Libertariana

Several blogs that have a far wider readership than SCT have already linked to the new kid on the block Bleeding Heart Libertarian, which if it bucks the trend of dying young will likely become an established go-to site for political and economic insight that has stopped riding the right-left seesaw. I'm going to plug it even though I doubt anyone will hear it hear first, because it's more or less down my alley. The two fellow-bloggers with whom I most often concur on political questions are The Poseidonian, and Amod Lele, and like them, I keep, as it were, a foot in both camps (or maybe I just mutter "a plague on both your houses"). I am more troubled than the Poseidonian seems to be by the fact that liberalism founders upon the question of justification of values (I am troubled because I believe there are reasons to think that this makes liberalism potentially immunodeficient), and I am probably more paranoid than Amod (I am entertained by--and I sometimes entertain--conspiracy theory to what I assume is a far greater degree), which is why what would be quietism in him is often alienation in myself; but in general I find myself with few demurrals. My social conservatism comes from the same place as my ecological conservationism, for the boundary between noosphere and biosphere is permeable and both realms need equilibrium. My suspicion of business is of a piece with my suspicion of government--the bigger, the worse, is the way my kneecap thinks, and while I often argue my kneecap down (I have not mastered the art some seem to have, of writing with it), I always listen. In my Uptopian moods I'm probably something of an anarcho-monarchist, like Salvador Dali or J.R.R. Tolkien, but realistically I'd settle for a constitution and some responsible, Cincinnatus-style parliamentarians (I think the weak point of Badiou's politics is his weird animus against parliamentarianism and electoral politics per se as opposed to in practice). That said, I'm sure there'll be plenty to argue with on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism, but (from my point of view) it'll be arguing-with, and that's saying something.