One sort of knows, in the background, that it goes on, but one is rather tired from striving to pay Gordon Brown and all that stuff….and Yemen and Afghanistan are rather far-away countries right now, of which we know little…

…but I even wondered about this picture for a LA caption competition – just look at the poor LITTLE girl’s face: this is her wedding photo, the poor mite – he’s “about 40”, and she’s eleven:-

David Davis

In my mind, there is no problem for a woman to marry an older man, in principle. I am 16 years older than my wife, and even the Director, Sean Gabb, married his dear and nice wife whom we know and love, when she was at the time about 12 or 13 years younger than he was. They have now caught up in age together, as you do, and as we have done. My wife is still 16 years younger than I am, but we are both now old warring scrag-bags together.

But I think for the wife to be “eleven”, as in the above picture, so it is said, is pushing at the boundaries of the envelope” a little bit, or even a lot. If this is what is going on, then I as a Libertarian who believes that individual humans have Natural Rights, believe this sort of process to be disgusting. If we believe that children are children up to a “certain age” (about which there can be some argument but broadly we all agree it is “about” 16 (or so) and therefore cannot consent legally to serious interpersonal arrangements or other sorts of contracts under that age, then that must be the case for all humans. It cannot be that our children here can’t do it, but Yemeni (or other) children can, for some spurious and quasi-religious or other pre-Renaissance pre-capitalist reason.

Ragged pre-capitalist, pre-classical-liberal, and barbarian-warlord-survival-guides, cleverly promoted and peddled as “religions”, and dealing with the disposal of debts, animals, defeated tribes, the enemy’s widows-of-beheaded-warriors, and his relict children, his men’s and boy’s severed heads, and his slaves and concubines, are no help to these poor children in the photo. Not at all.

Libertarians, when they will have regained The West (a long job, Boyo!) will have their foreign-policy-work cut out for some time. But perhaps not as long as against Lithuanian EU Commissioners who hate light bulbs.

This is the real, primary sort of Enemy-Class enemy that we ought to be “servicing”. We can then, having secured our civilisation, “service” people like that “Taliban” bloke who seems to be able to get lots of interesting and exciting weapons to attack our boys with. I can’t find a correct wikiref to “service”, which in the Cold War, meant “kill on the battlefield”. Sorry.