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Peter Tatchell has compiled this rather good dossier detailing high profiel homophobic dancehall artists. Interesting but depressing reading.
I came across this quote recently from Major General Smedley Butler (apparently described by General MacArthur as “one of the really great generals in American history”) who writes:
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the very few at the expense of the masses [...] I spent thirty-three years and fourth months in active military service as a member of the country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I’m quite tempted to buy his book War as a Racket. Though strangely enough Amazon doesn’t seem to have it.
That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
As much as I think liberal political philosophy is an utter mess, I think much of the ethics underlying it is spot on. It represents a genuine gain for human life and it would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bath water, just as liberalism itself did when it undermined morality as a rational category in its pursuit of private conscience. It seems obvious that you can rescue the ethics, or perhaps it might be better to say the ethos, underlying it while rightfully junking the philosophy.
Prima facie the harm principle looks like what is now, in the western liberal democracies, mostly taken as moral common sense. Yet the obvious flaw with it the question of harm done that is not to any specific individual but rather to the collective. At least in Mill’s formulation the principle is deeply individualistic. So the obvious step is to uncleave the ethic from the atomistic picture of social life that liberalism has bequeathed it. To deny the reality of our individuality is as mistaken as denying the reality of our collectivity . We are individuals in so far as that we have a continuous sense of self. Yet this sense is formed dialogically not monologically. It involves thinking together not as an isolated individual (sitting in front of the fire, drinking wine and pondering metaphysical questions). This is what Descartes did, as with many other philosophers, is it therefore any wonder that there’s such a strong monological bias in their work?
Our participation in prior webs of interaction and communication is what allows our sense of individuality to emerge. We’re part of wider culture(s) and tradition(s) which frame our understanding of the world. Our understanding of the world is founded on the understandings of others and in our capcity as individuals, as well as through our cooperation with others, we can in turn change that understanding. Without individual humans there wouldn’t be human society but human society is irreducibile to the aggregate of individuals composing it. As Aristotle put it, man without a community (taken in its proper sense, not with the modern identity politics notion) must be either beast or god.
When we recognise this interdependence, the moral content of the harm principles transform. It no longer serves to keep atomistic individuals free to pursue their own end. The notion of harm becomes much broader, sufficient to (among other things) protect the environment and criticise social circumstances that demean us all through their injustice.
An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.
The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the city of Gebze on Friday.
She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.
Turkish police say they have detained a man in connection with the killing.
Reports say the man led the police to the body.
The most depressing news article ever?
A wonderful debate where Chomsky kicks the shit out of the odious twat who is the intellectual father of modern American conservatism.
What an awesome video. Look at Buckley go: “now listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-nazi or I’ll sock you in your god damn face and you’ll stay plastered”. Could anyone point to a more obnoxious twat than Buckley? The background to the video was the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 where the US police engaged in what a federal commission later called a “police riot”.
In 1968, ABC News hired Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. as political analysts of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions, predicting that television viewers would enjoy seeing two men of letters engage in on-air battle.[citation needed] As it turned out, verbal and nearly physical combat ensued. After days of mutual bickering, their debates devolved to vitriolic, ad hominem attacks. During discussions of the 1968 Democratic National Convention Protests, the men were arguing about Freedom of Speechin regards to American protestors displaying a Viet Cong flag when Vidal told Buckley to “shut up a minute” and, in response to Buckley’s reference to “pro-Nazi” protestors, went on to call Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” The visibly livid Buckley replied: “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” After an interruption by anchor and facilitator Howard K. Smith, the men continued to discuss the topic in a less hostile manner.[15]
Later, in 1969, the feud was continued as Buckley further attacked Vidal in the lengthy essay, “On Experiencing Gore Vidal”, published in the August 1969 issue of Esquire. The essay is collected in The Governor Listeth, an anthology of Buckley’s writings of the time. In a key passage attacking Vidal as an apologist for homosexuality, Buckley wrote, “The man who in his essays proclaims the normalcy of his affliction [i.e., homosexuality], and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher.”
