The Libertarian Alliance has published a new pamphlet by Samizdatista Paul Marks called A Critique of a Critique: An Examination of Kevin Carson’s Contract Feudalism.
He is in splendid and splenic form, I am pleased to say.
|
|||||
|
…Abolish it. That is what the latest Libertarian Alliance press release demands and I find it hard not to agree. In this era of channel fragmentation, cable, satellite and the rise of the internet as a method of distribution, what on earth is the point of the BBC? If I want to see what the other side is thinking I can watch Al Jezeera or read the Independent. June 21st, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 One of the downsides of being stuck in a hotel is having ones breakfast browsing depend overly on the dismal International Herald Tribune, the incestuous off-spring of the Washington Post and the New York Times. There was an article in the IHT about the Italian state cracking down on tax evasion which cause the customary eye rolling when a free marketeer reads statements of of unquestioned absurdity such as:
So taking more money away from people, essentially destroying some of their wealth, will make the economy better? And the government will not reduce the amount of personal wealth it destroys until people start cooperating more with having their wealth destroyed? Yes, that all makes perfect sense. June 16th, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an interesting article on New West by Christian Probasco, called California Looms.
His description of California reminded me of… Blair’s ever more authoritarian Britain. Another example of creeping democratic totalitarianism? June 15th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Seen on a street in Addis Ababa, near the interesting Entoto market 
So you reckon your job sucks, eh? June 15th, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Getting on-line in Ethiopia is a nightmare and so it has taken me a while to comment on a strange article in the Financial Times that had me choking on my breakfast of injera and zil zil tibs.
And later in the article, readers are reminded that Royal Dutch Shell was forced last November to sell control of its $20bn Sakhalin-2 oil and gas venture to state-controlled Gazprom and BP’s flagship Russia venture TNK-BP is now being threatened with the loss of its licence to develop the east Siberian Kovykta field. So how exactly are these de facto nationalisation (in reality seizing assets for the benefit of members of Putin’s clique) a sign that “Russia’s transition to a market economy has been successful and cannot be undone”? Seems to me that Putin is doing an excellent job of undoing it. June 14th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alice Thomson has writen an interesting article called Be a ‘bad’ parent and let your children out in which she decries the enervating risk-averse trends in which parents, with the encouragement of our political masters, try to supervise and regulate every aspect of their children’s lives. The comments are also quite interesting. One of them , calling herself ‘Mum’, bristles at the suggestion Thomson makes:
Well ‘Mum’, I do not have any children either but I am very happy you were not my ‘Mum. Moreover I, like everyone else, am fully qualified to have on opinion on how children should be raised because believe it or not, I and everyone else was once a child. I agree totally with Alice Thomson and think it is time people stopped indulging their neurotic need to control everything and just let children grow up without panoptic supervision. June 6th, 2007 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is not often I read the Independent but even that haven of fluorescent idiocy seems to be on the right side of the need to face down Vladimir Putin’s increasingly sinister regime. There is a very interesting open letter by journalist Yelena Tregubova on the importance of not pretending that everything in Russia is just fine and dandy. Of course over the last few days Putin has made the task of those shouting warning about the dangers posed by Russia a great deal easier, what with him threatening to target nuclear weapons at Europe again and pretty much announcing that he is about to appropriate BP’s investments in Russia. Clearly Putin needs to be taken down a peg or two because if there are no consequences for his theft of foreign investments in Russia and the murders of opponents to his regime both at home and overseas, all we can look forward to is ever more destabilising antics coming out of the Kremlin. June 5th, 2007 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
The new logo for the 2012 London Olympics has been unveiled and it has produced howls of outrage. Yet I beg to differ. I think it is perfect.  What does it look like to you? To me it is obvious: a collapsing structure of some sort, perhaps a building at the moment of demolition. The sense of downwards motion towards the bottom of the page is palpable. Breathtaking. I mean what truly magnificent symbolism. The entire Olympic endeavour has been a massive looting spree with already grotesque cost over-runs (and it is only 2007), so surely something that conjures up images of collapse and disaster is really on the money… and speaking of money, at £400,000 (just under $800,000 USD) for the logo, it perfectly sums up the whole ‘Olympic Experience’ for London taxpayers. No, if ever there was ‘truth in advertising’, this is it. Well done Lord Coe, I salute you. June 4th, 2007 | 74 comments - (Comments are closed)
But are those really the best definitions of totalitarian? When someone uses the term ‘totalitarian’, we think of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany or Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Mao’s China. Those were indisputably totalitarian states. We think of gulags and killing fields. We think of secret police and surveillance. Yet I would argue that all those things can just as satisfactorily described as ‘tyranny’ of whatever political completion. The thing that makes a place ‘totalitarian’ is not the nastiness of it or even the repressiveness of it, but the totality of state control. The real defining characteristic of totalitarian seems obvious from the word itself. And what is a total state? It is a state in which there is no civil society, just politically derived rules by which people may interact. And I would argue the key to that is removing the right to free association, usually on grounds of ‘fairness’ or ‘diversity’ and by declaring private property to be ‘public’. Britain has no gulags, no killing fields, it has a relatively free press (though less so than it was), it has no internal passports (though they are working on that with ID cards and panoptic surveillance)… but every year we take more and more steps towards the destruction of a voluntary civil society of free interaction and its replacement with a state in which no aspect of life is not politically regulated. This is often described as making things ‘more democratic’… and in that the supporters of the total state are not being disingenuous, for democracy is just a type of politics after all. We are headed for a different kind of totalitarianism than that of Stalin or Hitler or Mao, but a total state really is what a great many people have in mind for us all. They seek a sort of ‘smiley face fascism’ in which all interactions are regulated in the name of preventing sexism, promoting health, and defending the environment. The excuses will not invoke the Glory of the Nation or the Proletariat or the Volk or the King or the Flag or any of those old fashioned tools for tyrants, but rather it will be “for our own good”, “for the Planet”, “for the whales”, “for the children”, “for the disabled” or “for equality”. But if they get their way it will be quite, quite totalitarian. June 3rd, 2007 | 96 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an excellent article in the Telegraph by Charles Moore called What if Israelis had abducted BBC man?, addressing the morally demented attitude amongst the tranzi media and government set.
Whatever one thinks of Israel’s policies on various issues, the nauseating double standards so consistently in play by so many ‘news’ organisations are something that need to be pointed out often and unapologetically. Charles Moore is to be commended for his article. Read the whole thing. June 2nd, 2007 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
The latest weird twist in the Alexander Litvinenko assassination has been the release by prime suspect Andrei Lugovoi of his promised ‘stunning revelations’ about the case. His claim was that Litvinenko was in fact working for the British intelligence services and that MI6 had in fact attempted to recruit him as well Now what makes this all really puzzling to me is that even if this is all true, far from taking the heat off himself and the Russian security services, he seems to in fact be providing the Russian spooks with an excellent motive for wanting to kill Litvinenko. Am I missing something here? May 31st, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||