The cheek of this is unbelievable. These are people who have had their higher education paid for by the state and now they've grown old and selfish and decided they don't want to repay the favour, as they should. Instead of charging us more, they should go out and take £9000 off every university graduate who graduated before 1990 and make up the funding shortfall using that.
There seems to be a general feeling among people that political extremism is a bad thing. People shun extremists and think that the moderate view is the correct one. They try to strike a deal between various sides and pick one that appears to be in the middle and is equally appealing and distasteful to both sides.
This is not necessarily right. There are number of positions today which we take for granted that originated as extremist ones. Giving women the vote, giving most men the vote, treating black people as people, legalising same-sex relationships/marriage (legalising same-sex marriage was scarcely heard of just a couple of generations ago).
A few suggestions that seem extreme today that could easily be accepted ideas in 50 years time:
Complete nuclear disarmament. Few people think that we should get rid of all our nukes and advocate the keeping of just a small number as insurance. Most people agree that we don't need the huge numbers we do and pick a reduction in their numbers as a moderate view.
Legalising polygamy. There is a tentative acceptance of open relationships/marriages in some places. Permitting people more than one legal spouse is an extreme viewpoint that there is no rational reason to prevent.
Drug legalisation. Again, this appears to be an extreme point of view but in my other blog:
/shameless self-promotion of own blog in another blog
I show that it's actually a good idea that should be adopted.
People shun extremism because... well, it's extreme. Outliers are rare in most human characteristics and people are unsure of how to deal with them. However in politics, things change and they often change quite significantly. Things that seem extreme today will not seem extreme tomorrow. Dismissing an idea because it is "extreme" is foolish; a moderate idea is not necessarily better than an extreme one just because more people hold it. Extremism is relative (implied by above paragraph).
Under capitalism/libertarianism, we're all supposed to be able to live freely, nobody's rights are infringed and nobody can take my property. Socialism is criticised because it takes my property (through taxation) and gives it to people who don't deserve it (everybody else, through welfare/education/healthcare).
This is all fine and dandy and makes sense. Nobody does have a right to the fruits of my labour. However, what if they aren't actually the fruits of my labour?
Our societies did not spring into existence yesterday. They've been established over many thousands of years. And not peacefully. They were founded upon war, bloodshed, theft and murder. Land was not divided up and given to people who worked for it, it was seized. If the initial divisions of land were not equal, nothing afterwards will be. Land was taken by the ruling classes and the general population was then required to work on it. You have no right to property that was stolen in the first place.
To make libertarianism a sound philosophy to base a society on, you'd have to go for some crazy purge where wealth and land was divided up equally and THEN introduce libertarianism. Otherwise you're just perpetuating a system that can never be equal or just.
As an example, The Duke of Westminster owns about 50 acres of Mayfair in London. This makes him one of the wealthiest property owners in the UK. He inherited it. What right does he have to his land? His ancestors seized it from some other suckers back in the day. How is his claim any more legitimate than mine if I was to march in there with some gunmen tomorrow and take it for myself? Stolen property is stolen property, regardless of how many hands it's gone through since the initial theft.
I've been thinking of this idea for a while and then I found out today that that bastard Marx had already written about it in Das Kapital. It's called the primitive accumulation of capital and it's a major problem for liberal economics.
Many right-wingers object to government intervention in parenting and social programs to teach people to raise their kids better. Then you get stories like this:
Ignore the bit about the mother dosing them with cannabis because it's not the point. All the other things she did were perfectly legal, just examples of terrible, terrible parenting. The kids were little bastards and were pretty much guaranteed to turn up into criminals (or more serious criminals). Instead, right-wingers would advocate leaving them until they were adults and then penalising them harshly when they committed serious crimes. They also wouldn't be likely to agree with rehabilitating the criminals to give them a chance of not being criminals when they were released.
This is a weird view to take. You'd be addressing the symptoms and not the cause. You'd also be abandoning the kids to a life of crime rather than helping them when they're younger and preventing it ever happening. I'm not sure the right of a parent to improperly raise their child supersedes the right of the child to not have a shitty parent. Or the right of other people to not have to deal with the child when it grows up.
