Wings Over Scotland

…or the fire exit signs at Ibrox?

Damn it, Callum, you’ve just fused my Bullshit Meter.

The cost to me of replacing it will likely go through the roof as the Pound tanks against the USD.

Yes , Ian , I think it will be clear when Trump picks his team whether or not he was serious in his pre-Election statements . If he again surrounds himself with the same warmongering ghouls and Permanent State parasites , we’ll know pretty quickly he wasn’t . If , on the other hand , he drives the latter out and makes use of the talents of people like RFKjnr ( too bad about the latter’s support for the monsters in Z…ist Goshen , other than that aberration , he has a pretty sound grasp of the things that are destroying the U.S and the West generally ) then we may able to consider his victory a good thing for the World .

“…Richard Nixon utterly destroyed George McGovern ..”
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In our own parish a few years back, SLABber#1 was mockingly referred to as “Elmer Fudd”

Was the inspiration for this the cartoonish identification of George McGovern as Mr Magoo?

Nixon’s young supporters (who may have included DJ Trump) coined the ditty:

“What do you do if you’re Mr Magoo
When your teeth don’t fit
And your hair starts thinning…
And you have no chance of winning?@

“Only 1 presidential election before…”
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Not quite right. My original wording was: “ The penultimate election before… “ was right!

Gloriana; I think the point is an independence successor party in place and available to vote for once the devolutionist SNP is finally deep sixed.

Try and keep up eh?

michael the wizard was reputedly the model for Prospero in the Tempest

Scotland has produced many philosophers and intellectuals who have given us theories and contributions to knowledge:

link to salvo-cor.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

With all due respect to SALVO, I have always been skeptical of constitutional “popular sovereignty” being indigenously rooted in the Highland clan system. Whatever the merits or demerits of the latter (and I myself would be wary of a stultifying tribalism), I think SALVO’s view fails to glimpse, let alone encompass, the sophisticated heritage of European philosophical thought which preceded the marginalization of Irish and Scottish Gaeldom. For instance, the Renaissance of Charlemagne involved a great many speakers of Lingua Scottorum (Common Gaelic). Foremost among the latter was the brilliant (and even yet increasingly influential) Irishman JOHANNES SCOTTUS ERIUGENA (800-877), in whom both Hegel and Heidegger found nourishment. A line of anti-authoritarian thought in Eriugena landed him in serious trouble with the ecclesiastical establishment and seems self-evidently relevant to our focus on constitutional sovereignty. Eriugena writes:

“For authority proceeds from true reason, but reason certainly does not proceed from authority. For every authority which is not upheld by true reason is seen to be weak, whereas true reason is kept firm and immutable by her own powers and does not require to be confirmed by the assent of any authority.” (De Divisione Naturae, Bk. 1, ch. 69)

Another, even more obvious and comprehensively documented taproot thinker was George Buchanan (1506-1582).

Buchanan was a Gaelic-speaker from Killearn on Lochlomondside. His high-class Latin writings on popular sovereignty influenced the American Revolution. But his radical views certainly did not spring fully-formed from the heather. Whether he read the Latin of Eriugena I have no idea, but like Eriugena, he certainly read classical writers deeply. The following are just a few relevant extracts from the book mentioned in a previous comment, ie David Allan’s PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS IN LATER STUART SCOTLAND. Buchanan’s interest in Stoicism features strongly:

« George Buchanan [mentor to Montaigne] brooks large in any survey of neo-Latin literature, in a European as well as merely in a Scottish context. […] But Buchanan’s modern reputation arises chiefly from his Latin prose compositions, intellectual achievements which comfortably make him ‘by far the most radical of the Calvinist revolutionaries’; and these certainly do bear upon the Scottish encounter with neo-Stoicism. For whilst drawing together several older strands of political thought and subsequently giving rise to a deeply troubling libertarian tradition which was to have ramifications far into the modern period, Buchanan’s famous treatises also built prodigiously upon Stoical precedent. In doing so, they revealed just how fruitful could be the impulse within neo-classical authorship to promote a keener interest in certain aspects of Roman philosophical tradition.

« Nowhere was this connection more far-reaching than in the De jure regni apud Scotos dialogus (1579), the notorious tract which on its publication was dedicated by Buchanan, with characteristic lack of tact, to his own long-suffering pupil, the young James VI. The disturbing thrust of this text, essentially that tyrannical kings may legitimately be deposed by ther subjects, possessed an acute local topicality neither unintended by is author nor lost on his perplexed Scottish contemporaries. After all, the king’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been removed by her aristocratic enemies in just such circumstances – and Buchanan’s work itself was probably drafted in the later 1560s, in the immediate aftermath of this revolutionary event. Its eventual publication was also no coincidence of timing, for, by the later 1570s, her son too needed to be reminded of his dependence upon the support of his own politically-ambitious Protestant nobility.

« Such was the immediate context in which Buchanan’s explosive De jure regni first burst upon the public scene. Yet underlying its theory of resistance was a notion of popular sovereignty, of an elective Scottish monarchy dependent upon the consent of the political community, which, like the near-simultaneous claims of François Hotman in France (the Francogallia had in fact appeared in 1573), had very specific roots in ancient Roman philosophy. Indeed, in the form that Buchanan himself employed it, this idea was plucked straight from an impeccably learned classical text, Cicero’s De inventione. 

« Pasquier, a liberal Catholic and admirer of Montaigne, promulgated a confident revisionism inserting arguments for governmental restraint and accountability culled from his own attentive reading of Cicero and Tacitus. François Hotman, Alciati’s successor at Bourges and a man of stronger Huguenot sympathies, advanced in Francogallia (1573) a theory of popular sovereignty and a right to resist tyranny indebted to his intimate knowledge of the legal and constitutional history of the Roman republic. Nowhere, perhaps, was the Stoical preoccupation with the timeless ethical and legal questions of public life rendered more significant in the second half of the sixteenth century than in furnishing the embattled Calvinists of Northern Europe with reputable arguments for active resistance to their autocratic persecutors. 

« Buchanan also saw, secondly, that his didactic purposes required a rather fuller account of constitutional history. Not only would this help reinforce his somewhat questionable claim that Scottish kingship was elective in character. It would also provide the convincing details, which only a sustained analysis of real political action over time could hope to yield, of those particular aspects of monarchy which were to be admired and those which were at all costs to be avoided. These pressing requirements, too, were traceable directly back to the Stoical origins of Buchanan’s political thought. And soon after the publication of the De jure regni they gave rise to a final published work, an almost equally contentious prose tract, the Rerum Scoticarum historia (1582). A tendentious Latin history of the Scottish people and their government down the ages, this has become another key text to students of British and European political thought, further underlining how important was Buchanan’s achievement, most visibly seen in these two majestic late prose works, in introducing certain Roman philosophical ideas into sixteenth-century Scottish literature. (p50)
 
« Neither Buchanan’s importance in the development of neo-Latin poetic culture nor his specific influence in the expeditious transfer of philosophical Stoicism to his homeland can ever be overstated… Such connections also mark Buchanan out as the single Scottish author situated nearest to the cultural and physical centre of Europe’s gathering Stoic revival. »

~ Extracts from ‘PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS IN LATER STUART SCOTLAND: Neo-Stoicism, Culture and Ideology in an Age of Crisis, 1540-1690’, by DAVID ALLAN (Tuckwell Press, East Linton, Scotland, 2000).