Speaking of Rojava:
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Hah, don’t read anything from the Mises Institute unless you want to die from uncontrollable laughter. They always seem to write one thing or another about Somalia as some kind of libertopia from time to time.
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And then the oh-so-serious Libertarians who claim to read mises-org (as opposed to Objectivist fanboi sites) get insulted when you jokingly suggest they move to that small-government paradise.
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Of course, I don’t dispute that exists, and I’m a Chomsky fan. My comment was about the quiz and the stigma surrounding the word “Libertarian”. It’s not even about left and right. Libertarianism for corporations can mean totalitarianism for people. That means we need a third continuum or a different word for the second continuum.
Inverted totalitarianism (corporate rule) is a form of totalitarianism. This is allowed by giving corporations freedom to do as they please (including dictate policy). Libertarian means something different since corporate personhood. The obvious flaw is that corporations are not people.
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Yeah, no doubt!
The thing is, Somalia itself is a failed state, and is being used by various state and non-state actors as a haven to be able to exploit it for their own gain… but Somalialand is actually doing pretty good, primarily BECAUSE they have a democratically elected government that is working for the betterment of it’s citizens, not from a lack of government.
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I don’t dispute that, I even referenced it above.
To clarify, why did you respond to my post with a link to the Libertarian Socialism article? There was no accompanying comment, so I don’t know what you are trying to say.
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Because I am physically tired and assumed that you were talking from the usual US oriented “all libertarians are capitalists” perspective.
I may be fighting a losing battle, but I read enough Orwell to understand that if you hand control of language to your political opponents then eventually you are unable to express your political beliefs anymore.
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Double plus good. Totally agree, it’s vitally important to not oversimplify these things.
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Oh yeah, they always try to make it into “polycentric jurisprudence” or some other word salad. To me, it’s like they (Mises Institute wonks) want to pretend to be anarchists but at the same time really really want their own Versailles Palace with all the servants and gardens (insert random Dangerous Liaisons scene here).
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I think that’s probably accurate!
Also, instead of Dangerous Liasons, how about Valmont instead (based on same book, but I like that version better… Colin Firth, Annette Bening, and Meg Tilly - I love the Tilly sisters!)…
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(And @armozel)
Yeah, the website owners seem to have abandoned the SomaliAnarchy website around the time of the Islamic Courts Union. After Ethiopia invaded and kicked out the ICU, and al-Shabaab filled the subsequent void, I didn’t see much of anyone pushing the positive spin in Wikipedia’s Somalia article.
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I’ll have to look that film. For me, I watched Dangerous Liaisons as a kid (my mom was the one who loved the film no clue why) and got a crush on Glenn Close in it. Beyond that, I couldn’t keep myself interested in the film beyond her. >_>
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That’s good at least, they just shouldn’t have done that from the start, frankly. I think this is my biggest problem with that sort of branch of libertarianism - that history is really meaningless to them and viewed as an unnecessary component of their analysis of states as they exist now. When it comes to former colonial countries, it is absolutely critical to understanding what’s happening and why.
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Yeah, Glenn Close was pretty great in it. I think I saw Valmont before I saw Dangerous Liasons, and thought that both Colin Firth and Meg Tilly were the bee’s knees. Especially Meg Tilly! She was so full of utter angst during that entire film… she played it so beautifully. She was also in Agnes of God, too, another great film about a sort of naive young nun who winds up pregnant some how (well, we know HOW, but her naivety about it and her utter love of god was pretty absorbing)…
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I think history is more antithetical to them than it is meaningless to them (they act like it’s meaningless because they want to be cool). They are providing one of H. L. Mencken’s “neat, plausible and wrong” solutions to the problem of how we negotiate a society among ourselves. Considering anything outside a greatly simplified view of the “human nature” would show the problems with their models. History has a way of making things more complicated.
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Oh, I’m not trying to tell you that you are a libertarian. I’m just pointing out that there is indeed a dichotomy between libertarian and authoritarian, and so if you don’t agree with libertarian values, this necessarily aligns you more with authoritarian values. After all, if you don’t care whether I have autonomy, you’re much more likely to take it away compared to a libertarian.
Your analogy characterizes liberty as a harmful phenomenon which should be avoided where possible and secured against where inevitable. Definitely an authoritarian world-view.
But I guess the “third position” that you may be claiming is nihilism. You reject the existence of the concepts in question:
Sure, but valuing something “for it’s own sake” is actually pretty rare. Core values don’t all have to be pure philosophical or religious premises. I mean, if we’re expected to posit our values as timeless, acontexual absolutes, probably most of us would be hard-pressed to have any values at all - I know I would.
It’s ok to say “I value liberty because it is the most pragmatic approach for creating or achieving some other thing I value more deeply”. It doesn’t make you not a libertarian if you’re motivated by something other than an arbitrary religious fervor for freedom.
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I totally disagree with this. I wouldn’t describe something as a “core value” if it was something I thought was just pragmatically useful. I would think that’s the whole point of using “core” as an adjective before “value”. I value streetcars because they get me to work. I don’t have a core value that streetcars are good things.
By contrast, I value preserving life. I think that’s a good thing. If you try to provide me with a context in which I couldn’t possibly agree it would be a good idea to preserve someone’s life, it would be a context in which the good of preserving life was outweighed by some harm, but I’d always value preserving life as a good. That’s a core value.
Organizing society in a way to maximize people’s ability to do what they want so long as it doesn’t create adverse outcomes for other people is a tool to create outcomes that I actually value. If that distinction isn’t meaningful then I end up having a core value of “hammers” every time I need a nail pounded in.
Yeah, that was not an accident. I can argue against the war on drugs, in favour of abortion rights, against militarized police, and for any number of other “libertarian” positions starting by assuming that human freedom is a risky thing that causes problems, and then observing that, for example, outlawing marijuana is basically threatening a hurricane with arrest if it makes landfall. It’s a stupid misunderstanding of the how people behave and it has tragic consequences.*
You can’t guess whether my analysis is based on the idea that freedom is an inherently good thing or an inherently bad thing based on the position that I eventually arrive at. Which is why a quiz that asks me about my political positions would end up calling me “libertarian” when I’m not.
Not at all. I don’t reject the existence of chocolate and vanilla, but I don’t bring them into the debate on health care policy. I don’t reject the freedom or authority. I think those are real things that really exist. I reject the idea that analysis of whether a thing increases or decreases freedom is a useful framework for determining public policy.
* The actual war on drugs wasn’t a bad outcome from a well meaning idea, it was the successful implementation of voter suppression mostly at the expense of racial minorities.
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Single-axis measures are even more cartoonish and ridiculous that two-axis measures like that in this post.
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I had even more problems with the questions on that test! It comes across very much as a push poll, where the categories are defined to fit a thesis and not to provide a meaningful general purpose taxonomy.
But anyway, I got “New Era Enterprisers”.
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