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Gadhafi and Western intellectuals
Robert Putnam was once called to a meeting with Gadhafi. Here is an excerpt from his account:
Students of Western political philosophy would categorize Col. Gadhafi as a quintessential student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: He made clear that he deeply distrusted any political group that might stand between individual citizens and the "General Will" as interpreted by the Legislator (i.e., Col. Gadhafi himself). When I argued that freedom of association could enhance democratic stability, he vehemently dismissed the idea. That might be so in the West, he insisted, but in Libya it would simply strengthen tribalism, and he would not stand for disunity.
Throughout, he styled our meeting as a conversation between two profound political thinkers, a trope that approached the absurd when he observed that there were international organizations for many professions nowadays, but none for philosopher-kings. "Why don't we make that happen?" he proposed with a straight face. I smiled, at a loss for words. Col. Gadhafi was a tyrant and a megalomaniac, not a philosopher-king, but our visit left me convinced that he was not a simple man.
Was this a serious conversation or an elaborate farce? Naturally, I came away thinking—hoping—that I had managed to sway Col. Gadhafi in some small way, but my wife was skeptical. Two months later I was invited back to a public roundtable in Libya, but by then I had concluded that the whole exercise was a public-relations stunt, and I declined.
Hat tip goes to Monkey Cage and ultimately, the fabled Daniel Lippman. But that's not all -- Benjamin Barber also had some visits to meet with the Libyan leader, here is his account:
Written off not long ago as an implacable despot, Gaddafi is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat. Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country's role in a changed and changing world.
And:
Surprisingly flexible and pragmatic, Gaddafi was once an ardent socialist who now acknowledges private property and capital as sometimes appropriate elements in developing societies. Once an opponent of representative central government, he is wrestling with the need to delegate substantial authority to competent public officials if Libya is to join the global system. Once fearful of outside media, he has permitted satellite dishes throughout his country, and he himself surfs the Internet.
Libya under Gaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally.
Here is Barber's piece on Libya from 2011. It starts like this:
I offer my views about Libya here not just as a democratic theorist and HuffPost regular, but as a member of the International Board of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation until this morning, when I resigned.
Reader riposte: Eyes over Libya
Margot Carlson Delogne from DigitalGlobe responds to Prakash Mirchandani:
I read with interest your posting about Egypt and the recent events in Libya, with the note that it 'is surprising DigitalGlobe has not released any images of Libya'. We actually give any news agency our imagery in these situations, never holding that back. We haven't to date captured much in Libya due to cloud cover and other factors.
We believe it's critical to share insights about what is happening on the ground in dynamic situations. That's why we are the main satellite imagery provider behind the Satellite Sentinel Project. A recent story on this was published in the Denver Post and broadcast on CNN International.
Image: DigitalGlobe.
How Egypt shut down the Internet
Perhaps very much so planned in light of the given country, which has been in a state of emergency since 1967, the government had access to the internet entirely cut off from its citizens last week. From days of allegedly denying to be behind the block of Facebook and Twitter and saying that it supported free speech, the Egyptian government pulled an astonishing move which is unprecedented and yet almost unimaginable for a state that has relatively a strong Internet economy and an equity market that is one of the most developed in the region.
So how did the Egyptians just turn off the Internet? Does Mubarak actually have a kill switch in Abdeen Palace? Unlikely. The real assumed observed way was that someone from the top called each major network (Autonomous System) and directed them to take themselves offline. Observed here by Renesys, an Internet monitoring body, they listed the shutdown times of 5 of the 6 major networks in Egypt:
First impressions: this sequencing looks like people getting phone calls, one at a time, telling them to take themselves off the air. Not an automated system that takes all providers down at once; instead, the incumbent leads and other providers follow meekly one by one until Egypt is silenced.
Essentially, the government has taken two approaches; it disabled DNS lookup of addresses that ends in .eg - which is the equivalent of as if the postal service had lost the address of everyone - and any outgoing or incoming packets with a specific address will not go though their Border Gateway Protocol. They could have just taken out the country's sole IXP but the downstream impact could have aggravated their neighbors igniting all sort of other conflicts.
What should be of most apparent to anyone is that complete reliability and uttermost assurance of the Internet as a haven for free speech and democracy is insignificant and can be easily undermined - particularly in a country where there's a high level of governmental control - where they can just switch off access to the rest of the world.
