I find that blogs with 'Liberty' in the title are generally awful - so NNW had the field to himself after all.
Still, NNW scores a bulls eye on the essential humbuggery of libertarianism: for folks who profess to be all about the freedom, they aren't half certain about what views will and won't be permitted in the New Libertarian Order.
Ditto, with the other elephant in the room. Consider what we're talking about: the supposed right of a small group of fanatics to issue threats to wreck an event supported by millions of their fellow citizens. Where's the liberty in allowing lunatics to impose themselves on other people?
Knee-jerk scepticism of authority is just gullibility standing on it's head. Instead of blindly accepting violence from the state, it's blindly accepting it becuase it's not from the state. Ditto, there's no point libertarians trotting out that dreadful old cliché 'pre-crime' then seamlessly shifting into talk of 'slippery slopes'. Perhaps we ought to start calling 'slippery slope' arguments 'pre-tyranny'?
But there's something more to it than all that. Consider this charming comment:
Alarmist? Consider the implications of that comment: violent lunatics are merely 'dissenters' meanwhile opponents of extremist thuggery want a world that's fluffy and Disneyfied. In other words, not only is violence a valid means of political action, but those who oppose violence are, by definition, contemptible and weak.
This belief in violence not only as a means to an end but as purifying force, sweeping away the bourgeois conventions of a society that is both corrupt and corrupting is an avowedly fascist idea, all the more so when combined with contempt for the Daily Mail reading masses. At least Marxists put it more poetically when they talk of a 'Democracy of the Committed' but the end result is the same: a totalitarian vision of a world reborn in violence and blood-shed.
All of which leads to the dirty little secret that really gets under libertarian skins. These loons wanted a revolution, instead they got briefly detained by the police. This isn't a story about heroism and repression, it's a story about a bunch of juvenile prats being prevented from acting out by agents of the state using a minimum of force and with the support of the vast majority of the Great British Public. And libertarians think this is a winning issue for them? Some day soon we're going to find out that the libertarian movement is being secretly run out of the Home Office.
Still, NNW scores a bulls eye on the essential humbuggery of libertarianism: for folks who profess to be all about the freedom, they aren't half certain about what views will and won't be permitted in the New Libertarian Order.
Ditto, with the other elephant in the room. Consider what we're talking about: the supposed right of a small group of fanatics to issue threats to wreck an event supported by millions of their fellow citizens. Where's the liberty in allowing lunatics to impose themselves on other people?
Knee-jerk scepticism of authority is just gullibility standing on it's head. Instead of blindly accepting violence from the state, it's blindly accepting it becuase it's not from the state. Ditto, there's no point libertarians trotting out that dreadful old cliché 'pre-crime' then seamlessly shifting into talk of 'slippery slopes'. Perhaps we ought to start calling 'slippery slope' arguments 'pre-tyranny'?
But there's something more to it than all that. Consider this charming comment:
I hold that liberty has a higher purpose and is an awful lot messier than simply making the world safe, fluffy and Disneyfied for readers of the Daily Mail.Uh huh. Looks like it won't just be certain opinions that aren't allowed in the New Libertarian Order. Mind you, considering the Daily Mail is Britain's best selling newspaper, I'm guessing there's going to have to be a whole lot of liberating going on before Utopia arrives.
It is double minded to claim decency when dissenters are rounded up and locked away, although it is easier to rationalise when they are demonised as loons or closet Marxists.
Alarmist? Consider the implications of that comment: violent lunatics are merely 'dissenters' meanwhile opponents of extremist thuggery want a world that's fluffy and Disneyfied. In other words, not only is violence a valid means of political action, but those who oppose violence are, by definition, contemptible and weak.
This belief in violence not only as a means to an end but as purifying force, sweeping away the bourgeois conventions of a society that is both corrupt and corrupting is an avowedly fascist idea, all the more so when combined with contempt for the Daily Mail reading masses. At least Marxists put it more poetically when they talk of a 'Democracy of the Committed' but the end result is the same: a totalitarian vision of a world reborn in violence and blood-shed.
All of which leads to the dirty little secret that really gets under libertarian skins. These loons wanted a revolution, instead they got briefly detained by the police. This isn't a story about heroism and repression, it's a story about a bunch of juvenile prats being prevented from acting out by agents of the state using a minimum of force and with the support of the vast majority of the Great British Public. And libertarians think this is a winning issue for them? Some day soon we're going to find out that the libertarian movement is being secretly run out of the Home Office.
2 comments:
"This isn't a story about heroism and repression, it's a story about a bunch of juvenile prats being prevented from acting out by agents of the state using a minimum of force and with the support of the vast majority of the Great British Public. "
Spot on!
Geez, DJ, anyone who takes this up as a libertarian cause celèbre understands libertarianism about as well as you do.
There is only one “line” in libertarianism: the initiation of force against another's property (your person being your property). Whoever owns the streets has the right to prevent anyone from using them, for any or no reason. In this country, at the moment, the state does. And it stopped them. Case closed.
The libertarian argument here isn't (or shouldn't be) that the state mustn't prevent people from using its streets for protest; it's that the state shouldn't own the streets in the first place, because it can therefore, quite legitimately by libertarian principles, supress any protest on any street.
But even that is far from taking the Islamists' side; in fact, the details of the case are something of a red herring. Would anybody having a wedding let protests against it go ahead on their land? Would somebody making a living by hiring out spaces to hold weddings allow protests against them to take place there? It seems unlikely. And violent disruption of the wedding would certainly be seen as initiation of force against property even if the owner of the land on which it took place permitted it.
Horses' heads in people's beds? That would involve Breaking and Entering, right?
Post a Comment