Distant echoes
I can't remember which Scottish MP called Alexander is the Labour one. It doesn't matter. He — the Labour Alexander — opines (in London, of course) that the reason his party are in trouble in Scotland is because we — the pro-independence element of the population of Scotland — get our news from social media, and we've created out of it a self-reinforcing echo-chamber for our own beliefs. And, of course, to an extent he's right.
But his problem — and ours — is this. The pro-independence element of the population of Scotland is by and large us — the people — the great unwashed. Those whom Labour were once wont to call 'the workers'. In the days when they were the party of the workers. Remember? By contrast, the pro-union element of the population of Scotland — them — is drawn largely from the elite. And it's the nature of the elite that they control many of the principal institutions of the country, including what we've been politely calling the main stream media, but which we ought to call by its true name, the elite media. The newspapers, the television channels, the radio. And they've made of that a self-reinforcing echo chamber which reinforces their own beliefs.
The Law of Freedom in a Web Page; or, the True Levellers' Standard advanced anew
The law is at best a lagging indicator of the social consensus; at worst, a set of rules made by the privileged to preserve privilege. In reality, all law falls somewhere on a continuum between the two, with — in democracies — politician-made law tending towards the first end of the scale, and judge-made law — for judges are everywhere appointed from the elite — towards the second. But the truth is that even at best the law lags; and it lags most when the social consensus is moving fastest.
That's where I think we are now with Land Reform. The law as it stands is mainly elite-made law, most of it, in fact, dating back before the beginning of the democratic era. Thus our great estates have their origins in the dispositions of medieval civil administration. The Bruce, and the Stuarts who followed him, did not see in their grants of land anything like the modern idea of heritable property; they made ad-hoc grants to reliable allies who could hold the area and suppress revolt. Then, in the turbulent years of Scotland's late middle ages and early modern period, through a parliament from which ordinary folk were ruthlessly excluded, the rights of the great estates were progressively fortified and extended.
Voice acting considered harmful
Long, long, time ago, I can still remember when... we played (and wrote) adventure games where the user typed at a command line, and the system printed back at them. A Read-Eval-Print loop in the classic Lisp sense, and I wrote my adventure games in Lisp. I used the same opportunistic parser whether the developer was building the game
Create a new room north of here called dungeon-3
Response to the Government's consultation anent land reform
Simon Brooke Standingstone Farm Auchencairn DG7 1RF (simon@journeyman.cc)
Preamble
Nae dykes stood when this land was new
An when enclosit for the few
On ilka barn the red cock crew
The new big't dykes we overthrew
I tell ye, swear ye, this is true
And though thae dykes are raised anew
As we did then sae we can do
It's time tae rise as levellers again.
Weapons of mass destruction, and defence in the modern world
Dear Russell Brown
In the days when I was a supporter of the Labour Party, the Labour Party stood for unilateral nuclear disarmament. I'm older than you, but I'm sure that you, too, joined a Labour Party was committed to peace and to reducing the world's burden of weapons of mass destruction.
I know that many casuists in your party now will mouth platitudes about multilateral disarmament, but you know as well as I do that politicians have mouthed those platitudes for seventy years, and nothing has changed. For change to happen, someone has to make a bold first step.