Positive Liberty

I found this link while going through my server statistics. It’s a site for plagiarists that features one of my own efforts as a search result.

On the one hand, I’m upset. On the other, it gives me pleasant dreams just picturing a high school cheat trying to explain to his teacher how he (or she!) entered into a same-sex marriage with a man.

Steal my essay, I dare you.

A while ago, I blogged about Koopa the Turtle, challenging readers to distinguish his efforts from those of Willem de Kooning. Now comes Marla Olmstead, who is four years old and whose paintings sell for thousands of dollars. It strikes me that she has more talent than either Koopa or de Kooning, at least given what I’ve seen of each.

The NYT also has the scoop on the coming gay marriage debacle of November 2.

I can at least take heart in that just ten years ago, Oregon was asked to vote on an amendment requiring the state to “discourage homosexuality.” It failed back then, and the cause has advanced tremendously in the meantime. I suppose I should be happy that we’re even fighting this battle, rather than any of the others. But I still can’t escape a certain feeling of dread.

The anti-marriage amendment sounds like it will be a difficult fight on both sides in Oregon at least. But everywhere else, similar amendments are expected to pass.

What really irritates me about all of this is how thoroughly the pro-marriage side (that’s us) has capitulated in the rhetorical battle. We are the ones who support marriage for all. We support families no matter what they look like.

They want to deny marriage, even to couples who love and support one another for life. They want to deny marriage, even when children are present and when, by their own admission, legal marriage exists solely for the benefit of children.

How are they the “pro-” marriage side? How are they the pro-family side? They are openly against millions of families. And if permitted, these so-called pro-family groups would almost certainly use the law to split these families up.

Nonsense like the following should never go unchallenged:

Kent Ostrander, executive director of the Family Foundation, a conservative group in Kentucky, said the proposed amendment was so popular that legislative candidates were fighting over who supported it first. “Everybody is running to the pro-marriage side,” he said.

Wrong. Everyone is running to the anti-marriage side. They’re running to the side that wants to exclude people from marriage, even if they have a family to support. Shame on Kentucky and its legislators.

Okay, I’m ranting. I’ll stop.

And if you have read this far, the chances are that you’re one of my devoted fans. My stats say that the mode length-of-stay at Positive Liberty is thirty seconds or less–which is true of almost all sites in the blogosphere.

The site’s average stay, though, is nearly six minutes, and this is quite a respectable number. PL’s second mode length-of-stay is at 30 minutes to an hour, while the third mode is at one hour or more.

In other words, Positive Liberty one of the “stickiest” blogs around.

It’s exactly what I was looking for when I started this site, and I have to thank you all for making it possible. As Ed Brayton has noted, it’s wonderful to have such a thoughtful community around me. You can’t directly measure intellectual depth by the numbers, of course, but it’s still gratifying that so many smart people spend so much of their time here.

And I don’t like to waste that time, so now I have a question for you.

I’m thinking very seriously about participating in National Novel Writing Month, an idea that I learned about from Dave Jansing. Here’s the concept:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

I would also blog the results exactly as they happened, every single day.

Chances are good that whatever I produce will look a lot like my short fiction, some of which can be seen here and here.

But NaNoWriMo would preempt my usual posts on history, politics, and the life of the mind. I simply would not have time to do all of it effectively, unless, of course, I gave up on my dissertation–which I’m not about to do.

So I’m asking you, my readers, whether I should go ahead with NaNoWriMo–or stick to the usual routine. Please comment, especially if you are a frequent contributor.

Do note that this site is an enlightened despotism, not a democracy. After suitable consultation, the enlightened despot will make the final decsion. But relax: Whatever the decision, his best interests are defined as coinciding with your own.

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