Poor Explanations #1: I, er, had a baby... also Kill Consensus

Some of you may be wondering where on Earth I've been. Most of you probably won't have been. Some of you who read this blog probably are unsurprised by my sporadic absences, although 9 months so far tops the lot.

It's been 9 months since my last post.

I wish I could tell you I went to travel the world and try local delicacies we consider in this country to be housepets. I wish I'd been doing that.

I was thinking I could say I got pregnant and just gave birth, but that too would be misleading (I haven't given birth for 3 and a half years now).

Now for the real reasons. I don't really know. I could point to loads of things? Political apathy/fatigue/despair? All that's true, but really, I started blogging to begin with because I was apathetic, fatigued and despairing at the UK's political choices. Though, yes, now things are much worse.

The past 9 months, we have travelled far nationally and globally down the road to totally fucked-dom.

I like to think there's an alternate universe where all the things that elites and politicos have done in the past few years, both in this country and in others, which have caused our rotten situation, were not done;

where hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and hundreds of British soldiers, were still alive, at home;

where bankster crooks on both sides of the Atlantic hadn't looted our economies into a crumbling ruin of debt while simultaneously consolidating their power over the financial system to a scale never before seen;

where authoritarian trends in the UK, and expansion of the EU project, had been stopped in their tracks by freedom-loving souls;

where the scientific debate about the environment hadn't been hijacked and warped into a dogmatic, political farce;

where interventionist choices made in Middle Eastern affairs that have brought the region so close to the brink of a major regional war, which would have painful global implications, hadn't been made;

where the only apparent "choice" we have in the upcoming General Election is between a pathetic, bullying slimeball, and a pathetic slimeball; (Nick who? Cloggs?)

where Americans hadn't been duped into voting for the smiling, hopeful visage of Obama - who is nothing more than a visage. That said, the "choice" was between him and John Me-No-Likey-Brown-People McCain.

And maybe, if we can find a loophole or a wormhole, we can reverse all the damage. But that seems far-fetched. So we have to stand up for ourselves today, and not waver, and yes, I'm chiding myself here more than anyone else.

Other reasons for lack of blogging? I was busy. This is true; I spent the summer at a rather rigorous work placement in the field of marketing and entrepreneurship, and am otherwise very occupied by Uni, friends, music, nightlife, chemical experimentation, females ... the usual for a 20 year old student.

But also, I feel I must have very mild ADD, because I struggle to stay interested in any one thing for long, and that's why a purely-politics based blog became difficult, when it stopped being my primary interest, or fluctuated in the rankings, so to speak.

So this blog has been re-branded, re-styled, and the direction is going to change, to a much more personal and multi-purpose blog. This started off as "Voyage of Discovery" - a journey of self-discovery of my own political opinions, and it turned out I was a libertarian, small L and capital L for LPUK, the UK's first and only Libertarian Party, of which I am very proud to be a part of, having joined so quickly after its birth, now led by the enigmatic Chris Mounsey.

The LPUK has exceeded all my expectations in its growth and the sheer vibrancy of its ideas. I began the regional branch of LPUK, Scottish Libertarians, in December 2008, and honestly, if you take a look at the progress made since Duncan Soutar and Steven Sexton since they took the reins, it is fantastic. I was, frankly, neither particularly organised or focused enough when I started it up, and it is being developed into something much bigger now, with regular meetings in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and probably other places I've forgot.

So politics and economics from a libertarian bent will no doubt remain one of the, if not the, key themes of my writing here, the only difference being now that I may focus more on the global situation, because, as important to us in the UK as our troubles are, the global strife that is just beginning is like a compounded, magnified representation of what's going on here.

But I figure, if I ever get bored about DOOM DOOM DOOM, and politics generally, which is inevitable based on past experience, I can write about some of my other big interests. I actually did a little list of everything I wanted to write about earlier, not in any defined order per se, but probably not far off the order it's in:

- Global Economy/Politics

- UK affairs (bureaucratic/authoritarian State, freedom, the idiocy of it all)

- UK Libertarian Party

- Philosophy

- Music

- Creative Writing

- LOST (which is on tonight, result)

- Tennis

- Personal Stories/General Interest


You see, I also love philosophy, I love music (play and write in a band, and am moderately but not enough active in the Glasgow scene), Lost is my favourite TV show by a mile, I like sports, particularly tennis, and I write a lot of stuff besides blog posts and songs. So this blog is going to become the hub for all of that.

So. Er, to sum up, no, I didn't have a baby, although I'd like one sometime around the time I'm 67 and a half, and secondarily, we're in danger of burning in the slow fire of consensus.

The bitter pill is that the consensus is whatever the great faceless THEY say it is. And right now, THEY are saying we need more security and less freedom, more taxes and less freedom, less sovereignty, less purchasing power for the pound, and implicitly, less savings, less manufacturing and production, and more debt, which to my mind is all tantamount to less freedom. We are being cleaved, whether we like it or not, to the cold dead bosom of the zombie State.

She needs us but we don't need her, and the only reason so many people cling so willingly to this fat, old, cancerous hag is because she's conned them into thinking they do.

They don't They never did. You don't. You never did. And if we want to stop the steady (or, who knows, possibly rapid) decline in freedom, economic power and stability, peace, and fresh ideas, we need to beat the consensus to a pulp, batter it until it is unrecognisable, so that fresh eyes can look at situations without the dogma and circularity of "the mainstream", and debate rationally to recognise how we might stop the rot, before it's all rot. We do this by relentlessly, passionately, being the alternative voice of reason and sense, because we believe in trying, but never trying to enforce, the preservation what is good and right, and not meaning to go all hippy on you, but is there any better way of summing up what's good in this world than in the three words, peace, love and freedom?

Orwell wrote in 1984 that the future was a boot stamping on a human face forever. Right now, for us in Britain at least, we're not there yet. The boots are in the closet, but they haven't got us on our backs yet. They're slapping us in the face everyday, testing our limits and thresholds, and aren't finding much resistance. So let's show them some resistance.

And I think that if we work our asses off, maybe, just maybe, we can tie the shoelaces of her steel-toed boots together before she goes for the first real stamp.