A jovial band of jolly political activists walk into a bar, they are each united by their love of policies that seek to take control over the lives of others, their tolerance or support for pervasive surveillance, for controls on speech, by their support for a party that endorsed an illegal war, and their fondness for spending other people’s money and controlling the property of others that they cannot tax away. They were also united by the fact that they each had, or had sympathy for those with unusual sexual or gender preferences – they were a Labour LGBT group.

The duty manager, after a while, says something like “we don’t serve your kind around here”. Bravo I say. I would not want to serve such a group either, but the problem here was that he referred not to their overt love of fascism but to their sexual and gender preferences.

I am not saying that the discrimination that took place was less evil because the people being discriminated against were fascists (okay, Labour Party members). What I am doing is asking isn’t it strange that they were discriminated against for being kinky, rather than for being fascists? That is a further example for my list of social judgments, ethical calculations performed in groups, going badly wrong. Discrimination against fascists isn’t really a thing, but it should be – more so now than ever.

Anyway, the duty manager was fired – rightly – by an apologetic brewery. Society worked. The calculation worked. The free-market worked. The idiot was made accountable for being an idiot. This is exactly the kind of thing libertarians rely on when we say we dislike bigotry but do not support state regulation of bigots. This is what non-state regulation of bigots looks like.

Something else that libertarians rely on is pubs. We tend to have meetings in them. Another group booked our usual pub so tonight we are in the pub where the above happened.  We will talk about sexual freedom in a place where society has scored a victory over its more unsavory and intolerant self – in favor of sexual freedom.

It also happens to have been the last pub available, so don’t read too much into it.