Could some fellow Brits help me explain the issue of gun control to americans?

Mr_Wolfgang_Beard · 2012-05-23T05:39:20.862177+00:00

It's fair to note though that gun control is only one factor involved in the murder rate of a society - the culture plays a much bigger role. So, for example, the UK has a medium murder rate and gun control; Jamaica has a high rate and gun control; Finland, Germany and Switzerland have lower rates with much looser gun control; the US has a high rate with loose gun control etc.

God_Wills_It · 2012-05-23T05:13:32.995733+00:00

They can blog too - sometimes very cogently and intelligently.

brightoncontrarian · 2012-05-23T01:21:33.472807+00:00

I do question the manner in which war-related deaths are ascribed to the various categories, and the term genocide (and hence genocide-denial) carries a strong political loading. I thought Dave Edwards gave a fairly adequate response to the original article, and I can't see how this further stirring of the waters takes us forward any. Although I'm by no means a Chomsky fanboy, I'm not sure I trust the Guardian on matters-Chomsky after the last debacle. He is its nemesis - its the exact model of a liberal gate-keeping publication to coral progressive opinion after all - and its fulfilling its role admirably in this example.

Jedibeeftrix · 2012-05-22T13:49:50.146870+00:00

A single land value tax, whilst deceptively complicated to implement, tends to appeal across the political spectrum since it has egalitarian consequences (it minimises 'rent' in the sense of unearned income from fundamentally scarce resources - i.e. land - whilst not penalising productivity).

CrazyDrummer · 2012-05-22T11:49:17.815236+00:00

Doesn't apply to cheddar though, does it? You can get Canadian cheddar, NZ cheddar, Aussie cheddar etc., but really it's strictly just as much a centuries' old brand (from Cheddar in Somerset).

LS69 · 2012-05-22T03:52:42.111704-07:00

In my school we always got a letter for attainment and a number for effort. So from A1 through to F5. We aimed for the gold standard of an A5, but the best I think I ever achieved was an A3.

sodyourculture · 2012-05-22T09:42:23.999852+00:00

TBH, I've not been following Somalia in recent months, so I'm not sure I could give a well-grounded opinion. I suspect it might be part of the same process/mess - since it's US-backed, targeted at ousting al-Shabaab whom the US effectively led to power in the first place, and brought the Ethiopians calling again.

sodyourculture · 2012-05-22T09:24:03.806882+00:00

I assume you are referring to the policing of international waters by the EU? Hardly imperialism. The world relies on shipping going through that area.

No, that's hardly the only international interference in Somalia's history - though it's also not the black and white issue you cast it as - a very one-sided story has been presented of the piracy issue as much else. At this very moment, we Brits (as well as the Chinese, Americans and others) are discussing the future for their oil reserves and how best to exploit them. The US/UN sent in peacekeeping forces and had them ejected during the period 1992/4 (resulting in 1000s of deaths) and there was a further US-sponsored and logistically supported Ethiopian attack during 2006 and the last forces from that only left a couple of years ago. The war on terror has consistently been used as a justification for destabilisation activities which are really more about geopolitics and resources and employ all the usual (neo)imperialist tactics of propping up one minority over the rest. In the case of Somalia the West has had its pet warlords - in Puntland for example (where BP hopes to get the oil rights).

tdobson · 1 day

If we want to be really authentic, the athletes all have to be in the nude...

chrisjd · 1 day

Well, you certainly won't catch me going in to bat for the BBC - bunch of corporate, government and establishment apologists that they are. The amount of malicious propaganda that they spout about the libertarian left means I view them as a fairly implacable foe, even if I still honestly enjoy a fair bit of their non-news programming.

As for the NHS, healthcare is a bit of an exceptional case as regards centralisation, given that joined-up healthcare makes sense from a user's point of view. Our healthcare system is renowned as one of the most effective and efficient in the world by most impartial analyses, so radical change needs to be approached with caution - unlike what's currently envisaged. Having said that, I definitely oppose State-run healthcare ideologically, and it's rife with problems (social control being one of the most obvious, and one which we're seeing the undisguised face of more frequently these days).

