When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?
— John Maynard Keynes
When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?
— John Maynard Keynes
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About SmartiesWhy smartiesFor the real discussion of why I started smarties see the Inaugural Post in the sidebar, but briefly, I like computers and I like politics and this puts them both in one amusing hobby. Some smarties statisticsEvery post is assigned a topic type: politics, economics, history, philosophy, culture, science, apropos of nothing and about smarties. To date, the number and percent of posts of each type are as follows:
Since posts can have more than one type (e.g. a post on the effect of a Congressional quarel on bond rates should be both politics and economics), the total will be less that the sum of the types. To date I have busted my hump to the tune of 211,917 words, though when I count only words written myself — that is, the total excluding blockquotes (words contained between the HTML <blockquote> tags for those interested in the algorithm) — my total output comes to 160,183. So approximately 75.8 percent of the text on my blog is my own. Ignore the Man Behind the CurtainMy interests include: economic history, monetary policy, diplomatic history, nuclear strategy, the Cold War, national security, international relations, intellectual history, Western philosophy, biographies, general systems theory, cosmology, critique of ideology, issues of sex and gender, classical studies. Those who I consider my ideal types include, of course, the economist John Meynard Keynes; Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Acheson; United States founding father Alexander Hamilton; and to a lesser extent, Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin; and national security intellectual Paul Wolfowitz. The two works that have most shaped the way that I view and analyse the world are Fernand Braudel's three volume Civilization and Capitalism and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Following close on the heals of these two would be Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. All expound a sort of a posteriori analytical method and share a commitment to close faith with the world and experience. For more of the detritus on the author consult the personal pages. |
 Inaugural PostIf I am going to join the bloggosphere, I guess that an inaugural post is in order, in which I offer certain explanations, make certain confessions, enumerate goals and make a polite gesture toward the specter of propriety (and I do think that this is a deeply improprietious endeavor). Why blogging? What am I trying to accomplish? Why should anyone care what I think? Why join this societal wave of exhibitionism? Before I get on to the explaining, allow me to make a theoretical discussion. In the future, content filtering will be done less by authorities such as editors and more by personally determined trust networks. I frequently fantasize about the future universal digital library. The problem (or advantage) of such a scheme is that although content providers may continue to produce on a regular, periodic schedule, content would be disaggregated from its brand name. For instance, right now I read from many different "containers": The New York Times, The New Republic et cetera. I know what containers to draw from because I know the network of associations built around the brand names. I know which publications are reputable and I know the editorial positions associated with each publication. The brand name under which articles are currently agglomerated serves as a network of information and authority, a guarantee of quality, an indicator of various literary characteristics...more |
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Donald W. Taylor II Washington, D.C. United States of America taylordw@goodleaf.net |
