Apologies to all for my almost complete absence; this is due to a number of administrative factors. Contrary to popular belief, I have not given up blogging for Lent (nor even for Hired).
As to what I’ve been up to: one does not discuss on the internet the accounts of one’s shadowy global international terrorist organisation, whether or not it exists; however, I entirely endorse those of the remarks which I can be bothered to read on one of the numerous blogs of the scarily productive Mr. Ken Frost, which is called HMRC is Shite.
We are sick to death of bending over backwards for swine like these, trying to keep the books straight, to render unto Caesar, etc. and being severely punished as a result, and I very much look forward to an historically inevitable Libertarian electoral victory, after which we will get the builders in the same afternoon and damn well render over Caesar.
Speaking of which (the victory, not the rendering) I was embarrassed once again today by my failure to carry a sufficiency of LPUK business cards. People have taken to interrupting my conversations in shops and asking to know more (it is amost unbeliveable how few people have heard not only of the Civil Contingencies Act but also of all the other legislation which was passed while their attention was otherwise occupied).
Everyone is utterly fed up with the present incompetent, corrupt and totalitarian government, and with all of its various crimes, and also with the prospect of its replacement in due course, but in name only, by another party of professional politicians distinguishable from their predecessors only visually, and that in certain cases only with some difficulty.
Frankly, everyone is utterly fed up with paying through the nose to be patronised, scolded, spied upon and bullied by the sort of people with whom any civilised person, or any but the most broadminded and permissive savage, would hesitate to share a railway-compartment.
Since I have made it clear on several occasions in the past that I consider the personal recruitment of real support for the Party to transcend in its importance the enjoyable but predictably less productive (because few read a newspaper, or a blog, with which they completely disagree) online practices of harrumphing at the Daily Telegraph, providing a detailed cross-section of today’s slice from the salami of civil liberties, and searching automatic thesauri for things to call the prime minister*, I hope that my regular readers (bless you both) will forgive me for a somewhat less than prolific performance.
I do feel that it is important that we as libertarians should start preaching to the unconverted. There is no point in having a political party if you don’t bore people to tears with talking about it, until they are pleased to vote for you just to get you into Westminster and out of their shops, or drawing-rooms, or, as one notices increasingly with age, consulting-rooms.
* I am such an Old Boy nowadays that I find it difficult to perceive Gordon Brown and his minions as anyone other than the Mekon and his Treens. They do say that the short-term memory’s the first to, er
“Frankly, everyone is utterly fed up with paying through the nose to be patronised, scolded, spied upon and bullied by the sort of people with whom any civilised person, or any but the most broadminded and permissive savage, would hesitate to share a railway-compartment.”
Mr Landed Underclass, you are no doubt aware of the phrase “sweet spot”, used to describe that part of the stringing on a tennis racquet giving the best possible accuracy and impetus to the ball.
More in like vein, please. You deserve a wider readership.
Mr Underclass is right. For too long we have been talking to ourselves, while the socialists fiddled and Rome burned. The blogs should turn outwards more.
Dennis, thank you for your kind generosity, but all I have ever known about tennis is the extraordinary injuries, similar to those familiar to motorcyclists, caused by enthusiastically diving for a ball, missing it, and landing full length on a tarmac court. At this point I decided that it was a nasty rough game suitable only for girls (like lacrosse, after which a tactical ballistic missile was once named, not without reason) and concentrated instead on trying to avoid being mistaken for the ball in rugby.
DD: this is like that scene in that film (it’s like that film, Captain Mainwaring) in which the mad newsreader exhorts his viewers to go to the window and yell “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more.” I am inclined to think that to progress much further some of us, at least, need to spend rather more time not on the computer.
Over here, in Minnesota, when the confab in the coffee bar does get around to libertarian ideas, it turns up that everybody else has a nut party of their own to try to put across on you. The Greens, the Natural Law Party, the Independence Party, the Wiccan New Earth Alliance, the varieties of socialist are all alive and well, too. When I try out the Libertarian Party oral test to show to people that they really often basically already are Libertarians, and that taxation is theft and so forth, they often as not rejoin by saying we need government to make this all work! Grrr….. (It is a gray forty-something sort of murky day here on the North Coast of Ioway, and my little English Smoke cat, Bogus, is gazing out into the garden at birds at the sopping feeders, and making up Spring yardwork lists in her head.)
[...] http://landedunderclass.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/preaching-to-the-unconverted/#comment-2257 [...]
I think one of the important things to convey about libertarianism is that it seeks to minimise, rather than to eliminate entirely, tax-funded government, by concentrating on those provisions which cannot otherwise realistically be made.
When people ask me (as they always do) “What do Libertarians stand for, then?” I always reply “The rule of Law; the defence of the Realm, and the freedom of the Individual.”
Followed by a blank stare,Mr Underclass?
Well, not always. In the older ones there sometimes seems to be a distant, semi-mythical racial memory of these things once having existed.
Over here some of the liveliest young ones such as a regular web log respondent of mine from North Dakota who is a 2008 maths grad from my old college and a gradschool researcher in topology, and who ranches at home with her dad and husband, are saying they will walk out on this federal scam in a heartbeat — in order to live constitutionally. And, I perceive, they will fight to do it if need be, if the federal presence for whatever reason withdraws and then tries any reassertion. (This is perhaps the real underlying motivation to print money now and so on, and to foment police problems into “terrorism,” all to keep up the illusionary
momentum of “effective” “central” “authority.”)
I think sometimes to see the emerging solution will be a loose North American, and equivalent European, federalism for defense, and with LOTS of local variety in government, as to WHAT may be rights and HOW these are conveyed and so forth.
Good luck to ‘em; hope it works. As to federalism, hmm. Need to see the fine print before I’d sign anything, and I might be kinda crabby about it even then.