At its best, as I wrote of LP when it closed in 2012, it was one of the few places where Left and Right still spoke. More often it was home to the kind of marginal ideas (and behaviour) that the ‘blogosphere’, for good reason, encouraged—Austrian economics, free-speech absolutism, and so on. In the era where everyone with a twitter account is her or his own megaphone, and where nobody can pretend Internet Speech doesn’t have the potential to end in real violence, with real mobs with real fists, we forget how constrained the world of political ideas was in the 2000s. It’s hard to believe it really could be refreshing, rather than harmful to one’s own mental health, to go online and read other people’s firm views. It was the only place on the internet—indeed, in the world—where someone like Graeme Bird could be tolerated to take on all comers in a >10,000 comment argument about the fractional reserve in banking, about growth, profit and the State, and the nature of money, never anybody quite sure how much was playful and how much was deadly serious.
At its worst, and there is no kind way to say this, it was a hatefully racist and sectarian sewer, and was a predecessor of the kind of filth-as-speech that is now the worst, and most dangerous, of social media. It would be kind, but unfair, to remember only its good moments, without the horrible.
AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY IN THE present moment fulfils all of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's promises to the future. Joh, Premier of Queensland 1968–1987 presided over a State with all the qualities Australia enjoys today: it was parochial, violent, hypocritical, complacent, as crooked as a broken finger, as racist as the day is long. Since he failed to become Prime Minister, we have no sense of how Joh would have treated the border, but we can infer his probable attitudes from today's current affairs, a strongman Fortress Australia that looks inward, punishing the vulnerable, wondering why anyone would want to leave.
The most interesting and ambitious people left late 20thC Queensland. The most powerful people dominated it without any real agenda except to enrich themselves and their friends, and to punish their enemies. Since political dissenters were treated as criminals, the concept of politics shaded into the question of crime, and the only real politics was to decide what kinds of things were to be punished or not. Leaders and Ministers stole, bribed and took bribes, and conflicted themselves into knots. The law was a bare figleaf over power. The society was power-worshipping, authoritarian, and dominated in practice by the Police. Extractive industries were favoured: real estate, mining, agribusiness. Culture war is everything, but ideas are for suckers.
Our political arrangements are as nakedly clientelist as Joh's proto-thief state, all the Parties openly bidding: the Nationals pork-barrelling for the regions, the Liberals rewriting the rules of property on property's behalf, Labor ritually dancing a 1980s dance to bring back an imaginary 1980s loyalty-owing working class, the Greens promising social housing and a renters' paradise, but taking one listen to their voters and sensibly rejecting development, protecting inner-city Character (and housing prices). It's not a question of the behaviour of Parties, it's the end result of a concept of the political that delivers State power to People Like Us.
There's minor differences now---the most interesting and ambitious can't emigrate, since it's against the law to leave. Joh Bjelke-Petersen was a sincere Christian whose religious practices came before his politics, a thing hard to say of any current prominent politician.
IN 1988 THE KLF published The Manual, or How To Have A Number One The Easy Way. Like the band's music, it's both instantly dated and completely timeless. It might be one of the most significant manifestoes of the 20thC or it might be a worthless cynical PR pamphlet. A fan has "transcribed it into plaintext and hosted it":https://github.com/pronoiac/the-manual/blob/main/the-manual.md.
bq. Money is a very strange concept. There will be points in the forthcoming months when you might not have the change in your pockets to get the bus into town at the same time as you are talking to people on the telephone in terms of tens of thousands of pounds. Some of the following might seem contradictory but in matters of money they often are. We spoke earlier of how being on the dole gives you a clearer vision of how society works. What it doesn't do is give you a clear idea of how money works...