Re "Perhaps you're more of a Libertarian? Do you have those in the U.K.?": Not enough! I've always liked the label "libertarian", perhaps because it chimes with "libertine" and "liberal" - liberal in the old-fashioned, 19th-century, sense of individual freedoms and not your current US sense which homes-in on group values and the ghettoisation that attitude entails). But "libertarian" in the USA also seems to imply a fuck-the-poor attitude which I don't share. I've read a few of Ayn Rand's books (yep, I know she rejects the label "libertarian" but that's what she was essentially) and respect her rants against state encroachment but she never addresses the issue that wealth gets concentrated in elites. Here in the UK they've been able to ascertain, using DNA analysis, that most of the wealth of the country is in the hands of people who can trace their roots back to the Norman Conquest in 1066! That make it the longest military occupation in history! You can't ignore brute facts like that. But although I sympathise with the left's concern with poverty (I've been at the bottom of the pile myself in the past and even today can count drug addicts and seriously fucked-up people amongst my friends) the over-riding priority for me has always been individual freedom - and that was also the case when all I had to eat (as a latter-day hippie) was onion sandwiches and I was sleeping on a mattress rescued from a rubbish tip! I think the thing that really pisses me off about present-day lefties is the white-guilt crap. Yes, I know the British Empire once controlled a quarter of the world (and I admit to feeling slightly smug and amused about that fact!) but that was before I was born, and just as I always treat individuals as individuals I demand that they treat me the same. And if they don't - screw 'em!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" wrote: > > > > Regardless, I wouldn't allow myself to be placed on a political > > spectrum. My heroes are all renegades. Some are lefties like Blake, > > Shelley, old Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson; some are on the > > individualist right like Aleister Crowley, the Marquis de Sade (really!) > > and Max Stirner. > > Perhaps you're more of a Libertarian? Do you have those > in the U.K.? >
