Well, I use ‘writer’ in the loosest possible sense, but the end result is the same: I have nothing to say.
Update.
You know what it is? I’m sick to the back teeth of politics. I’m sick of politicians. Labour? Brown? How did I ever imagine, for a second, that they were worth writing about? Worth caring about? There’s got to be more to life than this, surely?
I’m simply overwhelmed. We live in a highly risk-averse society, full of fear and threats. Liberty is to ‘normal’ people what leaving home is to a pre-teen. It’s not something to be looked forward to – it’s something to be dreaded and feared.
The majority doesn’t value liberty, they value security. They don’t value freedom – they value safety.
I accidently looked up at the mountain and now I don’t know what to write.
Oranjepan said...
17 Jun 09 at 1:33 am
Less politics, more policies. Less comment, more analysis.
James D said...
17 Jun 09 at 3:02 am
Well, if all else fails, you could always write a constitution based upon liberty…
Oh, and I think you’re stretching the definition of “afternoon” to breaking point. But maybe “late night quickies” doesn’t have quite the same ring about it…
Tiberius Leodis said...
17 Jun 09 at 3:31 am
“Liberty is to ‘normal’ people what leaving home is to a pre-teen. It’s not something to be looked forward to – it’s something to be dreaded and feared.”
Very, very true.
There is an excellent book by Erich Fromm called ‘Fear Of Freedom’ (’Escape From Freedom’ in US) which examines this roots of this issue, and how it is exploited in Western societies. It was written about 50 years ago but the arguements are still very relevant today.
You’re a very good writer, and that quote perfectly sum up (for me) what a blog like this should be about.
T.
Mark Reckons said...
17 Jun 09 at 8:42 am
Well I for one hope you are back blogging soon. I very much enjoy your posts when you are active and we need people with strongly held views who can write articulately like yourself in the blogosphere. The web would be a poorer place without you Charlotte.
I don’t really believe you don’t care. I think your last comment sums up the problem but all we can do is fight from our own little corners and do it a step at a time.
I sometimes feel the same as you have described about electoral reform (my personal hobby horse as you might have noticed!) like the weight of the world is against me and it is so hard to get people engaged with the subject. The best way I have found though is to keep plugging away. Maybe post about a few other things but then come back to it later.
Wayne Lawrence said...
17 Jun 09 at 10:20 am
I hope your back to blogging soon too Charlotte. From my classical liberal point of view, your blogs are some of the most insightful I have read.
“The majority doesn’t value liberty, they value security. They don’t value freedom – they value safety.”
This is true and illustrates the counter-intuitive conclusion from Game Theory that people are more motivated by fear of loss than by prospect of gain. This can be loss of money, influence, status, credit, whatever.
When folks believe they have too much to lose, they’ll put up with all sorts of nonsense. When they believe they have nothing left to lose is when there are revolutions.
It’s the root psychology behind the pseudo-Keynesian policy responses of Labour to the current recession (bastardized though it is).
Maybe that’s what Tiberius’ book is about too?
The Tories and more particularly Labour are masters of framing debate in this manner in their sleazy gradualist fashion, whereas Lib Dems generally aren’t.
To get through to the security and safety muppets, we civil libertarians need to frame our arguments with game theory in mind. As I said, it’s counter-intuitive and can be negative. Logic and eloquent argument won’t do by themselves, we need to use the dark side of the force too, as a means to an end.
As such it probably goes against the grain of most freedom loving Lib Dems, it can be extremely tiresome; but the alternative is increasing Orwellianization of the UK.
Freedom lovers can’t let that happen and we need you. I reckon what Mark Reckons – “post about a few other things but then come back to it later”.
Matthew Huntbach said...
17 Jun 09 at 10:52 am
The majority doesn’t value liberty, they value security. They don’t value freedom – they value safety.
Yes. Is that the sound of the penny dropping?
But, and here’s the crucial point, only in your definition of “liberty”, which is a narrow one.
This is perhaps like a younger me when the penny dropped and I realised most people didn’t want to “take power for themselves” when that meant attending endless meetings running things. What the heck – even I didn’t want to attend all those meetings running things, and I was a councillor who had some duty and was paid some allowance to do so.
