No! Just because it was shoved down our throats, and the cost for industry to comply. PET told us we had to embrace it, but the US of A still isn't behind it, and Canada still isn't 100% complient.strange1 said:
The Great Right North?
- Thread starter onthebottom
- Start date
That isn't the issue. It was decided years ago on the Plains of Abraham, that Canada would eventually be controlled by the French and Roman Catholics. As far as I know, Harper doesn't fit in either category.langeweile said:
It's not for nothing that stock-car racing is regarded as vulgar by the same elites who denounce common law as an irrational mess and who dream of replacing a spontaneous order of liberty with a centrally planned and engineered utopia. Formula One is the isomorph in the world of sport to police-State government in the word of politics, a classic case of what Hayek identified as "constructivism". The F1 race car is pure artifact, an attempt to engineer the ultimate machine from theoretical first principles, which machine has no existence of its own prior to the will of the governing body that ordained it into being. Engineering the perfect machine is no bad thing in itself- but this technological project is, first and foremost, a social project; the social prototype of this machine is the old European dream of the "well-ordered police State" in all its permutations from Enlightened despotism to National Socialism and Stalinism. Engineered speed symbolizes the might of the State as it hurtles through history to its destiny (it should be noted that there were no speed limits on Hitler's Autobahns). The blueprint or diagram that gives us the F1 car in the field of sport gives us the Five Year Plan, the Prussian war machine, and the extermination gas chamber in the field of government.
The stock car, by contrast, corresponds to the rule of common law. One takes an existing vehicle- one that ordinary people actually own and drive in day-to-day life, and which thus has an organic social existence all its own outside of any technocratic fantasies or socialist formulas or five-year plans- and improves on it without doing violence to its nature. In the field of politics, this corresponds to how 21st century North Americans do business and govern themselves in and according to institutions and laws that are suitably upgraded, but still essentially feudal; the Toronto businessman of today still sends MPs to Parliament, insists on his right to habeas corpus and jury trial, and litigates in court on the basis of principles that long antedate the will of the Liberal Party.
The stock car, by contrast, corresponds to the rule of common law. One takes an existing vehicle- one that ordinary people actually own and drive in day-to-day life, and which thus has an organic social existence all its own outside of any technocratic fantasies or socialist formulas or five-year plans- and improves on it without doing violence to its nature. In the field of politics, this corresponds to how 21st century North Americans do business and govern themselves in and according to institutions and laws that are suitably upgraded, but still essentially feudal; the Toronto businessman of today still sends MPs to Parliament, insists on his right to habeas corpus and jury trial, and litigates in court on the basis of principles that long antedate the will of the Liberal Party.
Stupid me. I always thought that racing was just a bunch of cars trying to get to the finish line first.Truncador said:
Where do you come up with this kind of stuff?
I haven't figured out if you are incredibly smart or just plain paranoid...in any case it makes good reading and good thinking...THX
On the other hand...I am being accused of being simplistic...right DQ?
This objection doesn't make the analysis any more or less correct. The liberal, common-law mind and the constructivist, police mind aren't watertight entities existing in a mutually-exclusive geographical distribution. Constructivism has a long and distinguished pedigree in America, not least of all because Germans and Judeo-Germans make up the second largest ethnic group there, but also because the dissenting Protestantism on which America was founded- for all its individualism- had a deep and indelible paternalistic streak in it, dissenting with absolutism only over the question of whether or not the King, as opposed to God, was the father of the people. These Protestant groups often had their own utopian blueprints for a perfect social machinery to be leveraged into being from scratch, with the difference being that this machine wasn't intended to serve the greater glory of the State (consider the fact it was the Quaker colonists- fiercely anti-Statist communitarians- who invented the modern prison, later praised by Founding Father Dr. Benjamin Rush as a "republican machine"); and the Continental treatises on polizeiwissenschaft were by no means unknown to them.Asterix said:
Actually in this case it's a combination of Barthes, Karl Marx, Hayek, and late-period Foucault. Were he alive, Derrida would deconstruct that post eight ways from Sunday; it's to a grammatologist what a computer running all ports open online is to a hackerLifeSucks said:
No, it doesn't. Not to trivialize the campaign against water flouridation, though; far from being frivolous, that campaign adressed some extremely serious issues, namely of building nanny-State controls into the very physical infrastructure or environment (in which respect the flouridation proponents were on the cutting edge of a psychotically totalitarian public-health movement that luckily seems to have floundered and died).Strange1: said:
Mind if I ask what you do for living? You and I are obviously of a somewhat different persuasion, but it's not everyday that I come across a guy (or gal, as the case might be) whose readings swing from Hayek to Foucault, not to mention picky enough to highlight Foucault's latter days. I find that many resident Bushphiliacs on this board are caricatures lifted straight from the show Simple Life, whose sophomoric understanding of politics and political theory emasculates their minds too much to engage in any decent dialogue beyond screaming the dreaded word "lefties" and "liberals," but you, my friend, you actually show some signs of intelligence, which is a rare commodity among the flag-waving, foaming-in-the-mouth, Bible-thumping Bush supporters. Certainly this is the first time that I've come across a confessed Bushphiliac who actually knows that Foucault is not an automobile brand.Truncador said:
We both know, of course, that Dubya himself could hardly make any sense of your posts, let alone grasp a single paragraph of Derrida.
