It's time tae rise as levellers again -- Updated
This is an update of an essay first published on Thursday, 9 May 2013, to account for things which have actually changed in the interim
If you follow this blog, you know already that I am an essayist; you know I'm not a poet. So here is an essay. It's an essay that has been boiling up in me for weeks, and I've been trying to do the background research I need to support it. I haven't fully succeeded in that. There hasn't been time. But now the iron is hot, and I must strike. So here it is: an essay.
Defence of the Good Society
Violence, for any purpose, but perhaps especially for imposing the will of one group of people on another, is an evil; an evil that must be anathema to a good society. But the problem of evil exists and will not go away because we will it so. As I write this, the Russian army is rolling very slowly, and at enormous cost, forward across Ukraine, crushing under its weight thousands of people and at least hundreds of thousands of homes. Behind that advance it trails an exceedingly bad — an exceedingly violent and repressive — society.
Ukraine is not a 'good society' in the sense of this essay, but it's not a bad society. On the contrary, it is a society which aspires to be better and before this unprovoked orgy of violence was making progress towards being better. Indeed, it's probably because it was making progress — making its people both freer and more prosperous — and because that relative prosperity and freedom contrasted sharply with the conditions of the people of Russia across the border, that the Russian elite considered it a threat.
The good society would be extremely free. And while, in absolute terms, it would probably produce less material goods than a capitalist society, nevertheless, because it would share those goods it had much more equitably, its people would be adequately prosperous. Thus, by existing, it would provide an exemplar to the people of less good societies that things could be different, and, by that means, it would constitute a threat to the rulers of those less good societies which sought to keep them less free and to concentrate prosperity into their elites.
Response to Consultation ‘Land Reform in a Net Zero Nation’
(submitted Tuesday 13th September 2022)
Simon Brooke, Standingstone Farm, Auchencairn, 11th July 2022
Introduction
The Heist and After
Extending Act 2 of Cyberpunk 2077
It's an axiom of this essay and the essays in this sub-collection that Cyberpunk 2077 is a flawed masterpiece. It's further an axiom that a major reason that it is flawed is that the actual story was rushed, and that what was delivered is unfinished and substantially less than the original vision. I personally believe these two things, although the first more strongly than the second; but unless you provisionally accept them these essays will not make much sense to you.
Manifesto for a good society
This essay grows out of a quite minor Twitter thread, which is here.
Scotland now provides period products for free, to everyone who needs them.
That's an incredibly powerful thing. The fact that Scotland does it — the fact that Scotland is the first nation in the world to do it — makes me proud to be Scots. It is a seed from which the good society can grow.