I’m thinking about how to make use of the suggestions offered in the comments to my previous post. First I want to elaborate on something I said here and try to give you a little insight into what I’m up to.

When I mentioned high standards, I was not talking about how well you use grammar, punctuation, imagery and tropes. I was talking about a standard of intellectual discourse. You folks are the best group of bloggers that I know when it comes to calling bullshit when you see it. A lot of you make it seem like an art form. You don’t sugarcoat anything, and you don’t care whether it’s primary season or not. You say fuck when you see something that ought to make decent people say that. I’m amazed by how well you’ve kept this up over time. That sort of honesty is in my mind the most important element that is missing from our public discourse. It’s a big part of what’s wrong with the media. We need more of it if we’re ever going to get to the point where enough people are willing to put bodies on the line to change this country, and I am afraid that is exactly where we’re gonna have to go before we’re done.

My hesitation to post here doesn’t have anything to do with my confidence as a writer. I’m sure I can hold my own with most people in that department. I identify myself primarily as a writer, no matter what job I happened to be doing at any given time. I’ve been a writer since I wrote my first poem in 1984. It only took one to get me hooked, and when I look back on my life up to this point, the most miserable times were the times when I wasn’t writing anything. The hesitation I expressed is more about my confidence as a thinker and my confidence in my ability to put it on the line and let the chips fall where they may. Lucky for me, that gets easier with practice.

Political philosophers used to be actors. Sometimes they had to flee for their lives, and sometimes they got beheaded for saying the wrong things. Now they write papers in peer reviewed journals. Nearly all of those journals have a symbiotic relationship with that little old institution we know as the Corporation. Few of them are risk-takers anymore. Most of their work is abstract. Disconnected from the way people live their lives. And once philosophy strays too far from the everyday life of human beings, my friends, it is dead. We need more of the old kind of political philosophy, and I think getting there starts with that willingness to call bullshit on anyone.

When is the last time you witnessed any of our major public intellectuals seeking a major media outlet to explore the moral and social consequences of our health care pricing structure? Thought so!

I’m trying to get to the place with my writing where I can be the guy who can explain those moral and social consequences to the average person on the street in a way that makes them go Bingo! and makes them mad as hell. That way they’ll be motivated when my more policy-oriented colleagues propose the solution. The blogs have been absolutely critical in getting my skills where they are today, and I think the next step in the process is to try and take my blogging to the next level. And that is why I’m here.

I just started blogging again after almost a year of barely writing anything at all. I want to share some of the other work I’m trying to do. My goals are fairly modest, I think.

When I am active online, I try to give Left in Alabama a good bit of my time and content. It’s a soapbox community. They helped me get started and gave me some love when my personal blog was only a few weeks old, and they are the closest thing I have to a thriving community of lefties in my own area. Here I try to be as positive as I can about the Democrats without compromising my values or letting anything slide. I post an occasional diary there and comment as much as I can. I stay out of the discussions of local politics and stick mostly to progressive issues. I try to keep three specific goals in mind with my comments there and be as disciplined about it.

1.) Make the threads more fun, so that more lurkers will consider joining the discussion.

2.) Provide useful and encouraging feedback to other writers.

3.) Provide more information where it is warranted.

I do this because LiA is a safe place for lefties to network, support one another, and work out their positions. We need this desperately if we’re ever going to start really pushing back down here. It’s kinda lonely at the moment, and we’re never going to organize if we don’t start teaching ourselves to do it. The moderators are great, and I am proud of their accomplishments over the last couple of years. I have done none of the heavy lifting to get this community where it is. I’ve mostly stood on the sidelines and chimed in now and then. It’s a very friendly place, and I want it to prosper.

My personal blog. Archives are spotty because I’ve walked away twice for long periods of time. I’m just kicking off the third stage of its evolution. I started it as an attempt to organize and motivate real-world activism, but the market in my local area is just not there yet. This third stage is going to be mostly about raging against things like centrism and corporate power (OMG! They’re related!), posting youtubes, and throwing links to small blogs that I like out onto the wordpress topic indexes. Probably a post-a-day project at best. I don’t worry much about traffic. With great traffic comes great responsibility, and I like to be able to walk away and evaluate my strategy when I get to the point where I feel like I’m just banging my head against a wall. So I play a game of fives and tens with this blog. I engage the occasional commenter. My most popular post has around 3,000 views, and it only has as many as it does because I got lucky with my wording and it pulls in five or ten Google hits a day.

Notice which of those I put first. That’s because I care a hell of a lot more about contributing to online communities and helping them grow than I do about building an award-winning small blog. Priorities. I think that if I can find the right balance between posting here and posting at those two places, I can make some real progress.

Now I want to show you the first blog I ever attempted. I only maintained it for a couple of seconds. I’m glad I didn’t delete it when I abandoned it. It’s an artifact. I started it before I began to seriously train myself in the social sciences. I was pretty clueless. I understood the media problem and the money problem, but I didn’t really understand power relationships. I knew next to nothing about the theories and methods of non-violence. I was intimidated by the security state to the point that I didn’t dare use my real name or share it with anyone in my local area. On the rare occasion when I visit it, I feel proud of myself for getting where I am intellectually with my sanity intact.

I’ve never shown it to anyone and said “this was me.” I want to share it here because I want anyone who’s interested to be able to compare my first attempt to the things I’m doing now and see the growth. This was the most important post. About the time I wrote it, I went ALL IN with Corrente in my heart. I’ve been struggling to figure out just what I have to contribute ever since. I’m linking this here because I want folks to see that even way back then, and even way down here in the reddest of the red states, this community was having a discernable political effect on an individual human being. It’s important to me that you see it.

Further Reading: If you’re interested in academic work, here’s a paper on the history of political repression in the U.S. I wrote for a Human Rights and Civil Liberties course as a first-year master’s candidate. Bibliography. wordpress converted some of the page numbers in the references into smileys, and I left them because I think they add something to the text.

If you’re not into long papers, here’s the most important conclusion I drew from my study, and the only one I still remember:

If you want a society that respects civil liberties and human rights, you have to find a way to produce elites that respect civil liberties and human rights.

That’s my personal meme. It’s a point I make whenever possible. I take special care to teach it to youngsters.

It’s my studied opinion that the first thing we need to do if we want to get there from where we are right now is to RESTORE THE RULE OF LAW, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!