A couple of months ago I said I had moral qualms about the trend towards agricultural investment.
Now there's an article from the same site (farmlandgrab.org), looking at proposals to regulate the process somehow.
The writer doesn't buy it:
... the rules are always about making the project work for the investor. Local communities, soils, watersheds, local labour markets and even the domestic food security situation in the host country are treated as risk factors that need to be mitigated. The objective is to manage costs, including those connected to reputational risks, to ensure an acceptable return. The rules for responsible farmland investment are thus for the investor, for whom taking care of the fallout for local people becomes another cost of doing business -- and one that companies can make profits from to boot.
... Other sectors where this has been tried out -- sustainable cotton, sustainable soy, responsible palm oil, timber, banking and whatnot -- have a profoundly blotted track record.
... What we need is not responsible farmland investment, but divestment. By this we mean that rather than trying to make this new trend of financialising farmland work, these deals need to be stopped and undone, with the lands restituted to the communities that lived from them. And instead of promoting the growth of industrial agriculture, we need to strengthen family- and community-based food sovereignty approaches, across the world. Initiatives are being taken in these directions, aiming to choke capital flows into firms with a history of land grabbing or into funds specifically set up to peddle rights to farmland, bolstered by advocacy and political pressure to support small-scale family-based farming systems and local markets. While it is a huge and uphill battle, it's clear that we need to stop the financing of land grabs, not make it responsible.
Again and again, I feel that Big Corporation is not an alternative to Big Brother. For example, it's not so very long since Monsanto was trying for a scheme that would have economically enslaved farmers across the world: the "terminator gene" project, finally halted (or is it finally?) in 1999.
Lovers of liberty need to look over their right shoulder as well as their left.
INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: Mostly in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), but now planning to build up some reserves of physical gold via regular saving.
DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Call to reverse farmland investment
A couple of months ago I said I had moral qualms about the trend towards agricultural investment.
Now there's an article from the same site (farmlandgrab.org), looking at proposals to regulate the process somehow.
The writer doesn't buy it:
... the rules are always about making the project work for the investor. Local communities, soils, watersheds, local labour markets and even the domestic food security situation in the host country are treated as risk factors that need to be mitigated. The objective is to manage costs, including those connected to reputational risks, to ensure an acceptable return. The rules for responsible farmland investment are thus for the investor, for whom taking care of the fallout for local people becomes another cost of doing business -- and one that companies can make profits from to boot.
... Other sectors where this has been tried out -- sustainable cotton, sustainable soy, responsible palm oil, timber, banking and whatnot -- have a profoundly blotted track record.
... What we need is not responsible farmland investment, but divestment. By this we mean that rather than trying to make this new trend of financialising farmland work, these deals need to be stopped and undone, with the lands restituted to the communities that lived from them. And instead of promoting the growth of industrial agriculture, we need to strengthen family- and community-based food sovereignty approaches, across the world. Initiatives are being taken in these directions, aiming to choke capital flows into firms with a history of land grabbing or into funds specifically set up to peddle rights to farmland, bolstered by advocacy and political pressure to support small-scale family-based farming systems and local markets. While it is a huge and uphill battle, it's clear that we need to stop the financing of land grabs, not make it responsible.
Again and again, I feel that Big Corporation is not an alternative to Big Brother. For example, it's not so very long since Monsanto was trying for a scheme that would have economically enslaved farmers across the world: the "terminator gene" project, finally halted (or is it finally?) in 1999.
Lovers of liberty need to look over their right shoulder as well as their left.
INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: Mostly in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), but now planning to build up some reserves of physical gold via regular saving.
DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Hair funnies (NSFW, also don't drink or operate machinery)
This one (for women) I first saw a long time ago, but the memory lingers on:
Waxing
... but this one (for men - and hard-hearted women) has just recently started to do the rounds:
A review of Veet for Men
After having been told my danglies looked like an elderly Rastafarian I decided to take the plunge and buy some of this as previous shaving attempts had only been mildly successful and I nearly put my back out trying to reach the more difficult bits. Being a bit of a romantic I thought I would do the deed on the missus's birthday as a bit of a treat. I ordered it well in advance and working in the North sea I considered myself a bit above some of the characters writing the previous reviews and wrote them off as soft office types...oh my fellow sufferers how wrong I was. I waited until the other half was tucked up in bed and after giving some vague hints about a special surprise I went down to the bathroom. Initially all went well and I applied the gel and stood waiting for something to happen.
