Given Who Is Asking, If You Really Wanted Me To Stop You'd Praise Me - Stupid Question In Stupid Mail

In an e-mail that encourages me to give up posting these meditations of politics and the wide range of relevant side issues, also music and radio drama, occasional stuff I am ashamed to admit falls to the level of a feuilleton - generally in response to a simpleton, I'll say in my defense - someone asks me why I've been doing this for the last number of years, assuring me "no one reads it".

Well, I know some people read it, though it's true, all of those hits that show up in the automated statistics I think I've looked at fewer than a dozen times might all be bots, though I get enough hate mail to prove SOMEONE is reading it, not to mention the occasional substantial and interesting comment.  That Memorial Day poem of the other day, when I first posted it on my first blog got a comment from Left Rev. that said I wrote one of the better blogs no one comments on.  Perhaps that early encouragement went to my head all these years.  It's not as if I'm burdened with over-praise.  I think if I got even a little more of that it would make me feel nervous, not encouraged.  The last thing I want to feel is that I have to meet expectations.  That would inhibit me. 

I don't write things in the belief that thousands and thousands of influential and, to use the repulsive phrase I absolutely reject, "important people" will find ideas here that they will spread far and wide, I write things because writing is such a good way to both take a hard look at ideas you get and, in reviewing what you've thought, generate further ideas, to see connections (or rather possible connections) to notice connections that are obviously there but which people don't seem to see, etc.  I wrote things a lot earlier than I ever went online or even before I had my first computer which had no modem of way of getting online.  I taught myself shorthand out of a cheap paperback,  Zinman's Rapid Writing, and used to scribble away for long periods of time and found it was a really good way of organizing your thinking.  Once I could do that even faster by typing into a computer it was even more of an attraction.  I was skeptical about these new personal computers at first and the first course I took in DOS certainly didn't encourage me to be less skeptical but, then I took one in word processing and I knew I'd never use a typewriter ever again - the nostalgia for typewriters is sheer lunacy though I'd certainly go back to doing it by hand. 

As I said the other day my blogging was an outgrowth of typing out long comments during blog arguments and brawls, especially in reaction to some pretty horrific habits of thought among the alleged lefties of many of the popular blogs of the 000s.  Finding out that some of the alleged bright lights among them were far more preppy-libertarians than egalitarian-democratic liberals was the fist one.  Finding out that D.B. reputedly one of the big thinkers among them opposed the Fairness Doctrine might be the first incidence of realizing how stupid a lot of them were.  Another one was reading supposed lefties using the term "trailer trash" mocking the victims of a tornado in Oklahoma even as they were recovering bodies, the barroom atheist blather, etc.  In time those pieces all fit together and I realized a lot of them were going to do far more to damage the fight against Republican-fascism than they were going to help.  They were a bunch of preppy-Ivy Leaguers and wannabees, people who wished they'd been red-diaper babies of the fabled and totally awful NYC left (as read in The Nation and workshopped at the Left Forum) who worshiped idiots and traitors and stooges and idiots who I have to admit still are to be found in many a more successful (but never successful enough to ever make a difference except for the worse) online blog, Twitter feed, podcast, youtube channel, etc.   

I find that after my disillusion with Majority Report over their idiotic Bernie or Buster policy of undercutting Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, and other candidates who, unlike Bernie might, someday be president, that I don't even retain much in the way of affection for them.  When we agree it is more than made up for by their idiocy.  And if I don't feel for them, I certainly don't feel for more than one or two of those early bloggers of blogs I used to frequent.  I looked at one of them right before I wrote this and see the boob still is holding a torch for Jeremy Corbyn, probably the worst or second worst Labour Party leader in the history of the party and a total disaster in terms of electoral politics.  The guy is a total and complete idiot. 

I figure if I'm going to write stuff out for myself, I'll post it.  It doesn't hurt anyone.  And it might annoy some people who I'd like to annoy.