mummysquid: (Default)
C:。ミ ([personal profile] mummysquid) wrote in [community profile] hms_anon2015-06-19 01:28 pm

(no subject)



deletion

In wake of the Charleston Church shooting please content warn your discussion of the event on anon.

(Anonymous) 2015-06-19 03:17 am (UTC)(link)
It is a libertarian dream. Hexagonal neighborhoods of square apartments bob sedately by tiny coiffed parks and tastefully featureless marinas, an Orange County of the soul. It is the ultimate gated community, designed not by the very rich and certainly not by the very powerful, but by the middlingly so. As a utopia, the Atlantis Project is pitiful. Beyond the single one-trick fact of its watery location, it is tragically non-ambitious, crippled with class anxiety, nostalgic not for mythic glory but for the anonymous sanctimony of an invented 1950s. This is no ruling class vision: it is the plaintive daydream of a petty bourgeoisie, whose sulky solution to perceived social problems is to run away–set sail into a tax-free sunset.
None of this is surprising. Libertarianism is not a ruling-class theory. It may be indulged, certainly, for the useful ideas it can throw up, and its prophets have at times influenced dominant ideologies–witness the cack-handed depredations of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile after Allende’s bloody overthrow. But untempered by the realpolitik of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the anti-statism of “pure” libertarianism is worse than useless to the ruling class.
Big capital will support tax-lowering measures, of course, but it does not need to piss and moan about taxes with the tedious relentlessness of the libertarian. Big capital, with its ranks of accountant-Houdinis, just gets on with not paying it. And why hate a state that pays so well? Big capital is big, after all, not only because of the generous contracts its state obligingly hands it, but because of the gun-ships with which its state opens up markets for it.
Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

– China Mieville, on the topic of the many proposals made for libertarian enclave societies.

(Anonymous) 2015-06-19 03:17 am (UTC)(link)
china mieville is the buff scifi author yeah?

(Anonymous) 2015-06-19 03:18 am (UTC)(link)
yes

(Anonymous) 2015-06-19 03:19 am (UTC)(link)
finally got a face 2 the name

(Anonymous) 2015-06-19 03:19 am (UTC)(link)
glenn_beck_independence_usa.mov