Information control, or, How to get to Orwellian governance

You are entitled to this opinion of course, but don't be surprised if it fails to persuade a lot of other people.

Just by the by...you are a delight.

David Brock's book "the republican noise machine" is the best thing I've yet found for detailing the individuals and forces which set to the task of derogating "liberalism". Of course, there has always been a set of historical/cultural factors in the US which they could tap into, but there was (and is) a distinct project in place to overturn perceived (by them) threats to capitalist structures and goals that came into being in the sixties.

The folks here who cannot properly or knowledgeably define "liberalism" or "liberals" are greatly successful products of this marketing/black PR campaign. Almost none of them have much education and of those who do, few have engaged in any studies of political theory.

Re gunga...paradigm case of whom one might wish to exclude if engaged in a rational discussion on any matter at all.

set

I'm not sure what label you'd wish to place on what we've come to understand now as liberalism. For example, JK Galbraith's ideas or Isaiah Berlin's or Amartya Sen's or Martha Nussbaum's or Rawls'. Or even modern values re women's or race issues with their push towards equality and inclusion.

And there seems to be no question that Mill's arguments sit as part of the philosophical structure beneath each of these people and issues.

thomas

It seems to me that your vision of the optimum educational situation presupposes an existing and widespread appreciation of the value of diversity. I'd have no problem with foxfyre sending her kids to Falwell Senior Secondary but for the evangelical zest of its staff, student body and board of directors to take over the school up the block...for the good of the souls there.

I disagree with this for two reasons. One, I am skeptical of your perspective on evangelicals. Two, even if I'm wrong and you're right about point one, it makes no difference, because a free market in schooling removes the leverage point through which evangelicals can now enact their views over the objections of secular parents.

On the first point, the ground-level evangelicals I have met so far mostly seem to care about protecting their own children against "dangerous" ideas, such as evolution and that homosexuality is okay. They don't seem to care nearly as much about saving the souls of other people's childern. As some evidence that this is true for more Evangelicals than the ones I happen to have met, I offer their support of vouchers and homeschooling. Both institutions increase Evangelicals' control over their own children, but reduce their control over other people's children. Still, Evangelicals are much more willing to support those institutions than teachers unions, who aren't conventionally regarded as trying to save the souls of other people's children.

But even if evangelical Christians would try to save the souls of children who attend Richard Dawkins High, they have less leverage to do so in a free market than they currently have. In a free market, producers tend to deliver what consumers pay for, and evangelicals aren't paying Richard Dawkins High for anything. Contrast this to a democracy, where governments tend to enact what the majority believes is right. In particular, if governments run the schools and a majority of voters believes in young Earth creationism (as a plurality of Americans do), schoolboards will tend to enact creationism. At this point, you depend on some deus ex machina to rescue the children of agnostics, currently the federal courts. A market in schooling achieves the same outcome through its internal checks and balances.

thomas

Off to work, but let me toss this item in here on the topic of how this administration controls information...



Twenty mill in taxpayer dollars allocated for a PR stunt. Nothing new in this (Mission Accomplished, the debacle of the New Orleans speech where power was diverted from necessary uses to lighting up the backdrop for Bush's speech, or the millions spent in the Green Zone for a PR studio, etc).

So, as an incomplete list we have:
- hiding unfavorable data
- punishing those who might leak unfavorable data
- promoting only those who behave in accord with the above
- threatening the press' independence
- paying the press to carry propaganda
- lying whenever it looks desireable
- restricting access at speeches of anyone who might voice counter ideas
- staging events (soldier backdrops, convention in New York, etc etc) in typical advertising style, with absolutely no regard for this misuse of taxpayer dollars

On reflection, I think I should expand on this a little. After all, Setanta has repeatedly corrected me when he thought I miss the nuances of American attitudes and usages. It would seem unfair not to return the favor. As Setanta stated in the beginning of his post, " i refer to the European model, not the just left of reaction American mode." With this in mind, I can assert the following point on my authority as a European.

Suppose that, for some unlikely reason, some government would heed the advice in Mill's essay On Liberty. Suppose it abolished expanded free-speech laws to legalize holocaust denial, allowed consenting grown-ups to enter polygamous marriages, established free trade in opium, privatized the schools, and so forth. How would a typical speaker of French, German, Italian or Spanish categorize this set of policies? For one thing, the speaker would most likely categorize it as "nutty", for continental Europeans tend to trust their governments more than the English, Americans, and other peoples with Anglo-Saxon traditions. Also, more pertinently to our disagreement, all of the speakers would categorize these policies as "liberal" or "neoliberal". (For everyday policy discussions, both words mean the same; "neoliberal" is the buzzier buzzword though.)

I don't expect you, Setanta, to take my word for any of this. You are therefore welcome to cross-check with other native speakers of European languages such as nimh, Walter, or Francis.

