ah well!

Freudian slip?

Just to make it clearer, i agree with your arguments to a spooky degree, and that’s why i commented… just to give you a flavour of the dilemmas I feel face me as a fellow-traveller.

I’m wondering whether protecting our spaces for dissent leads to questions about how this will be done. So you are write that when I write “you”, I really mean “I”. And, err, one is sorry for invading one’s identity!

What is a libertarian to do?

i’m not sure what you mean at all - if i didn’t have a blog i wouldn’t have to worry ? How would anything be different?

“And however much you might deny it, you are supporting them by developing the discourse which legitimises the unorthodox and delegitimises ideologies of coercion”

who says i denied ‘it’ > what’s ‘It’? Who is ‘them’? Perhaps you need to think more about what you say, just as I need to think about what I say. Of course you don’t have a blog..so perhaps you’re not staying up all night?

In any case I’m curious as to why you’re focusing on ‘me’ at all. Who am I in any case? Why not ‘yourself’? I’m quite interested..

Everything you say is ditto for yourself of course

And naturally by ‘being’ we - me - you- and everyone else - perpetuate the social contract we unwittingly find ourselves in. obviously..

Perhaps my language isn’t as self-effacing as you think it ought to be? I do apologize..but hey. It’s not the end of the world, could do ‘better’ in future but it’ll have to do for now.

But there are compensations for others, such as satisfying an urge to dominate. And there are more complex moral motives, such as keeping people who would otherwise act very destructively out of power.

When push comes to shove, you would probably make the effort to support a lesser evil, even if you don’t consciously believe in evil “out there”. Wouldn’t you?

So even if you will steer clear of taking responsibility as a leader, there’s still your responsibility as a follower. And to say phooey to all of it is just as much of a moral decision. The people now in power won’t let you be a hermit, as they go about removing all models of living which aren’t consumerist and which stand in the way of resource exploitation… so surely it is in your interest to support the liberal who has a leadership complex against the neoliberal. And perhaps to support the conservative against the neoconservative.

And however much you might deny it, you are supporting them by developing the discourse which legitimises the unorthodox and delegitimises ideologies of coercion. The more people who populate the terrain of your blog, the more you have to stay awake at night to make sure that there isn’t a takeover by predatory capitalists or socialists….

What I have in your blog, that I don’t have in a nation state (or non-nation state), is a meaningful sense of voice and exit as options if I disagree. Perhaps that is something that foreign and domestic policy would focus on under the regime of the Sonia Party, allowing hermits and dissidents to go about their business unmolested.

i’m also very suspicious when it comes to abstractions over real individuals - don’t know what ‘blanket term’ that can fall under.

but then i’m a hermit who’d much rather live on a mountain than deal with fellow man. apart from to theorize and criticize of course..he heh. No doubt some would say i can’t deal with the reality of life, and there’s a good chance that’s probably true.