David McDonagh
Sean feels that mere ideas have failed. He seeks other alternative strategies.
He feels that the latest state efforts to counter terror are bad viz. the Investigatory Powers Bill They have already curtailed civil liberties more than was felted needed during the IRA campaign of the 1970s and 1980s that was an existential to the UK, at least, as it aimed to conquer Northern Ireland. Islamic terrorism, by contrast, has been mild yet all are subject to terrorist suspicion by the UK state. This seems to be largely irrelevant to what the terrorists are up to, Sean says, as the terrorists do not need to use E mail or the telephone and nor do they need to use English anyway, but if ever they do then they might use a version full of religious meanings not particularly understood by the UK authorities who will be doing something other than countering them in storing all data of the Internet for a year. Nor is such data safe in the UK state’s hands.
A police state need not censor or arrest people, it is enough to tell them they are being watched, Sean continues. The current Bill against terrorism might not make a complete police state but it is a step in that direction.
But Sean fears that there is nothing that he can do about it anyway and he asks why none in authority listens to him. This lack of listening of those in authority seems to be important for some reason.
Between 1930 and 1990 many liberal criticisms of the state were made and Chris Tame made a bibliography of much of it and reflected some of it in his essays. They convinced Sean but have had close to no effect elsewhere, he says, though the market has had more favour since about 1980. The IEA may have had some impact there. But now the likes of Antony Flew are dead there will be no replacement. Sean concludes that liberty has lost out.
Evidence on state food fads and on state education have been ignored and/or forgotten, says Sean. So have reports on state failure in other areas.
Sean feels that if the ideas of liberty had been adequate we would have full liberty by now. But important people just do not listen. Otherwise we would have an anarcho-liberal society today. For some reason he imagines that Platonism supported witchcraft but that a mathematical reality is alien to it. In fact, Platonism does its best exactly as a paradigm of mathematical realism.
Sean continues to show similar poor scholarship about witches and other things. He repeats his unmitigated folly of his last LA talk on literature and culture on the sheer delusion that it is one whit germane to liberty. That anyone could think that pop’ songs or East-enders matter in this respect is quite phenomenal. But that is what Sean says he thinks.
Sean looks at the way how the Marxists gave up Marxism for Political Correctness instead and recommends the few pristine liberals to do the same. He thinks in terms of left and right but both are germane only for ordinary statists but irrelevant to Marx’s pristine outlook, and similarly it is irrelevant to liberty.
Sean does not grasp that tax cuts alone is germane and that almost nothing else is to the cause of getting the state off our back. He thinks music matters, as do schools, and he even thinks we need secret schools but why he feels secrecy helps liberty is far from clear, but it all sounds Romantic, I suppose.
Sean says we need to impress right across the cultural spectrum but the stuff he seems to have in mind do not begin to be relevant to the cause of rolling back the state. Sean says intellectual activism is not a complete waste of time but I would never dream of being saying the same about his ideas of culture and general entertainment, as it seems to me to be exactly a waste of time.
Economic analysis is needed to defend free trade and laissez faire and maybe some social philosophy, or sociology, for the general outlook of state free liberty but the rest does not seem to matter very much.
I disagree that Sean has clearly explained his ideas. It does not seem to be even one whit clear as to why he holds them. He seems to be merely confused.
