. . . muttered the ogre

It amuses me to have a go at translating this Livejournal entry by François-René Rideau (“Faré”):

. . . in taking positions based on static emotions disconnected from causal mechanisms, [the socialists] come to advocate absurdities. The more Swiss cheese, the more holes; the more holes, the less cheese; therefore, the more cheese, the less cheese. Correlations with moving referent, variation of the constant, semantic slippage — an anti-conceptual mentality, impaired from proper reasoning, exposes itself to such sophisms.
. . .
Enemy of the people and of the other enemies of the people, alone in the world where man is man’s wolf, where each is the enemy of all — behold at once the spectre that socialism demonizes and the prophecy that socialism realizes.

To which I suppose a socialist would say, I know you are but what am I?

Some of Faré’s entries are in (excellent) English, by the way.

About a decade ago, someone or other wrote in The Nation advocating that the Left reclaim the word populist. I was tempted to send a letter asking whether, in that case, we individualists could have liberal back.

The Economist, in its current issue, makes a similar plea for liberal, remarking:

“Liberal” is a term of contempt in much of Europe as well – even though, strangely enough, it usually denotes the opposite tendency. Rather than being keen on taxes and public spending, European liberals are often derided (notably in France) for seeking minimal government – in fact, for denying that government has any useful role at all, aside from pruning vital regulation and subverting the norms of decency that impede the poor from being ground down. Thus, in continental Europe, as in the United States, liberalism is also regarded as a perversion, a pathology: there is consistency in that respect, even though the sickness takes such different forms.