Time for another blogroll cleanup — bye, people

The biggest deletion? Since Massimo Pigliucci has gone to Patreon, which doesn't have an RSS, his old Plato's Footnote is out of the blogroll. That also said, his Patreon site is NOT going into my links list as of this time. A number of small comments issues over the past several months have become enough. That history of comments issues and related items is here. (That said, Dan Kaufman may read and comment less there, too, a silver lining.)

I'll still read him from time to time, since Patreon has email notices. But ... not gonna link him. Not right now. That may change in the future, but not now.

Beyond that, I had usually, on average, already read half or so the Friday links roundup he posted, so,  unless something new popped up, I found it less stimulating than years ago. Also — and I know that, as a blogger, it's hard to avoid this entirely — he's starting to recycle stuff. In August, he wrote his third piece in less than 18 months about what's wrong, in his estimation, with informal fallacies of classical logic.

One linked almost as long? And which will certainly remain delinked? And is the biggest deletion?

3 Quarks Daily had been in a bit of suspension in my mind for a few months. Posting a 15-year-old Harvard Magazine story about Egyptology is the latest in my craw of how it at times is pretentious about how it "curates" seven or eight things daily — then asks for money for this task of awesomeness, then pulls crap like that. (This is the first time I've seen anything THAT old, but I've seen stuff more than a year old before, and from my perspective on matters philosophical, I've seen more crap there — including two Alex Rosenberg pieces in less than a month. (The reality about him can be found in this piece by friend Massimo, "Why Alex Rosenberg is wrong about just about everything.") More recently, it ran with a piece claiming "lefties are dissing evolution." The piece was actually about ev psych, not evolutionary biology, which is a pseudoscience.

And, it has now blocked me from commenting there, since I voiced these complaints there. That is despite its running two philosophical essays I wrote for Massimo, which even made the first cut in a competition, as I note here. And Twitter and FB. So, it's deleted. (It was the comment I had on the ev psych piece, which was total bullshit, plus a followup comment to another commenter about the Egyptology piece, that got me blocked. At least I went out in style.)

I deleted The North Star because, while the previous incarnation of the site had great info from a leftist but not extremist POV, it's been more than 90 days since they started on a promised overhaul and the organizers still have nothing but an "about" / placeholder home page up. I'll add it back if and when the website is actually up and running.

And, I've deleted another. And done other things related to that. And that's that.

One I have added is Carl Beijer. He blogs but occasionally, but, is usually at least half as snarky as he is on Twitter. At the same time ... for someone who worked for Nader twice, but doesn't note in a blog post that the reason Dems flipped so many Republican seats is that they ran a lot of military-industrial complex or spying-snooping complex ConservaDems is a bit of an eyebrow raiser. (Maybe he thinks those people don't go against Democrats' core values; to the degree the Doinks DO have core values, I'd agree with him, but ... he doesn't spell that out.) OTOH,  I would support Beijer's idea of a more socialist Green New Deal than the Roses (or the US Green Party, I think he's right) have offered. Anyway ... he's his own person. And, then, in February 2019, he undercuts himself again by doing a "rally the troops to Bernie" post and ignoring Greens — and Sanders' still iffiness on foreign policy issues.

OTTH (On the third hand) Beijer does a bit of shark-jumping for me when he claims that capitalism inexorably leads to fascism. There, he refuses to call himself a dialectical materialist, but does call himself a "historic materialist."


A difference that makes no diff, Carl. You're claiming to be a Commie, specifically of Marxist variety, not just a socialist. As I've said elsewhere, Marxism is bankrupt both scientifically and philosophically.

Related? I've added Corey Robin, who is somewhere between left-liberal and leftist. He remains more accommodating of DSA Dems than I am, and somewhat more accommodating of the "internal reform" idea, but, he certainly doesn't write blank checks. He posts rarely; I haven't followed him on Book of Face but I do on Twitter.

Another add is PsyPost. It's pop psychology in reading level, but reasonably rigorous in what it reports. And very interesting

A third, which I have read for years, is John Horgan's blog at SciAm.

A fourth is Schneier on Security, who covers all sorts of cybersecurity issues.

A fifth is Smokey the Cat, a Twitter friend and yinzer who is in my general neck of the world politically and has started into the blog world.

A sixth is Bosque Bill. It's not entirely about New Mexico, and it's not entirely about nature, but it's primarily pretty much about one or the other of those.

A seventh addition is connected to the last deletion.

Otherwise, I in general don't keep a long, large blogroll. Seriously, who has time to track 50 or more different ones? Especially if they're all ones about politics? (You'll notice that's not the case with mine.)