Get The State OUT Of Marriage

Look at the trouble it’s causing. The gay “community” ( I always put ” community” in scare quotes nowadays ) want to call their partnerships marriages, and of course some people are all for it, and some are against it, but what they are all calling for without exception is for the all powerful state to change it’s mind about what a marriage is.

Well I’m sorry, but that’s bollocks.

A marriage is a contract between consenting adults. It is a promise to share lives and wealth until death, said in front of witnesses and associated paperwork signed and witnessed. The state has no business in dictating the terms of such a contract, dictating where it may be agreed to or dictating who may sign it. Full stop. (A libertarian may here interject that the State may have some role in enforcing contracts but I’m an anarchist, so they can bugger off).

This whole debate amounts to one side saying “please sir, please sir, those people want to say they’re married but I don’t WANT them to” and the other side saying “Oh, but SIR, you simply MUST agree that we can call it marriage too or it’s just so UNFAIR!” Grow the fuck up. You love each other so why do you care what sir thinks? Or the other crowd? Get the state OUT of marriage altogether and the whole debate simply fades away. Sign a contract, find somewhere to hire out to celebrate it (and somewhere else for a proper party afterwards ) and have done with it.

And don’t get me started on religious freedom. What about Muslims and Mormons and anyone else who fancies a bit of polygamy? I hear a lot about one man and one woman, two men or two women but what if you fancy two wives or three husbands? Or a wife, two bisexuals and a tranny? If they all agree then why shouldn’t they be able to enter into contract?  And call it marriage or whatever else they want?

And “advertising standards” can kiss my arse as well. It’s a contradiction in terms anyway. Next time you see “x% of y women agreed” do the maths, see if it comes out to a real number of women. That’s just more corporatism, right there.

Nature

"The distinction between natural and artificial is an artificial distinction."

I forget who said that, possibly Benjamin Hoff, but equally possibly someone else. I’m firmly of the opinion than Man would be a lot happier on this planet if he somehow stopped thinking of himself as being somehow seperate from nature. I’ve been a Taoist for a long time now, since I read The Tao Of Pooh in my teens, actually, and it has no doubt had some effect on my ending up as an anarchist. This post was inspired by Mark Wadsworth‘s comment on this post at Obnoxio’s place:

Agreed. This island could easily cope with a population of a couple of hundred million, we’d just have to organise ourselves properly.

Which is probably true, but what if we didn’t? I don’t believe there is any need to ‘control ourselves properly,’ not actively in any case, or to be more precise to submit a couple of hundred million people to control by a few hundred or thousand in order to manage the food and space and presumably universal healthcare and welfare needs of them all. Nature, and by that I mean the decisions made by several billion organisms seeking survival and then comfort en masse, would do all the controlling necessary. Granted, the population of Britain probably wouldn’t reach several hundred million, but that’s actually the point. Several hundred million people probably wouldn’t want to live here all at once, for a start. People that were here and didn’t like it would leave, and people that were thinking of coming would probably revise their plans and go somewhere less crowded. If the society was working well at that high a population figure then all well and good, but if there were a large number of poor, starving people then nature would once again step in, as various pathogens, scavenger animals and opportunist vermin bred to uncontrollable levels and cut the human population through disease. If the island was stuffed with hard-working, dilligent people creating wealth and producing goods and services that people elsewhere wanted to buy then it wouldn’t matter if every inch of Britain was stuffed with high-rise apartment buildings and offices (and factories- remember Beneath A Steel Sky? (Play it! It’s freeware!)) as we could buy in enough food and pay people to take away our waste… In all likelihood some balance of these scenarios would be in existence.

As Hoppe is fond of saying, arguments against immigrants overloading the welfare system (or welching off hard working Brits/Americans/Germans) are properly arguments againsat the welfare system. With no welfare system and no border controls (and no minimum wage, natch) the population of Britain would regulate itself.

I was going to put in lots more examples and so on, but I’m sure you get the drift. Well, you beter be. I’m off to download SCUMMVM.rpm and play Monkey Island.

