Telling People What to Do, and Who to Listen To: Liberals or Conservatives?

I must say that when the following popped into my cerebral inbox, it was received half as an attempt to distract, and half as a lickspittle underling: dance, boy, dance! Now dance me another dance!

'i have a question for you - why is liberalism better than fundamental conservatism? what does freedom to do whatever you want have on being told by others what to do? when you get the freedom you do whatever you want and then feel like shit and realize you screwed up anyway, and either find a cause to fight against to distract yourself or try to put all the blame on them. its all distraction. you have the freedom, now what? life still seems pretty meaningless doesnt it? i really dont see the difference between them telling me what to do conservatively and you liberally. youre both telling me what to do. though i dont mind you doing so if you do it in the comfort of your own home and not in my face.'

Fortunately (sadly?), I've got far too powerful an ego to conform to such perceptions, and far too much pride to resist the urge to talk about myself.

Let us clarify a couple of things here:

Liberalism
I suspect that 'liberalism' has a different definition in Northern America than it does in Australia. This is a minor problem; a much larger one is that I suspect that 'liberalism' has a vastly different meaning in Gwain's mind than it does in mine. So without taking the time to determine what the different definitions are, let's instead use mine: liberalism is the notion of individual freedom. It is not a philosophy to which I whole-heartedly subscribe.

Conservatism
Conservatism in my usage is the notion that there are certain fundamental values which are so self-evidently good that they should never be changed. It is not a philosophy to which I whole-heartedly subscribe.

I endeavour to extract elements of both and subsume them into a coherent personal philosophy. It is an ongoing and fascinating task.

On freedom
I endorse the notion that we should have some individual liberty. I like to feel as if I am making decisions and actively participating in my own existence, and do not like feeling as if my behaviour is being enforced and that I am passively enduring my own existence. My endorsement of individual liberty stops at the point where individual liberty unreasonably encroaches upon the happiness of others. For example:

- An individual's desire for the freedom to rape children is not a freedom I endorse.

- An individual's desire to accumulate and maintain power at the unreasonable expense of the happiness of others, and to exercise that power at the unreasonable expense of the happiness of others, is not a freedom I endorse.

- An individual's desire to carry a concealed handgun is not a freedom I endorse.

On conservation
I endorse the notion that we should conserve and maintain certain fundamental values. The destruction of these values, as most conservatives contend, can lead to the degeneration of a functional society. For example:

- The understanding that consenting adults may safely and privately pursue their own sex life is a fundamental value I would see conserved.

- The understanding that nobody deserves to be tortured or executed is a fundamental value I would see conserved.

- The understanding that all people deserve equality before the law I would see conserved.

On Telling People What to Do
At this point in my life, I don't aspire for more personal freedom. I'm lucky enough to be included amongst the 'freest' people in the world: I live in a secular liberal western democracy, I am university educated, I am employed, I am male, I am white. On the whole, nobody tries to enforce my behaviour. The only organisation which does (and to which I am largely bound to obey) is the state. I can see how the state has a role enforcing behaviour, such as when the collective individual liberties of a minority (eg. the desire to rape children) obfuscate the collective individual liberties of a majority (eg. the desire of children not to be raped and the desire of parents not to have their children raped). On the whole, I think it is not inherently good for the state to enforce behaviour, and the operation of the state requires constant vigilance from its citizens, who are obliged to object when the state oversteps its mandate to enforce behaviour. In my opinion this is a workable (but not unproblematic) mode of existence, not least because it is open to the notion of change, and in particular to the notion of the transfer and devolution of power.

There are certain institutions which seek to enforce behaviour without a popular mandate, without consultation with its constituents, and without recourse to the possibility of devolving power. Some examples of such institutions are certain organised religions, tyrannies, and totalitarian states. These institutions invest and seek to consolidate power in a small minority, who enforce the behaviour of the majority according either to doctrine, or to nothing more than their own unaccountable whim. In my opinion, these are unlikely to be workable modes of existence, as they resist the notion of change, and in particular the notion of the transfer and devolution of power. They will often oppress, sometimes with violence, those who endorse the notion of the transfer and devolution of power.

