secessionist) voice from Italy.