I didn't have long to wait.
At first there was a gentle warmth which in a matter of seconds was replaced by an intense burning and a feeling I can only describe as like being given a barbed wire wedgie by two people intent on hitting the ceiling with my head. Religion hadn't featured much in my life until that night but I suddenly became willing to convert to any religion to stop the violent burning around the turd tunnel and what seemed like the destruction of the meat and two veg.
Struggling to not bite through my bottom lip I tried to wash the gel of in the sink and only succeeded in blocking the plughole with a mat of hair. Through the haze of tears I struggled out of the bathroom across the hall into the kitchen by this time walking was not really possible and I crawled the final yard to the fridge in the hope of some form of cold relief. I yanked the freezer drawer out and found a tub of ice cream, tore the lid of and positioned it under me. The relief was fantastic but only temporary as it melted fairly quickly and the fiery stabbing soon returned .
Due to the shape of the ice cream tub I hadn't managed to give the starfish any treatment and I groped around in the draw for something else as I was sure my vision was going to fail fairly soon.I grabbed a bag of what I later found out was frozen sprouts and tore it open trying to be quiet as I did so.I took a handful of them and tried in vain to clench some between the cheeks of my arse. This was not doing the trick as some of the gel had found it's way up the chutney channel and it felt like the space shuttle was running it's engines behind me.
This was probably and hopefully the only time in my life I was going to wish there was a gay snowman in the kitchen which should give you some idea of the depths I was willing to sink to in order to ease the pain. The only solution my pain crazed mind could come up with was to gently ease one of the sprouts where no veg had gone before.
Unfortunately, alerted by the strange grunts coming from the kitchen the other half chose that moment to come and investigate and was greeted by the sight of me, arse in the air, strawberry ice cream dripping from my bell end pushing a sprout up my arse while muttering..." Ooooh that feels good ". Understandably this was a shock to her and she let out a scream and as I hadn't heard her come in it caused an involuntary spasm of shock in myself which resulted in the sprout being ejected at quite some speed in her direction.
I can understand that having a sprout farted against your leg at 11 at night in the kitchen probably wasn't the special surprise she was expecting and having to explain to the kids the next day what the strange hollow in the ice cream was didn't improve my status...So to sum it up Veet removes hair, dignity and self respect.
UPDATE: the earliest online source I can find for the second piece is here.
Waxing
All methods have tricked me with their promises of easy,
painless removal - the Epilady, the standard razor, the scissors, the Nair,
the EpilStop, and now ...The Wax.
My night began as any other normal weekday night. I came
home from work, fixed dinner for my son and we played for a while. I then had
the thought that would ring painfully in my mind for the next couple hours:
maybe I should use that wax in my medicine cabinet. I set up my boy with a video
and head to the site of my demise, um, I mean bathroom.
It was one of those cold wax kits. No melting a clump
of hot wax, you just rub the clear strips in your hand, peel them apart, press
it on your leg (or wherever) and ignore the frantically rising crescendo of
string instruments in the background. No muss, no fuss. How hard can this be? I
mean, I'm not the girly-est of girls but I'm mechanically inclined so maybe I
can figure out how this works. You'd think. So I pull one of the thin strips
out. It's two strips facing each other, stuck together. I'm supposed to rub it
in my hand to warm and soften the wax (I'm guessing). I go one better: I pull
out the hair dryer! And heat the SOB to ten thousand degrees. Cold wax, my ass.
(Oh, how that phrase will come back to haunt me.)
I lay the strip across my thigh. I hold the skin around
it and pull. OK, so it wasn't the best feeling in the world, but it wasn't bad.
I can do this! Hair removal no longer eludes me! I am She-Ra, fighter of all
wayward body hair and smooth skin extraordinaire!