Vidal responded in the September 1969 issue of Esquire, variously characterizing Buckley as “anti-black”, “anti-semitic“, and a “warmonger”.[16] The presiding judge in Buckley’s subsequent libel suit against Vidal initially concluded that “[t]he court must conclude that Vidal’s comments in these paragraphs meet the minimal standard of fair comment. The inferences made by Vidal from Buckley’s [earlier editorial] statements cannot be said to be completely unreasonable.”[citation needed] However, Vidal also strongly implied that, in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in their Sharon, Connecticut, hometown after the pastor’s wife had sold a house to a Jewish family. Buckley sued Vidal and Esquire for libel. Vidal counter-claimed for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley’s characterization of Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge as pornography.[citation needed]
The court dismissed Vidal’s counter-claim; Buckley settled for $115,000 in attorney’s fees and an editorial statement from Esquire magazine that they were “utterly convinced” of the untruthfulness of Vidal’s assertion[citation needed]. However, in a letter to Newsweek, the Esquire publisher stated that “the settlement of Buckley’s suit against us” was not “a ‘disavowal’ of Vidal’s article. On the contrary, it clearly states that we published that article because we believed that Vidal had a right to assert his opinions, even though we did not share them.”
As Vidal biographer, Fred Kaplan, later commented, “The court had ‘not’ sustained Buckley’s case against Esquire… [t]he court had ‘not’ ruled that Vidal’s article was ‘defamatory.’ It had ruled that the case would have to go to trial in order to determine as a matter of fact whether or not it was defamatory. [italics original.] The cash value of the settlement with Esquire represented ‘only’ Buckley’s legal expenses [not damages based on libel]… ” ultimately, Vidal bore the cost of his own attorney’s fees, estimated at $75,000.
In 2003, this affair re-surfaced when Esquire published Esquire’s Big Book of Great Writing, an anthology that included Vidal’s essay. Buckley again sued for libel, and Esquire again settled for $55,000 in attorney’s fees and $10,000 in personal damages to Buckley.[
What an amusing feud this must have been to witness first hand. Since it seems relevant, here’s Buckley (ironically) threatening to punch Chomsky in the face:
I just saw an event on facebook for an International Day Against Homophobia. The number of people who criticised the event for being intolerant of intolerance (and therefore hypocritical) and/or argued that it ought to be a day for gays, not a day against homophobes because that was hateful was really rather silly but all too predictable. One of my favourites was this:
An entire day devoted to homophobia is hypocrisy in its purest form. You’re simply taking negative attitudes towards homosexuals and reciprocating them against homophobes. There is already a day celebrating homosexuality. To claim this is a hate-free zone is completely ignorant. This entire group is dedicated to hating homophobes.
I realise I’m kind of a broken record on this front (my phd will be good for me because it will actually give me an outlet for this) but the issue underlying this is the subjectivism inherent in liberal thought. People ought to be free to believe what they choose but those beliefs are nothing but a choice i.e. they are ultimately subjective and arbitrary. Consequently there’s no way to ultimately pass judgement on another’s beliefs: your own judgement on their belief is just as arbitrary and subjective as theirs. All moral claims are reduced to the same category of subjective and arbitrary expressions of personal disposition. Therefore respect for the person (tolerance) demands we respect the beliefs of others, given that we have no rational grounds to do otherwise.
Any condemnation of anothers beliefs, or at very least their core beliefs, is a unjustified exercise in prejudice. Having a day against homophobia is a hypocritical: it’s seen as a day condemning a lack of tolerance which itself proceeds by being intolerant of others. Any rational assessment of the beliefs and practices of the people we’re ‘tolerating’ drops entirely out of the picture. Moral discourse gradually collapses. The wheels of capitalism keep successfully turning because the spread of this bullshit undermines the possibility of uniting people in the sort of critical outlook which is the prerequisitefor successful communal political action. After all, how committed can you be to something that’s “just your opinion”? How far can you go in opposing someone who’s “just doing what they believe in”?
Agorism is revolutionary market anarchism. In a market anarchist society, law and security will be provided by market institutions, not political institutions. Agorists recognize, therefore, that those institutions can not develop through political reform. Instead, they will come about as a result of market processes. As government is banditry, revolution culminates in the suppression of government by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers is what will lead to their emergence. Development of that demand will come from economic growth in the sector of the economy that explicitly shuns state involvement (and therefore can not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy — black and grey markets.
So writes Brad Spangler. It’s still sometimes shocks me quite how idiotic some people’s thinking can be: (a) a market requires a system of private property relations, enforcement of contracts and infrastructure to allow the transmission of price signals (b) corporations are reliant on infrastructure and social capital & the free-rider problem shows that it’s never going to be economically rational for them to provide these things themselves or to try and work together in order to collectively provide them. You can’t substitute a market for the state because the market requires the state. Any ‘market’ that could exist in the absence of the state would be little more than a group of actors doing things for money and, rather crucially, they would be subject to no constraint beyond what other market actors are capable of enforcing. Force would be the only arbiter. To propose this as a desirable state of affairs in the same paragraph as the utterance “government is banditry” is breathtakingly stupid.
