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.
Mark Level
Thanks, Ian. I used to love FDL back in the day, it was among my top 5 blogs of that era. Then I did see the quality drop off, move to the middle with Lib-adjacent pablum, & I abandoned it. Before FDL, The Smirking Chimp had many years during the Bush Jr. Regime when it was indispensable & worth reading. Some other stand-outs I recall from the “oughts” & after were Sadly, No!, Atrios/Eschaton, and on the loopy humor side of the spectrum, Jesus’ General (a great satire of far-right Culture War dreck, before the term “Alt-Right” was even invented!! I even shared Smirking Chimp articles with some of my High School students between 2005-09, it went over quite well.
All gone now. Atrios got “audience-captured” by the dumbest, most prosperous Shit-Libs, I started getting angrily denounced anytime I put anything anti-War or critical of Empire on there. 3 or 4x a year I look at it now, just for laughs. It is pathetic: hugely Russophobic, claiming that Ukraine would win, little (or nothing) to say critical of the Gaza genocide, just comfortable Shit-Lib hating on the Orange Man, and on the dirty fucking hippies who aren’t 100% hypnotized & owned by the DNC & Clintonism. (I wasn’t even reading it in 2016 when HRC got owned, I’m sure the melt-down was Epic!!) Duncan Black was genuinely Left and a great writer for a long time (I believe you also worked there?) but like I said, Audience Capture, maybe he got fat, lazy & complacent with success also. A favorite I recall by him was c. 2000 or ’01 when he did “the Worst of” the 90s posts, just brilliant. Oh, & when speaking of blogs gone bad, “Lawyers, Guns & Money” was never very good (except for the name & graphics), some technocratic snooty dude with his nose in the air over his “credentials”, but it really became a pathetic echo-chamber for Virtue-signaling, anodyne morons. It’s practically unreadable, apart from charting cult-like Group Think.
Sending you a check this week some time (since I can’t use PayPal.) Keep up the good work, & thanks.
Dan Kelly
Ian, just curious: Do you enjoy writing, or is it more of a chore that you engage in because it’s necessry and you believe it’s helpful for people? Or some combo of both?
If you had just enough to live on would you write these articles anyway because it’s a creative endeavor you enjoy? And/or because you believe it’s helpful for humanity and the environment at large?
Or does the money coming in serve as its own motivation?
I am aware of the ‘economic principle’ you plainly state:
‘The simplest economic principle is this: people do more of what they’re rewarded for. When you donate, it tells me you value my writing and that I should write more.’
So, that is an economic principle. Yet many of the commenters here and within your milieu over the years have made the case that the entire concept of ‘economics’ is a silly discipline to begin with that was created by the wealthy and powerful in their own interest.
If you were the lower class equivalent of ‘independently wealthy’ – which doesn’t mean ‘wealthy’ in the economic sense at all – would you continue to write these pieces sans any economic motivation?
Ian Welsh
For the first five years of this blog I didn’t fundraise at all. I started doing so because I need the money. If the blog didn’t make money I’d write less because I’d have to spend more time making money other ways. If I won the jackpot or something and didn’t need the money I’d write on a rather more erratic schedule, mostly.
I like writing, as a rule. Some of it is for me, some of it is for you guys, a lot of it is for both.
Net Neutrality
I finally subscribed. I should have done so years ago. I am fortunate that you’ve endured for all these years, and your writing has never wavered as a voice of reason.
Nate Wilcox
It’s funny to remember how the “netroots” got shuttled into the veal pen by Obama and all the careerists made their choices. Proud to know you, Ian.
Senator-Elect
Mark Level: Atrios is still pretty good. He is staunchly anti-genocide and anti-centrist DLC types and anti-grifters, despite his commenters. On that point, it’s amazing how much political energy was wasted on the Russiagate nonsense, which has failed to take down Trump over an 8-year period. I was happy to see Jeet Heer call it out as such in the Nation article Tony linked to over the weekend. Imagine if all that hue and cry were devoted to private equity or climate change or corruption.
Net Neutrality: Amen to that!
And if Swamp Yankee is reading, props to you for great comments recently. Please keep posting!
Mark Level
Sen-Elect– Atrios himself lost me fully in 2020 when (audience capture!) he came out for the utterly phony Liz Warren to keep the Lib pod-people there happy & subscribing. My guess is that he can’t be THAT stupid and so it was insincere & a sell-out. Anyone who can’t tell their truth loses my interest at that point.
Glad to hear he is anti-genocide, but every time I saw a good post from him, 95% of the audience would simply ignore it and start tweeting (basically) about what lunch meal they were making, or the weather, or for those with special hobby horses to ride & share, their latest hate fetish– A dude with “Bear” in his screen name was always agitating for “Putin’s” death & dismemberment, e.g. I’d bet one in a hundred people in his audience have gone to a Cease Fire demo since Oct. of 2023, & that may be overly generous.
The entire Liberal Class doesn’t have the brain power to stop repeating their stupid little canards & obsessions: e.g., in an old 2017 issue of Harper’s, there was a full-page ad for the journal Daedalus. That used to be a great literary magazine (in the last century, maybe 5 years into this one, I saw it less on the newsstands in the Bay Area, so dunno) but the issue advertised was “Russia After Putin”!! Not shittin’ anyone here. So 7 years later, how’d that work out? I just can’t waste my time with Shit Libs. The right-wing crazies are at least a little interesting & weird (& 2 in 100x they are actual insightful, show class consciousness, which the phony Shit Libs never will.)
To paraphrase Barbara Bush (on the coffins coming back from Afghanistan & Iraq in 2005) I’m not gonna “waste my beautiful mind” on that.
different clue
@Mark Level,
Here is an interesting blog in the unlikely chance that you don’t already know about it anyway. ( If you already do know about it, please forgive me in advance for having wasted your time and attention).
And here it is. Ran Prieur. https://www.ranprieur.com/
He writes about different random things that he thinks are interesting and that he hopes might interest others. He purges a lot of what he writes out of his ongoing rolling blog as it ongoingly rolls, and keeps what he thinks is the best. ( He has a couple of fans who are trying to preserve it all somewhere).
He is a leaner tougher meaner hippie for today’s leaner tougher meaner times of today. He describes himself a little bit in his “about me” page.
https://www.ranprieur.com/me.html
He had ( and may still have somewhere) a subsection called “advice”. It may just be semi-hidden and hard to find.