With my next wax strip, I move north. After checking on
the boy and verifying that he was, in fact, becoming one with Bear and learning
all about smells, I sneak into the bathroom for The Ultimate Hair Fighting
Championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet. Using the same
procedure, I then apply the wax strip! across the right side on my bikini line,
covering the right half of my vagina and stretching up into the inside of the
right ass cheek. (Yeah, it was a long strip.)
I inhale deeply. I brace myself. RRRIIIIPPP!!!!
I'm blind! Blind from the pain! ....... Vision
returning.
Oh crap. I've managed to pull off half an inch of the
strip.
Another deep breath. And RIIIP! Everything is swirly and
tie-dyed? Do I hear crashing drums? OK, coming back to normal again. I want
to see my trophy - my wax covered pelt that caused me so much agony. I want to
revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold the wax strip like
an Olympic gold medallist.
But why is there no hair on it? Why is the wax mostly
gone?
Where could the wax go, if not on the strip?
Slowly, I eased my head down, my foot still perched on
the toilet. I see hair - the hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I feel.
I am touching wax. I look to the ceiling! and silently shout "nooooooo!!"
And realize I have just begun living my own personal
version of "The Tar Baby."
I peel my fingers off the softest, most sensitive part
of my body that is now Covered in cold wax and matted hair, and make the next
big mistake - up until this point, you'll remember, I've had my foot on the
toilet. I know I need to move, to do something. So I put my foot down on the
floor. And then I hear the slamming of the cell door. Vagina? Sealed shut. Ass?
Sealed shut. A little voice in my head says "I hope you don't have to shit
anytime soon. Your head just might pop off." I penguin walk around the bathroom
trying desperately to figure out what I should do next.
Hot water! Hot water melts wax! I'll run the hottest
water I can stand and get in - the wax should melt and I can gently wipe it
away, right? Wrong.
I get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than is
used to torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment. And I
sit.
Now the only thing worse than having your goodies glued
together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom of a tub. In
scalding hot water. Which, by the way, does not melt the cold wax.
So now I'm stuck to the tub. I call my friend, C,
because she once dropped out of beauty school So surely she has some secret
knowledge or trick to get wax off skin. It's ever good to start a conversation
with "So my ass and vagina are stuck to the tub."
She doesn't have a trick. She does her best to suppress
laughter. She wants to know exactly where the wax is on the ass. "Are we talking
cheek or hole, here?" she asks. She isn't even trying to hide the giggles
now.
I give her the run-down of the entire night. She tells
me to call the number on the side of the box, but to have a good cover story for
where the wax actually is. "You know that if we were working the help line at XX
Wax Co. and somebody called with their entire crack sealed shut we'd just put
them on hold then record the conversation for everyone we know. You're going to
end up on a radio show or the Internet if you tell them the truth.
While we go through various solutions, I have resorted to
scraping the wax off with a razor. Boy, nothing feels better to the girly
goodies than covering them in wax, sticking them to a tub
In the middle of the conversation (which has
inexplicably turned to Other subjects!) I find the little, beautiful saving
grace that is the lotion provided with this torturous box of wax, to remove the
‘excess’.
I rub some in and start screaming "It's working! It's
working!" I get hearty congratulations from C and we hang up.
I successfully remove all the wax and notice, to my
dismay, that the Hair is still there. So I shaved the damned stuff off.
Hell, I was numb by that point anyway. And then I put
the box of wax back in my medicine cabinet! Never know when a mustache might
start to come in.
Tonight, I attempt hair dying.
After having been told my danglies looked like an elderly Rastafarian I decided to take the plunge and buy some of this as previous shaving attempts had only been mildly successful and I nearly put my back out trying to reach the more difficult bits. Being a bit of a romantic I thought I would do the deed on the missus's birthday as a bit of a treat. I ordered it well in advance and working in the North sea I considered myself a bit above some of the characters writing the previous reviews and wrote them off as soft office types...oh my fellow sufferers how wrong I was. I waited until the other half was tucked up in bed and after giving some vague hints about a special surprise I went down to the bathroom. Initially all went well and I applied the gel and stood waiting for something to happen.
