Paul is back from hiatus

You know you’ve been away too long when you start getting other bloggers noticing and writing posts about your absence.

You know you’ve been away way too long when you start getting phone calls from your mother and the former leader of the federal Green Party asking when your blog’s going to be updated next.

So, I just wanted to write to let everyone know that I haven’t abandoned Paulitics, in fact far from it.  I’m just finishing up my last semester of my masters degree and I didn’t plan out the schedule for all my assignments very well, so it just worked out that I had 5 major presentations/projects/essays due in the span of 13 days.  But as of yesterday evening, I’ve finished my crazy two weeks and will return to blogging and podcasting very shortly.

In fact, I’ve got two blog topic ideas ready to go as well as a new podcast episode in the works that will be released in the next few days.

Stay tuned.

Paul’s off for a much needed vacation

As of 10pm tonight, I’m going to be heading off for a much needed and long overdue vacation with my girlfriend and family.  We’re going to be heading to the Florida Keys, and apparently there’s extremely limited internet access in the Keys, so the blog is going to slow down for a bit while I’m gone for two weeks.  However, I do plan on updating the polling resource at least once while I’m down there as well as doing a post when I get my 100,000th hit which should be any day now.

If I don’t return to blogging by early January, please let somebody know because that probably means that I’ve been ‘disappeared’ or become an “unperson” by homeland security.  :)

And, just as a precaution, if any of the good, kind folks from Homeland Security are reading this blog and know who I am (I can’t imagine how they would know, because it’s not like the government has had any shady dealings with telecommunications companies), I would like to take this opportunity to point out that, while I am a Marxist who seeks the abolition of capital and the state, I do oppose individual expressions of political violence and thus am completely and totally harmless.

Paulitics Polls: Now Bilingual! (Les sondages Paulitics: Maintenant bilingue!)

I’ve decided to brush up on my (very rusty) French, so as a preliminary step towards making some of the resources on this blog more francophone-friendly, I’ve decided to translate the Paulitics Polling Resource page into french.

Once upon a time, I once was fluently bilingual, but, unfortunately, those days are long gone.  If there are any good comrades who would be willing to help correct my errors or translate more, I’d be greatly appreciative.

You can access the new and improved bilingual Paulitics Polling Resource here.

As for the rest of the blog, don’t worry folks, I haven’t forgotten about it.  It’s just that this is the end of the semester crunch for graduate students, so as of this wednesday or so, I should be free to start blogging again with regularity.

Paulitics will be troll-free for the month of November

As those regular readers of this blog will be more than aware, I am incapable of not responding to anybody who takes the time to write a lengthy comment — no matter how offensive, no matter how ignorant and no matter how troll-ish. (see here, here, here, or here).  Call it a personal defect, call it obsessive compuslive disorder, call it being opinionated to a fault (all would be accurate), but the fact of the matter is that if somebody leaves a steaming pile of… well, you know what… on this blog, I feel obliged to ‘clean it up’ (so to speak) rather than merely delete it. 

Today, for the first time ever, I have regretfully had to moderate a troll.  To be fair, this particular troll today wasn’t offensive like, say, Brent (IP address 74.136.99.158) who wrote this lovingly Christian comment a while back “Burn in hell commie. You are my enemy.”

But nevertheless, to the anonymous “eimaJ” (and all other trolls), I understand that your comments were not bad compared to the filth spewed by other trolls (which is why I’m not publishing “eimaJ” or backwards Jamie’s two IP addresses), however, this being the November essay season and me having the character defect of not being able to let a comment — even a troll’s comments — go unanswered, I have decided to moderate troll-ish comments.  This decision will last only until December 1st when my last essay for my last semester of course work for my Masters’ degree is finished.  After that, I will remove all bans on all trolls and you can feel free to troll this blog again (with the assurances that I will respond, no less)  until your heats’ content.

Have a wonderful November and I’ll see all you trolls again in December once I can waste more time responding to you without it impacting on my studies.

Updates galore

For those of you who are interested, several of the Paulitics resources have been updated in the past couple of days.

•I’ve updated the Quotes Resource by adding a new section for atheist and other deliciously sacreligious quotations. →

•I’ve also updated the Ontario 2007 Polling Resource to include three new polls (two of which I had previously missed, and one that is very recent).
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•There have also been updates made to the Marx-to-English Dictionary Resource.  Some of the new entries in the dictionary include “bourgeoisie”, “petite bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”.  ↓

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What should Paul do?

Help, I need my readers’ advice.

As my regular readers will know, I’ve been contemplating expanding Paulitics: Paul’s Socialist Investigations now for some time.

I’ve been wanting to develop an American Empire Encyclopedia — possibly as a wiki, but at the very least with a clickable map containing links to academic scholarship documenting the democratically-elected governments the U.S. has overthrown throughout history and the brutal dictatorships they’ve supported.

I’ve also been wanting to develop a home for far left bloggers to put their feeds all in one place and read what each other thinks.  I figure if libertarians, Liberals, Tories, and New Democrats each have one, there’s no reason why can’t we anarchists, Marxists and socialists have some sort of a website to promote each other’s blogs, get more readers, and find new far-left blogs that are interesting.

Now, unfortunately it looks like both of these things will require me to host my own blog and thus to move Paulitics away from wordress (but I’ll make sure to pay wordpress for a domain mapping service so that it redirects).

In order to afford the bandwidth and the hosting services and the domain mapping services, I will have to put some advertisements up on the new blog and that, I realize, is a sensitive issue for leftist bloggers.

