And in My Eye, a Beam

I've long delighted in baiting socialism with its unhappy tendency to attract the sort of people who wish to be The People.

It's taken me rather longer to note explicitly that libertarianism has a similarly unsavoury attraction, for such individuals as each want to be The Individual.  Mea culpa!

If convivial libertarians allow the good name of self-rule and enlightened self-interest to be carried away, to cloak the mangy bodies of mere self-conceit and calculating selfishness, we shall have no-one but ourselves to blame.  Could just a tiny bit of this already be occurring?

Perhaps the likes of me have something to learn from the liberal Christian Bearing Witness project hereabouts - an attempt to take a very different, or at least differently-oriented, message of kindness and humility and courage, and brush off the hatefully visible inversions it seems to attract as black suits attract white lint.  I'm not saying the same approach is appropriate - politics and religion are and should be monster different things, and all - but I'm surely saying the same de-linting needs attention.

Otherwise, one of these days I might go along to a perfectly splendid ball, only to discover that everybody is looking at me and wondering what the hell I'm doing there in a fluffy dirty-white suit!

(No feet were stepped on in the manufacture of this metaphor.  May contain daydream.)

If It Ain't One Darn Thing, Then The Other!

With Luke's chapter I kept slogging to a stop in the cold mire.  With Kate's, the words come quickly, but they flare and burn me.  I don't think I can be her any more today.

533 words, and a dry-stone wall, and a trout.  The trout tells me how the chapter ends.  Possibly it is the Salmon of Wisdom in disguise.  Just call me Taliesin, yeah?