I love stumbling on things while looking for other things. I guess the Amiga can go back up into Mum’s loft ;0)

Necro-Answer (Dinosaur Zombie Edition)

Ok, so sometimes I leave my RSS feeds unread- possibly unjustifiably in the case of Mr. Civil Libertarian, who I mentally classify as “posting videos” and therefore requiring some PC-time at a nebulous later date. Therefore, this rejoinder to his post This Post Contains Dinosaurs about the statist nature of large companies is largely out of date. Sorry about that.

Tesco, Wal-Mart, Kingfisher, Morrisons. Yes, they are all statist organisations, both in philosophy and in practice- in that they operate a highly authoritarian structure within themselves and also in that they support and benefit from the statist regulatory model. However, to attack these private organisations on the way that they conduct their private contracts (one-sided or otherwise) between themselves and the individuals who sell their labour to them is wrong-headed in my opinion.

By all means, to attack the companies on the relationships between themselves and national and supra-national govenrments- on W.E.E.E., the H.S.E., food hygiene licensing, mandatory battery recycling, the Minimum Wage and a host of other barriers to entry imposed in their favour by the Governments to which they cosy up. These arrangements are nothing more than Corporatism/Facism and deserve to be denounced as such. However, the internal structures of private companies are just that. Private- and of no concern to anybody but the signees of the employment contracts concerned. Employees of Tesco are not slaves- they have at any time the option to walk out of their job and attempt to gain employment elsewhere, or set up their own businesses, or join the “black economy” or even to go on Welfare. Nobody forces them at gunpoint to go to work in the morning- they are honouring a contract freely entered into by two Persons, the whole basis of Western Civilisation!

Despite all this enthusiasm for the authority of bosses and glorification of corporate power, I would argue that if the Right-Libertarians I refer to here were to actually advocate the the principles they claim they do, rather than continue to act in a knee-jerk, reactionary way to any policy or idea labelled “socialist” or “collectivist”, then they would quickly realize that freedom requires not just the removal of the State, but the active fight against those institutions that act like States too. To be a Libertarian, you must be against authority too; but there are those amongst us that fail to see those sources of authority that don’t stem directly from what we conventionally know as “The State”.

This being the section I most take issue with. Firstly, the removal of the State would in a large way go to stem the way these companies act- with fair competition both for customers and employees large companies would in no way be able to get away with the things they do. Secondly- to be a Libertarian is in no way to be against authority. Neither is to be an Anarchist. I am such, and yet I go to work every day, and for eight hours I do what my boss wants (he has authority over me in this respect) and in return I receive a princely sum for each of those eight hours. These were the terms I agreed to when I signed my contract, and I am free to terminate said contract at any time. I sell my submission to his authority for cash- I see no contradiction here. I also see no need to fight against such institutions. The root problem is the state- the state has created a situation and the market throws up the best setup for that situation. Change the situation, and change the market, it will evolve. That is what it does.

Emmanuel Goldstein Dead

So, it’s really official this time, Bin Laden is really (no really! This time he really is!) dead. Again.

Although, judging by the MSM column inches and continual 24-hour scrolling coverage this isn’t a story they’ll be using again, any time soon…

At least, I don’t think they think we’re that stupid.

Whether you believe (officially former) CIA asset Tim Osman was working for the USG the whole time, or was just a barely-leashed wolf gone renegade there is no denying how very useful he has been to those who love to destroy freedom. The post 9/11 world has been one long turn of a ratchet, with terrorism (a wholly new phenomenon never seen before 2001) being the prime driver for humiliating searches at airports, ever-more-authoritarian legislation and endless wars and Bin Laden, bogeyman supreme has popped up here and there with video and audio releases reminding us all what is at stake.

None of this will end now, of course. Terrorism will not stop overnight and there are plenty of henchmen ready to fill the space. Al Quaida -if it can be said to exist at all- is a franchise at most and an ideology at least. You can remove Colonel Sanders, you can bomb every KFC even, but fried chicken restaraunts will nonetheless pop up in every vacant shop.

Even if terrorists to a man held their hands up and said “Ok lads. The Sheik is dead, let’s all wrap in now,” the assaults on our freedom would continue unabated. They have AGW, financial crises and natural disasters aplenty. Cars that track your every move and meters that can restrict your ‘excessive’ energy use are born not of terrorism but Green Issues.

A Very Bad Man is dead, and I’ll not shed a tear, but I’m not expecting any good to come of it.

The Right?

