This weekend the Big Blether is on in the Scottish countryside. Have been there on Tuesday, it is located in an amazing place this year, on the mountains over Loch Tay, with a stunning view over the lake.
Slight disadvantage that my exhaust fell off on the journey. Luckily enough one passenger… aehm not quite repaired it, but made the journey continuable, the exhaust is now lying in the back of the car and it is incredibly more noisy and smelly.
The venue is an embryonic community, named Culdees, however, it is less of a community as the landlady wants to make all the decisions by herself and seems to be slightly unpredictable in her decision making.It is quite odd after all this time in the autonomist/libertarian scene to come back to a hierarchical decision making, and i don’t like it that much, but hey, it is actually the first place with more than 10 people living together which is spotless tidied up and everything is in place. They are into permaculture and receyling, DIY and environmentalism, but not into shared decisionmaking.
The land is large, and they have a lot of empty stable and fields which are screaming for more animals and if it would be more autonomously organised I would be very eager to get involved and to build up something with animals.
When I arrived at the venue 2 people decided not to speak for a day, because of wanting to experience buddhist values. What also interests me is that the landlord is an Indian medic who has specialised into herbal medicines and has success stories into curing persisting and permanent deseases, such like rheuma, and similar. I would be keen to learn more about this and trying to use these methods, too.
my community psychology course is getting on well, yesterday we examined and researched Edinburghs community policy documents in regards of the communities and local people and residents views – particularly the SIP- Social Inclusion partnership areas. It was quite interesting, especially as these documents still lay the blame for poverty on the individual, rather than the system. So, e.g. one main point they make is “provide usefull labour” or something like that, from a community perspective this is again blaming the individual, but not the employers, governemt or the industries for unemployment. It also doesn’t say anything about the quality of employment, e.g. the wage, workers rights etc. Other points that were made in the document is that “the New deal should be continued to provide opportunities for individuals and lone parents” well the gist of this sentence is, like probably everybody knows, is that the New deal never provided any opportunities and that lone parents so far are NOT included in the New Deal (nice name for a shitty concept), but that there are intentions to do so. As this can be seen this is not empowering individuals but the policy makers, the people in power to continue with their fucked up “reform from the top down” strategy. Anyway, one particular sentence – would need to look it up to get it right though, was something like “the city needs to coninue to grow and flourish so that other areas(?) can benefit too” – or something like that. Basically it is a justification to say – in a government document, that they continue to support the rich getting richer at the expenses of the poor. (will dig out the exact sentence later.)