Tag: political philosophy

Parfit’s Long-Termism and Property Rights

Posted in economics, equality, fiction, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, property, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Cause and effect: This clip by Jonny Thompson influenced this post.

I’ve written extensively (and, some might say, relentlessly) on the immorality of private property, particularly the theological nonsense that undergirds its supposed legitimacy. Locke’s first-come, first-served logic might have sounded dashing in the 17th century, but it now reads like a boarding queue at Ryanair: desperate, arbitrary, and hostile to basic decency.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this content.

The core problem? Locke’s formulation assumes land was once freely available, as if Earth were a kind of colonial vending machine: insert labour, receive title. But that vending machine was already jammed by the time most of humanity got a look-in. Worse, it bakes in two kinds of chauvinism: temporal (screw the future) and speciesist (screw anything non-human).

Parfit’s long-termism lays bare the absurdity: why should a bit of land or atmospheric stability belong to those who happened to get here first, especially when their stewardship amounts to strip-mining the pantry and then boarding up the exit?

And no, “mixing your labour” with the land does not miraculously confer ownership—any more than a damp bint lobbing a sword at you from a pond makes you sovereign. That’s not philosophy; that’s Arthurian cosplay.

Switching Teams, Same Game: How Politics Is the New Religion

Posted in language, modernism, philosophy, postmodernism, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Jean-François Lyotard’s Le DiffĂ©rend has a way of gnawing at you—not with profound revelations, but with the slow, disquieting erosion of assumptions. It got me thinking about something uncomfortably obvious: political orientation is nothing more than the secular cousin of religious indoctrination. Just as most people will, without much scrutiny, cling to the religion of their upbringing and defend it as the One True Faith, the same applies to their political worldview. Whether you’re baptised into Anglicanism or wade knee-deep into the waters of neoliberalism, the zeal is indistinguishable.

Of course, there are the self-proclaimed rebels who smugly declare they’ve rejected their parents’ politics. The ones who went left when Mum and Dad leaned right or discovered anarchism in the ruins of a conservative household. But let’s not be fooled by the patina of rebellion: they may have switched teams, but they’re still playing the same game. They’ve accepted the foundational myths of institutions and democracy—those hallowed, untouchable idols. Like religion, these constructs are not just defended but sanctified, preached as the best or only possible versions of salvation. Dissenters are heretics; non-believers are unthinkable.

It’s not that political ideologies are inherently bad (just like religion has its occasional charm). It’s that the devout rarely stop to question whether the framework itself might be the problem. They assume the boundaries are fixed, the terms are immutable, and the debate is merely about the correct interpretation of the catechism. But if Lyotard has taught us anything, it’s this: the real battles—the diffĂ©rends—are the ones no one’s even acknowledging because the language to articulate them doesn’t exist in the prevailing orthodoxy.