My plan for the ads is that I would place the ads in a few select locations (not everywhere like most bloggers) and I was hoping to take from the revenue only the money needed to maintain the site, and then with 100% of the profits that remain, host a monthly or quarterly ‘election’ with Paulitics readers to decide which charity/leftist political party should receive the left-over money.

This way, I figure, not only would we be blogging and expressing important revolutionary opinions, but we would also be able to generate revenue for important charities and revolutionary causes.  These charities could be anything that was democratically elected by you, the readers, such as Amnesty International or homeless advocacy organizations or local charities such as women’s shelters or even political causes such as a particular candidate for the Communist Party, the Marxist-Leninist Party, Quebec Solidaire or the Socialist Caucus of the NDP.

So, given that this would be a big move, and one which would require the implementation of advertisements to pay for the newly-found overhead, I wanted to ask my readers what they thought and what their advice was.

I’ve created a poll for this topic and I’d appreciate it if you’d all go and vote to give me your opinions.  You can find it here:

Vote Now!

The American Empire Encyclopedia (work-in-progress)

For some time now, I’ve been extremely interested creating something of an encyclopedia documenting all instances of the United States’ imperial adventures.  Specifically, I’ve been interested in countries in which the U.S. either overthrew a democratically-elected government, or countries in which the U.S. helped to keep an existing brutal dictatorship in power despite democratic opposition.

That the U.S. regularly overthrows democratically-elected governments should come as no real surprise to most people who are literate and somewhat familiar at all with global history.  However, in all my searching, I have never found a single exhaustive source which compiled all instances of U.S. imperialism along with proper academic citations for future reference, so I have taken it upon myself to try to get together such an admittedly ambitious collection of information.

So far, my highly incomplete tally has resulted in the creation of this map:

The problem is two-fold:

#1) I would like to create a ‘clickable map’ so that readers can click on each highlighted country and be brought to a page detailing important dates, information, credible academic sources and possibly even direct quotes and page numbers.

The problem here is that I have little to no experience with html code and am unable to find good programs to generate such a ‘clickable map’ of the data on the American Empire.

#2) This project would obviously be much richer if it were structured as a “wiki” for all like-minded people with an interest in this subject to be able to contribute.

Now the problem here is that I’m not sure of the best way of going about accomplishing this task.  I’m considering switching this blog out of wordpress.com so that I can host it myself, but does anybody here know anything about ‘wiki’ software and hosting said software on a wordpress.org blog?

Can any kind soul help me with these problems?

Blogs to expand your mind

The always delightful Polly Jones nominated me a while back as one of the five blogs that make her think.  I haven’t had a chance to participate in naming the five blogs that make me think yet, so I figured that now was as good a time as any.

There are way more than 5 blogs listed on my blogroll which make me think and which challenge me to better myself everytime I read them.

I’m going to try to not re-nominate some of the blogs who have already been nominated for a thinking blogger award.  So, despite my love of Red Jenny’s blog and Polly Jones’ blog and April Reign’s blog (and they’re all fantastic blogs), I’m going to try to draw my readers’ attention to what are maybe some less popular blogs who are just as worthy of receiving a thinking blogger award as these three popular blogs.

So, my five nominations for a thinking blogger award are:

#1)  http://theproles.blogspot.com/

In my opinion, Doug’s blog is one of the most underrated blogs on the internet and deserves to be read by every progressive and thinking comrade.

#2)  http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/

Even if you know nothing of Louis Proyect, reading his blog makes you abundantly aware that this is a man who knows what he is talking about better than 99.9% of all bloggers out there.  Truly, a joy to read.

#3)  http://scottneigh.blogspot.com/

Now Scott’s blog, I believe, is a very popular blog, so it’s entirely likely that it has already been nominated for a thinking blogger award.  But, nevertheless, I first stumbled across his blog through a post he had discussing the Gramscian roots of the popular television series Sesame Street.  As a Gramscian, I couldn’t help but find instant respect for Scott and that respect has stayed ever since then.

#4)  http://rppe.wordpress.com/

While I definitely identify as a Marxist, the truth is that my formal education was painfully wanting in economics and political economics.  So, whenever I find myself drifting towards utopian, purely moral socialism, Relentlessly Progressive Political Economy is one of the sources I rely upon to help put me back in touch with scientific socialism.

#5)  http://democraticspace.com/blog/

Lastly, there’s Greg’s blog Democratic Space.  Never let it be said that I’m a purely partisan who can’t recognize intelligence in non-socialist and non-anarchist comrades.  Greg and I have definitely had our differences and I don’t agree with him on everything he writes, but I can’t deny that he puts an inordinate amount of work into his blog and it is always very well researched and well thought out.  I would recommend it even to other socialists

So, that’s it.  I hope everybody goes and gives each of these fantastic blogs a try.  You’ll be better off having done so.

Polling resource & political images updated

I know I’ve been AWOL for a while, but rest assured, it’s purely because I’ve been in the process of working over 43 hours per week and trying to set up a new apartment.  Rest assured, that I haven’t gone anywhere and that Paulitics will be back to its former glory in the near future.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve greatly expanded the data on the provincial breakdown section of the Paulitics Polling Resource.  The Polling Resource now features a 6 month history of poll results at the provincial level as well as providing the ever famous Paulitics rolling five poll graphs.  Take a look at it and let me know what everybody thinks.

I’ve also done a large update to the Political Images resource, for those interested.