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John Quiggin 
So Labor sided with the Liberals to support the metadata laws. Disgusting.
Predictable. RW populism riles, OK.
Ask Murdoch why that is, Terje.
I don’t see it as being populism of any flavour.
The justification of metadata retention laws is premised on rank populism. It is to keep you safe – from whatever you’re afraid of in the digital age. Failure to pass metadata laws will, according to the PM, lead to an “explosion in unsolved crime”. If you’ve done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide then you’ve got nothing to fear. If you’re against metadata laws you’re obviously a pedophile. Or some smarty pants elite concerned with some abstract notion of “rights” that you probably became attached to while studying arts at a sandstone university. Or you’re a terrorist trying to take our freedom away. If this is not populism I’m not sure what is.
According to newsdotcomdotau “A recent Essential poll has shown that around 40 per cent of Australians support the introduction of the new metadata laws, while 44 per cent do not.” I assume this means another 16% are undecided. With only 40% in favour of metadata retention this is not a popular policy. So it is doubtful that it is a policy of populism overall. It may be Right Wing populism in that it appeals to the perceived self-interests of the RW and their foolish minority of supporters.
Rather than RW populism, I think this is RW elitism. “We know better than the people. We will decide everything. We will order your lives for you. Or rather (snicker, snicker) we will order your lives for us.”
Effective democracy is collapsing and we are entering the Age of Corporate Fascism. How we react will determine how far this goes and whether we can recover from this dire situation.
The first legal and peaceful step is to destroy the capitalist-corporate oligarchic parties (LNP and ALP in Australia) at the ballot box. The Greeks have taken this first step by destroying the old major parties, what were their names? I have forgotten them already. However, this destruction has to be permanent. LNP and ALP must be destroyed electorally and never allowed electorally to rise again. This is just the first minimal step. Much more needs to be done before, during and after this process.
Is it amazing or is it more evidence of the fundamental irrationality of Libertarian ideology and the particular personality dynamics that lead to this way of being, that libertarians apparently see no hypocrisy in advertising the choices they make about who and what to be disgusted about?
And I also wonder why they feel the need to let people know how they ‘feel’. What possible interest is it that someone feels disgust? What is the reasoning behind this disgust? That’s what I’d like to know, but Libertarians don’t seem to be able to do reasoning about their own personal preferences and try and understand how their overblown self-regard has developed despite the lack of any real personal achievements in the way of character and moral development.
The evolutionary basis of disgust and how this adaptive response might develop into dysfunctional self-serving beliefs, attitudes and behaviours by the cultural practices of certain societies and families is interesting and not raising people who think like this is probably the only long term solution for the human species.
Julie likes to advertise her amazement. But who really cares if Julie is amazed.
The metadata laws are being implemented by the Liberal Party. That means a lot on the left will oppose them for purely tribal reasons not sound policy reasons. And likewise a lot on the right will support them for similar base tribal reasons. So I suspect that even though most people oppose these laws they are probably a bit less popular on the left. If the parties in government and opposition were reversed then I suspect it would skew things the other way.
These laws are not being driven by popular demand. They are being driven by our security authorities (eg police) and a political culture that readily discounts freedom and privacy in pursuate of safety. Although in this instance I think the safety on offer is almost entirely an illusion.
As usual I agree with the libertarian senators position on this issue. As articulated in this interview:-
I’ve said it before. Libertarianism is a broad church. I can see my own personal/political tendencies are to slip towards Autonomism or Autonomist Marxism. It might be arguable whether libertarian elements or communitarian elements dominate in such a position. I would argue that both elements exist in an uneasy and ultimately never fully resolvable tension. In me the communitarian aspects exist ideally and politically. That is, I hold intellectually that our unavoidably shared political and community life in a complex, densely populated, interconnected civilization needs to be communitarian. However, emotionally I am not a communitarian. Emotionally, I am a kind of autonomous libertarian. I want as much personal autonomy as possible free from hierarchical and even communitarian rules.
I simply recognise that realistically, whilst hierarchies must be diminished as much as possible, some hierarchy (that of ability and capability) must exist. I also recognise realistically that communitarian values must exist or our society will fall apart altogether. However, and this a key point, I think an eclectic society ought to tolerate both communitarian and (say) anarchic libertarian tendencies. The key test for individual freedoms is that they may be exercised as much as one likes but not in a way to infringe other persons’ freedoms. Also, we need to recognise that individual freedoms may be a matter of position and perception. There is not a single unchallengable norm of individual freedom.