On Who to Listen To
The purpose of all this is to establish sufficient individual freedom and the conservation of sufficient fundamental values that each of us is able to decide for ourselves what the purpose and meaning of life is. I personally dislike the notion of being told what the purpose and meaning of my life is. That is nobody's decision but mine. Hence, I find the notion of telling others what the purpose and meaning of their lives are to be highly oppressive and totally unnecessary. Unfortunately, it is not the case that everybody has sufficient individual freedom and the conservation of sufficient fundamental values that they might decide what the purpose and meaning of their lives are. This is the motivating principle of my political activities.

liberals

in part canadians dislike the style that accompanies the colour red, the liberal party's official colour. red things jump in your eyes, they attack your cattle, they flow from your veins when striken. but most of all they: stand for nothing? allow gay marriage? get caught up in scandals? take bribes like in most normal third world countries? often make up the government (and people love to hate the powers that be)? perhaps stand for nothing (that ever-present evil of canadian culture: middle of the road indisdinctness often mistaken for tolerance)?

canada votes (from time to time): in answer to a stimulating overview of politics down below

in canada there are political parties much like in australia. we owe much to the british for the general construction of the political process, and on the surface it appears that we owe them much for the general spirit as well. but this was before the eighties, when we were finally granted the right to vote. until that time the red coats reserved that right for themselves. for many years people had been arguing it was wrong to let some old chap in worchestershire decide what would be happening in saskatchewan, but it wasnt until the end of hard rock and the arrival of bryan adams that canadians decided upon the reckless step of self governement they have been rueing ever since.
the liberals (variously now as liberals, whigs, and something else that slips the mind)
usually make up a very slight majority government not because the country loves them, but more because it often appears that the other parties cant tie their own shoes (to use the vernacular of the people.) the common canadian is dying to see another party in power.
continue to make up the government (with the present term excepted) on the strength of the population of ontario. outside of ontario the average canuck deeply despises the liberals because they are, as the name suggests, quite liberal.
the conservatives (known sometimes as tories, or right wing crazies)
havent been very popular with the average man (though they make up the present minority government) since the eighties of this century when they pushed through the north american free trade agreement despite the fact every single canadian threatened to be angry if they did. also unpopular in central canada (ontario especially) because they can be seen as a religious - evangelical Christian - party, mainly representative of western style (saskatchewan, alberta, british columbia)hillbillies. the eastern and central canadian hillbilly is decidedly secular.
the ndp or new democrats (socialists)
always win a few seats on the strength of their popularity amongst the students, the ageing hippies, and the working poor
the bloc quebecois
stand mainly for whats best for quebec (which is sometimes portrayed as canada ceasing to exist.) quite popular in quebec. less popular outside of quebec where they do not run candidates. they have even been known to form the official opposition in parliament, much the chagrin of english speaking canadians.

Australia Votes 07: Who's Wearing What?

As we don’t have fixed-terms here in Australia, it’s up to the PM to call the election. Once he does so, everyone will fly into a tizz because they have only 6 weeks left to decide what they’ll wear on polling day. Polling day itself is on a Saturday, so there’s a broad range to choose from – no work gear necessary, but anything else other than stark nakidity goes. On this side of the Yarra, most opt for the traditional ‘tracksuit and t-shirt’ ensemble, with greens thongs and the occasional denim jacket. Over on the far side they probably wear roopelt coats with glimmery shirts made of newborn babyskin and hollowed out stoats for shoes.

On polling day, I’ll be wearing the onitsuka tigers (we form the brains-trust of the branch), some light slacks for the warm weather, and probably an ill-fitting Greens t-shirt (preferably black, not white). I gotta fang round Broady and surrounds in a car, making sure everything is popping off all Greenlike and sorting disputes and generally being the Commander in the Chariot, like I was born to be.

Afterwards, I’ll probably duck home for a shower and a loosey before throwing on something suitably summery yet alluring - maybe a shirt with a horse on it, although I don't really like horses, so maybe I should trust my instinct and go for a shirt with a dragon on it - and head off to wherever the election night party is. Hoping to sink piss and watch the votes roll in, but suspect I’ll collapse in a heap after two beers.

