Interesting Links for 01-02-2020

[andrewducker]

Westminster Cannot Block Scottish Independence (but 51% is not nearly enough for a unilateral declaration)

(tags:Scotland independence law UK )

SSE Renewables to build first subsidy-free wind farm

(tags:windpower scotland economics )

Fictional characters fight! (My favourite was Granny Weatherwax Vs Professor X)

(tags:fighting fiction funny )

Otters spotted in Edinburgh city centre (in the canal)

(tags:Edinburgh animals video canal otters )

Looks like the government have finally realised they're going to have to have customs checks

(tags:trade UK Doom Europe )

How we pay attention changes the shape of our brains

(tags:brain attention )

Keir Starmer comes out for electoral reform

(tags:Labour reform voting UK )

Comments

[calimac]

I'm trying to apply the principles in the Scottish independence article to the South in the US Civil War.

If I follow this correctly, the argument would be that the Union had no right to stand in the way of secession, and that the failure of secession was measured by the CSA's inability to get other nations (notably the UK and France) to recognize it as a state.

But the reluctance of these other countries to recognize the CSA was a result of its inability to establish itself as a functioning nation, and that inability was in turn caused by the Union actively and militarily preventing it from doing so.

So the cause derives from the result in some head-splitting way.

In actual fact, the Union justified its actions on an entirely different principle, which is that the Constitution contained no provisions for dissolution of the Union and that it therefore must be treated as perpetual. Would the author of this article consider that to be nonsense?

The other problem with the Scottish independence article is that it seems to assume a referendum would be held for the purpose of asking the UK for permission to leave, a permission the author considers unnecessary. But I thought the purpose of a referendum would be to determine whether the Scottish people really want to go.

[autopope]

Wrong metaphor. The pre-1860 USA was constitutionally rather different from the UK (and after the rebellion, even more so.)

The correct reference point is Irish independence. But remember that there are vastly fewer troops in the British Army right now than were available in 1916-22 (and a good proportion of them are Scottish, so politically unreliable if push came to shove and Westminster wanted to occupy Scotland).

Occupation by force of arms is unfeasible: Operation Motorman in 1974 worked because the British Army was able to flood Ulster with 22,000 troops -- but that's nearly double the current available force of the British Army for deployment. And Scotland has seven times the land area and four times the population of Northern Ireland. All troops on the streets would do is legitimize resistance -- I'm guessing in the shape of a general strike, and as Scotland exports gigawatts of (renewable) power to England via the grid, that's not going to end well for anyone: unlike conventional power stations, wind farms are distributed and virtually impossible to secure against, e.g., drones trailing steel cables.

[cmcmck]

They also forget that many English people (like me) are married to Scots and may not take kindly to that sort of approach either.

And I don't think they'd get away with the likes of the Black and Tans these days........

[autopope]

Correct on both counts at present (the Black and Tans tolerability index is prone to drastic shifts within a frame of 5-10 years: all it takes is enough othering of Scots in the English press, as we've seen from the demonization of the EU over the past few years).

More likely if Westminster opts for a crackdown we'll see algorithmic security enforcement through ubiquitous social media/comms monitoring, targeted law enforcement, and the likes of Blackwater (American mercenaries) brought in to handle skull-breaking duties so that the police and army don't get delegitimized.

But at that point we're into foreign troops conducting a hostile occupation. That's not going to look good to anyone, and I expect diplomatic pressure to be applied.

The real problem is that Boris only cares about Boris, and the Tories collectively only care about themselves: they have zero understanding of Scotland, and less interest. And Boris isn't a details-oriented guy, he's a bullshitter. The risk is that he'll bullshit his way into a blind alley then double-down on it heedlessly, without regard for the consequences -- the way he did with Brexit (it's very interesting that he was completely absent from the public eye, hiding out in Number 10, on Brexit Day: almost as if he didn't want to remind anybody how instrumental he was in laying the tinder and pouring fuel on the pyre).

[cmcmck]

I hear you on Boris and as the granddaughter of colliers, I SO hear you on Tories.

The one thing that you can trust them on every time is that they do what it says on the tin!

[calimac]

Constitutional differences between countries are quite irrelevant to the argument. The article says quite specifically that this is a matter of international law and overrides anything the country's constitutions may say.

[aldabra]

Also, these principles don't say that a union can't try to prevent a secession, militarily or by invoking constitutions. They just say that it won't necessarily work.

If California or Texas secedes from the Union, that's a rejection of the Constitution. They could nevertheless end up as an independent state, if the Union doesn't prevent it militarily and if enough of the rest of the world goes along with the idea. If the Union is not *in fact* perpetual then it can't be made so by the Constitution.

[jack]

I think the confederacy secession is also a bad analogy because their government didn't represent the people, in that nearly half of the people didn't get any vote and were massively worse off for seceding.

[calimac]

You're justifiably concerned with the moral right to secede, but the article didn't address that. It was purely about legally getting away with it. It may seem justifiable for Scotland, but the question of whether it would also apply to the Confederates should give us pause.

[jack]

Yeah, but it's not just that. "Whether the nominal government of the seceding region actually represents the people in it, or is occupying them by force" can tip the balance a bit in whether other countries recognise them, if the de facto independence is ambiguous. And it can have a big effect on how much the original country can hold on to the seceding region by force: the North won the US civil war, but I don't know if they had enough military superiority to hold the South by force for more than a hundred years if 80% of the people there saw themselves primarily as a separate country under armed occupation from the North, which would maybe weigh in other countries' assessment.

Fictional characters fight

[nojay]

There were four graphics novels based on Dredd and Batman facing off thanks to dimensional gates. Real Battle of the Chins stuff.

Bruce Wayne tied to a chair in a Hall of Justice interrogation room while Dredd goes through Wayne's bat-belt. "Vigilantism, twenty years in the isocubes."