OK, to move forward, you need to realise that for many people, security is part of liberty. When one is secure, one can more easily plan ahead in life, making those plans for things that interest you, knowing those things that don’t interest you won’t change and mess up your plans. When there are familiar secure things one can rely on, one is more certain about how to use them and move forward. When it’s all insecurity and uncertainty which you call “liberty”, people feel lost and helpless. We don’t all want to be active participants in a market just like we don’t all want to be active members of committees running things. We don’t want to have to think about boring things or be made to do so by “libertarians” who think that’s good for us so want a society where we’re forced to do so. We do want the boring things done for us so we can get on with the things we find interesting.
Charlotte Gore said...
17 Jun 09 at 11:11 am
Matthew,
My definition of liberty doesn’t include things that aren’t liberty. Being in the majority doesn’t make you right, it makes you the problem.
Charlotte Gore said...
17 Jun 09 at 11:22 am
Actually sorry that was needlessly harsh of me. What you say about what ‘we’ want is spot on, you’re right. That’s how most people think. ‘Liberty’ is ‘Freedom from Responsibility’ which, as I’m sure you can appreciate, can never be a universal thing. Whenever you remove a responsibility from one person that responsibility doesn’t just disappear – it is transferred to someone else.
Your definition of liberty means infringing on the liberty of one group for the benefit of your group and you do it by force and you do it using the collective power of the majority.
The problem is where do you stop? Take, take, take, take, take, take until there’s nothing left to take? Who do you shift the responsibility onto then? Who pays then?
You might be thrilled with it. You might thing it’s great. You might, in fact, be confident that there’s nothing anyone can do to change this. You’re probably not wrong.
Wayne Lawrence said...
17 Jun 09 at 11:35 am
Whoa there Matthew,
Being a loose there with definitions of security and liberty I think.
Freedom and free markets and safety and security are not mutually exclusive as you’ve implied. In fact security in the western world is utterly dependent on markets. The more you disincentivise marketeers (by robbing from them in the form of undue and excess taxation, and excessive regulation [and please note the use of the word "excessive"]) the less secure everybody is. Disincentivise enough and nobody will want to be active in markets.
The truth is, whether or not people like to admit it, we are ALL involved in markets every day. Free markets are not just commercial paper, stocks and high finance, free markets go all the way down to flogging fruit and veg on the side of the road… and yes, the supply of your labour to a company or public body. Some of those markets have become synthetic via socialist policies, but nobody can remove themselves completely from markets altogether… unless you want to live in a cave and eat snails, roots and berries.
There seems to be the disingenuous suggestion that libertarian’s form of liberty is in fact anarchy. Not so.
Classical liberals argue that security is enhanced by liberty. My observation is that in this nanny, welfare, surveillance and punishment based state, there is a general sense of unhappiness and unease. People are miserable and angry, and that was before the greatest debt bubble the world has ever known popped (incidentally a bubble blown from govt and central bank intervention, NOT laissez faire economics as has been fraudulently misrepresented by those of the left).
Feeling of “security” are largely psychological, refer to game theory as posted above.
Ian B said...
17 Jun 09 at 12:15 pm
Sorry to read this post Charlotte, but I know the feeling.
Reading Matthew’s comment, I think one thing I feel as a libertarian is that the idea of the burden of liberty is mistaken in a real sense; that is, we all sometimes want somebody else to deal with things, and feel a libertarian society would make us work too hard to look after ourselves. But I don’t think that’s true.
The reality of the statist societies we now live in is that they are an enormous burden on people- we get laden down with taxes and regulations (the stress of council tax is huge for poorer people for instance), with form filling and bureaucracy (including corporatist bureaucracy like the nightmares people get into with utility companies, and I can speak on that personally), and these can soak up enormous amounts of effort. I think it’s part of the reason we are so “beaten” as a people. Everyone is just having to struggle so hard just to keep going. The problem is that all this stress is coming from myriad, diffuse sources so it’s hard to pin the blame anywhere. The more intrusive the machinery around us becomes, the more we have to do.
As an anecdote- as a young man I was a typical “employee” and felt the same fear of the idea of “casualisation” of work- that is losing the sense of security of a guaranteed job. Then later on in life, through circumstance, I ended up doing agency work. I went into it fearfully, and hoping it would lead rapidly to a job. But once I’d done it a short while, I found the opposite; I refused every job I was offered (pretty much everywhere I worked) and began to pity the full-timers trapped like insects in amber in their safe, underpaid jobs that they were all genuinely terrified of losing. I felt genuinely freer- I had more real, pesonal liberty, even if I didn’t have the illusory “freedom” of a “safe job”. And I found the same with other agency workers I knew too. We didn’t want the supposed security of being trapped in an indefinite contract. If the assignment was crap, you just picked up your toolbox and left, basically. The experience had a very significant effect on my thinking in general and changing it from somewhat-lefty to liberty.
