A little book I figured to rifle through looking for secrets of the enemy turned out to be a great libertarian read. Yes, Unspeak by the Englishman living in Paris, Steven Poole, says what cannot be said by an American or he would have to have his blog registered for sure.
One delightful bit of information is how the U.S. denies using napalm even though we see the melted skin of Iraqis. Napalm is banned internationally. But the U.S. substituted kerosene for petrol, calls this 'Mark 77 firebombs' (quotes are in Steven's English style) and the U.S. is not criminal. Troops still call it napalm.
You may have noticed how libertarian writers use the words mercantilism, "internal improvements" and "American System" followed by corporate welfare. Mr. Poole writes about the word corporate: (I put it in red.)
Most radical of all the attempts by business to insinuate itself into pre-existing civil vocabularies was the borrowing of the term 'corporation'. It originally meant a political grouping of people united along local-government, religious, or other lines. Its first use in a commercial sense came in the US, noted by Charles Dickens in 1842. The word literally means embodiment. By the process of 'incorporation', the company becomes flesh, and is understood in law to be a person. Conversely, the rhetorical attitude of corporations to their workers took a dehumanising turn: remember how the phrase 'human resources' implies that people are undifferentiable assets that can be used up and replaced. Thus, by means of Unspeak, businesses became people, and people became fungible matter.
I won't go into 14th Amendment arguments here.
In the interesting arguments that Paine produced with his Rights of Man came the libertarian definition of crime that the late Johnnie Sancedio loved so much, and Poole explains it contrasting it with what is to be taken in Iraq for freedom:
... This contrasts with the classical liberal view of freedom as one thing, hedged around by law but homogeneous, in terms both of the set of 'rights' it affords individuals, and the relationship of each individual to everyone else, so that unjustly to curtail one person's freedom is an insult to all. The growth of civil rights - or, if you prefer, the march of freedom - thus consists not in adding extra discrete freedoms to those we already have, but in approaching ever more closely to the ideal of this one big freedom, defined by Thomas Paine simply as 'the power of doing whatever does not injure another.'
Now I purposely reference a FOX News guy, Judge Andrew Napolitano below, to explain how Natural Law's "Rule of Law" is slipping away in the U.S. to a positivist horror.
This is because, from a book which has too much TRUTH - YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH! - I would like to quote a silly phrase from a FOX guy.
...which, as you will remember, hosts Bill O'Reilly's denunciations of civil libertarians as 'terrorists', refuses to call US Marines snipers because it sounds too violent,...
I here want to focus on old Bill calling civil libertarians terrorists. What if a civil libertarian said, "kill Bill"? Then he would not be a civil libertarian. By definition a civil libertarian cannot be a terrorist and a terrorist cannot be a civil libertarian. Now if terrorist meant freedom fighter....
One last shot by me. Madison by Garry Wills is a terrible book. But it does show how Neocons are using circular arguments. He uses encroachments on freedom by Wilson and FDR, popular yet oh so evil, to make the excesses of the Alien and Sedition Acts look okay. Now we see Cheney and Rumsfeld speaking of the beloved Lincoln, evil incarnate (how about evil incorporated), saying if old Abe could be a tyrant, why not our beloved W.
If you can handle more humor, this guy mocks Madison for calling for Hamilton's impeachment. He does this without mentioning the cause. (The cause was Hamilton stealing money appropriated for one thing and spending it on another.) Only read this book if you are very well read on Madison.
Turn to Unspeak. It should be hated by Ds and Rs. (It got a so-so to poor review by Labour.)
1 comment:
Would the libertarians really be any better than the other two parties, I don't think so.
There good people in all parties but shit usually floats to the top.
Parties are not the problem, we the people are. We are getting what we deserve.
One of the Penalties for Refusing to Participate in Politics is that You End Up being Governed By your Inferiors - Plato
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