According to Sky News, William Hague has “urged the Egyptian leaders to protect the right of people to carry out peaceful protests.”

Is this the right right?

It may be that “people” have “the right” to carry out peaceful protests… but this statement comes with the assumption that “rights” are something “allowed” by the government. The assumption being, therefore, that you are allowed to protest against the government, so long as you do it peacefully and therefore presumably agree that your protest, while being noted, is entirely within the gift of the very thing you protest against to decide whether your protest is valid or not. A bit like raising a grievance at work… it’s up to the bosses to decide whether they are being bastards, but with the vital difference that you are entirely free to tell work to stick their fucking job should you believe they aren’t taking you seriously.

Of course, as those settled on the liberty side of the axis, we may argue rather differently. Rights, not being something granted (with caveats) by the government but instead our birthright as human beings we may not accept that protests must be “peaceful.” Why should they? The government of the day, simply by levying taxes has violated the non-aggression axiom and has done so far more severely in the case of a government like Egypt’s. When the people of a place have decided that those who pretend to leadership must go, then upon refusal are they merely to say “Ok then”? Is this as far as their “rights” extend?
Try telling George Washington that.

So Where Am I Now?

First off, apologies for the lack of postings of late, I have been experiencing a malaise in creative thought and my leisure time has been mostly filled with what can best be described as dicking about, with the insides of my Android phone first of all, which re-kindled my love of dicking about in general… I’m now writing this from a Linux distro installed and running from the memory on my old phone… neatly by-passing the problem of deleting Windows from Mrs. Wh00ps’ old laptop.

I do intend to rectify this in the new year.

So where am I? Well, like Vladimir, the Coalition government took the wind out of my sails for a little while, acting almost completely as I expected (i.e. no different from Labour, just in nicer suits) and, like he I went into thought-experiment mode. The directions we took are somewhat different: his away from libertarianism and into Rule Of Law Statism and mine further away from statism and further into fully-fledged anarchism.

It has become apparent to me, that government -like a cancer or a parasite- needs to be entirely eradicated, rather than attempted to be contained as a minarchist would argue. You can’t have a minimal cancer or some constitutionally limited fleas and the idea of doing the same with the state will inevitably fail. The job of governance attracts bureaucrats, and bureaucrats like to expand their power and influence, and once the heady days of revolution fade and We The People stop paying attention (which is, after all, what they are supposedly paying the bureaucrats so that they can do) the slow-slow ratchet of increased governmental power will begin all over again. It may take a couple of centuries to progress from John Hancock to Barack Obama but the route is well-travelled.

Whether it is achievable is another question entirely. Certainly doing away with the state by method of revolution is a non-starter: the chaos and uncertainty inevitably attracts people to whoever promises stability, and that invariably will hand the reins to another kind of statist rather than doing away with the reins altogether. We’d end up in more or less the same place we are now (or worse) with the added disadvantages of thousands dead and massive destruction of infrastructure and property. How to get there is a question that still remains unanswered.

But where is “there?” Perhaps before we decide on our vehicle we should decide on our destination. My preferred place would be somewhere with no state whatsoever. No welfare, no NHS, no regulations and no police. I understand that this will be where I part company from many of the people I read and respect and while I understand why minimal-state people may wish to retain so-called “essential” functions such as courts, police and defence I am now firmly of the belief that even these functions put us firmly back on the road to total control by bureaucracies. How I envision society functioning in such a scenario will be the subject of my next post.

The British People?

Seeing this morning that the ASA has banned a Tesco advert promising ‘fresh baked bread from scratch’ in its stores my initial thought was “fair enough,” but when I read further down the page this statement from the “Real Bread Campaign working party Chairman” Iain Loe:

We believe that this ruling sends an important message to unscrupulous advertisers: if you plan to hide or distort the facts in an attempt to draw customers away from small, independent bakeries that make an honest living baking honest loaves, the people of Britain won’t stand for it.’

The “People of Britain? Really? It seems to me that if this were true there would be no need for a “Real Bread Campaign” (as opposed to the imaginary bread, presumably phase-shifted 90° onto the j axis, foisted on us by eeevil corporations)  as the Great British Public would already be buying all their bread from little (real) bakeries.

