Last year, I promised to collect my most important posts, and write commentary on them.
I’m turning to that now, and I have some that’ll definitely be there.
But I’d like to know what readers think to help me choose others. Please let me know in the comments, or feel free to email me (admin-at-ianwelsh-dot-net.) If you want to add something extra, let me know why you think it was a post that mattered.
If you’ve been reading me for a long time, please think back a bit on older posts. I’ve been writing for a long time now…
Tracy
You predicted a far right nationalist would be elected after Obama left office. I wish to God you had been wrong.
Brian A. Graham
“The Intolerance of Genius”
Herman
There are so many good posts to choose from but if I had to choose one I would choose “The Culture of Meanness” from February 23, 2016.
Jeff Wegerson
I love your prescriptions for how countries should manage their economies (along with friendly criticisms of MMT) and including building an enlightened, awakened, psychologically sound, technocratic, bureaucratic, self regenerating class to prevent back-sliding. And could we get this done before the climate apocalypse please?
Daniel A Lynch
–the post on your friend Peter is probably my all time favorite.
–Several posts with the theme of “you get more out of people by treating them kindly”
–Several posts with the theme of “you can choose a left wing populist or you can choose a right wing populist” seem highly appropriate for the current times.
Sid Finster
The post on how to run a real left-wing government.
Sid Finster
https://theconversation.com/venezuelas-long-history-of-racism-is-coming-back-to-haunt-it-82199
Lest anyone accuse Ian of making things up, antisemitism or anything else.
different clue
@Ian Welsh,
Are your collected Best Posts together with new commentary to be published separately as an ink-on-paper book for separate sale? Or posted here on your blog? Or both?
Are they to be be in chronological order as first-posted, or are they going to be grouped into separate subject-matter blocks and/or conceptual sections?
Ian Welsh
They’ll be posted here, then gathered into a single document which people can download.
Not sure about order, but it won’t be chronological. Conceptual most likely.
Sam
The Kindergarten Ethics We Need is brilliant, and Default To Kindness is a good foundational piece.
Dave Dell
My first introduction to your writing might have been a link from MiketheMadBiologist:
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-usefulness-of-alt-left-emoprog-berniebro-and-firebagger/
A little dated, perhaps, since you don’t hear or read much about “BernieBro” these days but:
“The existence of all of the above phrases brings joy to my life. I consider it like nature giving skunks a broad white stripe down their back, as an extra “bad, very, very bad” warning.”
These and many other phrases cause me to instantly dismiss anything that follows as not worth reading. It’s similar to never reading a column by George Will or Charles Krauthammer. You’ll know less than when you started, and you may experience a drop in intelligence.
Herman
I would also add “The Age of Compliance” from November 22, 2018 and your posts on helicopter parenting “The Sheer Idiocy of Helicopter Parenting” from April 13, 2015 and “Will Children Ever Be Free Again?” from May 7, 2018.
I also suggest your posts on technology especially “Amazon Rolls Out Face Recognition to Police” from May 22, 2018, “The End of Cash; The End of Freedom” from July 19, 2017, “The Late (Internet) Telecom Revolution Is Not Such a Big Deal” from December 18, 2015, “What the Infotech/Telecom Revolution Has Actually Done” from April 23, 2016, “The Telecom Revolution Is Mostly Authoritarian” from January 3, 2018 and “Slavery, Amazon Version” from February 2, 2018.
Pretty much anything under the category “surveillance society” is worth adding although I understand that you can only add some of those pieces but they are all really great.
Seattle Resident
Pretty much any post regarding the destructive impact of climate change is welcome.
different clue
@Ian Welsh,
I hope you end up deciding that “conceptual” is a good way to group the articles into related-topic-bunches.
Perhaps “climate change” might be one such bundled conceptual bunch . . . . ?