The kids in the link aren't evil, they've just never been taught how to be good. They've been seriously, seriously let down by their parents and I don't think letting them grow into adults who are going to do serious harm to other people is a good idea. They should be pitied, not held up as examples of the inherent evil of humanity by the tabloids, as they doubtless will be.
It's accepted by many people that as you get older, you become more right-wing. Socialism and others are seen as political ideologies for less mature people whilst more mature, educated, experienced and intelligent older people drift towards the right-wing.
It's possible this is true. Maybe I'll feel the same way in 30 years (note: this is the least likely thing EVER). Alternatively, right-wing people say it a lot to try and undermine the credibility of left-wing ideas and the resolve of people who follow them. If you're constantly told that as you get older, you become more right-wing, it's likely that, as you get older, you'll become more right-wing. It's not an inevitable consequence of aging, it's an inevitable consequence of the social pressure set up against left-wing ideals.
This is inexplicable. This is not a business that is worried about money, it is a council that has wronged its constituents and is fighting to avoid paying them the money.
Speaking after the meeting, Mr Mallender said the cost of appealing would run into six figures, but he said it would be worth it as the council could recover some costs if it won.
He said: "It's a two-way situation. By paying these legal costs, we might recover the monies already spent and we might end up far better off."
YOU'RE A COUNCIL. It is TAXPAYERS' money. You are spending OUR money to rob these people of the compensation they deserve.
In all likelihood, this will be my least coherent blog because I am not writing to make a point, I'm writing to try and order my thoughts and I figured you mortals might gain an insight from seeing how they work.
For the past 2500 years (roughly counting from the advent of Western philosophy), human political thought has been progressing. The Greeks started ut although IMO their main achievement was laying the groundwork for the incredible work done from the 17th century onwards. Something I noticed earlier today is that John Locke was one of the first political philosophers of this era and created the foundations of capitalism. From his work, capitalism was implemented and it continues to be the dominant idea today. Others surpassed it. Socialism, Anarchy and Communism were all created in the subsequent couple of hundred years. These were all developments. People had looked at capitalism and created better ideas.
There are few situations in which we will look at the entire body of available knowledge and pick something that was 400 years old as the best option. Choosing capitalism is exactly this. As a society, we have not been able to keep up with the advance of our greatest minds. We refuse to progress, instead sticking with something older than almost any other idea still followed.
Capitalism is a regressive philosophy. It has scarcely changed since Locke first developed its ideas. We reduce everything to market values and exchanges (a flawed approach in the first place). Instead of ownership of other human beings under slavery and feudalism, we rent each other. I think there's something to be said for the political evolution Marx talked about, although I don't know enough about it to say whether I think it will happen as he does (I doubt it).
Bearing in mind I don't necessarily believe all this. I'll need to re-read it and re-think it another time, I just started thinking and had to write some stuff down.
One of the things I often find strange about people and the way they go about having relationships is the complete focus on monogamy. Polyamory (the true alternative as it were) is never thought of and if it is, not as a possibility. Even the few people in real life I speak to who occasionally come out with some vaguely sensible idea aren't even close to thinking about it.
Some times it's just acceptance of societal norms and people not bothering to fight against it but most people don't understand the idea, even though polyamory is at least as good an idea as monogamy.
There is no rational reason to react in the way people do to sexual infidelity. People are routinely told that jealousy is wrong yet jealousy in relationships is often portrayed as entirely acceptable. Why would people consider kissing someone else grounds enough to end a relationship? It doesn't mean they don't like/love you any more. It's possible for people to be sexually interested in more than one person and it doesn't follow that interest in one is at the expense of interest in the other. People don't have a set amount of love to apportion between people. I can love someone as much as anyone loves their partner and still want to have sex with someone else.
To limit yourself as being solely monogamous is regressive.
This next bit is gonna take a while to explain so bear with me: I think everyone should be a polyamorist in theory. That's the best way I can think of stating it yet it's not quite what I mean. When you say someone's monogamous you can be describing either their ideals or their practices. You can be a polyamorist in theory whilst still being monogamous in practice and that's what I mean.
