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Alan Colquhoun

@alancolquhoun.bsky.social

1.4K followers 1.6K following 7.2K posts

Pianist, philosopher, author, ethicist, metaphysician, moralist, aesthete...🇺🇦

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · Nov 18

Plain enough to cut through the bullshit, but sharp enough to keep it clean...

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 7h

substack.com/@anneappleba...

Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum)

Nobel Peace Prizes have often been awarded to people who fight autocracy. Maria Corina Machado fits right into that tradition https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/maria-machado-nobel-pe...

substack.com

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

I am a de jure citizen of Poland

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

So I need not beg for entry

I require only that Poland officially recognise what the facts - and the statutes - already proclaim:

that I am hers by 'blood' and therefore by law, even if Brexit tried to abjure this

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

Poland's 2009 Act merely bows to reality:

those who acquired citizenship under earlier law remain citizens

Continuity is the law’s heartbeat, and my pulse is in rhythm with it

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

The legally binding chain was never broken

My grandfather remained Polish in 1954; my mother never renounced; nor have I

Citizenship here is not a privilege to be earned but a condition to be acknowledged

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

I was born in 1974, and the 1962 Act sang the same tune:

a child of a Polish citizen is Polish, even if born beneath foreign rain

My status was conferred not by state favour but by legal inevitability

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

The 1951 Act’s Article 4 was brutally simple:

one Polish parent, and citizenship is automatic

No forms, no approvals

My mother did not apply to be Polish — she was Polish the moment she opened her eyes

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

My grandfather, Ignacy Wodecki, was Polish — his passport proof against bureaucratic amnesia

In 1954 my mother was born to him in Scotland, and Polish law enfolded her without ceremony or petition

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

Yet what Westminster cannot confiscate is blood

Beneath the rubble of “Global Britain” flows a quieter jurisdiction:

'jus sanguinis', the Roman principle that ancestry outranks referendum in the hierarchy of belonging

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

Brexit was a theft — a clumsy, populist burglary of something I had never agreed to lose:

my European citizenship

One morning it was simply gone, snatched not by law’s logic but by the tantrum of a flag-draped electorate

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 11h

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Awfully sad news

One of the most significant influences on my creative development

Moody Blues singer John Lodge dies aged 82

Lodge played on some of the group's best known songs, such as Nights In White Satin and Question.

www.bbc.co.uk

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 16h

Authoritarian regimes love pre-existing, vaguely defined, or over-broad laws

They don’t just ignore them - they weaponise them for legitimacy and efficiency

(and this allows them to shrug and plead democratic innocence)

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 16h

The Enabling Act (1933) didn’t create Hitler’s fascism but it was an indispensable legal mechanism that allowed him to entrench it

The Patriot Act didn’t create authoritarianism but it expanded the available toolkit for surveillance and coercion

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 16h

P1: Fascists seek to abuse power

P2: Legal instruments can make abuse easier or harder

C: Therefore, we should avoid creating legal instruments that make abuse easier

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 16h

@mrjamesob.bsky.social If a legal power could be abused, then its potential abusers must be considered in designing it - especially if they would otherwise struggle to achieve their aims...

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

There be sharks

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

It's gorgeous

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

(from left to right) Toby myself and my younger brother...

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

Me (age 20) with 'Mindy' the budgerigar...

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

Och! Poor you.

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

We each had our flu jab, about an hour ago...

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Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

'Sulphur tuft', in our garden, just now...

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

In that sense, the focus of the essay sits one logical tier beneath Freud’s schema - not between id and superego, but at the point where reflex first hesitates and asks whether it must obey either

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

Not quite, though I can see why the parallel tempts

Freud’s model presupposes a psychic architecture already partitioned: id as impulse, ego as mediator, superego as moral censor

My concern is with what precedes such architecture:

the point at which volition itself emerges

Alan Colquhoun @alancolquhoun.bsky.social · 1d

open.substack.com/pub/alancolq...

The Insubordinate Flesh

On the Will, the Myth of Innocence, and the Grammar of the Good...

open.substack.com

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