If I could preach here I would say Terje and Julie and Julie and Terje need to avoid personal animosity while feeling free to criticise the position(s) of the other. There is a difference.
The irony here is (I am pretty sure) that Terje and Julie would both oppose metadata storage. I do too. Let’s at least combine on the things we agree on. That is both a communitarian and a libertarian value, strangely enough.
Libertarian is not the opposite of communitarian. Libertarians just generally don’t want collective efforts to be mandated. But we should be free to join groups and act collectively. Given we are social creatures I’m sure that we would frequently act collectively in a libertarian world. It’s in our nature and in our interest. Usually.
@TerjeP
We agree on that. You and I will likely always have specific disagreements about certain policies but there are many we can and do agree on. The need to powerfully limit the security state is certainly one policy we do agree on. I am completely against the retention of metadata. I am completely against the para-militarisation of police services. I am completely against the type of wars against countries we have engaged in in the last 20 or 30 years or so, indeed right back to Vietnam.
We would be enormously better off if we had not wasted all those resources on attacking peoples and wrecking their countries and our economies. Instead we should trade peaceably with them and leave them to sort out their own means of governance. There are countries where things have been very bad but every time we interfere we just make things ten times worse.
Terje, just makin’ stuff up, again:
Libertarian is not the opposite of communitarian.
@TerjeP
Terje you are free to join a community if they want you. I wouldn’t want a libertarian to move into my little town. Communities like this run on trust. Conservatives may not be very bright and they worry too much about doing things differently – OMG you can’t do that! – but once they trust a person even a greenie, they are very trustworthy in return and able to put the needs of the community before their own.
But why would a community trust an individual who puts their own selfish first whatever happens?
I am not the only one amazed by the weirdness of libertarianism, your particular flavour or any of the many manifestations of this pathological attitude to fellow humans.
For sure it isn’t just me who is interested in the libertarian persona, or interested in understanding what personality factors this dysfunctional cognitive style seems to attract, and working out how to prevent children developing into anti-social people like you who are fascinating as an object of study but not much fun for other people to have as part of their society and what use would these individualists be as part of a society that aims to provide equal support to every child, which is one way to address the idea that all people should be equal.
@TerjeP
Yep, pretty spineless.
@Julie Thomas
Now I see! For Terje the essence of libertarianism is freedom of individual choice. He is unconstrained by all previous history and philosophy and therefore able to make historically uninformed and downright ignorant statements about the pov he espouses because to give precedent its proper place would be a constraint on his individual rights.
What rubbish. Individuals who live apart from society are extremely rare creatures. And I don’t know of any notable libertarians that choose to or want to live apart from society. Or any that advocate that others try living apart from society.
No, its not rubbish and you are wrong. The whole point of Rorty’s ‘veil of ignorance’, drawing heavily on Kant, was to devise a standard individual against whom all propositions could be universally tested. In doing so he mirrored the foundation myth of Hobbes who proposed we should consider an average individual man not born of woman but sprung from the earth, fully formed.
It is tosh. Both liberalism and its ‘mini-me’, libertarianism, have form on this. Take away the possibility of talking about a universal individual and liberalism looks just plain silly. One of the great benefits of second wave feminism was its insistence (Judith Butler comes to mind) on the necessity of constructing a meaningful individual narrative in which the person knew who they were, what people had formed and shaped them, which social institutions had aided or hindered them, which historical forces had they been subject to, how they had been gendered and sexed, how they bore the injuries of class, what advantage or disadvantage was attached to their ethnicity.
I’m not saying that libertarian hyper-individualists live like monks in caves. The world would be better if they did, perhaps, rather than living off the labours of others, as they currently do, without paying sufficient tax or extending sufficient recognition to others.
In NZ some of the universities teach courses whereby students learn to construct the story of their place first in relation to time and geographical features and then to family. I can’t recall what this is called.
Anyway. I don’t think your up to philosophy so I’ll try this:
These are murky waters but ah what the heck, I will put my oar in again.
While modern libertarianism is talking about self-autonomy I have no problem with it. When it talks about self-ownership I think it is at the beginning of its philosophical problems. Self-management, self-autonomy, self-actuation, self-realisation are all related and defendable notions but self-ownership becomes absurd in a very real sense. It is a bifurcation of the self. It becomes a case of treating oneself as an object as well as subject.