Australia Votes 07: Who's Voting for Whom?

Over here in democratic Australia we have the great fortune to choose from more than one or two political parties. Virtually any bloke and his dog can and does enter a candidate in the polls. Happily, most Australians are smart enough not to vote for any bloke and his dog, so there’s a lot of parties who end up getting as near as zero votes as a political could care to and still call themselves a political party with a modicum of self-respect. A few examples: ‘Pauline’, the party run solely on the personality of an inbred red-neck quincelander. Her policies: eject the gooks, kill the boongs, burn the poofs and more lamingtons for everybody. There’s also the Citizens’ Electoral Council, who are hamstrung every election by the fact that they are a front-organisation for Lyndon LaRouche but are so incredibly embarrassed by this fact that they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge their connection, and hence won’t publish their policies.

The Libs
Only selfish wankers vote for the Libs. In fact, in order to vote for the Libs, you have to be a proudly and pompously selfish wanker, otherwise you can vote for the ALP. The Libs have been in government for 11 years, during which time they’ve fiddled about, slapped each others’ backs, snorted champagne froth out of their noses while giggling, and counted their money and then counted it again. Every now and then they are rather vexingly required to obtain a mandate to govern from the Australian population: this usually sees them cooking up the most unlikely prophecies of doom, scurrilously spreading these prophecies throughout their extensive media networks, then sitting back and watching the voters from aspirational middle-Australia come scurrying into the polling booth while casting fearful glances left and right, feverishly scratching a ‘1’ into the Libs box, begging for interest rates and the blacks to be kept down all the while. It’s easy to dislike the Libs, but it’s much easier to dislike the idiots who willingly swallow their dubious tales of impending doom.

Prospect: look set to lose in a landslide. After 11 years of pathetic compliance, the voting population seem to have woken up and decided they’re not happy about being lied to, that really they didn’t know they were being lied to the whole time (honest!), and that they’re going to punish somebody for it.

The Nats
Only red-necks and hypocrites vote for the Nats. The Libs and the Nats invariably join together to form a coalition of government. While the Libs appeal to the merchant bankers (for money) and the aspirational urban middle class (for votes), the Nats appeal to wealthy livestock holders (for money) and rural farmers (for votes). The ostensible strangeness of this coalition is that while the Libs are supposed to endorse free trade, the Nats are totally consumed with maintaining their agrarian socialist stranglehold on Australia’s farming industry. But in fact the coalition does makes sense: the Libs are trying to help wealthy city folk become wealthier, the Nats are trying to help wealthy country folk become wealthier. Traditional Nats voters are beginning to wake up to the fact that it is not in their own best interest to try to run farms in a nation perpetually beset by crippling drought and simultaneously obtain parliamentary representation from a party which denies the existence anthropomorphic climate change. Expect to see an about-face on climate change from the Nats soon, along with a startling remedy for their constituents (‘You all need to be given more money’).

Prospect: same as it ever was – they’ll get sweet fuck all of the votes overall, but they’ll get enough votes in key areas to secure seats, and exercise influence well beyond their numerical representation.

The ALP
Only panic-merchants and weirdos vote for the ALP. These are the guys whom everybody with a skerrick of conscience wants to see in government, but they are notoriously bad at getting their act together, and inevitably calculate the reason for their electoral losses as ‘we’re not enough like the Libs’ rather than ‘we didn’t get our act together’. So the ALP are in a perpetual slide to the right, but nobody is sure whether they are following votes or whether they are dragging voters with them. Everybody hopes that once the ALP get in, they’ll move back to their progressive, left-wing philosophical roots; everybody expects that they will become ‘conservatism with a human face’ – which is to say, they’ll do everything the current government does, but they’ll acknowledge climate change and sign Kyoto, and they’ll stop locking people up in detention centres in the desert because they have the temerity to be notWhite and notChristian. It is in fact logically impossible to be a decent person and vote for the ALP on their current policies, but most ALP-voters are well-practised in the art of ethical contortion.

