Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Eight Years of Sketchy Thoughts

It has been eight years since i started this blog, basically as a way of trying to figure out how to develop and explore some political ideas and perhaps also deal with a period of political and personal isolation i was going through. It "worked", and provided a space not only to try and figure some things out, to record things i would otherwise have forgotten, and to try and elaborate a set of political reference points. It has been a nice complement to what at the time was the more business-oriented kersplebedeb.com site i also run.

Of course, every medium shapes the message, and there are drawbacks to this particular format. For one, not all blog posts are equal, and not all have the same staying power. Reposting a callout for a demo may be more important than writing up thoughts on the Iranian Revolution, but a year later the latter might retain some value, while the former does not. Furthermore, for some reason, google does not index all blog posts. There are things i have written here that for whatever reason are essentially invisible to the internet. And finally, with the advent of Facebook, a lot of things i would have written about here, i now simply repost or "like" there. Facebook is an amazing organizing tool, but comes with a major built-in security liability, and tends to dumb down our thoughts as well as our conversations. Beyond the quip and the snark, anything worth saying becomes "TLDR" in a mindscape ruled by grumpy cats and bad collages dubbed "memes".

Ever since i set up the leftwingbooks website for stuff that i sell, the distinction between what belongs on Sketchy Thoughts and what belongs on kersplebedeb has become pretty arbitrary. The ideal would be to somehow combine them. For the past year or so i have been exploring, with different people, ways to do just this, in the hopes of making a more coherent and useful repertoire of documents and thoughts. This was supposed to happen before the end of 2012, but that obviously was as bit too hopeful. Nevertheless, i'm going to take advantage of this New Year's to post a retrospective of sorts, a compendium of the things i am most pleased with having written on this blog over the past 8 years. (Unfortunately, this leaves out the many excellent things other people have written which i have reposted here, as well as series of reports i posted which only take on relevance when seen together; however this is just not that kind of retrospective!)

My hope is that soon all of this will be consolidated in a new way, but in case it isn't, here is a guide to the my favorites out of over 1000 postings to have made it on to sketchy thoughts since 2005, in reverse chronological order and separated out into categories:



Class and National Contradictions in quebec (and canada)



Political Struggle


On the Subject of Patriarchy



Militant Resistance and State Repression in quebec (and canada)

Fascism, Warlordism, Genocide, and Other Nightmare Potentials

Nations, Colonialism, Imperialism

 Science Fiction



AddThis Social Bookmark Button

at 11:37 AM

Labels:





No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)