Setting Up Shop: The Thinker’s Podium

As my old blog “Bruce’s Rave and Rant”, goes into wind down I’m finally getting off my bum and getting this new blog up and running.

Not that I have anything against the Google crowd, indeed events such as Google’s “Summer of Code” will keep them in my good books (even if I frown at their participation in China’s quests for censorship.) Blogger just wasn’t doing it for me anymore and I think that I may just be happier with WordPress (another FOSS project bless it.)

As I write this, an auto-save feature has just kicked in. How I wish that had happened on more than one occasion over on Blogger. And then there’s this wonderful “more tag.”

As one who waffles on sometimes, a more tag would have helped shorten the front-page of my old blog. This is good.

But it’s not just gadgrety that precipitates my change in blogging behaviour. It has been pointed out to me on more than one occasion that “Rave and Rant” was a little misleading. In short, I attempted (mostly successfully in my opinion) to justify too many of my ideas with evidence and logic; rants aren’t supposed to be well reasoned.

This brings us to the title; “Thinker’s Podium.” I didn’t want to say forum because let’s just face it, to call this another forum is both obvious and quite frankly a bit of an over used term. “Soapbox” was up for serious consideration and it may very well be a better choice.

I wanted something with a bit of “ancient Greek” flavor though, but “Socrates’ Corner of the Web” seemed a tad presumptuous. “Podium” seems to hit the spot. As for “thinker’s”, well I think that’s an accurate description of both myself and the majority of those with whom I enjoy a discourse. I don’t think it’s overly presumptuous.

“Thinker’s” also denotes a part of my value system; an opinion formed by way of reason (where the topic is subject to reason) is in my view far more reliable than the product of sophistry, mysticism, rhetoric and any other means that pays too little regard to the truth. Anyone who reads my commentary on my old blog (in good faith) knows that I don’t have a penchant for sugar coating my responses or protecting people’s egos; while I may occasionally spin something after making a reasoned argument for that thing’s truth, I don’t spin things simply because those things are palatable.

For example, the notion that readers would be opposed to the actions of various “flame warriors” who were quite active in what can best be described as “blogging vengeance campaigns” (if not in some instances “cyber stalking”, of which I’ve been a target) is one that is palatable to me. However, when said opposition involved what I thought was unfair criticism of the offenders, I said so. No sugar coating.

Sometimes the truth can lack plesance. That’s not something that bothers a “thinker” (rather inaction over an unpleasant truth is something that may bother the thinker).

This blog, like my last, will be one where one should not be afraid to disagree and should expect to have their claims challenged. Those who pay short shrift to reason should also expect to have their motives questions, although perhaps short of psychologisms on my part.

Now this “thinker’s” thing sounds a bit like elitism, but let’s not give in to truthiness. Let’s be reasonable.

Noam Chomsky once pointed out that the Internet is an elitist medium given that most people in the world don’t have access to it. In this respect I will contend that my blog (as well as every other blog on Earth) is elitist. What we should object to though is willing elitism.

We should allow our blogs to be mirrored by organisations that do so to allow those under dictatorships access to contrary opinion. I’ll state now that the Creative Commons license that I used on my old blog, and the one I will use on this blog, extend to such practices.

We should not discriminate against the socio-economic or sub-cultural base of our readership. I don’t care if someone is a chicken farmer or a multi-billionaire, that doesn’t exclude them from being a thinker. I pondered metaphysical solipsism as a 2 year old when my parents were dirt poor and we lived in a shed and I used to read Dawkins and Nietzsche in the lunch room at the factory where I worked during the recession of the 90s.

I’m not expecting people to be as weird or prosaic as perhaps I am and I do acknowledge that socio-economic background plays a role in educational opportunity. What it doesn’t do is stop people from being able to be reasonable and honest (although as a tangent, one may wish to discuss the role mental illness here).

For most people reading this, you have the time to comment on an/or read blogs. You have time, you have a powerful educational tool; the Internet. You have the opportunity to learn critical thinking, primary reasoning and basic research skills if indeed you don’t already possess them.

Aside from mental illness and other maladies, why then is it that so many people on the Internet choose to be rhetorical, chose to avoid reliable information and rely on dodgy work to impose untruths? I won’t go into psychologisms or prognostications of motives, but I think one word needs to be brought up; “choose.”

If someone’s choice to be irrational and/or dishonest (not that I think the terms are often separate) excludes them from meaningful participation in this forum and if that exclusion makes me an elitist, then I’m an elitist. Not that I think that another’s carelessness (with the truth) should be cause for me to adopt a pejorative as a title, I will adopt the title. Indeed, if honesty is the basis for the term, I don’t see it as a pejorative.

So the irrational, practitioners of empty rhetoric and the pseudo-skeptics out there can call me elitist ’till the cows come home. This blog is a space for the honest and I think motivated alienation from it, except on grounds of mental illness or perhaps an aversion to my writing style (which is not necessarily a sign of bad taste) does more to indite the excluded.

“The elitists wouldn’t let me in Mummy! They said I had to be honest! Bwahhh!”

This blog is dedicated to the honest thinker.

~ Bruce.