Prospect: look set to shit their way to victory in a landslide – astonishingly, this will be thanks to the fact that most voters hate the Libs industrial relations policy, even though the ALP’s industrial relations policy is virtually the same.

The Greens
Only sensible people and champions vote for the Greens. That’s why the Greens poll about 9% - everyone else in the country is insane or a loser. Garner lots of votes from left-leaning inner-urban voters who are big on climate change, human rights, free education, effective public transport, and consistently good cafe latte. Also garner a few votes from hardcore, deep green environmentalists but far more from whackos and eccentrics who have their own deeply-held fascination with something obscure which they believe the Greens may champion (and probably will, so long as they get the vote). Rumoured to be ‘communists’, who will give away free drugs and force everyone to ride bicycles and eat vegetables if they win.

Prospect: did look to maintain their perpetual 9% and maybe scrape in a senator or two, but whispers are that they may reap the unionised benefit of being the only party to present an industrial relations policy which looks to defend the rights of the employee rather than line the pocket of the employer.

Family First
Only twisted sickos vote for Family First. This is the religious fundamentalist party. Nobody is quite sure what their policies are, least of all them. They don’t like poofs and lesos, that’s for sure – last election one of their candidates endorsed a policy of burning lesbians at the stake. And they’re not into single-parent families, or even separated families- you gotta go nuclear all the way, or you’re just ain’t the real deal. Women in their place and men wear the pants. FF voters must be Christians, by which I mean evangelists. They’re really not into non-Christians, but they are prepared to countenance the existence of black people, so long as they’re evangelists and live in the south. Oh yeah, they’re big time into money. The more the better – well, the more the holier. FF voters are largely derived from those evangelist mega-Churches, where you get told that ‘to get rich is divine’. The ‘family’ in Family First is a reference to the overlords who run this show from behind the scenes. Now those guys are rich.

Prospect: these guys can barely poll 1%, so they don’t even qualify as a real political party. But here’s the rub – they’ve got members in marginal seats, so they can negotiate with the big boys: we’ll give you OUR lower house preferences, if you give us YOUR upper house preferences. And thus Family First will sew up at least one senator, if not three or four, and retard the political progression of this nation for years to come, but at least we’ll have good singers.

voting!? about what? what could you possibly want to vote about?! in all serisouness, what do you mean? do you reallly vote?

Ma politique, tic tac, c'est l'attaque

La politique, en gros, en tres GROS, c'est la guerre.

tjsdf

after waking up this morning, i dashed straight into the bathroom - maybe there was someone in there. but there wasnt. so then i scrambled and dashed into the kitchen - maybe id catch them in there. but i didnt. so i dashed back into the room, and since no one was in there, got dressed and dashed out the door. on my way out the door i started to think about politics - about how everything is political, and how the only reason i was dashing here and there was because of the indoctrination id received - wed all received - as children and as adults, and i dashed down the stairs, hearing a door opening and trying to catch the bastard before he got out.

The Importance of Politics

'All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some deomon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.'

George Orwell, 'Why I Write', 1946

this bleak state of abandonment

and if life helps now and then with terrors that transcend the parrot-wisdom of banal experience, the the petty bourgeios mentality despairs.
candidate A despairs. we wont name his name, but we might be called upon to add that he hails from somewhere in the general direction of the antipodes. and as we said he despairs because he has no reason to say what he says nor believe what he believes. to be quite accessible: though he should say he believes in his cultures altruism he hates everyone and is nice only when in fear or awe. and in wardly he despairs.
candidate B also despairs. neither will we unmask his name, but we will note that judging from his speech he seems to be from the nearer corners of the european continent, possibly from the parts that speak a pure romantic tongue. and he despairs because to unfocus is to find hilarity and to focus is to find emptiness that needs filling and practice at a pursuit. in other words, that the cistern of his is empty at the moment and to focus is to start again from zero. it is a situation rife with despair.
and finally candidate C. does he despair? of course! but his situation is much closer to the one in which the patient tells the doctor he is sick. it does not mean he necessarily is. though to find he werent would be tantamount to despair. so naturally he is. and he is from nowhere.