I didn't have long to wait.
At first there was a gentle warmth which in a matter of seconds was replaced by an intense burning and a feeling I can only describe as like being given a barbed wire wedgie by two people intent on hitting the ceiling with my head. Religion hadn't featured much in my life until that night but I suddenly became willing to convert to any religion to stop the violent burning around the turd tunnel and what seemed like the destruction of the meat and two veg.
Struggling to not bite through my bottom lip I tried to wash the gel of in the sink and only succeeded in blocking the plughole with a mat of hair. Through the haze of tears I struggled out of the bathroom across the hall into the kitchen by this time walking was not really possible and I crawled the final yard to the fridge in the hope of some form of cold relief. I yanked the freezer drawer out and found a tub of ice cream, tore the lid of and positioned it under me. The relief was fantastic but only temporary as it melted fairly quickly and the fiery stabbing soon returned .
Due to the shape of the ice cream tub I hadn't managed to give the starfish any treatment and I groped around in the draw for something else as I was sure my vision was going to fail fairly soon.I grabbed a bag of what I later found out was frozen sprouts and tore it open trying to be quiet as I did so.I took a handful of them and tried in vain to clench some between the cheeks of my arse. This was not doing the trick as some of the gel had found it's way up the chutney channel and it felt like the space shuttle was running it's engines behind me.
This was probably and hopefully the only time in my life I was going to wish there was a gay snowman in the kitchen which should give you some idea of the depths I was willing to sink to in order to ease the pain. The only solution my pain crazed mind could come up with was to gently ease one of the sprouts where no veg had gone before.
Unfortunately, alerted by the strange grunts coming from the kitchen the other half chose that moment to come and investigate and was greeted by the sight of me, arse in the air, strawberry ice cream dripping from my bell end pushing a sprout up my arse while muttering..." Ooooh that feels good ". Understandably this was a shock to her and she let out a scream and as I hadn't heard her come in it caused an involuntary spasm of shock in myself which resulted in the sprout being ejected at quite some speed in her direction.
I can understand that having a sprout farted against your leg at 11 at night in the kitchen probably wasn't the special surprise she was expecting and having to explain to the kids the next day what the strange hollow in the ice cream was didn't improve my status...So to sum it up Veet removes hair, dignity and self respect.
UPDATE: the earliest online source I can find for the second piece is here.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Assange: more than 14 years to go to beat the record
How times change. The USA was once willing to provide political asylum in its Budapest embassy for 15 years:
The memorial plaque reads:
"The Government of the United States of America gave shelter to Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty in this building between November 4, 1956 - September 28, 1971"
"Az Amerikai Egyesült Államok kormánya ebben az épületben adott menedéket Mindszenty József bíborosnak 1956. november 4. – 1971. szeptember 28. között"
In my view, the Government of Great Britain has suffered enormous reputational damage for even considering breaching diplomatic protocol. Much of the rest of the world will tell itself that the mask slipped for a moment and showed the ugly face of our ruthless, law-despising power elite. Real tyrants like Putin will be able to say "tu quoque" when justifying their own short way with dissenters.
The memorial plaque reads:
"The Government of the United States of America gave shelter to Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty in this building between November 4, 1956 - September 28, 1971"
"Az Amerikai Egyesült Államok kormánya ebben az épületben adott menedéket Mindszenty József bíborosnak 1956. november 4. – 1971. szeptember 28. között"
In my view, the Government of Great Britain has suffered enormous reputational damage for even considering breaching diplomatic protocol. Much of the rest of the world will tell itself that the mask slipped for a moment and showed the ugly face of our ruthless, law-despising power elite. Real tyrants like Putin will be able to say "tu quoque" when justifying their own short way with dissenters.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Oz fags - buy them while you can
"Plain packaging" is a misnomer when it comes to the new Australian regs:
Although not (for many years now) a smoker, I am tempted to buy some of these, for they won't be around forever. They will be collector's items in future, and good (benson and) hedges against inflation.
Look after them well, and don't break the cellophane - condition is so important at auction.
