This category contains pages of somewhat shorter entries, grouped by time of writing.
See the category navigation for the pages or visit the, as of 2024-01-02, most recent page.
I often (especially, with current events) have the wish to discuss, reference, or clarify something without creating a separate page. (E.g. because I lack the time or the topic the importance, because the resulting text simply would not be very long, because the eventual scope is not yet clear.) In such cases, a brief treatment on the latest page in this category might follow.
Note that any of the entries might eventually be moved elsewhere, e.g. in order to give a fuller treatment on a separate page. (Link at your own risk.)
Also note that my intention to give a brief treatment often fails. Once I get started, texts often turn out longer than planned, and chances are that at least some of the entries present at any given time would be long enough to warrant separate pages even in the now. (And are disproportionately likely to be among those later moved.)
Entries are typically given a date. Beware, however, that the date refers to first publication and that later changes will not necessarily be reflected. (This will depend on the extent of the changes and whether I pay attention to the matter at the time of change.)
Regardless of dating, I almost invariably add new entries at the top of a page. In rare cases, a new entry might be added next to an old entry with a strong connection, even should it be well below the top; however, even when such a connection is present, I usually go with the top. This with the idea that a recurring reader can get what is new by simply reading the top-most few entries.
A side-effect is that those who want to read the entries in approximate order of writing must start from the bottom of the respective page (while the order of the pages within this category should be self-explanatory).
In contrast, changes to older entries, including updates that are too small to warrant a separate new entry, leave the respective old entry in its original place. While I reserve the right to change any of the pages, updates will usually be rare outside the page currently active/most recent.
Would it not make more sense to put new contents at the bottom?
Maybe. In some cases, e.g. with very frequent updates on a current or sports event (including the poorly named “live blogs”), this is definitely the superior approach. (Reload the page every ten or twenty minutes and just keep reading from where the text used to end, with no need to find the right place, no scrolling up and down, no accidental reading of something in the wrong order, etc.) I chose the top based on likely reader expectations from other sources, including, sadly, those cases where updates-at-the-bottom would be the better policy.
Re-visiting older contents, I have found occasional repetitions.
In some cases, these might be warranted, because separate individual entries have an overlap or naturally draw on similar ideas/examples/whatnot, in a manner that would be unremarkable if they were on single-topic pages.
In other cases, I have simply forgotten that I had already addressed a particular topic or sub-topic and written some variation of the same a second time—for which I apologize. (Such memory errors might be understandable in light of the sheer number of entries, but are still a disservice to the reader and a poor use of my own time.)
Even in the latter case, I will usually let the repetition stand for now, but with an increased probability that the contents will be moved to a separate page and unified at a future date.
As discussed repeatedly in the past, I consider the traditional Left–Right scale simplistic, misleading, and harmful. (Note e.g. a text with suggestions for more sensible political scales ([1]).)
The alleged “Right”, in particular, is too heterogeneous to be grouped under a label that implies something homogeneous. (The Left, too, is problematic in this regard, but not to anywhere near the same degree.) Correspondingly, I tend to juxtapose the Left with the non-Left and to put words like “Right” (“far Right”, “Rightwing”, etc.) in scare quotes. (But note that the uses in this paragraph arise from speaking of words, not the need for scare quotes.)
Likewise, I tend to avoid the word “Center” and its variations, in part through my experiences in Germany (cf. side-note): (a) What is considered the political center varies too much from country to country and time to time. (b) It gives traditionally “Rightwing” parties incentives to hide under the label “Center”, to reduce the damage from the Leftist pushing of “everyone Rightwing is evil”, “The Nazis were Rightwing; ergo, the Rightwing is Nazi”, etc. (c) It indirectly supports an anti-“Right” worldview, where there is the acceptable Left (viewed as good by the Left and tolerated by the Center), the acceptable Center (seen as good by the Center and tolerated by the Left), and the unacceptable “Right” (uniformly rejected by both the Left and the Center). A better view is simply to see the highly problematic Left for what it is and to, again, contrast it with the non-Left. (While noting, again, that the non-Left is very heterogeneous, implying that the individual parties, politicians, ideologies, whatnot, must ultimately be judged on their individual merits. Some of them are problematic in their own right, some are not—but the Left is almost always worse.)
The stigma associated with the word “Right” varies considerably from country to country. In Germany, e.g., it is exceptionally strong, and few in the CDU would publicly call themselves “Rightwing”, for fear of immediately being grouped with Nazis and the like. (The more unfortunate, as the Nazis have much more in common with the German Left. Cf. [1].) In the U.K., e.g., the Tories are publicly considered “Rightwing” and no-one seems to take this amiss or jump to absurd conclusions about Nazis.
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