On 19/10/11 00:58, Natalie Golovin wrote:
You can’t throw away thousands of years of civilizations’ attempt to codify property and human rights& obligations.
In the moment you support the federal United States of America or any of its states or their respective constituencies, you throw away thousands of years of native livelihoods, property relations and traditions on the continent - in favour of an elitist European colony gone rogue, i.e. "independent", in the name of freedom, liberty and whatever other terms are bandied about to conceal a "keep your hands off of my stash" attitude. As always, whose freedom? Whose liberty? Freedom from what? To what? All of these terms are entirely dependent on a definition that can only be manifested through practices - else, as you suggested about equaliberty, it would be a mathematical/abstract idea removed from social relations and thus determining them like a despotic government would do, indeed, is required to do - and as such freedom and all that stuff must necessarily be measured in empathy, solidarity and that sort of thing, in aesthetics coupled with environmental justice (i.e that it is not always the poor, coloured, whatever who live where the industrial contamination is, for instance, and not always the indigenous people who live where the grave cost of resources for the industrial machine are really paid and so on) - not empty words spoken by the white/western/urban elites. Borders are the ultimate constructions of abstraction and you might find interesting stories about how maps and cadastral maps - borders internal to and surronding sovereign territories - were required to throw away thousands of years of property rights and associated cultural traditions/customs - this appears in the work of James Scott, recently referred to on this list. Also in Wolf's "Europe and the people without history", but you can find social history in many other sources. Linebaugh's work on the Magna Carta comes to mind, which is an extraordinary effort to extend the history of the modern world back into the 1200s, thus revealing the processes through which the obliteration of customary property relations (covering rights to food, fuel and building materials, i.e. the capacity to reproduce autonomously, or, as it were: real/lived libertarianism) unfolded and created a new universe of abstract nonsense on stilts that you now defend and have the temerity to proclaim as having its roots in time immemorial. The problem with your philosophy, then, to speak bluntly, is that your baseline, your "ground zero" - to use a popular term across the pond - is already exploitative and racist: premised on the last 4-800 years of white expansion and supremacy. That apart (and removal of any human decency and empathy beyond race and borders, i.e. historical knowledge/understanding/information not written by the winners), and I would sign up for Ron Paul, too. Alas, you both live in an entirely different universe, - all in the name of freedom, liberty etc. and with good intentions, I am sure, but.. -mp/ -- NOT sent from a flippin' "smart"phone - 'cause I like birds...