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Philippe Sands seems like a nice guy, but I would take the argument much further. My opinion is that when you have a nascent police state, the people creating it will actually create phony "threats" - even if you don't believe the USA could do this, or is doing it, there are countries where it is totally obvious, like Jordan, where on one occasion not long ago they made their contribution to the GWOT by filling a u-haul type van with plastic cans of turpentine and what-not, then torturing a couple of guys until they signed pre-written confessions that they had been planning to use it to blanket Amman with poison gas.
Political compass - I don't accept the premises of it. I don't accept that people even have political personalities like that. It's like pop Jungianism - you know, sensation,intuition, thinking, feeling, introversion, extroversion, bla, bla - but worse, because it somehow forecloses a whole lot of important political attitudes I can't quite think of, but I can feel.
Loony libertarians - thanks for the links, Mona. I took a quick look, but I am just not into debating this sort of thing or reading the debates. Politics to me is just a given, like having umpires or referees in sport - and it seems so obvious that if one starts out with the idea that all government is tyranny anyhow, then one has deprived oneself of any means of combating tyranny in the normal sense, because one has said, it's all the same. I do this sometimes, in that I arrive at a sort of punk attitude - you know, "they're all fascists" - but I know that this is the mental equivalent of throwing up. And once I have had my little spasm of nausea, I go back to trying as patiently as possible to cope with everyday reality, in which any system pretty much will be more or less corrupt in proportion to the inequalities of wealth within it. And compulsory equalisation of wealth by totalitarian means is no good, since the totalitarian authority supposedly doing the equalising is in reality infinitely powerful and therefore infinitely wealthy, and the wealth of its subjects is just a sham. That is true of Stalinism and its horrible efforts to impose social justice on the peasant proprietors. I am with Hannah Arendt on all this - still working my way very slowly through her "Origins of Totalitarianism," which is absolutely brilliant. I won't even try to classify her in terms of "isms" - it just doesn't capture her at all.
I have a concrete set of questions on my mind right now, which I think I put on another thread here, about, how did neocon philosophy move from scoop jackson style anti-communism to bernard lewis style anti-islamism. It isn't because of "the Jews" or "Israel" - they are just the occasion for it - there I am, being Arendt influenced again : the whole first part of "origins of Totalitarianism" is about this tendency for "the Jews" to act as pretexts or catalysts for various sorts of reactionary phenomena. That is a concrete historical problem that I need to get to grips with, and mere "isms" won't help.
This 'comment' is far too long, but I have explain my focus, sorry.