Modern libertarianism goes wrong philsophically most in its notions of ownership. I do not belong wholly to myself. I belong to others too. Yet none of this belonging is what should be called ownership. When it comes to other things like the land or the biosphere, we do not own it. If anything, it owns us. It generates us and we are wholly dependent on it. We use it or rather use some of its facets and properties for a short while. At best ownership of something like land is a right (only recognised by other humans in the same governed system) to use aspects of it for a while. Ownership of a factory and extensive personal wealth (while another person has no home and no job) is an artefact of a particular historical, and not very just, political economy. It is not any pure right written in stone forever. Other relations of “ownership” have existed or can be posited and can be shown to have equal of greater moral justifications from various angles.
More than anything modern libertarianism seems rooted in the deification of property as the ultimate value. One can see where it comes from though. Try being homeless (say living in a car which is a kind of up-market homelessness) and see how you go at getting a good night’s sleep, finding a place to shower, go to the toilet and clean your teeth. See how you go at turning up for a job interview and looking and acting like a presentable person who is worth a job. These practical problems do show that self-management, self-autonomy, self-actuation and self-realisation do depend on reliable access to real property items (not just real estate) which we depend on in modern society. These real property items could be personal property, communal property (not the toothbrush!) or public property but we each need reliable daily access.
Life indeed would be nasty, brutal and short without access to real property items. Personal property, communal property and public property (in various mixes) can all deliver these items. Private property relations taken to the capitalist or libertarian extreme lead to the hoarding up of wealth and property for the few and a lack of access for the many. This leads to a net diminishment of rights and liberty.
In a country like Australia we have pretty good property rights. They could be better but they are pretty good. I’m more ticked off at the tariff imposed by the government on my trade in labour. They certainly seem to think they own me. Their violation of my other property rights seem minor by comparison.
Ownership is merely a code word for control. If I own my tooth brush then by rights I decide what it can and can’t be used for. Thus I will feel violated if you use my tooth brush to clean your boots. But I feel at liberty to use it to clean mine. Likewise with my body. I will feel violated if you use it without my permission.
Most people in their personal dealings are very libertarian. But many people expect the state to be otherwise and claim it can command others do their bidding. This is the bit libertarians generally object to.
@TerjeP
I find it interesting that libertarians are so hung up on the state (even a democratic one) yet they seem to offer no criticisms of corporatism or the tyranny of business hierarchies. Apparently it’s OK for transnationals to mine in PNG and pollute the rivers people fish in. Apparently it’s OK for platinum mine owners to makes fortunes in South Africa and pay the miners something like $2 a day. Apparently it’s OK for Apple to cruelly exploit Chinese workers in their factories.
I have NEVER heard a libertarian criticise excess business, capitalist or corporate power. What explains this strange selective blindness I wonder? Maybe such criticism has occurred on the odd occasion. I just haven’t heard it. On the other hand, I hear libertarians criticise government all the time. Every statement they make contains a criticism of government somewhere in it.
I can understand libertarian disillusion with the US government now. It is the handmaiden of corporate capital. It is the police force of and legal guarantor of corporate capital, rich people and of not much else. It is totally in the pocket of corporate and oligarchic capital. However, as I say, I never hear libertarian criticism of the corporate, capitalist or oligarchic part of this very bad equation.
I have a comment in moderation. Maybe t y r a n n y is a bad word?
This Salon article is very good IMO.
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/08/libertarians_are_very_confused_about_capitalism/
@TerjeP
I watched that clip ’till 1.11 when I decided to go check the fuel air mix on my diesel Landy by sucking on the idling exhaust. It was a better use of my time than watching that nincompoop ventilate. It was like watchimg Placido Domingo talk about First Peoples whale hunting methods. Or a Monty Python sketch.
Eff me mate. Were you raised by Ch9 or youtube? There is a serious intellectual deficit in operation here.
One of the reasons I’m prepared to take you on is that I’ve read Mill (younger and elder), Hobbes, Locke, Rand, Malthus, Friedman, Hayek, Nozick, Blair, Giddens, Kant and a gazillion doctrinaire funtionaries thereafter.
By the same token I’ll wager that you’ve never heard of Bahro, EP Thompson, Morris, Cohen (the structuralist), Gramsci, Kollontai and a cast of thousands who have shaped the world in ways that you cannot imagine.
What you cannot imagine is that post Marxists know better thn you about the historical failures of communism and socialism than you do. Equally unimaginable to you is that such people might know just as much about the failures and depredations of liberalism than you do.
