Hulver's site || UK Libertarian Party?

UK Libertarian Party?

Good	5 votes - 83 %
Bad	1 vote - 16 %

6 Total Votes

Some of you are still human | 16 comments (16 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback

Halting State by jump the ladder (4.00 / 1) #1 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 07:22:59 AM EST

Definitely his weakest book and I agree largely with your criticsms but I'll give him that he's very prolific.

I wish he'd take a breather by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #2 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 07:36:32 AM EST

Stop churning stuff out and start editing what he's writing. He seems to be getting more careless: "The Merchants' War" was pretty poor too.

He seems to be writing 2 or 3 books a year now. I'd rather he wrote fewer and kept the quality higher.

Wikipedia says "Glasshouse", "The Jennifer Morgue" and "The Clan Corporate" came out in 2006; "Halting State", "The Merchants' War" and the novella "Missile Gap" in 2007. Slow down! Proofread! Chew your food!
--
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise." -- Bertrand Russell
[ Parent ]

: But he wants his ice cream by joh3n (4.00 / 1) #3 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 08:12:30 AM EST

noooowwwwwwww!!!!!!
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I just ate about 7 pounds of meat
-theantix
[ Parent ]
: not a stross fan by Merekat (4.00 / 1) #6 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 12:46:10 PM EST

I want to like him more than I do, but imo, all he has going for him in his books are the many ideas, and even if he's been building up to this for a lifetime and just hitting print now, he's going to run out.

[ Parent ]

I loved Halting State by Alan Crowe (3.00 / 2) #4 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 10:23:07 AM EST

I was so enthusiastic about Halting State that I bought three more copies and posted them to friends who are not science fiction fans.

That is not quite the endorsement it appears. Two of them had lived in Edinburgh for many years. The third had visited me in Edinburgh and had already seen many of the places mentioned. We took his sons to climb trees on Corstorphine Hill and I had pointed out the bunker. There is an innocent but insubstantial pleasure to be had from location spotting.

All three work in information technology, two of them on the infra-structure side, so I knew that the world and the jargon would be familiar to them and not an obstacle to enjoying the books. They all responded enthusiastically to the book, so either they did like it or they are being more polite than is really helpful.

I'm not sure whether the founding a Libertarian Party is good or bad. (I wonder how it differs from the rump of the Liberal Party, that never merged with the SDP in the founding of the Lib Dems?) My doubt is because I see a disturbing polarization about freedom. On one extreme there are the Libertarians, for whom liberty is the sole polictical axiom, no difficult decisions or awkward trade-offs required. On the other extreme is the current mainstream.

The current mainstream is quite nuanced, with several competing tier one values: national security, health, prosperity, social justice. Liberty is tier two. When it conflicts with a tier one value, there is no trade-off, it just loses.

An example of this is the prohibition of cannabis to adults. There is scope for range of opinion on the trade-off between liberty and health. I imagine freedom nuts who would only concede that cannabis was so dangerous that it had to be banned if it were killing a thousand a year. Meanwhile health nuts would insist that even though we are a nation of 60million, even 10 deaths a year would justify a ban. In the middle, mainstream opinion values freedom and health. We could accept a hunderd deaths a year to be free, but more than that is too big a threat to the health of the nation and justifies a ban.

What a vivid imagination I have. Modern Britain refuses take any casualties as the price of freedom. Liberty is a second tier value and hardly counts. I would like to see liberty as a first tier value.

So does the founding of the Libertarian Party please me? Not really. I cannot see Liberty as the sole first tier value. I fear that the Libertarian Party will polarize the debate, forcing people to chose whether freedom is all important or not important at all.

Who's dying from Cannabis? by ammoniacal (4.00 / 1) #7 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 01:12:50 PM EST

I'd really like to know.

Irony: ammo says it's time. Tom is blocked.
[ Parent ]

People inexplicably sensitive to carcinogens? by gazbo (4.00 / 1) #8 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 01:21:02 PM EST

"Engarde!" cried the larvae, huskily. - Scrymarch

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I don't know, by ambrosen (4.00 / 2) #9 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 06:11:52 PM EST

But IME, it's pretty bad for some people's mental health.

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My best friend's brothers pal told me about this by georgeha (4.00 / 1) #10 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 09:56:12 PM EST

dude who tried to catch a bale as it fell out of an airplane.

[ Parent ]

Can increase your likelihood by Breaker (4.00 / 1) #11 Mon Mar 31, 2008 at 06:52:10 AM EST

Of developing paranoid schizophrenia.

Seen it happen twice. One guy is dead by his own hand, the other is halfwitted through the medication required to keep him sane.

[ Parent ]

They could have been self medicating by georgeha (4.00 / 1) #13 Mon Mar 31, 2008 at 09:53:57 AM EST

We really need double blind tests, maybe with identical twins.

[ Parent ]

: One did go back on the weed by Breaker (4.00 / 1) #14 Mon Mar 31, 2008 at 10:12:25 AM EST

After they released him from hospital.
Dead within 2 weeks of release.
The other guy, to my knowledge, did not self medicate any further once he'd been sectioned.

[ Parent ]

Whoops! Should have made my logic explicit. by Alan Crowe (4.00 / 2) #15 Mon Mar 31, 2008 at 11:51:40 AM EST

I'm arguing that the current mainstream in the UK is a actually pretty extreme. Liberty is traditionally a core value and love of Liberty a key part of the British identity, but I'm claiming that it has slipped to being a second tier value that gets trumped, for example, by health, without any attempt to make a trade-off. That is a big, scary claim; I had better be able to back it up.

I construct my argument as a proof by contradiction. I imagine that Liberty is still a first tier value and follow the logic of that until I reach a contradition, which concludes my proof that it has slipped into the second tier.

So I follow the thought that different people would have different views on the trade-off between Health and Liberty. I think I do a fair job describing how today's debate would look if Liberty were still a tier one value.

Where I fail to be explicit is in failing to note that no-one is dying from Cannabis. I took that as common knowledge. So much so that I expected my readers to follow through the implication themselves. If Liberty were still a tier one value even the most anal nanny-statist would feel the need for an actual, if small, body count to justify prohibition, but we have prohition without a body count. Thats my contradiction.

We really have moved into an extreme era, with libertarians on one side, the "mainstream" on the other, and the sensible, middle ground left empty.

[ Parent ]

Those Orange ads are great by Scrymarch (4.00 / 1) #5 Sun Mar 30, 2008 at 10:34:33 AM EST

Didn't think to look for all the new ones.
_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}

Democratic NetRoots by wiredog (4.00 / 1) #12 Mon Mar 31, 2008 at 07:39:01 AM EST

I think the party has mostly been ignoring the netroots. Neither Obama nor, especially, Clinton is the candidate that the MoveOn.org crowd would like.

Earth First!
_{(We can strip mine the rest later.)}

The Thing is brilliant by nebbish (4.00 / 1) #16 Mon Mar 31, 2008 at 06:33:14 PM EST

It rips Alien off but is more successful I think. Very claustrophobic, cold and beardy.

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It's political correctness gone mad!

Some of you are still human | 16 comments (16 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback


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