Incidentally, the Campaign For Real Bread or whatever it’s called is part of Sustain , a charity with many branches devoted to global warming, organic food and other right-on causes.

Hear Hear, Lord Tebbit

Assuming you haven’t already, go here to read Norman Tebbit’s piece on the terrible state of manners in modern society. He wonders whether sportsmen’s poor showing on the fields and the media in general are part of the cause or a symptom.

Me, I believe that its a vicious circle, the starting of which is lost in the mists of time. There are things on tv now that would simply not have been concievable even as recently as a decade ago. Take Spartacus: Blood and Sand ( apologies for the poor linking , it’s a factor of the Android WordPress app) currently showing on the Bravo channel. Swearing, sex, full frontal (male and female) nudity… and graphic violence although that aspect has been acceptable for longer, but sex and nudity on that scale would have been taken off the air immdiately in the days of Mary Whitehouse, if it had even been attempted at all. As the boundries get pushed, people grow to accept the new ones, to the point where a tv series can be more explicit several times a week than a couple of scenes in a feature film like Last Tango  In Paris caused a huge stir with not so long ago, to virtually no fuss whatsoever.

The same holds true for Lord Tebbit’s point about manners. Can you imagine the outcry and fainting old ladies if the 1966 World Cup team had behaved in the way we take for granted now? With each little spit or dive or temper tantrum we expect a little less from our heroes, and a little less from ourselves.

We can’t expect (or at least we shouldn’t) the tv networks to refuse to show explicit sex and violence, or edit out spitting footballers and tantruming tennis players: tv networks show what people want to see (as demonstrated by ratings) and any other model is a recipe for tyranny. Bans and campaigns to have things taken off the air are both ideologically wrong (from a freedom of speech point of view) and unlikely to work in the long term, as the eighties and nineties showed.

As to manners, the only way to re-start the virtuous circle is to use them, become aghast when people don’t use them, teach our children to use them ( note to chavs: this doesn’t mean making them weak. Both the Krays and Ted Bundy were notoriously well-mannered. Common sense is required) and most importantly (and most difficultly) to build a society where people respect.each other. That involves a society in which people rely on and trust each other, a society where people are charitable and a society where people are not afraid to step in and help their neighbours for fear of prosecution. 

So how do we get there? For a start, such a society needs people to be free. People can’t be charitable without being free from  forced charity. All the while the State takes such a huge chunk of our hard-earned and gives it to ‘charities’ and ‘unfortunates’ then people are poorer (financially) and are both less able and less willing to give to either charitable organisatons or neighbours-in-need, making society poorer (morally) as a result. People need to be free to help. That means being able to approach a lost child without the fear of being labelled a paedophile. That means the freedom to defend a woman being attacked without the worry of her attacker pressing assault charges and it means, yes, the freedom to shoot, stab or bludgeon a burglar. In short. It requires that the State does not resent you defending yourself.

To respect each other, people need to value each other. As the State has the monopoly on force (meaning people look to the State’s forces rather than their neighbours to defend them), the monopoly on charity (meaning people look to the State to help them in times of financial difficulty rather than their friends and family) and the monoply on looking out for the cheeeldren (meaning people are more likely to ring social services than risk stepping in themselves) people are always helping each other at one remove -via the state- and until that changes society will continue to fragment.

The overarching state is the mother of ill manners, as it is so much else.

This Shouldn’t Be Illegal

Not just because I don’t mind burgers and porn (although putting them together isn’t something I’d have thought of).
Two lads have a fantastic promotional idea (free porn with orders over a fiver!) and are promptly prosecuted. What public purpose is served? It was obviously not offending anyone as it was by all accounts a successful business (with it’s own Facebook appreciation group!) so the only thing I can think of is that it was pirate porn, although this hasn’t been mentioned.

The pair didn’t have food licenses but I would argue that licenses are unnecessary anyway as burger vans that make people sick quickly get reputations (especially outside pubs and clubs where everybody talks) and lose custom.

One wonders what would have happened if the owners had held the correct licenses and held their porno promotion. As they’ve been bailed while the police decide on charges I’m betting the outcome would have been the same.

Stupefaction

As if it wasn’t bad enough that perry had become ‘pear cider’ the next logical progression is to designate actual, proper cider as ‘apple cider.’

Argh!