I am honoured to have been invited by David Davis (the real one, not the Member for No Fixed Ethics) to contribute to the blog of the Libertarian Alliance.
For what I suppose I could describe as a tactical reason I feel that I should decline this invitation.
I am already a member of the LPUK, which also has a blog, to which I believe I could contribute were I to make the appropriate technical arrangements.
I haven’t done this either. Nor, on sober reflection, have I joined any other kind of blogging group, despite my initial enthusiasm for such a project the better part of a year ago.
The tactical reason for this policy is that as an individual, stating on this blog my own personal opinions in what I hope and expect is a legal, decent, honest and truthful fashion, I may be somewhat less easy to silence than a blog contributed to by a number of people, any one of whose exercise of their alleged freedom of expression may in due course so infringe one of a rapidly-growing arsenal of totalitarian laws as to allow it, and perhaps also those of its contributors, to be shut down.
As things stand, provided that I manage to avoid obvious legal pitfalls such as libel, incitement, copyright and obscenity*, I feel that without making the LPUK a proscribed organisation, membership of which is illegal (like the IRA), or suppressing individual blogs in general (both of which courses of action having potentially unforeseen consequences), the government, despite knowing exactly who I really am thanks to their general surveillance of the internet, may find it relatively difficult to find legal means of making me shut up.
Of course they might not use legal means.
* this is, of course, deliberately rather vague in the legal sense; the only coherent definition of it which I have ever seen was due to a long-forgotten comedian, and was “Richard Branson’s teeth, pullover and beard.”
Ok no worries OM. Just thought you’d like it, and it would also inflate our self-importance here, for we are vain and venal like you.
For you are a grand writer and it would reflect well on our own judgement of what is good.
KBO
73
If ever you change your mind, just say.
73
I am also a LPUK member (no= 232 if I am not mistaken.)
We only hire the best!
Investors in people!
Scumbag socialist twaddle.
But you are great. 73
Gordon Brown
As I said, I’m honoured; composing the above post took between three and five times the customary time, and most uncharacteristically I got Mrs. Underclass to look at it before I posted it.
In discussion of the same point with an old activist friend I put it thus: rather than be part of a huge block of sandstone, I would be a grain of sand.
The huge block of sandstone, despite its solidarity and the safety in numbers of each of its component grains, can quite easily be craned onto a flatbed and, as OAC put it, ‘drug off’.
Whereas of individual grains, though many might be lost, many more would remain, never to be found or accounted for in total, and each one capable, in appropriate circumstances, of causing very expensive damage indeed.
Were I still a biker, I wouldn’t join the Hell’s Angels either, but would be one of those with a jacket which says ‘Lone wolf. No club. Fcuk you.’
Indeed, I am so distinctly unclubbable that I would doubtless have qualified, like Mycroft Holmes, for membership of the Diogenes Club.
However, thanks again for the invitation; should I undergo a diametric reversal of my current views I shall certainly let you know.
S’allright, OM. As we say here in Lancs, “you’re all-right”. No worries.