It won’t let me reply to David Robins’s comment so I’ll write a reply to myself, in reply to him instead. Presumably to stop the comment thread
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I guess advocates of libertarianism would never call themselves right wing in the original sense, that of social inequality being natural, desirable or inevitable in society. The case would be made to the poor or the working class along the lines of free markets and unfettered capitalism being a tide that raises all boats, that they spread opportunity and allow everyone the freedom to make something of themselves without the government holding them back or coddling them with social programmes. A sort of neo-American Dream I guess. The thing is, the Dream worked great at spreading prosperity when other people’s land was being grabbed and given to settlers, and there were slaves available to work it. Doesn’t apply quite so much in these days of technological unemployment, ever-increasing population on a planet of finite resources, the gap between income and household costs probably as high as ever, and global capital.

I remember reading that bit about child porn. I wonder if there are links with NAMBLA; I could envisage pathological individualists of these stripes arguing for the child’s ‘rights’ to partake in sex acts with adults, and that the government is oppressing their freedom of action.

Their anti-state argument is shown up in its ridiculousness on two premises: how much of a hellhole Libya has been since the government collapsed, and the fact that for all of us, the government guarantees property rights.

Libertarians are the far Centre. Everything is property, the body included (‘I own me’). The extremists advocate for child porn, on the grounds that there’s a market for it. Presumably, once the social programs are cut, selling your children into slavery will be seen as the enterprising solution.

There were three reports, the other two are also interesting. All three carry the fingerprints of the ‘Welsh Government’. This was a charade that will be used by WG to justify reducing funding and / or taking greater control. I’ll try to explain it in the next blog piece.

And don’t forget the space in which any model exists is curved and folds back on itself. Consider the libertarians in the States, they are ostensibly all about gay rights, whilst at the same time advocating shrinking the state and leaving everything to markets and enterprise. It’s tricky to reconcile the axing of social programs to reduce government spend, with being the bleeding heart champion of everyone’s rights, to my mind anyway.

Real life, with billions of actors, hundreds of polities and geography, fauna and flora overlaid on top, cannot be distilled down to facile models. If people would even have the humility to admit their understanding is limited and hold hands up to getting it wrong and making bad calls then we’d be half way to an enlightened populace.

They’re not all that good at this game really though are they, so it’s just wacky enough that it might be true. Look at the endless amounts of painfully obvious sock puppet accounts all over Twitter that some might say the 77th have a hand in (Russian doll of metaphors there; as was that… it’s hall of mirrors of metaphors… which is one again… Ahhh!). The hubris and oafishness goes right to the top of this shitty state, look at our glorious PM!

This creepy WA-RU body was invited in to produce this crock of shit by a National Institution who are part of what one might regard as the Welsh cultural identity. They appear to have ignored evidence that some BAME citizens motivate themselves to learn Welsh thus ticking one of the ability boxes for getting employment at the Arts Council or the Museums. Instead they make a big hoo-ha about all those lazy types, mostly Anglos, who can’t be bothered to learn, and tough shit can’t get one of those jobs.
Like another critic put it, you don’t get an engineer’s job unless you satisfy certain ability criteria so why should a job in Welsh arts or culture be any different. Ability trumps all, no matter whether you are white black brown or some shade in between.

People at the Arts Council and those Museums need a good clip around their collective earholes for entertaining such wokeish bullshit anyway. Any of them linked by any chance to the nutters who invaded YC ?

The 3D model has been available for as long as man has been aware that we are all 3D ! My preference is for a spherical model for politics but a cube will do nicely. However most people in politics are so lazy (or thick) they have to have everything reduced to 2D linear.

Flat earthers rule when it comes to politics, and the recent crop of “talent” that invaded YC are proof that some struggle with 2D. Enough to make one despair.

Left and Right, it’s a bit like the Bohr model of the atom, with electrons wizzing around in orbits. It’s just a model, a crude facsimile for how things really are. The biaxial spectrum of social and economic axes comes a bit closer. But what about a cube, of axes between nationalism and abandonment of nations as axes along a third dimension?

The economics of far Right and Old Left have always overlapped because national socialism was a riff on the original, one with working-class as well as ruling-class roots. The ‘yellow socialists’ – the earliest fascists – broke with the ‘red socialists’ over the same issue as Old Left / New Left, the failure of revolutionary change to happen. The yellow socialists blamed democracy and the New Left blamed the proles. The idea that if you go far enough in one direction you come out on the other side – ‘horseshoe theory’ – isn’t always true as policy but it is as psychology. The far Left have to denounce it in the most bloodcurdling terms because, of course, it can’t be allowed to be true. Hence the projection: everyone who isn’t them is ‘fascist’ by definition.

Left-wing academics view horseshoe theory as a dated attempt by the Centre to smear the Left while concealing their own affinities with the far Right. I agree only that it’s dated; a more plausible view is that this denunciation is an attempt by the far Left to smear the Right while concealing their own affinities with the Centre, for example, in relaxing immigration controls so as to lower wages. It’s noticeable how many prominent neo-liberals started their political life on the far Left. They were certainly never conservatives. The pressure for public ownership of strategically important assets now seems to be coming mainly from various shades of the Right. The Left can mouth the words about public ownership but in general no longer understand their meaning, because they no longer have a viable theory of the nation and its state.