Okay, so I’m just waffling. But I think the single biggest problem libertarians have is that we can only talk about liberty abstractly because most people have never really experience very much. It’s like offering freedom to the inmates of an institution… you open the doors and beckon them outside, but they stay inside, scared that leaving means nobody will make them jam roly-poly on tuesdays.
Charlotte Gore said...
17 Jun 09 at 12:22 pm
Indeed
Matthew Huntbach said...
17 Jun 09 at 1:38 pm
Your definition of liberty means infringing on the liberty of one group for the benefit of your group and you do it by force and you do it using the collective power of the majority.
And your definition of liberty means you believe somewhere like Denmark is the most oppressive unpleasant country in the world, and the people there must be feel bitterly enslaved and be flocking to move to somewhere truly free like Somalia or Afghanistan where the evil state has almost entirely broken down.
I don’t hold the social democratic states of northern Europe to be the ideal model, but I think the idea that they are cruelly lacking in freedom more so than anywhere else is ridiculous, yet it is a necessary corollary of what you write.
The problem is where do you stop? Take, take, take, take, take, take until there’s nothing left to take? Who do you shift the responsibility onto then? Who pays then?
You might be thrilled with it. You might thing it’s great.
I think it might help if you assume people you disagree with hold their opinions through genuine conviction and not through evil personal motivations which they hide when they say something else.
I may be wrong, you may be wrong, but we’re never going to get anywhere if we both assume we’re so rightety-right that anyone who disagrees with us must secretly really agree with us and only says what they say out of other ulterior motives.
Ian B said...
17 Jun 09 at 2:41 pm
And your definition of liberty means you believe somewhere like Denmark is the most oppressive unpleasant country in the world, and the people there must be feel bitterly enslaved and be flocking to move to somewhere truly free like Somalia or Afghanistan where the evil state has almost entirely broken down.
That’s a bit hyperbolic Matthew
I think something worse considering is that individuals’ perceptions of the state they live in rely quite heavily on their personal experience with it. For example; if some country were a generally free one except it had a strict and enforced sodomy law, that may feel like quite a nice place to live for most people, but like a police state to gays.
So I think people are turning towards libertarian thought when the various restraints characteristic of social democracies are aimed at them. For instance the fifth of the population of smokers, who have been made outcasts by law and subject to inspectors and secret police; if you’re not a smoker you may prefer this, but to the smoker this regime feels tyrannical. Likewise a small businessperson will feel the relentless press of regulation more than those in the large corporate sector, and more than people who are employees, or unemployed etc. Or to a person who arrives at school to collect their child, to find that child has been taken into care by the authorities, then find the child is lost to them as they fight a maze of bureaucrats with the full power of the state, that must feel very much like living in a tyranny.
The question of when a state is a tyranny is difficult. It much depends on who you are, often. If you’re a fanatical muslim, Iran must feel like a great place to live- if you’re a woman who desires the freedoms of a secular society, Iran must feel like crushing oppression.
Don’t be so ready to dismiss the concerns of others who are, perhaps, more affected by particular aspects of the state than you.
Stu said...
17 Jun 09 at 4:03 pm
Can I just say I love the way every single comments thread here winds up as a fervent debate on the nature of freedom?
It’s endearing
DavidNcl said...
17 Jun 09 at 4:57 pm
“I think it might help if you assume people you disagree with hold their opinions through genuine conviction and not through evil personal motivations which they hide when they say something else.”
When anyone who cares to educate themselves even in the most cursory fashion is well aware of the historical consequence of collectivist beliefs like yours I think it’s perfectly rational to consider those who hold such beliefs – particualy when held from genuine conviction – as, in some sense, “evil”.
Tom James said...
17 Jun 09 at 5:41 pm
But hang on @Stu, @Ian B, @Matthew Huntbach, et al are we talking about positive liberty or negative liberty?
Also @Charlotte:
Why are we wasting our collective time on the revolting intellectual squalor that is Westminster politics?
When I asked myself this question I realised it was for basically the same reason that people watch soap operas and football matches on t’ telly – for vicarious entertainment.
SaltedSlug said...
