Quote of the Day
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generationPost #5000
I had projected reaching this milestone next month, but I've been publishing at an above-average clip the last several weeks, not so much with the motivation of beating a projection. I remember reaching #4000 a couple of years back, somewhat disappointed that it took several days for that post to reach double-digits in pageviews. When I started this blog 12 years ago last summer, I never really thought I would ever reach this milestone. In fact, it took me several days to take the plunge in 2008, and there was a time around Obama's election, I thought I had written on about all the issues I was interested in and thought I would be repeating myself, so I thought that I would be scaling back this new hobby. Going back, there were some missed opportunities, e.g., the economic tsunami. In part, I had high expectations for the quality of my work, and I'm not a trained economist. And there were things I would do a lot differently now, like an essay on conservatism significantly influenced by Wikipedia pieces on the topic. Still, all but 1 post remains online: the good, the bad and the ugly. The missing post? For a while, I think I was getting targeted by some Russian hackers. for God knows what reason hitting certain posts, wildly distorting statistics. So I dropped and republished those posts. Usually I'm good at archiving my posts but apparently missed one. I can't tell you which one off the top of my head.
I think at one point I seriously thought of going back and reediting and reorganizing the posts. There were a lot of annoyances, e.g., videos I had embedded have since been taken down and a similar thing with respect to political cartoons. There were other concerns, e.g., I was worried about sampling political cartoons; I really didn't have a budget for licensing cartoons for a free blog I'm not even monetizing (not that I would make much from maybe a dozen readers on a good day). In fact, I link to my sources to the sources and try to limit the sampling of the work of any artist. I mostly sample from Townhall but occasionally from other sources. To be honest, there are times when I can't find material I agree with, although I sometimes will include a cartoon I don't necessarily agree with but think is funny, say a right-winger poking fun at progressive hubris. I see the cartoon selection as a means of promoting the work of artist without a fee; I don't personally profit a penny from my blogs. But if Google or an artist insists I cease and desist, I'll ditch the feature, maybe go back to old posts and edit them out. I would probably publicize the kerfuffle as time permits. I really don't get much feedback on the problem, in part because I don't allow comments. I have a couple of nephews who say they've occasionally looked at my posts and tactfully say they agree with some stuff, not others. One says that he likes the cartoons. Who knows? Maybe I'll do some of my own. Fair warning: I'm not very talented in art.
So now the road to #6000. I don't know how long I can sustain a publishing pace of nearly 500 posts a year, roughly a specialty format post every other day. There was a time I thought writing a blog might build an audience if and when I released a project, like a book. Well, that's probably not going to happen. It's not so much the projects but the readership building an audience to help sales. It might well be the relationship may be inverse in nature. But one thing I learned in teaching college was it forced me to know material inside-out in order to explain it to others. Writing a daily post forces me to keep current on topical issues; I'll often present debates and video clips I don't agree with. I learned that the discipline forces me to keep my thinking sharp and well organized. When I wrote my journal articles and book chapters I was fanatic about rewriting things to improve readability. When I devised a measure to assess documentation, I exhaustively read about measures in my own discipline (MIS). In part, I thought it would be easier to justify by referencing the methodology of others. It wasn't until I got into the nitty gritty of doing research I truly realized that they were a bunch of crap. While I was still a professor I did a couple of papers that dealt with that; one was more of a journal note explaining my criticisms of often cited measures; I knew that it made me a target for those who developed or used said measures who had a vested interest against my critique. And it really wasn't personal; all I wanted to do was to provide some thoughts for using measures in future studies. I think it was one of 2 papers I submitted or wrote which didn't get published. I got a lot of personal shots thrown at me; a couple I still remember were "grow some funk of your own, amigo" (stop criticizing others and come up with a better measure of your own), and "this writer hasn't cited any new psychometric (reference literature) sources in his article". Not to sound defensive on the latter point, but the point was they weren't applying or justifying their measures using standard processes in the reference literature. To give a sample example, this engineering guy with a computer user satisfaction measure used a binomial statistical argument to argue his list of factors were comprehensive. Say what? Memory recalls are not statistically independent events, and his list of experts was small and geographically concentrated. Is the emperor wearing clothes? Now I haven't tracked the literature since I left academia, and maybe others have published similar criticisms, but at the time I wrote my article, nobody ever challenged the author's claims; and other scholars basically building on his study basically reprinted the claims as if they were self-evident truths. To this day, I've never read a single paper in applied psychology ever making a similar argument and I've read literally thousands of journal articles. I stand by that article, even though probably only a handful of academics have ever read it.
The point I'm trying to make here is that probably nobody reading my stuff will agree with most of it, but I think most readers will learn something and find it interesting. And I'll continue my quixotic quest, and I'm sure the Biden Administration will inspire me just like the hapless Obama and Trump Administrations.
McClanahan on the Southern Tradition
Yes, I've been tagging some Abbeville Institute videos under the host's name; McClanahan generally hosts the weekly podcast.
Political Humor
Tom Woods on the Reddit/Stock Market Kerfuffle
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
Musical Interlude: #1 Hits of 1969
Zager & Evans, "In the Year 2525"
