I’m back. Words are now apparently being pressed in less time than it takes to make tea, roll a cigarette, and fetch the post. What was wrong with it I’m not really sure.
To amuse myself in default of laughing at people on the internet I made up a hasty A4 poster advertising fakecharities.org (which still seems to be wiggy), took it to the newsagents, got ten copies made, and within an hour or so had succeeded in placing all of them for free display in local shops. The shopkeepers all seemed to have their own stories about this sort of thing and several received their copies with glad cries.
I also gave out a couple more LPUK cards to like-minded people, who may or may not join the party (it’s one of those individual things), and have had to send off for more.
It is becoming difficult to escape the conclusion that however depressing and stressful it might be to sit for ages in front of one’s computer, harrumphing at the Daily Telegraph without any apparent effect, more seems likely to be achieved by preaching to the unconverted.
I’m not saying that anyone ought to stop blogging (I certainly won’t), but I would urge fellow Libertarians to give me the benefit of the doubt in my supposition that the time for Libertarianism might actually be now, and to go out onto the surface of the planet and speak unto the denizens thereof.
Nobody will support any of the 2.5 socialist parties, and I’ve only so far come across one fellow with the damn gall to admit that he ever did (LibDem). Nobody really wants to vote for the absurdly unsatisfactory (one hesitates over terms such as ‘reactionary, national-socialist, xenophobic and proletarian-tribalist’) BNP, except perhaps to give the Labour Party one in the eye. Nobody seems to give a damn about UKIP.
But everyone wants to believe in something, anything, that might stop the country’s apparently inescapable slide into membership of the Warsaw Pact (though, thinking about it, it’s quite possible that East Germany’s economy was actually better managed than is our own).
I think I shall print out some LPUK posters next and see how we get on with those.
Interestingly enough the reason libertarians are not quite so prominent in the world is do to fear of individualism. People being so disillusioned by the other political philosophies will unlikely allow them to over come that fear. I have been preaching libertarianism to people across the globe for many years and this fear is most blatantly present in Europe. Particularly eastern Europe certainly, however it is also present in the U.K.
I do wish you luck, I would love to see libertarian idealism rise anywhere, I am just pointing out your greatest road block; fear of individualism.
(This last bit is… over dramatized to highlight the issue)
The worlds current thought process is individualism is a form of anti-society, rather a form of chaos if you will. We know that a society is formed by individuals and the stronger he individual the stronger the society; therefore the problem is convincing them of this, and that our goal is not to destroy society.
I haven’t encountered that particular problem; my results suggest that any residual fear of individualism (to engender which is certainly one of the objectives of the state media) is transcended by loathing of constantly-increasing taxes and regulations.
Excellent post, Landed!
(May I call you by your real name? What on earth is it? If you sent me your callsign privately, qsl to M3LBG if u want, I could at least respond by name in private…probably even over the sound-wireless-TX-thingy.)
To get to the point…
I have often complained to other libertarians about the fact that we mostly have seemed to be talking to each other, and not facing outwards. That was the purpose of the LA blog: a sort of shop window, in a more populist style, if you will.
You may be right. The problem I envisage is that I think there are currently too few of us to make much of a difference. If it wasn’t for the internet I don’t know where we’d be.
Muttering in bus stations, shouting at roadside furniture, carrying sandwich boards, and regularly reciting the words
“As soon as this pub closes, ‘t revolution starts.”
The name of the character in which I write this blog is ‘Herbert Arkwright’, if you must know. He’s a composite, like Dr. Strangelove. I gather from a number of sources that whether or not one chooses to attract the attention of the ‘authorities’ with one’s futile attempts at technical anonymity it is probably still as inadvisable to release one’s real name on the internet as it is to release the number of one’s credit card, and for similar reasons, the person at the other end being trustworthy, but the mechanisms in between being anything but.
As to radio, regrettably I am QRT at the moment owing to a marked lack of aerials and both transmitting rigs being so old as now to need recrystalling (or preferably replacement) owing to recent goalpost motions. To be quite honest I never took to the practice of blethering on the wireless anyway, having been trained by the Army in the virtues of radio silence, or, failing that, a degree of terseness which my erstwhile Raynet controller, a bletherer, found quite culturally challenging (“Hello Alfa, this is Charlie. Contact. Wait. Out.”).