17 Jun 09 at 5:52 pm
I also sympathise. I endeavour to post about ‘nice’ things, but always end up complaining about the most recent outrage by some tool in high office. Frankly it’s all getting a bit tedious.
This is about a good a reason for a Tory government as I can think of(aside from the removal of the incumbents)- at least they’ll be new material to work with.
Bunny Smedley said...
17 Jun 09 at 6:03 pm
Why not forget politics for a few days and try writing about some other facet of your life? Some of the best libertarian posts I’ve ever read were ones that approached the whole ‘freedom’ thing from a new, or at least wholly unexpected angle …
As for politics, though, it’s been a long haul from the G20 protests, ‘Smeargate’ and so forth to MPs’ expenses, the election etc, and I think everyone’s just a bit exhausted – the anticlimactic lull after the slightly over-extended orgy, as it were.
Oranjepan said...
17 Jun 09 at 10:44 pm
Why are liberty and security mutually exclusive?
I’ve always thought they are mutually dependent and that it’s a false choice to force a choice between them – reduce one and you reduce all, failure to protect either damages both!
SuperiorLibraryAssistant said...
17 Jun 09 at 11:31 pm
Fancy going out for a beer? I’m in L**ds on Saturday…teehee
Ian B said...
17 Jun 09 at 11:39 pm
“Security” might not be the right term. A better one might be “certainty”. There is a considerable, justifiable appeal to certainty- the certainty of a dole cheque, the certainty of state healthcare, the certainty of a full time job, etc.
Mark Reckons said...
17 Jun 09 at 11:41 pm
SuperiorLibraryAssistant sounds like it should be a song by The Fall.
Tiberius Leodis said...
18 Jun 09 at 1:06 am
@Bunny Smedley
“As for politics, though, it’s been a long haul from the G20 protests, ‘Smeargate’ and so forth to MPs’ expenses, the election etc, and I think everyone’s just a bit exhausted – the anticlimactic lull after the slightly over-extended orgy, as it were.”
Seconded. There’s nothing worse than a slightly over-extended orgy…apparently.
David said...
18 Jun 09 at 10:12 am
“The majority doesn’t value liberty, they value security. They don’t value freedom – they value safety.”
Maybe you would like to discuss with the good people of Tehran???
Ian B said...
18 Jun 09 at 11:10 am
Maybe you would like to discuss with the good people of Tehran???
Well, one difference is the Iranians have a populist leader type offering some sort of reform that many Iranians want. That is, to sound marxist, this is some kind of counterhegemonic movement. Where’s ours? The entire establishment are in agreement, and we have no outsider as a focus.
But then, populist leaders with mass movements often turn out not to be very good themselves. Perhaps one reason we’re so docile is that we have a natural suspicion of such things. Revolutions often end up with something worse than you started with. The British are rule-of-thumb conservative in that regard, and that may not be a bad thing. If Iran has another revolution, there’s going to be a lot of violence. A lot of brutality. People will die. Loathe our establishment as I do, I have no urge to either die or kill to get rid of them.
I do find it hypocritical that western leaders are applauding the crowds in Iran. If we did the same here, they’d call us terrorists, and say it’s the British way to stay within the system and not cause a fuss. The majority of the british people want Brown to go. In fact, the majority of us never voted for him, nor for Blair, nor for New Labour itself. What was it, one in five? They won under an unrepresentative, knobbled voting system. Where is their commitment to the will of the people?
Matthew Huntbach said...
18 Jun 09 at 1:17 pm
Don’t be so ready to dismiss the concerns of others who are, perhaps, more affected by particular aspects of the state than you.
I don’t dismiss those concerns, I accept all the points you make are valid.
Now, I can turn each of those concerns round. As a non-smoker why should it be that I was supposed to accept that when I socialise it must be in places which leave my clothes and hair stinking, and my eyes and nose stinging? If I’m unemployed and need a job, why should it be that I am forced through necessity to work for an employer who has put my health and safety at risk through dangerous and poorly guarded equipment? And weren’t we all up in arms recently at social workers NOT taking away poor Baby Peter in Haringey?
Balance, that’s it. There are concerns both ways. Don’t be so ready to dismiss the concerns of others who are, perhaps, more affected by particular aspects of the minimal state than you. This is what I dislike about most libertarians I encounter on the web, and it’s what I used to dislike about the Trots of old. No sense of balance. No ability to be self critical. Just a 100% certainty that they are 100% right and everyone else is wrong, and if the facts don’t fit their case, they’ll change the facts.
