The First Year

It’s just over a year since I first posted on this blog, having set up associated Twitter and Facebook accounts at the same time. My aim was to set up a little political project that’s all my own – to give myself a place for self-indulgent writing, and hopefully spread a little information to counter disinformation.

Two of the more consistently popular blogposts during the first year have been posts on Jordan Peterson and Warren Buffet. The former covered the biologist PK Myers criticising the popular self-help guru Peterson for his unscientific approach. The latter gathered together various statements from the billionaire investor Warren Buffet calling for higher taxes on the rich. One of my more ambitious (arguably pretentious) aims has been to help arguments that I agree with to be more widely shared and understood in their original form, rather than being misrepresented. I think with these two posts I’ve had a small degree of success.

Although it was a success that burned briefly, in January I had a large number of visits and shares of a blogpost which drew attention to the fact that various Brexit supporters had argued for the principle behind a second referendum, before hypocritically deciding to oppose it when they came to believe that it would be bad for their cause. I was given credit by The European newspaper when they used a quote from ex-Brexit Minister David Davis that I had helped to elevate.

I have also used this blog as a place to house supporting evidence for arguments I have had on social media – a place where, by necessity, arguments need to be short and snappy. The blogposts that I’ve shared most often are ones summarising the evidence for the ‘97% of climate scientists’ statistic; refuting the claim that the Nazi Party were socialists; showing the evidence linking US food regulations and salmonella; and sharing Naomi Klein’s definition of neoliberalism – that its made up of “three policy pillars” of privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts.

While I feel that I’ve been somewhat successful in achieving my aims in the first year of the blog – creating messaging that some people have found useful, and turning my frustrations from wild fury into focused and concise messages – I think that I could have done more. I find that writing can be a process of turning abstract ideas lodged in the back of the brain to something more precise, focused and clear. I have a decent number of lumps of clay that I didn’t get round to putting through that process.

That will be my aim in the second year – more of the same, more regularly.