Self Critique

For the 100th entry to this blog, I've decided to do a little self critique on the efforts put forth to date. It's not by any means an exhaustive critique, nor is it intended to be one. But it serves well enough, I think, to illustrate where I think this blog can make some vast improvements...

First, I got off to a bit of a slow start. Having never operated a personal blog, all of my previous blogging efforts had been restricted to what little I'd done over at the AFB. In my first post here at Webster's, A New AF-Blogoventure, I explain to some extent what the idea behind having personal blogs entailed, and why the idea came to me to begin with. The truth is that I had, just prior to Webster's coming online, broken out of my shell and had begun to discover the Traditionalist Conservative blogging hemisphere.

That discovery, coupled with the fact that I usually have a lot to say on a variety of subjects that the AFB doesn't necessarily lend itself to, convinced me that a personal blog would be a good outlet for expressing those ideas and opinions more frequently, and for getting to know some of the other traditionalists who were already out there, and who had already become pretty well established as far as the blogosphere goes. Indeed, I had been living in such a bubble that I was not even aware of the traditionalist blogging movement. So much so that VFR had even escaped my radar.

The content of this blog is nowhere near where I'd like it to be as yet. So far it is not well defined, nor has it lived up to its billing as explicated in the blog description section. It is still the primary mission of this blog, as was announced from the beginning, to propagate and advance the ideas of Balanced Government which developed over at the AFB. It is, in short, to advance the concepts of returning to a national-federal structure of government overall, as the founders originally designed the framework of this government.

The process begins with the presupposition that something has gone seriously awry; that that something is reducible to a singular primary cause from which all other posthumous causes are really effects of either the primary first cause, or effects of some other secondary cause, which itself is an effect of some other cause. In other words, it recognizes the cause-effect relationship, and seeks to explain the conditions under which we now live thereby.

As I've said one way or the other so many times, what is evident on the surface is just that, surface scum. Examining this surface material should give us some insight into what lies beneath. And what lies beneath the surface is vastly more important than what is on the surface. The surface material only has value as it relates to and instructs us on the true nature of the underlying material.

But the key to it all is that we have to realize and own that the surface material itself is merely indicative of what is at the core. As long as we're treating the symptom and not the disease, we will ever continue to take more steps backwards than forward steps. It is my firm conviction indeed, that hopelessness is a well placed emotion whenever our whole approach to a given problem involves the process of attempting to limit the effects by dealing only with the effects and not the cause.

I hereby make the following commitment. From this day forward I will make a conscious effort to get to the heart of the matter on anything, any subject for which I choose to discuss on this blog. Recognizing my own limitations, I already know full well that I shall fail in this endeavor on numerous future occasions. But I hope that with my off-blog extra-curriculars, conversations and consultations with other traditionalist thinkers, the incorporation of more study and reflection, and etc., I will meet the requirements of this commitment to a fuller extent than has thus far been shown. In the meantime, I hope you'll bear with me as I continue to dust off my brain so that I can see things a little more clearly, and seeing them more clearly, thereby being equipped to express them more clearly. That is my commitment; that is the task before me. It is the very reason that I'm currently re-visiting so many volumes of material concurrently, and as we speak.

I appreciate everyone's patience, and I hope to make this blog better as time goes on.