Ian B said...
18 Jun 09 at 1:51 pm
Well Matthew, those replies aren’t really answering my point, which was about perceptions of whether a government is tyrannical or not, and that one’s perceptions tend to depend heavily whether one is on the receiving end or not. To use another example, the Jim Crow laws tyrannised the blacks, but not the whites (and provided advantages to the whites). Thus it was easy (and beneficial) for the whites to dismiss the blacks’ complaints as whining. Not so easy for the blacks to accept that verdict.
As to your point about smoking, don’t be ridiculous. There is no natural human right to be protected from smells you dislike, especially when on others’ private property. If you don’t like the facilities in your local boozer, nobody is forcing you to go there. I detest the smell of curry, which is why I avoid my local pub on curry nights. There is no “balance of rights” to be considered- it would be inordinately wrong for me to form a pressure group demanding the banning of curry in pubs, claiming my rights are being denied because it prevents me having a drink there. It would be tyrannical to curry enjoyers for such a ban to be imposed, regardless of whether I feel better that my eyes don’t sting and my clothes don’t “stink” of curry.
As to “Baby Peter”- no, I wasn’t up in arms about it. It was an unfortunate black swan event, and people need to get used to the idea that such events are effectively unpreventable in the real world. If you put every child in the country in the care of the state, some small proportion of them would be abused or even killed by mad, cunning care workers or foster parents. Utopia is nice to imagine, but unattainable.
Pugwash said...
18 Jun 09 at 4:58 pm
We are all FED up with these politicians, McBroon’s Zanulab, and even the Cameroons, esp “Dave and George” who think the tory party belongs to them alone.
It all stinks.
Matthew Huntbach said...
19 Jun 09 at 11:04 am
Well Matthew, those replies aren’t really answering my point, which was about perceptions of whether a government is tyrannical or not, and that one’s perceptions tend to depend heavily whether one is on the receiving end or not.
Yes, and one may turn this round and say that your perceptions on what is “freedom” may depend on whether you’re on the receiving end not being free due to not owning anything and not having much skills.
Regarding the smoking in pubs thing, I’m not particularly committed to the ban, I made that point just as balance. It does happen to be the case that in many circumstances one is expected to socialise by going to pubs, not to do so is to lead to being effectively ostracised and losing opportunities to move forward.
Pubs, until the ban, always were full of smokers. The thing about cigarettes is I think anyone who smokes them only does so because they wanted to look big when they were 14. I may be wrong, but I can’t think of any other reason why anyone smokes, at least people who are too young to have been around when they were promoted as being good for your health or used as a drug to calm the nerves of those being sent to war. So smokers are by nature extrovert dominating people, while we nonsmokers are by nature timid introverts, whose natural reaction to a smoker saying in effect “I’m going to stink you out, you don’t mind do you?” is “er, um, er no, go ahead”. Metaphorically that was what was happening when it was just assumed if you didn’t like cigarette smoke, tough.
So, yes, it seems to me I can be tyrannised by social conventions and people who are more assertive than me just as much as I can be tyrannised by big bad government. You choose to ignore one of those forms of tyranny and concentrate on the other.
Oranjepan said...
19 Jun 09 at 11:21 am
Matthew,
you expose your bias in your explanation of why smokers smoke.
Don’t you think there’s an element of self-destructiveness in there too?
Ian B said...
19 Jun 09 at 11:35 am
It does happen to be the case that in many circumstances one is expected to socialise by going to pubs, not to do so is to lead to being effectively ostracised and losing opportunities to move forward.
Then there would be some demand for smokeless pubs. There isn’t. There are lots of ways and places to socialise. Anyway, what you have to decide here is whether you want to go to a smelly place your friends go to, or not. If not, get some other friends.
Pubs, until the ban, always were full of smokers.
Yes, which means they were supplying the right service to their customers. In reality, smoking and drinking tend to go together. Health and hygeine hysterics rarely drink very much for the same reasons they don’t smoke. It’s worth remembering that pubs sell a drug. It’s bad for your health. People who are worried about that are not a good source of custom to pubs. They may prefer a juice bar, or the like- and if so, the market can provide that too.