And weirdly, you expect to be treated with respect when you wander the dank forests of theory. Watch out for the gun nuts, mate, they’ll shoot Bambi every time.
@Ikonoclast
Mate:
Done it and more. The welfare sector in Australia and elsewhere runs on people of good will and experience. People who know what its like to be in the hole and can guide you of that mess. Very few people from that sort of background turn into the sort of self fortifying individuals you imagine. The worst of us do and then plead their early suffering for sentencing leniency.
Hardship doesn’t produce winners. Privilege does.
Chomsky is my go-to man on most issues but only after I have attempted to nut something out myself. If I arrive at a position where I doubt myself (it does happen sometimes) I check out what Chomsky thinks. Now I don’t doubt myself re my thinking about American libertarianism but Chomsky has some interesting things to say including comments about the inversion of the meaning of words in the USA.
Excellent talk! Libertarians are viewing the world ‘as through a kamera obscura’, upside down, such is the potency of their false consciousness.
@jungney
Yes, using the correct definition of the term, US Libertarians are not libertarians at all. They are advocates of the most extreme t y r a n n y of capital possible. Since I have something stuck in moderation, I will try to post that text again. I will try to avoid banned words.
I find it interesting that libertarians are critical of even the democratic state yet they seem to offer no criticisms of corporatism or the t y r a n n y of business hierarchies. Apparently it’s OK for transnationals to mine in PNG and pollute the rivers people fish in. Apparently it’s OK for platinum mine owners to makes fortunes in South Africa and pay the miners something like $2 a day. Apparently it’s OK for Apple to cruelly exploit Chinese workers in their factories.
I have NEVER heard a libertarian criticise excess business, capitalist or corporate power. What explains this strange selective blindness I wonder? Maybe such criticism has occurred on the odd occasion. I just haven’t heard it. On the other hand, I hear libertarians criticise government all the time. Every statement they make contains a criticism of government somewhere in it.
I can understand disillusion with the US government now. It is the handmaiden of corporate capital. It is the police force of and legal guarantor of corporate capital, rich people and of not much else at all. It is totally in the pocket of corporate and oligarchic capital. However, as I say, I never hear libertarian criticism of the corporate, capitalist or oligarchic part of this very bad equation.
Edward Cain, in 1963, said or wrote:
” … Since [Libertarians’] use of the word “liberty” refers almost exclusively to property, it would be helpful if we had some other word, such as “propertarian,” to describe them. [….] Ayn Rand …. is the closest to what I mean by a propertarian.”
US style Libertarians are really Randian Propertarians. Their motto should be.
“My property! More important than your person!”
“Most people in their personal dealings are very libertarian. But many people expect the state to be otherwise and claim it can command others do their bidding. This is the bit libertarians generally object to.”
Most people? What most people? The most people in *your* environment maybe Terje, but that is because you don’t get out among the real people who populate this country. You don’t like the real people. They might want to take your stuff.
You stick to your own kind so that you feel comfortable. You seem to have only ventured out among the real people – like helping with charity to the homeless – to confirm your assumptions that there are people who are not as good as you and that is why they end up like they do.
I put myself among the homeless because I have been in that situation briefly.
This claim you make about “most people” is just so ludicrous and nothing like the way people who are very much not like you, really do think and act. You do not live in the real world.
Ikon, yes yes this is so true; “but self-ownership becomes absurd in a very real sense”.
The fundamental problem of regarding individuals as sprung from the earth fully formed and responsible for themselves is that individuals do not happen this way.
Children are born from a woman’s labour but they are not the property of the woman; they are a responsibility not a right; they cannot live without others taking responsibility for them.
And then at some stage through some mysterious process that no libertarian ever was able to elucidate, children with all their individual personalities and potentials are reduced to some abstract entity that is able to exercise freedom rationally and take responsibility for themselves. WTF?
This is just such a weird way of thinking about the reality of birth, death and the whole damn thing that it beggars belief.
@Julie Thomas
As always, “abstraction” is the problem. I mean abstracting from reality to get an idea or a model which is always, of course, simpler than reality. Often, the process of simplification is so severe that the idea or model bears no relation to reality at all. The myth of self-ownership springs from the same well as the myth of the self-made man. But let us get concrete (as you have done) and talk about how men and women are made. It is a worthwhile investigation.
