Smidgey

British Conservatism, liberalism (in the modern sense) and libertarianism are not the same thing. You have libertarianism where liberalism normally is.

Your account is far too confusing and unwealdy, not to mention that it muddies the distinctions between ideologies (such as the liberalism and libertarianism example above). With libertarianism/anti-authoritarianism on the right and collectivism/authoritarianism on the left, it is extremely easy to place every ideology on that axis.

Not to mention that in every single political compass/axis test I have ever done (which must be at least a dozen), I have never come out as left-wing. Either they are all wrong, or you are.

__________________
How vain is man, who boasts in fight the valour of gigantic might!

-Georg Friedrich Händel

Ken

Yes, but the axis is imaginary and the terms meaningless so you are not really making any points; only seeming to. I wonder what the Queen of Hearts would have said about it?

For_England

Thanks for the clarification. I admit it would need the state to implement policies aimed at the reversal of what has happened. But in other ways it would decentralise government - citizen-initiated referenda, a restoration of counties with traditional powers, restoration of traditional jurisprudence, right to bear arms, free speech, domestic parliaments for home nations - all of these would help to put power in the hands of the people. Of course I have to admit that if the present BNP took over, I don't think we would see any of those, but a fascist super-state, with a mass killing of anyone (like myself, Sharon Ebanks, Brummie, VoC etc) who has ever criticised them in public.

BonnieDundee

Incorrect. As I have said many times and not even remotely been refuted, collectivists can and often have been rightwing and there are leftwing individualists as well.

Would you American style libertarians stop trying to redefine everything, please?

__________________
"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."
-Bruce Schneier

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; build your own cabin and p*ss off front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
Edward Abbey

Leopold Kohr.

BonnieDundee

But why the hell would you set it up like that? That bares no resemblance to political history or reality. The term rightwing has often meant collectivists and there are some very libertarian individuals on the left, in fact probably a slim majority are and the most hardcore certainly are.

You position can only be supported by ignoring history and massively redefining terms. No doubt, as American style libertarians so often do, you have also redfined freedom and economic freedom to mean the adherence to a sticky version of lockean property rights which is a travesty of a definition and meaningless.

__________________
"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."
-Bruce Schneier

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; build your own cabin and p*ss off front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
Edward Abbey

Leopold Kohr.

BonnieDundee

And methodological individualism whereby you attempt to explain everything in terms of isolated, rational, utility maximising individuals is just as bad. Neither lead to decent view of society and the individual.

__________________
"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."
-Bruce Schneier

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; build your own cabin and p*ss off front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
Edward Abbey

Leopold Kohr.

BonnieDundee

My problem with nationalism is it usually based on intense emotions for an abstraction. English nats could never even attempt to intimately live in and know the whole English landscape and people. In a life time they might only be able to do this for something like 5-10 small locales and then they' have to keep revisiting ieach regularly.

__________________
"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."
-Bruce Schneier

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; build your own cabin and p*ss off front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
Edward Abbey

Leopold Kohr.

Frith

It was a second hand '55 Chev 210. I think he bought it in about 1958 or therabouts. Had a Morris Minor before that. He got rid of the Chev because it was black and the heat where we were made the thing like an oven and the black "duco" showed up every speck of dust.

Agree with you about coming together to form new politically allied groups, but I think independence groups are going to be more and more prominent after Scotland breaks away, so it would in the future perhaps need to be a case of allied groups of common purpose.

Frith

Actually, Bonnie D nationalism is not an abstraction, it is a very compact and workable political system if run with the right group ideology. I have lived in a very fascist national state almost all my life, a right wing one. I now live in an equally fascist left wing one. The left wing one is inefficient and corrupt. The right wing one became that way because it lacked political competition that could ever hope to supersede it. So democracy must be part of any group structure and nationalism must benefit the people as a whole or it will disintegrate into rebellion.

I know that younger people who favour a specific form of libertarianism won't have experienced any of the benefits of a national state so they may just think in terms of fascism or abuse, but in fact, if run with intelligent compassion (an ingredient essential to all social systems) a national state can offer employment for life for certain sectors of the public and offer pride in that employment. It can offer help in the sectors of education, health and business to those who may not otherwise be able to climb out of any holes they may have been born into. The state I lived in also had a powerful capitalist economy and this combination made it a successful first world economy with an envied educational system. But ... it fell to abuse through lack of democratic representation for all of the people and it gave all of its privileges to only one group. Had it listened to the English who wanted a more egalitarian system where everyone with merit could attain their goals South Africa may never have fallen.

On the other hand, the left was rising world wide and so all previously capitalist, first world, or developed, economies were in line for supersession by this ideology. The only way to change the western world now from socialism back to free market capitalism and a more liberty based system for the individual is to watch the world trends and adapt accordingly.

The new trend setters are not western, and the booming economies will all be in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). This completely new circumstance will force the west to adapt or die and usually that means new ways of surviving. That will mean goodbye to old world socialism and capitalism and hello to something both similar and different to find a place in the new economic world order.

BonnieDundee

Nationalism is an abstraction because it is about intense feelings for an area and people who an individual cannot possibly know very well.

__________________
"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."
-Bruce Schneier

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; build your own cabin and p*ss off front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
Edward Abbey

Leopold Kohr.