Building this blog

Let's see. Yes, this blog is going to have more than just recaps of shows and other music discussion. At least probably. Those are up now because I'm still not used to regular (my meaning is closer to "daily" than to "normal") blogging and those kind of posts are easy for me.

I have, however, decided that I'm not going to link negatively to anything except in aggregate - that is unless I can find (and link to) a large number of people saying the same thing (in different ways, with different sources.) By this I mean I'm not going to point out bad arguments and logical fallacies. I do not mean that I will refrain from linking to anyone I disagree with, I just won't be linking to the ones that come off (to me) as being written incompetently. I will allow myself to link to things I find well written, well thought out and reasonable - even (or especially) if I disagree with the conclusions.

That first Social Security post I had had another example of what I'm not going to do, which is take a quote from someone and try and show how/claim it's wrong. That's just bad, lazy writing. If I can't make a good point without using someone I disagree with as a launchpad then it's not worth going ahead with.

The main reason I'm setting these rules for me is that there are so many opinions out there that you can find basically anything you want and it's far to easy/tempting to imply/pretend that this is how everyone who disagrees with you (or everyone on the "left", etc.) sees the issue. The problem is attacking weak arguments because they're not quite strawmen.

The other reason has to do with is not increase traffic to bad articles, posts, etc. Don't get me wrong, I have no illusions about traffic generated by this site, it's just that that doesn't seem important.

Finally I'll point out that neither of these reasons/goals would be universally good - stupid arguments need to be shot down too and people need to read and be aware of bad arguments so that they can shoot them down themselves - but it seems to me like that market it well covered.