Historically, men have spent about 3 minutes of effort to make another human. This changed relatively recently when some men (still excluded biologically from the gestation effort of course) started to actually help after birth. It’s a real education and one I underwent to some considerable extent. My wife and I had twins. I took 6 weeks off work to help out. The twins started life in different sleep cycles. We were going day and night with about 4 hours sleep in each 24, none of it in a snatch longer than an hour. The sleep deprivation was brutal.
My wife stayed at home for about 5 months while I went back to work part-time. Then I stayed home for 6 month (6 months to 12 months age for the babies) while my wife went back to work full-time. At the end of this time, I said to anyone who would listen, “Looking after babies is the hardest thing that anyone can do in peacetime.” About this time a female CEO of an Australian bank said being a CEO was not as hard as being a mother with babies or young children. She had done both so she knew.
To wrap up this homily, one day when the babies were about 8 or 9 months and I had a spare moment I was washing up at the kitchen sink after doing a load of nappies in the laundry. In those days, we lived in a suburban house where my 2nd floor kitchen window looked down on a neighbouring backyard with a washing line just over the fence under my window. A mother was there hanging out washing and called out to her 16 year old son to come and help. He came with a bad grace, started an argument with his mother and then told her “You are full of s h i t.”
I fought back the impulse to yell out the window and tell him off. I thought “Fella, you have no idea what she has done for you.”
Footnote: In case the point of my above little domestic homily is not clear to Propertarians, the point is this. If the women of the world were to get full reimbursement for all their unpaid work they would own 4/5 ths of the property in the world.
Ikon
“I fought back the impulse to yell out the window and tell him off. I thought “Fella, you have no idea what she has done for you.””
It seems to me that it is the role of all the men in a society or community or neighbourhood – not just the father – to ensure that young men are socialised appropriately and do respect what women do. It would seem to me to be an essential role for all men to understand that making a new life and raising a good citizen requires “altruism’ – of some sort – and not selfishness.
I like living in this village because people are still interfering busy bodies.
One of my neighbours earned a great deal of respect from me and others in town by confronting another man who was beating his child up in the front yard. This bloke went onto the property and told the man beating his child up to stop. He did.
My neighbour behind, a woman in her ’50’s heard the single dad living next door to her saying some really awful things to one of his daughters and she told him off. That has caused her a lot of problems as the father has targeted her for the same sort of abuse he visits on his children.
There are some really awful child raising practices in our wonderful western civilization and thankfully there are still some people who still remember how we used to raise our children.
We shouldn’t ever take the ruling classes opinions of themselves at all seriously. It’s just propaganda. We should study them in order to see how ruling class consciousness produces and reproduces itself. M Donaldson and S Poynting’s ‘Snakes and Leaders Hegemonic Masculinity in Ruling-Class Boys’ Boarding Schools’ really nails it:
It is available as a free pdf if you google the title.
On the anecdotal side I had up close experience of the very wealthy while working as a personal nurse to a woman who, had her family not been able to pay for private 24 hour care, would have been in a Sched Five institution on a community welfare order. One of the reasons she was on an order was that her alienated husband was upset when she purchased a series six BMW with cash.
The drive way into their property had a dog leg and the garage was too small to turn the car around; the dog leg made reversing an unattractive option so they installed a turntable in the garage on which sat a Range Rover Vogue. They had a large part of the Barrier Reef in a fish tank which necessitated daily attendance, a hidden ‘panic room’; a kitchen in which no-one ever cooked, a massive lap pool in which no-one ever swam and rooms for the three boys who didn’t stay there because they boarded at a school within five kilometres of their home.
I met the entire family at various points and concluded that they were were the most utterly bizarre humans, totally devoid of any warmth towards each other, of my experience.
Yes, they did think of themselves as fit to lead and rule. It was fascinating and I happily pocketed every cash bonus they offered to keep me there.
This is good with lots of insights into how the rich are different from us.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/born-rich/
“First-time filmmaker Jamie Johnson, a 23-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, captures the rituals, worries and social customs of the young Trumps, Vanderbilts, Newhouses and Bloombergs in the documentary special, Born Rich.
Offering candid insights into the privileges and burdens of inheriting more money than most people will earn in a lifetime. Narrated by Johnson, a history student at New York University, and filmed over a three-year period, Born Rich spotlights ten young adults who came into the world knowing they would never have to work a day in their lives.
These society-column names speak frankly about the one subject they all know is taboo: money. With his unfettered access to this rarefied subculture, Johnson explores topics such as the anxieties of being cut off, and the misconception that money can solve all problems.
