Hog Wild

Back on Sunday from a big family gathering in Gosport, for the seventieth birthday of my eldest aunt - a witty fellow-scribbler who shares something of my penchant for fantasy.  Hampshire is nearly on my doorstep, but it isn't a county I know at all well. What I've seen makes me wish to amend that in the near future... It was a merry meeting, as they say. My mother and I stayed with a cousin who lives on what used to be a small farm, and has made a very fine place of it by the woody banks of a swift shallow river. High-tech comfort within, amiable shaggy wildness without, and dogs of the biggest and friendliest. My cousin, an ebulliently energetic businesswoman of many enthusiasms and a great affection for beasts and trees, is talking about bringing in a couple of pigs in the near future. That would be Hantsome of her!

Continuing with what is going to be a bigly piggy theme, I don't think I've eaten or - especially - drunk so lavishly since the cast-iron digestion of my first youth gave out on me - or had such a liking to do it. It was that sort of gathering. Possibly just because it was that sort of beano, I appear to have escaped any consequences, even a significant hangover. I've noticed such effects before. The eupeptic effects of good company and jolly mood are nearly as underrated as the dyspeptic effects of the reverse are notorious. In the mood for a quiet week now, though.

In that quiet week, my next job is to finish my festively-delayed chapter, with Kate's rallying of the Blancmange Army against the Bad Baron.  Whose much-despised token is... the blue boar.  The next chapter's events will be remembered in many folksongs, of which I wrote one of the more locally popular - The Hunting of the Boar - late last week.

Finally, with the turning of the year, it's time to begin a personal challenge that I've been working up of late.  I have a political and social theory that liberty can only increase in communities whose members are increasingly practising bounty rather than hoggishness.  In accordance with my related theories that advocates of freedom have less right to preach what they don't practise than advocates of authority, and that libertarians who don't willingly take on more responsibility than statists for general goods are witnesses against their own cause, I've been looking afresh at my own contributions to the common weal - and I am not satisfied with the tale.  I shall be blogging about the nontrivial parts of my solution, and no doubt exhibiting various pratfalls in the process, over the coming months.  More anon!

Libertarian Challenge #1 - Paying My Moral Debts

In which I begin to put my beliefs systematically to the test.

An easy and fairly painless one, first.   I'm going through the list of all the free stuff I, personally, am currently getting only because other people are enthusiastic and generous.  Then I'm seeing how much I can commit by way of fair return, and how much of that should or can be financial.  The coming month is for sorting out the financial side.

The question turns out not to be an easy or a simple one at all, which is one of the reasons (or excuses) for my not having answered it very well previously.  The easy and simple question I'm trying to answer in this challenge is: what am I going to do about it, right now?

For each problem I solve, I will allow myself one short post about one of the many issues behind this phase of the challenge, and the various questions, answers, and bewilderments in which it involves me.  All feedback, as ever, will be gratefully received.  Likewise, if any of my researches or mis-steps should later prove useful to anybody else, this challenge log will have served at least one of its principal purposes.

My immediate list of projects I believe I ought to be funding, but am not:

• Dreamwidth, via paid membership.  (I believe the LiveJournal community deserves my support in other ways: I don't feel any urge to support its administrators financially.)  All I need to do here is sort out a technical issue with my card payment - hopefully possible this evening.
• Wikipedia.  Yes, I have problems with it.  No, that hasn't stopped me making extensive use of it.  So...
• Project Gutenberg.
• The Center for a Stateless Society at the Molinari Institute - a political resource, here considered purely as a spring of much freely-given education and mental profit.
• Diane Duane, for the freely webbed version of her The Big Meow.
• Spybot Search and Destroy, that  most excellent labour of love against the evil malware.

Several other things from which I benefit, and for which I am grateful, but which I presently expect not to be funding, will also come up for consideration.

'Ere we go...