Solving Wikileaks' Problems
I can't find a better example than Wikileaks as to what Libertarian Socialists have in mind when they describe states of non-bureaucratic and non-hierarchical organizations that hold no private property. The fact that the identity of the original founders of Wikileaks are still unclear and inconclusive not only support this notion but demonstrate the original libertarians' theories' real world applicability.
The supposed acquired role of Assange is remarkably made up and was assumed so uninhibitedly by him. We have witnessed and will continue to observe how an institution which claims to belong to no one and yet serves everyone intelligently self organizes within a realm of 'anarch-digitalism' to survive and maintain its long term goal.
It is also ironic in nature that this is the organization which aims to disrupt authoritarian institutions and transfer control out of the controlling class as it pertains to informational guardianship and secrecy. Wikileaks and its supporters see fit to call those who are in possession of guarded information as illegitimate authority in every aspect.
It, until recently, was merely a back log within the depths of the intranetworks that is the internet, their progressive actions have in recent however propelled them onto the forefront of the world media. They have now found themselves within a circle of isolation and shunning with the likes of Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard and Visa having discontinued to provide anymore services.
Without getting into the legality or the ethics of it all, the proposed solution may be of help in the future for organizations who find themselves in similar situations: The whole affair drives home how dependent we are on a few corporations to make e-commerce function, and how little those corporations guarantee us anything in the way of rights.
Even worst, it is ironic to the fact that the founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel's, aim and vision was to free people 'from all government control'. There may seem not much one could do currently but in the long term, quantum money could be of help in solving the problem by providing a secure currency that can be used without resort to a broker.
Physicist Steve Wiesner first proposed the concept of quantum money in 1969. He realized that since quantum states can’t be copied, their existence opens the door to unforgeable money. Here’s how MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson explained the principles:
Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle says you can either measure the position of a particle or its momentum, but not both to unlimited accuracy. One consequence of the Uncertainty Principle is the so-called No-Cloning Theorem: there can be no “subatomic Xerox machine” that takes an unknown particle, and spits out two particles with exactly the same ...
Let's Remove the Politicians
Supporting my point, Hayek states:
Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation.
In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism. But the fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created, does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.
His position on the idea that one can indeed create a price mechanism to mitigate the increasing threat of climate change’s repercussions goes extremely contrary to the American right's opposition of carbon pricing. In a world where pollution is at the top of the political spectrum, I think we owe the world to come to a conclusion - that actions need to be taken.
Insofar as to the power the political elites are able to muster to move forward with planned undertakings, I am very sorry to say that the outlook is very much despairing and I have come to harbor a pessimistic view . It might just be plain ignorance or better said the industrial complex massive amounts of cash that they are willing to front delusively in the name of Hayek's sake.
To quote Peter Thiel: "In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics... The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it."
Next on the list for Climate Change
The next frontier on the global warming front is becoming less and less likely to be the so called cap and trade initiative. The bill died in the Senate recently and the cost of carbon emissions will remain steadily the same in the future. Not many options are left however to raise the cost of carbon emissions and experts are turning to alternatives and pointing towards the past to highlight where similar major initiatives were not left up to the market but materialized by government push.
...history shows that government-directed research can work. The Defense Department created the Internet, as part of a project to build a communications system safe from nuclear attack. The military helped make possible radar, microchips and modern aviation, too. The National Institutes of Health spawned the biotechnology industry. All those investments have turned into engines of job creation, even without any new tax on the technologies they replaced. “We didn’t tax typewriters to get the computer.
We didn’t tax telegraphs to get telephones,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., which is a sponsor of the proposal with A.E.I. and Brookings. “When you look at the history of technological innovation, you find that state investment is everywhere.”
In an attempt to even start by raising the price of fossil fuels, we are incapable of coming to a potential solution and, consequently, have come to looking to bypass the ordeal. In detail, no one is certain of the effectiveness of cap and trade and neither of the alternatives.
It all comes down to implementing all variants which can reduce green house gas emissions. Research, which can lead to an over-the-top wind mill or super photovoltaic materials, should also be employed. However, state participation is already sufficient - with a planned $4 billion budget in the United States alone. I would proposed a kind of diversification where green energy research can be subsidized by the government and, mainly, philanthropically whereby institutions undertake the initial research initiative due to the perputal rising cost of fossil fuel.