Most wealthy people are told from a very young age not to talk about money, notes Johnson. Consequently, they are extremely reluctant to speak to people about their backgrounds. Also, many of the subjects in my film already have more public recognition than they may want, and have very little to gain by receiving more.
Among the peers Johnson interviews are: Josiah Hornblower, heir to the Vanderbilt and Whitney fortunes; S.I. Newhouse IV, of the Conde Nast Newhouses; Ivanka Trump, daughter of Donald Trump; and Georgianna Bloomberg, daughter of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The story begins with the advent of the filmmaker’s 21st birthday, and his mingled anticipation and fear of receiving his portion of the family inheritance.
Unsure about the future direction of his own life, Johnson decides to document the experiences of his privileged peers in dealing with their family’s legacies. He explores their candid perspectives on subjects ranging from life philosophies and trust funds to prenuptial agreements and career choices, ultimately revealing their common struggle to discover their own identity.”
One almost feels sorry for these sad people and their ultimately futile search for an identity when all they have is money and their love for it which is, as all ‘enlightened’ cultures know the root of all evil.
@Julie Thomas
I get your point, but I had to keep in mind the issue of proportionate response and the likelihood of a “clannish” reaction where they would immediately re-bond and re-ally against me as a busybody or interloper. If the lad had started belting his mother with a stick or unleashing an endless tirade of foul-mouthed abuse which could be heard all over the neighbourhood, I would have intervened.
@jungney
The quoted passage reminds me of a sort of documentary I saw about the French Foreign Legion. I call it a “sort of” documentary because it was a Bear Grylls reality TV style concoction which showed Bear and a bunch of civilian Brit volunteers undergoing a facsimile of new intake training in the FFL. Facsimile or not it was really tough and only Grylls was really coping though a few others came close.
The interesting thing was the way the FFL broke down individuals and individualism and built them back up as a cohesive group with esprit de corps. The cost was high. Weak individuals, different individuals and natural loners or non-joiners were targeted, bullied and persecuted severely until they toed the line (unusual outcome for a maverick or outlier) or were finally humiliated by being washed out of the course.
It’s a form of institutionalisation and bastardisation which inculcates callousness, disregard and viciousness to a high degree. It makes sense that our rulers go through this process. Something has to explain their extreme callousness and nastiness. They really do hate the people. That is clear.
Ownership and authorship are not the same thing. And self ownership is a construct that is asserted not some law of nature like the mass of an electron. But I do say it should be asserted and that it is an idea that can be shown to have value. Of course we are all the product of other people’s inputs. I have three young children and at the moment I am their primary carer (the wife is the bread winner) so it’s not as if you are relating something that is foreign and not obvious. I do not assert ownership over my children although I do set rules and boundaries based on the fact that I am their benefactor. Negating the “myth of the self made man” is fine and dandy but it’s a straw man argument if the intent is to criticise libertarianism. Libertarianism is not predicated on the idea of the “self made man”.
@Ikonoclast
All military training is like that, to some extent, although the Australian army is less brutal than, for example, the US Marine Corps. (At least for recruit training – I expect an Infantry battallion would be harsher.)
My parents die destitute when I am young. I have no other family. I am severely disabled. I have no wealth, no property, no family to call on. In a Libertarian world, what happens to me? Do I die on the street for lack of food and shelter and the means by which to procure them? Presumably not, but why not?
I’m not taking the piss, I am genuinely interested in understanding how libertarians think a libertarian world deals with people in such plights as the above scenario.
@Ikonoclast
I watched some of the same programme wondering all the while why anyone would subject themselves to such rigours when there was not even the reward of military employment at the end of it. I spent a good two decades flogging myself uphill and down dale in the wild before I came across the beat poet Gary Snyder’s exhortation to study the ‘real wilderness which lies between your ears’ (or words to that effect). This entirely changed my experience of being in the wild, for sure. Now I carry it around in my head, as advised, without the need for a four day backpack 🙂
@Ikonoclast
I hadn’t even thought of you intervening in the situation you described. I think I meant to point out that people feel free to behave more ‘illegally’ in small communities and violate property conventions and that people out here really do still maintain some of the old social standards that we used to expect from people.
And would a libertarian have intervened in that sort of incident or would they not feel free to violate another man’s property in any situation?
@TerjeP
Couldn’t agree more Terje.