The thing about cigarettes is I think anyone who smokes them only does so because they wanted to look big when they were 14. I may be wrong,
You are, but don’t let me stop you enjoying getting a hate on.
but I can’t think of any other reason why anyone smokes, at least people who are too young to have been around when they were promoted as being good for your health or used as a drug to calm the nerves of those being sent to war.
Because, like most drugs and experiences in general that people choose, it is pleasurable. It is like saying “I cannot understand why anyone drinks- hangovers, vomiting in doorways, liver damage” compared to “ooh, a nice glass of wine”.
So smokers are by nature extrovert dominating people, while we nonsmokers are by nature timid introverts, whose natural reaction to a smoker saying in effect “I’m going to stink you out, you don’t mind do you?” is “er, um, er no, go ahead”. Metaphorically that was what was happening when it was just assumed if you didn’t like cigarette smoke, tough.
Oh, good grief. You want the state to protect you from your own personality? Also, I can assure you that the majority of anti-smokers are very assertive indeed. Which is why we got to this ridiculous stage.
The problem is, most anti-smokers think they have some kind of right to be listened to. It is no different to me marching into the local and saying I’m offended by the smell of curry, and expecting the landlord to Do Something About It. Whereas his likely reaction is to be, “if you don’t like it, f*ck off”, which is how people often respond (”assertively”) to rude impositions. Nobody is obligated to compromise, especially in a situation in which everyone is there by choice.
If you wanted to argue about somewhere a person must visit- such as government buildings, or public transport perhaps, well then you’ve got a point. But a pub is a place you visit by choice which has a range of facilities. It is not just a beer dispensary. It’s food, jukebox, live band or other entertainment, and so on, and one facility is whether smoking is allowed. If you don’t like that mix of facilities, don’t go there. It’s not hard to figure that out.
The point is, a pub is not a public place. It is a private place which you are invited to enter should you desire at the landlord’s discretion. He can ask you to leave any time. If pubs generally feature smoking, and you don’t like smoking then, congratulations, you don’t like pubs. Find some other entertainment.
The reality is, and this is what anti-smokers hate, that despite decades of propaganda and junk science and massive spending, most people really aren’t that bothered by smoking. THey may not like it in their homes, but down the boozer, most people were okay with it. There was no great public demand for a smoking ban. They recognised that pubs are places where people smoke. Which is why the thing had to be rammed through by subterfuge.
That isn’t a form of social tyranny. It’s that pubs are not squeaky clean health bars, and if you don’t like that- well, the pub isn’t the place for you. That’s it, really.
Dick Puddlecote said...
19 Jun 09 at 12:13 pm
Perfect summation, Ian. Sadly, such common sense seems a thing of the past. ‘Society’ has been skewed so much that a new ‘inferior’ minority has been now been targeted for hatred and prejudice.
I pinched your analogy from 12:15pm on the 17th by the way.
Ian B said...
19 Jun 09 at 1:18 pm
Thanks Dick
Dave Atherton said...
19 Jun 09 at 2:19 pm
Yes I am another pro choice smoking bore too, you may of seen my piece on Liberal Vision. Going back to Charlotte’s orginial point about “They don’t value freedom – they value safety.”
I was discussing the civil liberties aspect of the smoking ban with a smoker. He came out with “I’m used to it now” routine. I then mentioned this is a slippery slope to banning it in cars, in all public places and ultimately upgrading it to a class B drug like cannabis. “If that is the law then I’ll have to give up then.” The classic sheeple person. In exasperation I asked, from banning smoking in pubs to a Nazi or Soviet style government, when would you feel motivated to object and campaign against it? “I dunno.” Compulsory ID cards, being stopped in the street by police for no reason, imprisoned without trial by jury? It says it all “we’re not quite there yet.”
FFS why do we deserve this?
http://www.liberal-vision.org/2009/06/01/guest-article-a-liberal-approach-to-the-smoking-ban-dave-atherton/
.
Matthew Huntbach said...
20 Jun 09 at 12:10 am
Ian B,
Your reply is full of “tough, you have to do that”, and “go off and do the other” and the like.
Fine, so why is my being compelled in this way any different from you being compelled in other ways? Why is what you like and consider “freedom” better than what I might like and consider “freedom”?
I’m actually not particularly anti-smoking, I was just making the argument in the other side to see if you had any sense of balance and self-critical ability. You have proved my point – you haven’t.
Matthew Huntbach said...
20 Jun 09 at 12:52 am
Me
The thing about cigarettes is I think anyone who smokes them only does so because they wanted to look big when they were 14. I may be wrong,
Ian B
You are, but don’t let me stop you enjoying getting a hate on.