Although not (for many years now) a smoker, I am tempted to buy some of these, for they won't be around forever. They will be collector's items in future, and good (benson and) hedges against inflation.
Look after them well, and don't break the cellophane - condition is so important at auction.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Three levels of freedom
There are at least three different levels or arenas of the freedom debates. Much of the heat in a debate springs from the argument shifting midway from one area to another. Please accept this as a first poor attempt at mapping out the ground.
1. Collective freedom
Struggle between groups. Groups of people who have some common identity and feel oppressed or insufficiently involved in the power structures that govern them. E.g. national sovereignty vs the EU, the suffragette movement, the abolition of slavery. Sometimes, as in the last two examples, there is significant support from outsiders in their struggle.
This debate is generally about fairness.
Factual argument will be about how one group suffers more, or benefits less, than another, in terms of personal income and wealth, longevity, health etc.
Moral argument will be based on the sense of unearned privilege or luck of those outside the group.
The counter-argument to this is that the privileged pay for the difference by protecting and succouring others (e.g. treating servants kindly, providing for them in sickness or age, educating their children, giving to charity, leaving bequests in wills, administering justice in peacetime, leading in time of war). Another compensation is to accept additional restrictions on their personal conduct, or voluntarily to risk greater misfortune or suffer extraordinary pain (e.g. Aztec kings dragged ceremonial knotted ropes through holes in their tongues). In some cases, there is an appeal to (false?) identification: the privileged are allowing the less fortunate to live through them in imagination.
The counter-counter-argument is that the difference is never quite paid for in full.
Contradiction: when a group wins, it sets terms for those who disagree. Freedom of speech is limited to protect minorities; Marxists impose equality of wealth by suppressing enterprise, at the same time allowing Party members material privileges to buy their loyalty. There is no freedom for all unless all think the same way.
In commercial terms, the underdog can eventually become the oppressive overdog. Thus a certain outstandingly successful supermarket grew by offering benefits to its customers, but latterly has (allegedly) attempted to buttress its position by exploiting its suppliers to the point of financial ruin, buying land around its stores to prevent competition from springing up, worsening the contracts of its lorry-drivers etc.
2. Individual freedom
The individual's desire for more leeway in their personal conduct (e.g. to smoke in pubs, engage in certain sexual practices, take currently illicit drugs, go everywhere in the nude).
This debate is generally about harmlessness, at least with respect to others.
Factual argument will centre on statistics relating to mortality, morbidity, economics, health and crime on others (neighbours, partners, children, the public at large) and the costs to society of treating or preventing these undesired side-effects, which shade off into claimed wider and longer-term consequences (e.g. health effects of secondary smoking).
Moral and political argument will be about whether society in general should be involved in mitigating harm to third parties (e.g. should social workers intervene in families of alcoholics, wife-beaters etc). Should society save the "victims", punish the "offenders" or leave altogether alone?
There will also be an appeal to social or religious norms; some will say that the individual must accept certain behavioural restrictions so that the uncodified patterns of behaviour and expectation that are felt to hold society together are not weakened. Thus some will argue that it is important to set a good personal example, or not to set a bad one (this has implications for professions such as teaching); similarly, certain behaviours are felt to have the potential to provoke socially disruptive reactions and measures are instituted to limit them (e.g. sumptuary laws, rules on what may be said about others in public - or even in private).
The individualist may dispute the fact as far as possible, and beyond that appeal to the principle that every other individual must take responsibility for their own responses. Norms will be represented as arbitrary and unnecessary for human happiness; it will be claimed that society will hold together without them.
To set oneself against others is to make oneself vulnerable, so the individualist will attempt to form (often uneasy) alliances, and raise the debate or struggle to the level of a collective-freedom issue. Thus with the groups effectively defined by their "oppressor" we will find some groups who are self-defined by some chosen issue.
But the fundamentalist individualist may not bother to ask society's permission at all. In the first place, getting rules changed is an uncertain and long-term project; secondly, to ask permission or to gather collective approval is (in principle) to cede one's personal power to others.
