Fluent Radical

I started blogging in early 2005, with a big burst of enthusiasm. I left it at the end of 2006 with some regrets.

Looking around I’m a little sad at how few of my old blogroll friends made it from then to now. Non-trivial Solutions has left and his blog is missing. The Daily Ablution has given it up and his content is no longer available. Eu-serf has gone. Tory Convert has left and deleted her blog. James Hellyer’s Belief in Britain seems to be no more. Once More - the party group blog we started after the 2005 elections - is now occupied by squatters.

I understand that blogging is not necessarily something people want to do their entire lives, but I’m sad that the content is missing. It’s now as though they never blogged at all.

I believe that this blog will be online for many years to come, even though I won’t always be posting on it. I think it’s ok to post for a couple of years, drop it, and then come back to it. You’ll never be a network kingpin like Dale or Montgomerie, but your thoughts are still there to be reviewed later.

In fact I’ve had a real kick out of reading my old posts here. It’s great to see how fired up I was. I’m a little bit sad that I lost that.

So, to my future self: I hope you’re still blogging. And if you’re not, I hope you enjoyed reading this. And to friends who made it this far - Gavin Ayling, Little Man in a Toque, The England Project, Not Proud of Britain: it’s good to catch up with you again!

According to The Telegraph, a school’s isolation unit has been likened to Guantanamo Bay.

The room is painted totally black. The walls, the partitions, the window blinds – everything was black.

The partitions down one side created four cells where school kids are expected to sit at a desk all day.

I would rather take my son out of school than see him spend time in that dungeon.

Gosh. I recall on one occasion I was required to stand alone in the lobby of the school for one hour as a punishment for something or other. At the time it just annoyed me, but now I realize that it was in fact a shockingly medieval form of punishment.  Boredom plus public humiliation. Perhaps I should sue the school under human rights laws.

Get real. Boredom + public humiliation are just about the only punishments that you can legitimately apply in UK schools. Next they’ll be asking that teachers refrain from using sarcasm to humiliate kids in their classes.

The Mises Institute has an enormous selection of over 2,500 libertarian ebooks available for download from Mises Literature. I’m starting with The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn (1949) and The Regulated Consumer by Mary Bennett Peterson (1971). Let me know if you have any recommendations.