I’m not hating anyone. I don’t hate people who smoke.
I am, however, here writing from experience. Everyone I know who smokes started when they were young teenagers, and I remember being that age. No-one then started smoking saying “this will be a nice relaxing drug”. Everyone who did it did so because it made them look big. That was the sole reason anyone started. I don’t know anyone who started smoking later for any other reason. As it is addictive, people found they couldn’t stop even when it was no longer a “look at me, I’m big” thing. Given the number of people who want to stop but can’t, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable hypthesis to state that there are many doing it just because they wanted to look big at 14.
As a consequence of this, it is obvious there must be a tendency for a personality difference between smokers and non-smokers. I’m suggesting this may be an explanation for other things. It’s just a hypothesis.
I do, however, intensively dislike cigarette smoke. Perhaps I am particularly sensitive, but I find it extremely unpleasant and physically irritating, not to mention the stench it leaves. That is a fact – your use of dismissive phrases such as “hygeine hysterics” suggests you are unable to accept the fact of people who are different from you in what they like or experience, so just rubbish them. I do not think this is good in someone who poses as a champion of freedom. A true champion of freedom would, I think be more able to accept straight someone whose tastes and bodily sensations differed from his.
Now, the reality is that when people suggested going to pubs after meetings, a common thing in political life, I generally accepted because if one doesn’t one misses out on the chat etc. I never made a fuss about the smoke even though really I hated it. There wasn’t any alternative place to go, it was just social convention that all these places had smoke as a given. Whether I’m in a minority in finding it really unpleasant, or actually there are many more who did also but who kept quiet as I did, I don’t know. Perhaps because people didn’t speak up (maybe because non-smokers tend to be less extrovert than smokers for reasons I suggested), it is the case that the impression you gained that “most people really aren’t that bothered by smoking” was wrong.
The point however, is that our freedoms may be trammelled by social conventions as well as by state law. Saying this does not mean I necessarily support heavy-handed legal mechanisms to bust those conventions. I’m just noting what I started off with – your definition of freedom is narrow, and I rather feel biased towards those freedoms you personally most value. In that way, you are no different than most people, so don’t pose as some enlightened one who is oh-so-superior to others who quibble with the full “libertarian” line.
Ian B said...
20 Jun 09 at 9:39 am
Now, the reality is that when people suggested going to pubs after meetings, a common thing in political life, I generally accepted because if one doesn’t one misses out on the chat etc.
In other words, you’re saying that your right to shmooze in an environment you prefer is greater than the right of those with whom you are shmoozing to enjoy their preferred environment, and greater than the rights of millions of regular pub customers who used the pub as a regular place of socialising and entertainment and who are now denied the opportunity to enjoy themselves anywhere in the country.
Matthew Huntbach said...
20 Jun 09 at 11:56 pm
In other words, you’re saying that your right to shmooze in an environment you prefer is greater than the right of those with whom you are shmoozing to enjoy their preferred environment, and greater than the rights of millions of regular pub customers who used the pub as a regular place of socialising and entertainment and who are now denied the opportunity to enjoy themselves anywhere in the country.
I’m saying there’s a balance – the freedom of one is at the cost of the freedom of the other. I didn’t say I support the smoking ban in pubs. Look at what I wrote – I said I accepted all your points were valid, and that I wished only for balance to turn them round and consider the arguments against. My point was only to note that your approach is simplistic – you appear to believe only the freedoms you enjoy count. You don’t give a shit for others’ freedoms when they happen to oppose yours, you think it fine that they are forced to live in certain ways so that the people you like can live life how they want.
Now, if you were someone who had a genuine and real sense of freedom and an ability to be self-critical, you would be able to see there is a balance here. If you had come to the conclusion you come to and yet showed some ability to acknowledge the balance, I would have no problem at all with you. The problem I have is your self-righteous belief that you are 100% right and cannot be criticised and anyone who even puts the case against you is 100% wrong. I don’t like people like that, and with good reason – people like that are enemies of true freedom.
Friends of true freedom and true liberals can always see both sides of a case, can always put themselves in the shoes of another, even when considering the balance of isues they all on one side rather than the other of an argument.
Oranjepan said...
22 Jun 09 at 11:38 am
Arguments for balance=reconciliation is possible.
Take it and run folks! Harmony reigns!