Positive Liberty

Today is my first Bloggiversary.

I prefer “Bloggiversary” over “Blog Birthday” partly because blogging is a bit like having a second marriage: It comes with deep emotional commitments, happy times, sad times, occasional fights, and a whole set of great new opportunities. True, there hasn’t been any sex–and no blog children that I know of–but other than that, it’s pretty close.

Today I offer some outtakes, failed ideas, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and retrospectives as a way of marking the milestone.

One year later, what have I accomplished?

In part, I’ve created a persona, which is something I never expected I would do. Make no mistake, Positive Liberty is a persona, albeit one that comes more or less reflexively. It’s like my real self, except it shares all the bad habits of most online personae, including confirmation biases, hasty conclusions, and a far bit of–say it isn’t so!–sarcasm. Though I do strive against these tendencies, I can’t say they don’t exist.

I have often thought that if I were to blog again, I might adopt a consciously different persona, mostly to challenge myself about who I am and how I present myself. Wouldn’t it be great if it were so easy in real life?

I actually considered a lot of different blogging concepts before settling into a carbon copy of myself. Some of these I discarded before I even set up shop:

At first I wanted to work Voltaire into the name of the blog, but it never panned out. “Cabaret Voltaire” would have been perfect, but alas, it’s already taken–twice. “Réseau Voltaire” would have been great, too, except that it’s also taken–and sadly hitched to some absurd conspiracy theories. Go to the site and click on the Pentagon, if you must.

Also, Cordwainer Smith’s “Chronopathic Idiot” would have been a good name, except for three problems: 1) Too many bloggers already call themselves idiots. 2) Too many bloggers already are idiots, often including myself. 3) Not enough people read Cordwainer Smith these days.

Lastly, many bloggers try to remain anonymous, but I never really wanted to. I certainly couldn’t have kept it up for long. After all, how many early modern French historians are in a same-sex marriage and live in Baltimore? Anonymity would have clipped my wings.

I finally settled on a name out of Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” I wanted something that sounded positive rather than self-deprecating or self-inflating. It also helps that it’s easy to remember.

But what about positive liberty as a concept? If it means, as is often said, that society must compel the individual to be free, then I have nothing but contempt for positive liberty. That way lies fascism.

Yet I do admire the idea that negative liberty, or the right to be left alone, best encourages a positive contribution to the community–on the part of those willing to make it. In the final analysis, this liberty is only as good as what you do with it. (I explained all this, at length, in my wonderfully pompous preliminary discourse. And no, it’s not worth your trouble.)

Encouraged by my blogfather and real-life friend Dave Jansing, Positive Liberty began on February 11, 2004, with a LiveJournal site that I no longer maintain. I got tired of LiveJournal’s formatting limits, lack of server stats, inane quiz memes, slow search engine indexing–and above all the sense that I was only talking to a very limited circle of LiveJournal friends, most of whom only read me, I suspect, out of politeness.

A little over a week later, I moved to the stand-alone domain that is still my home. I declined to call it www.jasonkuznicki.com, in part because it is impossible to spell and in part because I’d always been open, though more or less quietly, to the prospect of turning Positive Liberty into a group blog (Right now, though, I’m not considering it. I’ve got more than enough “blog” as it stands).

So… On February 22, 2004–the first day for the stand-alone site–I plunked down $70.00 for the domain name, hosting package, and tech support offered by Nomonthlyfees.com.

That day I had a total of four visitors. And I suspect that most of them were Jason Kuznicki. By the end of the day, I was wondering where my seventy bucks had gone–and whether I could get them back.

And let’s not forget that server stats can be unreliable: AWstats, visible only to the administrator, routinely claims many more visitors than SiteMeter, which the rest of you can see in the credits to the left. Had I used SiteMeter at the time, I might well have had zero visitors my first day.

Positive Liberty has grown slowly but steadily since these humble beginnings. The first real breakthrough came when Paul Musgrave started linking to me in March. He remains my closest blog-confidant whom I have never met in real life, and we still often work closely together, sometimes behind the scenes, on drafts, comments, and future project ideas.

Then in May, this completely fluffy, throwaway post drew a link from Alas, a Blog. With it came several dozen new readers, and many of them stuck around. After that, I never felt like I was talking to myself again. I was surrounded by intelligent, incisive, critical commenters with a range of political and philosophical views. It’s been great having you folks along.

I read somewhere that the mode number of posts per blog is one. I topped out at 275 posts before my Blogger (grumble) profile jammed up and stopped working, which was sometime in mid-November. At that point I’d written 275 posts and 221,712 words. I have most likely written over 300,000 words by now, although I can’t say for sure. Not even my husband has read all of them.

In the year I’ve been online, no really giant blogger has ever noticed Positive Liberty; I doubt that any of them even read it. (The closest I’ve come was a link in a post at Crooked Timber; it was so incidental that most readers probably never even noticed it.) I’ve had no Instalanches, nor anything comparable, just a quiet, thoughtful little place on the sidelines of the Blogosphere. I rather like it that way, and I’m not sure I would want to get much bigger.