Contradiction: the individual may turn his dislike of others' power over him, into a mission to get power over others. At the extreme end we get Mao, Stalin etc. On a lesser scale, we get what is said to be the statistical over-representation of psychopaths in senior positions in politics and business.
3. Psychological (or spiritual) freedom
This is about conflict within the individual. Our desires are often contradictory; and sometimes there are demons hiding in one's background, waiting to finish business from long ago. Then there are patterns of expectation driving one to unsatisfactory aims, so that (e.g.) abused children often seek to start families of their own, long before they are capable of nurturing a child emotionally.
If you accept the insights of psychologists and prophets, failure to sort out the mess at this level sometimes results in drives and disasters at levels 2 and 3. Think of Citizen Kane and "Rosebud".
In this context it will be interesting to hear what Russell Brand has to say in his BBC Three TV documentary tomorrow. He is often seen as a poster-boy for indulgence, but actually is now an advocate for abstinence and for analysing one's reasons for wishing to indulge.
But this is about more than consumption-desires. Many of us (most? all?) are a mass of scores trying to be settled, patterns trying for completion, the expectations of family, friends or society, or unrealistic aspirations for ideal iconic life-moments that end forever with credits and closing music.
Contradiction: the fractured individual is afraid to be healed. Change is a kind of death. Creative people often fear that they could lose their motive force - e.g. Roald Dahl as reported by his daughter Tessa:
He hated the idea of therapy, analysis or psychiatry, as he said all his friends – Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett and the rest – ‘could never write after they had had all their nooks and crannies flattened like pancakes’. He was convinced that drugs were the answer (they didn’t flatten you like a pancake?). I believe he did not want to face his inner demons. So he told Anna to medicate me instead.
As the prophet Mohammed said (and he is far from the only one to say something like it), "Holy is the warrior who is at war with himself", i.e. who is this "I" and why does it want this thing?
But if the "I" is enigmatic, self-contradictory, untrustworthy and potentially destructive to self and others, by what shall we regulate our lives?
So we could get to another contradiction: voluntary submission. "To enter in these bonds is to be free," said Donne, enjoying the contradiction. The doctor and sometime Spectator contributor "Theodore Dalrymple" has more than once had prisoners tell him they prefer being "inside", where they don't have to make decisions. Round and round we go, like the worm Ouroboros. But surely here is where we begin.
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
1. Collective freedom
Struggle between groups. Groups of people who have some common identity and feel oppressed or insufficiently involved in the power structures that govern them. E.g. national sovereignty vs the EU, the suffragette movement, the abolition of slavery. Sometimes, as in the last two examples, there is significant support from outsiders in their struggle.
This debate is generally about fairness.
Factual argument will be about how one group suffers more, or benefits less, than another, in terms of personal income and wealth, longevity, health etc.
Moral argument will be based on the sense of unearned privilege or luck of those outside the group.
The counter-argument to this is that the privileged pay for the difference by protecting and succouring others (e.g. treating servants kindly, providing for them in sickness or age, educating their children, giving to charity, leaving bequests in wills, administering justice in peacetime, leading in time of war). Another compensation is to accept additional restrictions on their personal conduct, or voluntarily to risk greater misfortune or suffer extraordinary pain (e.g. Aztec kings dragged ceremonial knotted ropes through holes in their tongues). In some cases, there is an appeal to (false?) identification: the privileged are allowing the less fortunate to live through them in imagination.
The counter-counter-argument is that the difference is never quite paid for in full.
Contradiction: when a group wins, it sets terms for those who disagree. Freedom of speech is limited to protect minorities; Marxists impose equality of wealth by suppressing enterprise, at the same time allowing Party members material privileges to buy their loyalty. There is no freedom for all unless all think the same way.
In commercial terms, the underdog can eventually become the oppressive overdog. Thus a certain outstandingly successful supermarket grew by offering benefits to its customers, but latterly has (allegedly) attempted to buttress its position by exploiting its suppliers to the point of financial ruin, buying land around its stores to prevent competition from springing up, worsening the contracts of its lorry-drivers etc.
2. Individual freedom
The individual's desire for more leeway in their personal conduct (e.g. to smoke in pubs, engage in certain sexual practices, take currently illicit drugs, go everywhere in the nude).
