Ugh I have to say I find the recurring complaint that Brendan O’Neill/Spiked is “contrarian” and doesn’t have a “positive vision” for societal (dis)organisation increasingy tiresome. I think it cuts to the heart of the question of what people are *really* trying to achieve when they talk politics on the internet. This is my favourite recent work of his. brendanoneill.co.uk/post/47866744738/is-science-becoming-a-new-religion It doesn’t in conclusion specify which government programme must be dismantled. It doesn’t explicate what political manoeuvres the “classical iberal” faction of the LNP should undertake as a result. It doesn’t help answer how courts of law can be kept at arm’s length from the tyranny of the majority in anarchtopia. Hell, it even negligently omits to spell out the unavoidable conclusion that all climate change science ever published is obviously crap! What it does do is add some intellectual ballast to the sloganeering which seems more often preferred. It provides the bridge between the abstract of rhetoric and the here-and-now of political issues existing in real time. To whit, “Politics suffers because it becomes more rigid. It is hard to have a serious democratic debate about a course of action when that course of action is described as the correct, scientific thing to do.” “And science suffers because it inevitably becomes polluted, I think.” “The worst thing is that politicians’ increasing reliance on science, and some scientists’ willingness to go along with this, shrinks the space for public, mass engagement in policymaking.” Among all the libertarian-leaning earnest discussion, semantic point-scoring, joke-trolling, joke-troll-shaming, tedious repetition and brilliant insight which I have read, I have never read this simple clear and profound series of points made anywhere else. But it needs to be said. And all the thousands of quips which I have read on climate change to me sound vacuous in their absence. O’Neill, unlike Rothbard, has not probed all the philisophical permutations of the contention that children should be considered their parents’ property. He hasn’t to my knowledge come out in favour or opposition to the libertarian battle cry that all welfare should be dismantled. Thank goodness- it seems to have left him free to “be contrarian” about real issues in the real world.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 05:26:12 +0000
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