Given these disgusting policies from Brandis and the Liberals and the cowardly capitulation from Labor, can we expect the Greens to get your first preference in the Senate everywhere the LDP isn’t running?
I have a question for the pro-GMO crowd here, who also usually sneer at organic food. Given the central role of agricultural use of antibiotics in the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria, especially in the USA and UK, and the impossibility of doing anything about it legislatively (there is a good recent box article on the topic) do you advocate the consumption of only organic meat until the legislative process changes? How does this issue affect your view of organic food more broadly?
Full disclosure: I think organic food is complete tosh, and have always seen organic meat as a sop to middle class luvvies who want to pretend they care for animals but can’t give up their diets. But the antibiotic resistance thing has no other solution while governments refuse to legislate against the meat industry.
I only get to vote in one state. And in terms of the senate the Liberal Democrats should be running in every state anyway. But if the Liberal Democrats were not running then I suspect I’d just stop voting. In the senate I certainly would not vote for the Greens, Labor or the Liberals.
Adoption and charity.
Jack London.
Dickens described the way charity works and the hypocrisy of the rich who take pleasure and think well of themselves as they dispense their charity and their patronising pity with strings attached only to those poor who deserve it as determined by their narrow minded and shallow worldview.
And realistically, charity doesn’t work too well in the libertarian paradise that is the USA; they jail people who provide food to the poor and they put spikes in the ground so people can’t sleep in the shelter of doorways.
It would seem that libertarians believe that the poor need to be punished for being born without the support that would provide them with the ability to competing with the awesome people who become libertarians.
And personalising it here Terje but what sort of charity would you advise for your relative who is or was once homeless? Do you believe there is any obligation on you to provide some charity to this person or is that up to someone else?
We should all vote for DL and any other gormless chinless libertarian that you believe is some sort of guru. You thought that about Andrew Bolt and Tony Abbott didn’t you? I think your ability to assess the character of other people is quite limited and flawed by the narrowness of your life.
And these non-polices that you – adoption and charity – have would like totally fix the problem that the nanny state has created?
Since you are at home with the kids you could try a mummy blog rather than wasting your time trying to persuade people here that the LDP is a viable alternative to the Greens.
@TerjeP
I have a key question for you. It will be a little long-winded as I have to set out the paramaters.
Modern US-style Libertarians are highly concerned about excessive government; excessive government power, excessive government intrusion and excessive government taxes.The question I wonder about is this. Are such Libertarians concerned about corporations and oligopolistic capitalism? Are such Libertarians concerned about excessive corporate and capitalist power? Modern studies by Piketty and by Foster and McChesney have demonstrated that wealth is concentrating. Inequality is increasing. Transnational corporations are increasing in size not only absolutely but also relative to smaller businesses. Oligopilisation is increasing (meaning that fewer and fewer businesses are owning more and more and that market power worldwide is being concentrated in a relative few powerful transnationals and conglomerates at the top).
Some people use the term “Really Existing Capitalism & Democracy” or RECD for short for our current system. This term is meant to indicate that our system is not an ideal capitalist or market system nor is it an ideal democracy. It is just what we have at the present, warts and all. Under “Really Existing Capitalism & Democracy” or RECD, free markets do not behave like a benign and even-handed guiding hand. Rather, rich persons and corporations use their power to gain favour and advantage from government and to distort and rig markets.
If government is removed or attenuated then it will not exist to give favours to corporations but then neither will it exist to restrain corporations. Under RECD, at least in Australia, we see both forces at work. Business lobbies the government but the influence of a democratic vote on a still sizeable and effective government does limit business power including oligopolistic power from getting everything its own way.
To reiterate my questions and add a few more; Are US-Style Libertarians concerned;
(1) About corporations and oligopolistic capitalism?
(2) That excessive corporate capitalist power and oligopolistic power could increase with the removal of government controls?
(3) That wealth inequalities and extreme poverty could increase without government intervention?
(4) That the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and like initiatives are intended to further increase corporate business power (not small business and new entrepreneur power) and to weaken national governments?
What I am driving at is that someone or something will fill the power vacuum if you minimise really existing democratic government. I put it to you that this someone or something will be the vast transnational corporations and conglomerates and they will come to constitute a government by corporate cartel or even by cabal-style corporate dictatorship.
@Julie Thomas The problem with the rich and charity is that the rich are not necessarily sufficiently skilled to distribute charity effectively.
I do like this Chomskyism;