The liberal political traditions of continental Europe haven't derived from an academic consideration of what Hobbes, Locke, Mill or any other English-speaking political theorist wrote. They don't derive from any government or partisan political model in the English-speaking world. Liberalism, as it is known in continental Europe only appears in England late in the 19th century, specifically, after Palmerston dies in 1865, and John Russell resigns in 1868, and Gladstone takes over the Liberal Party, and begins to make its agenda coincide with the views of the middle and working class members who entered after the 1832 Reform Act, but who were basically unrepresented, except insofaras their views and desires coincided with the modified Whig-monied class aristocratic theory of government leadeship from top down which was best respresented by Palmerston.

In the United States, the mere act of successful revolution and the establishment of a large, democratic republic in a world which was still essentially monarchical or oligarchical was originally sufficiently liberal to answer to any such question--keeping in mind that liberal as a term for a partisan political organization did not then exist. But millions of immigrants who left Europe landless and powerless to go to America--Canada or the United States--to get land and to act politically has given both nations a conservative bias (people with property tend to wish things to remain as they are) which is not evident in Europe to the same degree. The Liberal Party of Canada is at best centrist, and would probably be seen as center-right in a European nation, as would the American's Democratic Party. As my Sweetiepie always says, just becaused it's called Liberal doesn't mean it is liberal. Liberalism in the United States after the first fifty years has usually been expressed in populist movements (such as the Grange or organized labor) which have consistently failed to make a successful third party, or to acheive national prominence in one of the two established partys (c.f. William Jennings Bryan--considered a dangerous radical by many, including people such as the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, himself considered unacceptably radical by the party organization).

In Europe, liberalism arises from the memory of the French Revolution (when at a sufficient distance in time [with its Napoleonic unpleasantness dimmed by time] it seemed preferrable to the reactionary conservatism of the monarchical principle as best embodied by the "Holy Alliance" of Russian, Prussian and Austrian near absolutism). Specifically, liberalism and socialism arise in Europe from the wreck of the 1848 debacle. No part of European liberalism derives from the theory or practice of the English-speaking world. Just as the legal traditions of continental Europe diverge significantly from those of the English-speaking world, traditions of political thought diverge as radically.

Claiming that Mill speaks for liberalism is ludicrous, to say the least.

I give up.

As well you ought.

Mill speaks for (if anything) what might be called "libertarianism," if it weren't such a silly term. You do resemble in my experience those in the United States who call themselves libertarians, who only have in common that they all have very little in common. Mill speaks for society based on property ownership, and the preservation of rights in property, and individual liberty in so far as it coincides with the preservation of rights in property.

Classic European liberalism, however, is based on the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number--and is willing to sacrifice a degree of individual liberty in the interest of social equity. Even Bentham's articulation of the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number is a classic expression of Whig liberalism, all principles and theory subordinated to the preservation of rights in property.

When the counter-revolutionary Directory executed Leboeuf, it was because he advocated an end to personal property, and called for all property and the means of production to be held in common. Marx was greatly influenced by Leboeuf, as he was by the Diggers and the Levellers of the period of the English civil wars. But the Diggers were driven off the common land, which continued to be enclosed, and many of the leading Levellers were executed, and the Agreement of the People was rejected by the Major Generals, and became nothing more than a curious and dusty artifact of history. It was exactly those men or that type of man who supported (albeit, quietly) the Lord Protector who later made the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and they were only in favor of any degree of social reform to the extent that it did not interfer with property and rights in property. Magna Carta is, above all else, a document which concerns itself with rights in property (read it sometime--habeas corpus, jury of one's peers, etc., occupy very little of a very long document).

When Napoleon arrived in Italy, he proclaimed that the French had come to liberate the Italian people. It was typical of one of his bulletins, because, of course, he had come to liberate their gold and silver specie, and their precious works of art. (The expression "lies like a bulletin" became a commonplace in France not long after Napoleon became First Consul.) Nevertheless, the Italians largely supported Napoleon, because they found the new opportunities for the middle class preferrable to the Austrian hegemony. Basically, the Germans at first embraced Napoleon as exporting to them the desirable aspects of the French Revolution. His brother Jerome, as King of Westphalia, actually applied the principles of the Revolution, and was beloved of the people for whom he was responsible. That meant, of course, that his days on the throne his brother had given him were numbered. Napoleon himself was actually closer in temperament to this original masters, the Directory, little of whose policies were changed when he took power. But the Italians and Germans initially embraced what they saw as the salubrious aspects of revolution which removed the onus of monarchy.

