![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
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!
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!
no subject
no subject
If government could be trusted to cut its villainous activities before its valuable ones, I could trust it to carry out the valuable ones in the first place! The only way to make our oligarchs share any of the burden at all will be to convince them it is... prudent. Resistance against power may not be an answer in itself, but it's no less worthwhile for that.
For other reasons I prefer not to go into here and now, I shan't be joining you on Saturday's demo. I shall, however, wish you good journey, good company, and a good homecoming at the end of it.
no subject
I'm am... not easy about the demonstration. I dislike crowds, and I dislike the potential for trouble that inevitably happens when thousands of people squeeze into small spaces, but I am seeing just how badly most Americans are being squeezed while the rich are getting a lot richer and I see the cabinet of millionaires heading in the same direction, and I don't want to be looking back in twenty years' time wondering where it all went wrong and why didn't I do something about it then?
no subject
We are living in a world where Milton Friedman's proposals on tax and benefits are considered so radioactively left-wing and levelling, that not the most militantly socialist government or major opposition party anywhere I've heard of will touch anything like them with a bargepole. Laugh? I nearly choke!
The mobility targeting is such a senselessly symbolic bit of kitten-kicking that I'm at a loss to explain it, except along lines probably too cynical even for me.
As for your last paragraph... I'm coming from almost the other direction, being a former political activist who cut it out when I came to believe my activities weren't helping the causes I thought they were. It has taken a long, long time to begin to see my path clear again. This time, I mean to tackle it like a Racing Tortoise.
Possibly useful tomorrow