If it were, readers with actual genuine information to share could share it/ offer it in threads to those comments. Or even in the thread drifting down from the whole Best Of entry itself. And if enough commenters were disciplined enough to post enough high-value information, links, titles, etc. in that thread or those threads that other people came to know that such information was reliably findable there, more and more new people would come here to find that information, and some to offer even more information.
different clue
Separately, I notice that some blogs gather all their blogposts into conceptual categories and give each category its own conceptual title. Clicking on that title allows the clicker-reader to see ALL the articles under that Topic Title. ( I know you know that. I just want people to know that I know that too, so they can follow my argument here).
Several blogs do that very thing. Naked Capitalism, Sic Semper Tyrannis, Rigorous Intuition 2.0
and maybe others group ALL their posts into separate Topics of bunched related articles. Since I know nothing of website/blogsite maintainance and design, I don’t know how easy or hard and time-consuming doing a total topic grouping and topic titling of all the posts here would be. If it would be a painful and time-consuming thing to do, perhaps the readership could be solicited for funds to devote to that particular project. And if too few people gave too little money to make it possible, then the idea would be discarded as being not materially supported enough to have mattered.
steeleweed
Hard to pick a favorite post. If you decide to make the collection more than just online, let me know. I can create ebooks or even private-printed paperback as I did for Joe Bageant’s family.
BTW: What news from Stirling Newberry?
willyrobinson
The EU/Brexit one from November 16th last. It’s a tour-de-fuck-you, handing out well deserved bitch-slaps left and right as appropriate. Brexit is horrible, but the EU is… everything you say it is. Sums up my own relationship as a European (non-British) citizen to a tee. One to be proud of.
Dave Dell
I take it back about not seeing the term “BernieBros” used these days. I sense that any criticism of Kamala Harris is now proof that the BernieBros are at it again.
Brian Train
I very much liked your post on \”leadership in organizations people believe in\”. (originally posted September 11, 2012)
Ben Hosen
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-existential-philosophy-of-decline-and-collapse/
I’ve been using two of those paragraphs as a holiday toast with family & friends since you wrote them. I’ve gotten better at not breaking into tears while doing so.
Also this harsh medicine. Allende reforms are just not allowed in Latin American, because the US will crush them without compunction. Honestly, makes me wonder if Sanders getting elected would end much differently. I don’t think he gets the rules either.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/7-rules-for-running-a-real-left-wing-government/?fbclid=IwAR0O7tZ_rXZVm10Z-oovTMuGOyd7_urdDI4m1SWFpdUCGMr7OQjxEV2mtXo
Many thanks for many years of writing, it had a profound effect on my thought and politics. Among many others you helped me out of a bad place and into… a really scary place, but at least I don’t feel queasy and rotten defending my politics anymore. [ED: To the extent I’m a weird tankie nerd now (60%?) that part’s not on Ian.] Anyway, best regards and good health. May 2019 suck less ass than 2018.
Senator-Elect
I like this one, On Economic Justice: https://www.ianwelsh.net/on-economic-justice/
different clue
We already know that Ian Welsh will bring out a collected Best Of Posts post, hopefully separated into coherent conceptual categories. If he at some point decides to arrange the Archives of all posts by conceptual categories of groupable posts, that would seem like a good thing to me. But that is up to time, life and chance as Mr. Welsh experiences them.
In the short-term meantime, what if commenters were to use THIS THREAD to start commenting about material survival information, the kind of information by which one could enhance one’s own survival chances or one’s own group’s survival chances . . . without diminishing the survival chances of any other person or group? This post certainly has a distinct title which people would remember and be able to find easily.
If somebody other than me wants to post such a comment . . . of real-world actionable survival-enhancement information . . . and Ian Welsh lets it appear or stay, then I will post the second short-little comment in that vein, and then so might others. If Ian Welsh wishes to Let It Be So.
johnnygl
My favorite is the ‘free trade is elites selling out their own people’ post.
Great framework for how modern colonialism works and why it’s so hard for countries to gain substantial autonomy in the western donimated global economy.
Aaron Armitage
https://www.ianwelsh.net/what-the-tao-teaches-us-about-the-devolution-of-the-good-society-to-the-bad/