re: #10 Decatur Deb

America had someplace to go, a continent to be stolen, and an ocean to protect us. Old-World separatist movements just break the pie into smaller and smaller slices to be fought over. Are you sure to retain the Orkneys and Shetlands?

(Pittsburgh still remembers the Black Watch—my family wouldn’t let me go no matter how much we loved the pipes.)

Well maybe the ‘better together’ campaign should make Vladimir Putin their new strategy Tsar, if the big problem facing Europe really is the unstoppable continuous fragmentation into ever tinier and tinier countries by ‘old world separatist movements’ (in which you include Scotland as far as I can tell, simply because of what side of the world it is on.) Anyway, where did that happen, exactly? Maybe the countries that went that way now too small to be seen with the naked eye and that’s why we don’t know about them?

Btw, who do you think is going to invade Scotland? The bleedin’ vikings? Pirates perhaps? :-)

Nuclear weapons are not installed on Scottish soil to give the Scots extra protection, or jobs. They are on our soil because the biggest danger is from the nuclear installations themselves, and London wants that danger as far away as possible from it.

British nationalism always wants to play big on the world stage, it has to live up to it’s historical baggage somehow even if that really means little more than being the tool of the big boys. Scotland just isn’t that kind of place, and it’s people don’t have those kind of pretensions. That isn’t to say that a future Scotland should be entirely isolationist, it’s just that we don’t have the same need to puff ourselves up as if to say “We’ve still got it! Good old Brittania! Still important after all these years.Look at us , we’re in a proper war and everything”. It will be refreshing, if the vote goes our way, to be free from having to carry part of that weird and embarrassing complex that we call British nationalism. I’m really looking forward to that, and more generally to chance to have a real say - a vote that counts and isn’t incidental - in the development of a new country, which places social justice and care for the vulnerable at the top of it’s agenda.

And with that, I’m out of here till after the referendum. Take care till then :-)