Progress is glacial

I have been poor at getting around to working on things at home that are important for me to do. Occasionally I manage to finally make time to try to make more progress with one but too often I am then discovering that it was enormously long since I last put a few minutes aside for the chosen task, sometimes even a year or two, so there is clearly much room for improvement. I still suspect that my problem is one of ingrained habits, perhaps poor prioritizing, or even just feeling tired and wanting a break or a rest rather too often.

It is coming to something when my rate of progress is such that I am in danger of dying of natural causes before, say, getting much piano practice or finally finishing sorting through old photographs. I am spending but a few minutes per year on some personal tasks even after regretfully striking many from the list altogether.

Independence referenda

I have mentioned how I wish the Scottish National Party would take more responsibility for the state of Scotland. They have often complained that problems are the fault of the UK government when it seemed to me that they were not yet fully wielding relevant devolved powers that they already had in hand, that blame was being transferred upward a little too eagerly.

I have separately written about the UK's relationship with the EU where, though I agree that the EU has serious flaws, it does attract rather a lot of blame given how little many British people even know about it. Indeed, perhaps it is given too little credit; I felt that even the Remain campaign insufficiently acknowledged much good that the EU does. I have often been glad of EU law being imposed because I thought it to be good law that I believe would not have independently originated from a Conservative government of recent mold.

Admittedly rather late, I notice a possible connection between the two independence campaigns. The UK government has much power over Scotland but many people don't know the details. The same is true of the EU's power over the UK. In both cases this may make for a convenient scapegoat when people are unhappy and casting about for an outside force that is plausibly the culprit. My unclear Aristotle wonders if that pattern might be the formal cause of the referenda, the efficient cause being the years of austerity following the financial crisis.