Thatcher's last stand against socialism
From Margaret Thatcher's last House of Commons Speech on November 22, 1990, where she addresses income inequality and a single currency.HT: Taxing Tennessee
racism in europe
European political leaders should do more to counter the appeal of the far right
THERE was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among liberal commentators after Austria’s election on September 28th. Two far-right parties, led by Heinz-Christian Strache (pictured left) and Jorg Haider (on his right), took 29% of the vote between them. Even more disheartening, a third of the country’s new young voters (the voting age has just been lowered to 16) backed them.
Austria has form. In 1999 Mr Haider’s far-right party won 27% of the vote and entered a coalition government that was briefly boycotted by its European partners. This time, not least because the two far-right leaders hate each other, neither is likely to be invited into the government. But although flavours of the far right vary widely, Austria is by no means alone. The Swiss People’s Party of Christoph Blocher is the biggest party in Switzerland. Belgium’s Vlaams Belang party remains strong in Flanders. Denmark’s government depends on the backing of Pia Kjaersgaard’s anti-immigrant People’s Party. In Italy the Northern League, part of the ruling right-wing coalition, is explicitly xenophobic.
All of this is obviously to be deplored. The harder question is what to do about it. The Austrians argued that by including Mr Haider in government they would defang him, a trick the Swiss later tried to play on Mr Blocher. For a time it even seemed to work (though the European boycott merely annoyed Austria’s voters). But the far right has since won back even more electoral ground. Elaborate steps to exclude the far right do not seem to have been any more effective. The Vlaams Belang has benefited from the other parties’ decision to keep it out of government. In Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, extreme parties of both left and right tend to gain votes when the big parties form grand coalitions in the centre.
Tackling the roots
The far right has prospered most when mainstream political parties have belittled or ignored the concerns of ordinary people about such issues as immigration. It does less well when political leaders accept its existence and try to respond to its supporters’ concerns. That points, for example, to reassuring voters that immigration is under control, not just to explaining why it can be beneficial. This is how the Conservative Party has neutralised the far-right vote in Britain. In the 2007 French presidential election Nicolas Sarkozy did the same to the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, who got into the run-off in 2002. Mr Sarkozy ate into Mr Le Pen’s support partly by talking tough on immigration and crime.
This, however, must not include pandering to voters’ racism and xenophobia. No respectable party should run on an anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim platform. Instead, political leaders should speak out loudly against all forms of prejudice. They should try to ensure that criticism of Israel does not blur into hostility to Jewry, for instance; and, equally, they should do their best to ensure that legitimate fears of Islamist terrorism do not translate into a prejudice against Muslims. Austria’s politicians could make a useful start by dropping their strident opposition to the notion that Turkey, a mainly Muslim country, might ever join the European Union. Promoting the belief that the EU ought to be an exclusive Christian club is likely to promote racism, not quell it.
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Why libertarians should vote for Obama
First, war. War is the antithesis of the libertarian philosophy of consent, voluntarism and trade. With every war in American history Leviathan has grown larger and our liberties have withered. War is the health of the state. And now, fulfilling the dreams of Big Brother, we are in a perpetual war.
A country cannot long combine unlimited government abroad and limited government at home. The Republican party has become the party of war and thus the party of unlimited government.With war has come FEAR, magnified many times over by the governing party. Fear is pulling Americans into the arms of the state. If only we were better at resisting. Alas, we Americans say that we love liberty but we are fair-weather lovers. Liberty will flourish only with peace.
Have libertarians gained on other margins in the past eight years? Not at all. Under the Republicans we have been sailing due South-West on the Nolan Chart – fewer civil liberties and more government, including the largest new government program in a generation, the Medicare prescription drug plan, and the biggest nationalization since the Great Depression. Tax cuts, the summum bonum of Republican economic policy, are a sham. The only way to cut taxes is to cut spending and that has not happened.The libertarian voice has not been listened to in Republican politics for a long time. The Republicans take the libertarian wing of the party for granted and with phony rhetoric and empty phrases have bought our support on the cheap. Thus - since voice has failed - it is time for exit. Remember that if a political party can count on you then you cannot count on it.
Exit is the right strategy because if there is any hope for reform it is by casting the Republicans out of power and into the wilderness where they may relearn virtue. Libertarians understand better than anyone that power corrupts. The Republican party illustrates. Lack of power is no guarantee of virtue but Republicans are a far better - more libertarian - party out-of-power than they are in power. When in the wilderness, Republicans turn naturally to a critique of power and they ratchet up libertarian rhetoric about free trade, free enterprise, abuse of government power and even the defense of civil liberties. We can hope that new leaders will arise in this libertarian milieu.