As it stands, I have an open seminar with two or three hundred visitors every day. It’s on any topic I please, and most of the participants are smart enough that we could easily trade places. Sometimes we do: I always welcome readers’ ideas for new posts, and if they are interesting enough, then I’m more than happy to give them top billing.

Along the way, I’ve also met a number of remarkable fools, morons, and possible psychotics. I prefer not to think of them, but… Remember this guy? He’s one of my favorites, and his current offering explains why gays are immoral using the special theory of relativity.

And just yesterday, I discovered Ex-Ex-Gay Watch. Besides the inherent limits of the concept (A site to watch people who watch people who watch gays with disapproval–with disapproval? Puh-leez.), it’s also the most punctuationally-challenged blog I have ever seen. Here are some of the headlines:

“Ex-Ex Gay” Watching the XXGAY [sic] movements [sic] every step!

EX Gay’s [sic to both] take message to Congress!

FBI report [sic] Race and Religion Top Hate Crime’s [sic. But did I even need to tell you?]

I’ve also been profiled on the site, much to my surprise. The author writes,

These are gay Writers [sic] who hold the same negative views about ex gay’s. [sic] They usaly [sic] make fun of ex gay’s [sic] through print. These same writers hate when gay people are written about negatively!

And yet I see no double standard here: The freedom to offend implies the freedom to take offense, and vice versa. Adults should be able to take it as well as they can dish it out.

To the e-xgays out there: You may do whatever you wish with your sexuality, or, for that matter, with your blogs. It is no business of mine.

That said, I am convinced that in almost all cases, the efforts of so-called reparative therapy are futile, and that homosexuality is in itself no more a moral question than whether one’s eyes are green or brown.

I can honestly say I’m happy with where I have ended up–out, openly gay, happily partnered to a wonderful man. We spend our days and our nights together, and we love every minute of it. We have a good life, and if you ex-gays can say the same–honestly, with no doubts about it–then more power to you.

But if not, then maybe you ought to reconsider the whole idea of being ex-gay. Lord knows you try hard enough to talk us out of homosexuality; it seems only fair that I get a chance to return the favor, and to challenge you about who you are.

Incidentally, I am not aware that I have directly made fun of any “ex gay’s.” Yes, I have parodied the ex-gay movement, but considering its overwhelming failure rate–and the ease with which a happy gay life can now be had–I do think a bit of parody is in order. I bear no one any malice (except for Paul Cameron, who is a monstrous fraud).

I am not a hypocrite, nor am I trying to censor your views: Please note that I don’t support hate crimes legislation, and I freely accept that parody is a weapon available to all. Do your worst (or your best). I will do mine, and we’ll see where it gets us.

And about the punctuation. Please, please learn how to use the apostrophe. Above all, learn the difference between “it’s” and “its.” Memorizing the proper use of the apostrophe does two very good things for you. First, it exercises your memory, which virtually no one does anymore. Second, the proper use of the apostrophe makes you a part of an elite secret society, one that shows itself only through esoteric marks hidden in the members’ writings.

When you join this secret society, you will be able to look with disdain on people who are not members and who do not possess the knowledge that you now have. One day, another member of this elite fraternity may even favor you with a job, a promotion, or an award–all because you are a member, and because your competition was not.

Gay, ex-gay, whatever. Just learn to punctuate correctly. Studies have shown it can be done.

Looking back on one year of Positive Liberty, the things that make me proudest are the well-written entries, even when they didn’t express anything all that profound. And the things I am least proud of are always written badly, whatever the underlying merit of their ideas. Acting on this observation, I’ve become considerably more lyrical and less newsy as the year went by. I don’t think my readers really come here for news.

In that vein I regret a bit that I haven’t posted any fiction since National Novel Writing Month. Perhaps I’ve burned it out of my system; perhaps I just felt like a damn fool after a grueling month of enforced silliness. I’m not sure. I will try, though, to come back to fiction in the year ahead.

In the coming weeks, though, you can look forward to a lot of new material. I have a folder where I keep my odd unfinished drafts; it now holds 32 separate files, some of which contain more than one idea.

Their titles alone are bizarre and maybe even tantalizing: “Abstinence Excess and Discipline,” “Robespierre on Hessler Street,” and (my personal favorite), “Eating the Marmosets.” Also in the works are a collaborative project with Paul Musgrave and a detailed reply to Dave Jansing, whose post on virtue in gay politics has been on my mind for quite some time.

Lastly, I would like to acknowledge that I also met some fascinating people through blogging, including Richard Chappell, Tim Sandefur, Jon Rowe, the Cliopatriarchs, the Liberty-and-Power-tarians, who have kindly allowed me to join them, and above all Ed Brayton, who has probably done more than any single person to publicize Positive Liberty.

To sum things up, it’s been a great year; every day has been a joy, and ultimately I could not imagine a better hobby for an intellectual. Yesterday I renewed my domain name, paid my seventy bucks, and would gladly have paid a good deal more. It’s been worth every penny.