Blackmoor Vituperative

Exactly one year ago, I held a rum-tasting at the Midnight Frights​ party at RavenCon​. The best one we tried was the 12-year rum from Trinidad, followed closely by the 5-year rum from Barbados. The 8-year rum from Haiti was a distant third. The New Orleans rum and the Cruzan 5-to-12-year rum were not very good, but perfectly serviceable when mixed with orange/pineapple/banana juice and ginger ale.

(I am posting this here so that I can easily find it when I am at the liquor store. If you find it useful, that’s a bonus.)

Happy Mother’s Day, Moms of America! Now go back to work.

I agree more with libertarians than I do with any other political cubbyhole that I have been able to find, but I think I might not actually be libertarian. Libertarianism is all about putting theory into practice, without exception (that theory being, in essence, “an it harm none, do what ye will“). There are, as far as I know, few libertarians who consider financial exploitation “harm” (I may, in fact, be the only one). But I think one would have to be deliberately blind to look at the USA around us and fail to see the harm done by financial exploitation.

Being “rich” in the USA in 2015 means you have a house and you can pay your bills.

That’s messed up, and it’s getting worse every year.

The thing is, twenty years ago, I was a hardcore libertarian. I sincerely believed that the world would be better if there were no laws preventing, say, an employer from tracking your every move, 24 hours a day. I sincerely believed that the world would be better if there were no laws requiring cars to be safer, or requiring employers to pay no less than a certain minimum, and so on. I didn’t believe these things because I wanted people to be underpaid and driving death traps — I believed that freedom of choice would result in the greater good. So what has changed in the past twenty years? What changed my mind?

Seeing how the world actually works for twenty years is what changed my mind. Because in theory, if everyone is free to choose, they can all choose not to work for employers who invade the medical privacy of every applicant. In theory, they can choose not to work for $2.13 an hour.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.