The responses to my little pot pourri yesterday were
delightful. Professor Pigden, thank you
for the bio. I had already googled and
read the official department write-up, but the family and personal data were fascinating. Your family includes a wrestler and a croupier!
Jerry, Google gives me all manner of
statistics about where my readers are, but they are not much help. For example, it claims, not surprisingly,
that most of my readers are in America, but after that it lists the Netherlands
as second, which seems wildly implausible.
Chile is down the list [thank you, S. Wallerstein], but Russia is
nestled in between the UK and Germany.
All very odd. At one point,
Croatia was popping up.
My sense is that we could put together a rich, exciting, and
varied college faculty from the regular readership. I seem to be very low in female readership,
alas, and I suspect, with no evidence, that non-White readership is also low,
also upsetting. But all I can do is put
myself out there and hope readers show up.
I usually draw between 1000 and 1500 page views a day, but
that tells me very little, because some people [not all that many] check in
several times a day, and some, I suspect, drop in periodically. When Brian Leiter links to my blog, page
views quadruple for a day and a half. To
the youngsters among you, all of this seems quite natural, but to an
octogenarian like myself, it is passing strange.
Equally odd is the response to my posted video
lectures. The page views for the Kant
series are eight to ten times as large as those for the Ideological Critique,
Freud, or Marx lectures. Perhaps George
Lucas would like to make a movie called The
Return of the Noumena, or The
Antinomy Strikes Back.
Meanwhile, the advent of Easter [that phrase is, I fear, a liturgical
mishmash] has, as usual, depressed me.
Several recent stories in the press have emphasized the enormous
mountain that gerrymandering has created for Democrats to climb, and I have
started to worry that even a blue wave will simply crash against it and recede
without having remade the political landscape, leaving me with nothing save the
Mueller probe to pin my hopes on.
But the sun is shining, there was a full moon this morning
during my walk, and my natural Tigger is reasserting itself.
2 comments:
With regards to your penultimate paragraph, maybe the chief worry should be not so much Trump or even his specifically disastrous policies, but the legacy of Trumpism in the American psyche.
How many young people (not the high school anti-gun protesters obviously) have "learned" that a political world which revolves around tweets, childish temper tantrums, greed, a mafia-style family business and Stormy Daniels is normal and business as usual? What will the American political scene be like post-Trump?
To use my Chilean experience, while the worst aspect of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) was obviously the bloody repression, the Chilean left never got it together post-dictatorship until a wholly new generation of leftists emerged in 2011, kids that were still in diapers or in nursery school when the dictatorship ended.
And it wasn't only the repression against the traditional left that destroyed it, it was that Pinochetism and the neoliberalism that Pinochet promoted in the society, infected almost everyone, even the left; and often those who remained immune to the infection of neoliberalism in the years immediately following the dictatorship did so through hardening into a leftwing puritanism that cut themselves off not only from Chilean society as a whole, but even from the possibility of personal growth.
So watch out for infectious Trumpism.
re between 1000 - 1500 visitors per day:
Google Analytics should also tell you how many 'unique visitors' per day you have (and, in some cases, which posts they read, e.g., if they find the blog by searching for something specific). Btw when I was blogging, under my initials, from approx. mid-2008 to 2016, fifteen or so unique visitors per day was a good day at my blog.
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