Even more so than general theories of anarcho-capitalism, this stuff is so utterly vacuous that it’s difficult to take it seriously. A moral theory which operates with such an absurdly anemic conception of liberty so as to define the state as coercieve but market relations not is fairly obviously stupid to anyone not trapped inside a prism of its dogmas. Likewise a society devoid of collective agency and dominated by economic rationality would fall apart so quickly that (I’d hope) the theory underlying it would never gain much attention beyond its current crew of pseudo-intellectual right-wing misfits and internet warriors. What I find much more interesting is the extent to which anarcho-capitalist seem to be fixated on claiming the anarchist flag (so to speak) as their own. I’m just reading a thread on libcom where an agorist is getting uppity about people claiming to be able to define a “real anarchist”.
You never leave your mobile out of sight. Your jogging gear has a special pocket for your mobile, and you would nto go out with that pocket empty just as you would not go running without your training shoes. As a matter of fact, you would go nowhere without your mobile (‘nowehere’ is, indeed, the space without a mobile, with a mobile out of range, or a mobile with a flat battery). And once with your mobile, you are never out or away. You are always in – but never locked up in one place. Cocooned in a web of calls and messages you are invulnerable. Those around you cannot blackball you, and if they try, nothing that truly matters would change.
As seems to be happening quite a lot recently, Zygmunt Bauman has said something I wanted to say better than I could have said it. The old bastard.
The concept of ‘anarchy’ is burdened with its essentially anti-state history. From Godwin through Proudhon and Bakunin to Kropotkin, the theorists of anarchy and the founders of anarchist movements deployed the term ‘anarchy’ as a name for an alternative society and the antonym of a power-assisted, coercive order. The alternative society they postulated was to differ from the really existing one by the absence of the state – the epitome of inhuman, intrinsically corruptingpower. Once the state power was dismantled and removed, human beings would resort (return?)t o the assets of mutual help, using, As Mikhail Bakunin kept repeating, their naturally endowed capacity to think and to rebel.
The wrath of the nineteenth-century anarchists focused on the state; the modern state, to be precise, a novelty in their time and not solidly enough entrenched to claim traditional legitimacy or rely on routinized obedience. That state strove for meticulous and ubiquitous control over the aspects of human life which past powers had left to local collective ways and means. It claimed the right and devised means to interfere in areas from which past powers, however oppressive and exploitative, kept their distance. In particular it set abut dismantling les pouvoirs intermediares, that is the received forms of local autonomy, communal self-assertion and self-government. Under assault, the habitual ways of resolving problems and conflicts generated by joint living appeared to the pioneers of anarchic movements as problematically given and indeed ‘natural’; they had also been imagined to be self-sustaining and fully capable of order maintenance under all social conditions and in all circumstances, so long as they were protected against impositions originating from the state. Anarchy, that is a society wihout a state and its coercive arms, was visualised as a non-coercive order, in which necessity did not clash with freedom nor freedom stand in the way of the prerequisites of living in company.
The early anarchist Weltanschauunghad a pronounced nostalgic flavour which it shared with the utopian socialism of the time (Proudhon’s and Weitling’s teachings epitomizing their intimate affinity); a dream of retreat from the road entered with the birth of a new, modern form of social power and capitalism (that is, the separation of business from the household) – back to a romanticized rather than genuinely conflict-free cosiness of communal unity of feelings and deeds. It is in this early, nostalgic and utopian form that the idea of ‘anarchy’ settled in the awareness of modern society and in most ifs political-science interpretations.
I think it’s important to look at the origin of anarchism, to contextualise it as a set of ideas, so as to see why the writers and activists who first began to systematize these ideas placed the emphasis where they did. The fixation on the state was a product of its time, with its growth as a coercive and controlling presence eroding a previously self-sustaining social fabric of mediating associations. Fast forward to the modern context and the state has been (though often isn’t) a vehicle for mass struggle. It’s still a deeply coercive bureaucratic institutions however unlike TNCs and NGOs it is at least potentially democratic. To say we shouldn’t focus on the state is not a support of statism, nor is it a denial of the claim that in a perfect world there would be no state. What we need is to instead focus on the establishment of the ”forms of local autonomy, communal self-assertion and self-government” which the development of the state has progressively eroded: revolutionary situations & attacks on the state should, if they occur, be a (defensive) result of this process of the establishing of genuinely democratic and autonomous mediating associations, as opposed to being something we consciously set out to engage in.