OTOH, handing the whole system over to corporations, the preferred solution of the libertarian right, is ripe for abuse also. We can see this in the US system - run by and for the benefit of big business and big pharma and their State enforcers. I've frankly never understood the right's assertion that handing over the lion's share of social provision to the tender mercies of corporate domination is somehow "libertarian". If you're trying to increase freedom, democracy, efficiency, responsiveness, flexibility etc. and to reduce organisational insanity, sclerotic bureaucracy and totalitarianism it seems entirely the wrong way to go about things.

Ultimately, I don't have an easy answer to healthcare, I don't think anyone does, but I'd like to see more French-style mutualist experiments (a la Mutualité Française). Carson's Healthcare Crisis paper is interesting too, though he's coming at it from the other direction (i.e. from the overpriced and corporate-captured disaster that the US healthcare system now is).

chrisjd · 1 day

We have economic democracy - if you own shares you get to vote at a company's AGM.

As Carson puts it: 'Despite their theoretical status as “owners” of the corporation, shareholders have little genuine control over management. In fact, management’s responsibility to shareholders is a legitimizing myth comparable to the claim of the State industrial bureaucracy in the old Soviet Union to represent “the people” or “the workers.” The management of most large corporations is actually a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a mass of unowned capital. But their claimed status as representatives of the shareholders, as little basis as it has in fact, serves a useful purpose in insulating management from internal political challenges–especially from internal stakeholders.'

When you buy products you are choosing which company gets your money.

Despite the illusion of choice, mostly differentiated on marketing puff, we're actually more in the territory of Hobson than a free market. We get to select from an artificially limited set of corporate alternatives, which are grown fat and abusively monopolistic and oligopolistic via the authoritarian State intervention that runs right through our rotten global capitalist system.

Edited: Tidied up grammar and language.

chrisjd · 1 day

Sounds like Spiked online's vision and closer to populist fascism than anything libertarian. But, at one level at least, I actually don't disagree. I do believe us proles have been heavily propagandised by powerful monied interests for a long long time, and increasingly heavily over the last few decades, but I don't disagree that a substantial conservative and populist voice has been unjustifiably silenced by the political establishment. I've got a lot more faith in people than you might think and I'm very happy with the idea of an expanded and more direct democracy even if it leads to a number of shitty and reactionary policies in the short term.

But mere political democracy isn't enough; it would have to incorporate a more substantive economic democracy too, and that's where you and the monied interests who're keen to empower populist forces in the political arena start to quail, because you know what populist power in the economic arena will ultimately deliver.

chrisjd · 1 day

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

No idea who this is, sorry.

by the way, it's Monday evening

That's what a long weekend means...

to cover for errors

It wasn't exactly a life or death one, perhaps I should've said hypergonadal(!) considering the reaction?

The irony of a, whatever you really are, claiming someone is "stealing" a word seems to be lost on you.

No, really it isn't. Or are you suggesting anarchists don't recognise theft? Didn't our founding father note "property is theft" after all? In any event, the issue here is one of deliberate obfuscation or misrepresentation rather than ownership of a word - what in capitalist economic parlance would be something akin to "passing off" or "plagiarism with malicious intent". The idea that any sort of liberty is possible without access to the means of life is risible. What you and your fellow "anarcho"-Statists want is unlimited freedom to exploit, and the society you envisage is a tyranny of landlords, petty despots, warlords and private absolute monarchs - a kind of feudalism on steroids - which would only be possible with a vicious State - more likely a patch-work of mini-States - to enforce it.

chrisjd · 1 day

I'm not sure I'd count voting for political parties as particularly libertarian, nor the UKIP as particularly progressive, but insofar as you seek to dismantle the State I'm sure we'll have ideas in common. Where we'll possibly diverge sharply is on issues like State support for corporate capitalism and private property.

sodyourculture · 1 day

Oh, the old "if you're an anarchist/libertarian, go live in Somalia" cliche? There are many responses from right wing libertarians to this showing that on many economic indicators the lives of the local inhabitants have improved since the fall of their corrupt government, and explaining how other factors - warlordism, civil war, imperial interventionism are responsible for some of the seriously negative outcomes. But I don't even need to go there, since it's sufficient to say that Somalia looks nothing like any socialist implementation of anarchism, indeed the country has precisely zero tradition of anarchism and never tried to implement it. You'd do better to consider anarchism where people with such traditions have actually been attempting to introduce it - the two best examples of which - both coloured by the fact they occurred during periods of civil war - are (anarchist Spain and anarchist Ukraine). If you want to see how anarchist principles operate in peacetime look at something like the Mondragon corporation, which though far from "pure" or "perfect" anarchism does show how it can equal or even outperform capitalism on the latter's home turf.

