This blog has been around since 2009. I had just stepped down as managing editor of FireDogLake (one of the larger progressive blogs of the time) after editorial direction disagreements. Running FDL was a seventy hour a week job for not very much money, you had to really believe in it. I had for most of my run, and under my editorship readership increased about 70%. After the election the site kept most of the readers who had started following it during the 2008 election, but I had lost my belief in the direction the site was to take. (The publisher trumps the managing editor.)
I still wanted to keep my foot in, so I threw this place up and in a fit of non-inspiration figured “fuck it, I’ll just use my name.”
Any blog this longstanding has a mix of good and bad, but there’s a lot I’m proud of. This collection of articles on character and ideology, for example. Over the years there have been troughs and peaks—ideas burst out, then there are periods of contemplation, then they come again.
I’m hoping to keep going, and to see a few more peaks and troughs. We’re up at a little over $8,300. That puts us past the second goal, adding three more books. One of them will be “MITI and the Japanese Miracle.” Industrialization and re-industrialization are among the topics of our age, and Japan pioneered the Asian model which China has since used to take the world by storm. Another will be “The Sociology of Philosophies”, which rambles over thousands of years of European, Chinese and Indian philosophy. With its rules of small numbers, the consolidation of the weak, the splitting of the strong and so on it offers both a look at the internal workings of intellectual communities and the circumstances which allow them to prosper, or which choke them into insipidness.
At $10,000, which is about 1,700 away, I’ll write an article on one of the fundamental processes, perhaps the fundamental process which keeps society together and how it renews or fails.
Thanks to all who have donated and to all my readers. It’s been a lovely and lively journey, hopefully you’ll be here with me for years more travel towards that horizon which is as far as we can imagine.