From: Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Feb 02 2002 - 22:07:43 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>
To: <transhuman@logrus.org>; <extropians@extropy.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2002 4:50 PM
Subject: Re: Bye-Bye to the >H Right Wing
> I should perhaps elaborate in my previous reply to
>
> At 06:46 AM 1/27/02 -0500, Brian Phillips <deepbluehalo@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> >> That said I have to ask.. are you a socialist?
>
> [I said:]
> > I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party. (Are
> you *nuts*?)
>
> I assumed that this wry reference to the formula used by the vile
> inquisitorial House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the USA during the
> 1950s would do, but I see now that it needs a bit more work.
It works for me. :)
> The background political assumptions of Australians appear to differ in
> subtle and less subtle ways from those of Americans, and even more from
> those of many Europeans. I found a quote today that helps position our
> historic standpoint; it's from Alfred Deakin, an early Prime Minister of
> the nation, who in 1906 (just five years after Federation) said this:
>
> `The best thing that Australians could do was to make the country so
> productive, so good a place to live, and bring about such just and fair
> conditions, with such fair opportunities for earning an honest living,
> such protection against monopolies, that other people would also want to
> become Australians.'
Excellent. So a victim-disarming monopoly on the use of deadly force is prohibited, of course. Also, the monetary system shall not
be imposed by monopoly fiat: forcing nearly everyone to become bonded debt-slaves to the Statists/bankstas. These items, along with
income-tax slavery, monopoly public "education" (i.e. Statist indoctrination camps) and monopoly Social Security pyramid schemes are
some of the most demeaning, unjust, evils (meaning "to cause harm") perpetuated by the protection racket occasionally referred to as
the State. I've never been down under, but I'd move there in a heartbeat if the above organized-crime schemes were absent.
> ...He cites Peter Botsman, a left
> theoretician, who argues that `part of the achievable answer... consists
> not of condemning people to hopelessness, but of "giving back control and
> power to people and communities to solve their own problems". That, and
> schemes of enlightened volunteerism, of creative programs that will give
> dispossessed children access to a broader world, can rescue threatened
> families.' He continues with appeals to the fraternal and typically
> skeptical voluntarism of those who fight raging bush fires, which is akin
> to the heroism of the men in New York during the terrorist attacks, except
> that these people are not professionals.
> This provides the flavor of Australian views; I would add (for what it's
> worth, and because I was asked) that my own understanding of this sentiment
> in theory and practice leans toward traditional anarchism, of a
> communitarian kind--the sort of mutual support that only free men and women
> can offer each other.
Yes, I agree, though different words might be selected.
Webster's 3rd-
communitarianism: n, a communal system of organization based on small (?) cooperative communities practicing some communist
principles.
Communitarian Platform:
http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/RCPlatform.html
is a gold-mine of distilled evil- I copped some of the phrases from this document for the earlier spoof on Neo-Feudalistic world
government, such as
"...moral education and character formation..."; "...character formation and moral education...";
"...A good citizen ..."; "...encouraging others to pay their fair share [to Massah']..."; "...national particularism ...";
"...Our communitarian concern may begin with ourselves and our families, but it rises inexorably to the long-imagined community of
humankind..." code for "let's conquer the world and impose H.G. Well's socialist dictatorship". World conquest and domination is an
inexorable force of nature in some minds.
and my personal favorite-
"Those who neglect these duties, should be explicitly considered poor members of the community."
Interestingly and tellingly, there is little difference between this platform and that of the German National Socialists (colloq.
"Nazies") of the 1920's-1940's. Right and left-wings are two "fuzzy" faces of the same conceptual disfunction: Statism.
> Don't mistake that for socialism, or I'll have to order the Commissar to
> take you off to the Gulag.
Thanks for the offer, sport, but I already live on or about the socialist shithole of Plantation USA, picking my "fair share" of
cotton for the greater grandeur of Massah'. I use Karl Marx's definition of socialism: the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto,
abolition of private property (slaves don't own property), dissolution of the family, etc., which is a fairly accurate,
funtionalistic description of the contemporary US System.
Forrest
-- Forrest Bishop Chairman, Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering www.iase.cc
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