This debate is generally about harmlessness, at least with respect to others.
Factual argument will centre on statistics relating to mortality, morbidity, economics, health and crime on others (neighbours, partners, children, the public at large) and the costs to society of treating or preventing these undesired side-effects, which shade off into claimed wider and longer-term consequences (e.g. health effects of secondary smoking).
Moral and political argument will be about whether society in general should be involved in mitigating harm to third parties (e.g. should social workers intervene in families of alcoholics, wife-beaters etc). Should society save the "victims", punish the "offenders" or leave altogether alone?
There will also be an appeal to social or religious norms; some will say that the individual must accept certain behavioural restrictions so that the uncodified patterns of behaviour and expectation that are felt to hold society together are not weakened. Thus some will argue that it is important to set a good personal example, or not to set a bad one (this has implications for professions such as teaching); similarly, certain behaviours are felt to have the potential to provoke socially disruptive reactions and measures are instituted to limit them (e.g. sumptuary laws, rules on what may be said about others in public - or even in private).
The individualist may dispute the fact as far as possible, and beyond that appeal to the principle that every other individual must take responsibility for their own responses. Norms will be represented as arbitrary and unnecessary for human happiness; it will be claimed that society will hold together without them.
To set oneself against others is to make oneself vulnerable, so the individualist will attempt to form (often uneasy) alliances, and raise the debate or struggle to the level of a collective-freedom issue. Thus with the groups effectively defined by their "oppressor" we will find some groups who are self-defined by some chosen issue.
But the fundamentalist individualist may not bother to ask society's permission at all. In the first place, getting rules changed is an uncertain and long-term project; secondly, to ask permission or to gather collective approval is (in principle) to cede one's personal power to others.
Contradiction: the individual may turn his dislike of others' power over him, into a mission to get power over others. At the extreme end we get Mao, Stalin etc. On a lesser scale, we get what is said to be the statistical over-representation of psychopaths in senior positions in politics and business.
3. Psychological (or spiritual) freedom
This is about conflict within the individual. Our desires are often contradictory; and sometimes there are demons hiding in one's background, waiting to finish business from long ago. Then there are patterns of expectation driving one to unsatisfactory aims, so that (e.g.) abused children often seek to start families of their own, long before they are capable of nurturing a child emotionally.
If you accept the insights of psychologists and prophets, failure to sort out the mess at this level sometimes results in drives and disasters at levels 2 and 3. Think of Citizen Kane and "Rosebud".
In this context it will be interesting to hear what Russell Brand has to say in his BBC Three TV documentary tomorrow. He is often seen as a poster-boy for indulgence, but actually is now an advocate for abstinence and for analysing one's reasons for wishing to indulge.
But this is about more than consumption-desires. Many of us (most? all?) are a mass of scores trying to be settled, patterns trying for completion, the expectations of family, friends or society, or unrealistic aspirations for ideal iconic life-moments that end forever with credits and closing music.
Contradiction: the fractured individual is afraid to be healed. Change is a kind of death. Creative people often fear that they could lose their motive force - e.g. Roald Dahl as reported by his daughter Tessa:
He hated the idea of therapy, analysis or psychiatry, as he said all his friends – Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett and the rest – ‘could never write after they had had all their nooks and crannies flattened like pancakes’. He was convinced that drugs were the answer (they didn’t flatten you like a pancake?). I believe he did not want to face his inner demons. So he told Anna to medicate me instead.
As the prophet Mohammed said (and he is far from the only one to say something like it), "Holy is the warrior who is at war with himself", i.e. who is this "I" and why does it want this thing?
But if the "I" is enigmatic, self-contradictory, untrustworthy and potentially destructive to self and others, by what shall we regulate our lives?
So we could get to another contradiction: voluntary submission. "To enter in these bonds is to be free," said Donne, enjoying the contradiction. The doctor and sometime Spectator contributor "Theodore Dalrymple" has more than once had prisoners tell him they prefer being "inside", where they don't have to make decisions. Round and round we go, like the worm Ouroboros. But surely here is where we begin.
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
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