chrisjd · 1 day

Yes, I'm aware of this. I'm not a communist so I'm speaking as an outsider, but it makes me uncomfortable too. The justification, as I understand it, is that this is the "free space" for communists to speak on reddit (bugger that Stalin gave not a single fuck about free spaces for speaking, and would've had you shot or your throat cut for even imagineering such a space), and therefore all sectarianism is considered uncomradely.

I don't wish to divide the left and I'll happily work alongside progressive libertarians of all stripes, but I won't work with authoritarian Statists and I'm always a bit nervy around the people who betrayed and butchered my ideological chums on at least 2 occasions during the last century.

chrisjd · 1 day

First, I don't recall pushing "US visions of corporate capitalism" anywhere, please return from lunar orbit to the argument.

My apologies, it was me stereotyping and over-generalising the "libertarian socialism is an oxymoron" brigade if you haven't. Normally, I only hear "moron" when I hear this because it's coming from politically naive idiots from the US who have no conception of the centuries of libertarian socialism we've had in Europe, and indeed the UK, going back to figures like Winstanley, Godwin, Blake, Wilde etc.

Second, it's hypothalamic not "hyperthalamic".

My bad, I actually meant hyperthyroidal. It's been very drunken long weekend.

This is a rather important point as you seem to be claiming to have some kind of expert knowledge regarding the etymology and meaning of "libertarian".

No it's not, it was a drunken cock up. And since you failed to correct it correctly, I don't see as that makes you any better placed sober!

Libertarian in the most widely accepted meaning does not include the savage censorship which your "libsoc" friend is peddling.

I never said it did, and indeed, if you check (and check the date-stamp), you'll see I spanked him well before I spanked you.

Nor does it include the primacy of the social over the individual for the most part, which would be required by your social-ism. Ergo, one cannot be a "Libertarian Socialist".

Ergo to you too! Who coined the term? Socialists did, that's who. Capitalists and right wingers only started playing with the term from the mid part of the last century onwards (really only since the '70s), and even then you knew you were stealing. You're even trying to steal anarchist now, and surprisingly a substantial number of Americans already seem to be historically illiterate enough to believe anarchism is or was ever a right wing ideology. If you want to throw rocks about historical revisionism I think the glasshouse is there for any objective observer to notice.

chrisjd · 1 day

I've never had much truck with nationalisation, it always seems the kind of thing a Statist would do rather than a communist after all. The fascists, like the capitalists, were huge Statists of course, the State and hierarchy were their thing. The best - and ultimately only - way to defend profits and property. They were brought in and funded by the big corporations to bolster the various European States against the rise of socialism as I recall? Just as they are currently in Greece... Didn't more than 50% of the cops in Greece vote fascist at the last election on behalf of the corporate sandbaggers? Aren't a substantial amount more Stalinists doing the same on behalf of them too?

chrisjd · 1 day

I don't distinguish that much - authoritarian capitalists both.

chrisjd · 1 day

Well, you know, if you're gonna use Stalinist language, expect to provoke a reaction...

chrisjd · 1 day

"filthy treasonous left wingers" - these are those who are prepared to sell out the perfectly formed "British" State to the continental super-State presumably? Whereas the "filthy treasonous right wingers" are those prepared to sell out the British people to their multinational corporate rulers and financiers and the lick-spittle State which serves them., right?

chrisjd · 1 day

God, that's the dumbest thing I've read today, but naturally not the first time I've read it. It's like you rightist pseudo-libertarians, brought up on hyperthalamic US visions of corporate capitalism have entirely forgotten when and where and for what the term "libertarian" was forged.

chrisjd · 1 day

You're not really remotely libertarian, are you?

CorporatePsychopath · 1 day

So long as your namesakes stay away, it will remain so! ;-)

Breznak · 1 day

DogBotherer

TROPHY CASE

DogBotherer

TROPHY CASE

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