Even if you don't believe in polyamorist at least have the decency to not look down on people who are or place a lesser value on relationships.
I may have blogged on this before and if I do, I don't apologise. You can read through and check to see if there is one (as I did until I got bored of remembering just how awesome I am) but I'm gonna rewrite it here. Everyone should have to read everything I have to say at least twice anyway.
Affirmative Action is a tricky subject. This is largely because people don't actually understand what it is. Affirmative Action is not about giving black people a free ride or punishing white people. Slavery was a pretty serious thing and its effects were long-lasting. Black people are still at a serious disadvantage, even if you don't believe there's much racism still around today. The huge social disparities between black and white people are by and large a result of slavery and the racism used to justify it.
That is what AA seeks to overturn. Black people have lost out and white people have benefited from slavery, even though both indirectly. If a black person gets a job over you due to AA, you aren't losing it to them because they're black. You shouldn't be comparing your situation to one without AA, you should be comparing it to one without slavery. If slavery and racism had never occurred, white and black people would (probably) be on the same level.
It's about making things fairer and making it seem as if slavery hadn't happened. A white person could say that they've done nothing wrong and so don't deserve to be punished but they aren't being punished, the advantages they gain are just being taken away. In a society in which society had never occurred, they'd be similarly de-advantaged by virtue of the black person approaching the job from the same (or similar) socio-economic position.
Nobody has to take responsibility for anything. The only issue with AA is whether or not you think the government should interfere to right wrongs, not whether the concept of AA is morally right. The only people who can justifiably reject AA are libertarians because they reject almost all government intervention.
As a little aside, reparations should never be paid for slavery. Throwing money at the disadvantaged doesn't make them less disadvantaged. Education and jobs do.
Lately I've been getting pretty bored of crime stores in the media.
"This person got stabbed."
"This person got beat up."
"We caught this guy who shot this other guy."
Etc etc. It is however interesting that they bring it up all the time. When you think about it, the murder of one person, although tragic, affects far fewer people than say... politics. Science and technology. Even sport. Yet crime stories often get top billing.
At this point people usually come out with something about how crime sells and it's true that people find crime stories interesting. However, it doesn't really fit the definintion of news properly. So a murderer got caught... this is national news why exactly? What far-reaching implications does it have?
It's also worth noting that not all crime stories get equal coverage. Violent crimes get far more attention. Maybe it's because it's more dramatic. Who knows. But some violent crimes get more attention than others. What really distinguishes one murder from another? The vast majority of murders are men killing their wives/girlfriends. These tend to be reported far less than muggings/burglaries gone wrong or random acts of violence. Now it could because it's less common but random murders are still common enough that they don't deserve all the media attention they get. Similar thing with rapes/child molestation cases; the vast majority are by people you know, usually family members or close friends. Only rarely are people snatched off the street or it's a dodgy neighbour down the street.
The main effect of all these stories is to scare people. But not just scare them away from people in general but specfically to make them fear strangers. You're taught that the kids in hoodies could be muggers armed with knives, the neighbour down the street could be a paedophile, the man on the train could be a rapist.
I imagine you've heard a lot of this before; a scared population is an easily controlled population. But that doesn't explain it all. Why the fear of strangers?
Because it promotes individualism. It's hard to trust and cooperate with strangers when the media bombards you from childhood with scare stories about strangers. Why would you advocate community cohesion and cooperative social policies? The media teaches people to fear their fellow citizens. It doesn't teach you to care about people, to want to help the disadvantaged or that poor people are anything but criminals. Focusing on violent crime promotes right-wing agendas.
It leads to funny situations on the BBC news where they report on loads of violent crime and then have pieces wondering why there's a lack of community nowadays.
And anticipating that the media teaches you to have a proportionate fear of crime, it doesn't. Crime surveys and statistics routinely show (in the UK and I very much suspect the US too) that people think violent crime is far higher than it really is. It's actually been falling for years.
I also accept that it's possible it's just a coincidence and that it's just that violent crime is more dramatic and violent crime is even more dramatic but the end result is the same. I don't really think you can say it's beyond the media to do such a thing either...
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Meths's blogs, last updated : September 21, 2009