The product of the Vienna conference of 1815 was the re-establishment of absolutist or near-absolutist monarchy, and the clamp down of the Austrian, Prussian and Russian administrations lead directly to the socialist uprisings of 1848. These rebels were ruthlessly crushed by the Holy Alliance, and many of them went to America, where quite few fought in Mr. Lincoln's armies because they believed in principles for which one cannot say with certainty the Mr. Lincoln himself were any more than lukewarm. The result was to drive France further to the left, despite the episode of Louis Bonapart (the soi-disant Napoleon III), who was, ironically, the son of that liberal monarch Jerome Bonapart. Increasingly, as France and England became more liberal, and reacted with revulsion to continental reaction and absolutism, they became reluctant allies. The Italians eventually succeeded in a revolution, with the at first reluctant, and eventually the unwilling aid of Napoleon III. No such happy event awaited the Germans, but the Germans socialists became the largest, the best-organized and the best-funded socialist party in Europe--and that despite, or perhaps because, German industrial workers had the lowest standard of living and the lowest wages of any industrial population in Europe west of Russia. Marx always believed (in what was undoubtedly a fit of wishful thinking) that the first true proletarian revolution would occur in Germany and establish the first socialist state. He flatly denied that it would occur in Russia.

I think you have some idealistic notion of what it means to be libertarian, and that you confuse this with liberalism. Two different critters.

Translation: You have read neither Mill's Subjection of Women, nor his Representative Government, nor On Liberty -- none of which assigns a prominent role to property ownership.


Translation: You have not read Mill's Utilitarianism, in which he takes positions similar to Bentham's on all the points you just mentioned.

And with that, I continue to have given up.

I read On Liberty and Utilitarianism, quite a long time ago, more than 30 years. You continue to ignore Mill's historical context, and the fact that he lived comfortably enough in the system which he disingenuous condemned. Mill believed in equity, certainly, and he belived in pragmatic government--which is not the same at all as saying the he agreed with curtailing individual liberties in aid of social equity, or that he believed in common ownership of all property and the means of production. Mill is the very archetype, along with Bentham, of the comfortable English thinker whose affluence enabled him to take a philosophical point of view which was in many respects at odds with the the way he lived. I don't recall that he ever gave up his salary with the East India Company based upon their treatment of and government of the Indians.

Ask yourself if the prohibition on denial of the holocaust can be justified by Mill's "harm principle." Does Mill not assert that acts which essentially only violate social convention or mores ought not to be restricted? Would not Mill object to social welfare states on exactly the same basis as do conservatives in the United States, given that he says:

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant"

That is hardly consonant with what political liberalism means today in Europe, nor how it is practised.

Even if you were able to assert, which i don't believe, that everything Mill believed about individual liberty is consistent with the political practice of liberalism in Europe today--it would still be incorrect to say that modern European liberalism derives from Mill's opus.

Look. In the post I directed to you, I tried to clarify a point about the European usage of the word "liberal", which I knew you'd disagree with. The historical context you provided is irrelevant to this point of current European usage. If you are interested in exploring with an open mind whether your disagreement is correct or not, you are welcome to cross-check with other speakers of European languages. Just ask nimh, Walter, or Francis, none of whom agrees with my politics, whether they agree or disagree with the usage point I make in my post. If, on the other hand, you are not interested in finding out if you're wrong, if instead you're interested in some kind of Freudian contest ("My expertise is bigger than yours!"), you aren't going to get it from me. And with that, go with Dog.

The post you linked was addressed to Mr. Mountie, and not to me. The post you linked does not address the subject of in what European liberalism consists. None of your posts concerning Mill establish anything more than that you take at face value the contentions in the English-speaking world that Mill is "the father of liberalism."

If anyone has a Freudian need to claim a greater expertise, i would say it is you. You have not advanced an argument that Mill's political philosophies underlie the practice of liberalism in contemporary Europe--you have just stated as much, as though ex cathedra.

Do you have an answer to how one can reconcile, for example, laws against holocaust denial, or welfare states, to Mill's articulation of the "harm principle," or do you just want to continue to assert that everybody knows you're right, and i'm persisting in error because i don't agree with you?

While you're chewing on that one, explain to me how Mill's apparent belief that individuals ought not to be interferred with in risk-taking, so long as there is no deceit, and the individual can be considered intellectually competent, squares with modern liberal government basics such as occupational health and safety regulation, trades union participation, ceilings on hours worked and floors on wages. If you please . . .

My mistake, I apologize -- I meant to link to the next post.

See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, chapter 2, where Mill discusses at length why repressing offensive speech does more harm than good whether that speech be true or false.

In America, it doesn't square at all -- which was the whole point of my initial response to Blatham.

In Europe, strong trade unions, and wage floors, etc., are not modern liberal government basics. I challenge you to find a strong endorsement of them in the party platform of our FDP.

So far, all i see that you have done is to agree with me, even if you won't admit it, that modern political liberal practice does not square with Mill's theories.

I fully acknowledge that Mill is reputed to be the father of liberalism. But i'm not buying that. Furthermore, i cannot accept a contention that modern continental European liberalism is descended from or consciously based upon Mill's philosophy. Finally, i only consider that Mill can be described as liberal by comparison to his English contemporaries. Mill is only liberal to a degree, and that a paltry one, and only in the context of capitalism--largely unregulated capitalism. Not my idea of functional modern liberalism at all.

That's because around 1920, the enemies of liberalism have appropriated its name. I said this in my first response to Blatham on this point, which I linked to in my last post. This may indeed be a different way of saying the same thing.