Fearless Philosophy’s Second Blogiversary

Two years ago on this day November 10, just a few days following the presidential election I wrote my inaugural post for Fearless Philosophy for Free Minds. Two years later, in the aftermath of the 2006 midterm election, there are very many issues I will get into to kick off the third year of this blog’s existence. For the purposes of this post, however; I would like to take a look back at some of the issues I wrote about in the past year and take the time to thank my fellow bloggers, the readers, and everyone who has taken the time to comment on my posts in the past two years.

When I marked the first blogiversary this time last year, my hit counter was approaching the 7,800 mark. As I look at the counter today, the number of hits is approaching the 24,900 mark, nearly 17,100 more hits than in the first year! This is a little surprising to me because most posts receive little or no comments but apparently, there are people out there reading my work.

Comparatively speaking, I am very aware that this blog is not very well known. In the TTLB Ecosystem Fearless Philosophy for Free Minds is ranked 2252 as I write this (an ‘Adorable Rodent’) as far as links go. While I would like to make my way back up to the next level, I am very happy with the level of readership I have earned so far. I owe much thanks for the exposure I have received mostly to my friends in the Life, Liberty, Property community, Buzz Brockway’s Fair Tax Fans community, Centrerion, the Bacon Eating Atheist Jew, Rene Aste at Up on Christian Hill (btw, congratulations on the birth of your baby boy!), and others who have linked to this blog. These are bloggers who are very diverse in their opinions, many of which are different than my own, but have seen enough value in my writing to pass along a link to my blog to their readers.

I want to also take a moment to thank my wife Aimee for continuing to put up with this hobby of mine and for proofreading my posts. Thanks to you my posts contain far fewer spelling and grammatical errors.

In the past year, I have presented a few new topics as well as revisit a few topics from the first year. I started year two the way I did in my second post of year one concerning the war on drugs but more specifically with the problem of mandatory minimum sentences. This would be the first of many posts I would devote to the war on drugs (directly or indirectly); in later posts I fisked a blogger who favors the war on drugs, introduced The Plight of Cory May (Update I, Update II), and wrote about the ‘collateral damage’ associated with paramilitary style police raids (Part I, Part II).

The war on drugs is a violation to the most fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property. John Locke was one who we can credit to be among the first to advocate these rights, therefore; I saw it fit to honor his memory as the first of in my Fearless Philosophers series (to date, the only one in the series I have written so far). I was very pleased with the responses this post received.

By January 2006, I wrote about my views on the war against Islamofascism. I weighed in on the ‘torture’ debate, took a look at the role religion plays in this conflict in my book review of Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, reacted to the thwarted terrorist attack on August 10th, and was inspired by the writings of Irshad Manji, one Muslim woman who is speaking out at great personal risk for reform in her faith. Beyond the Islamofascists’ terrorist tactics of the past year, the civilized world experienced threats to free speech. This was the year that Islamofascists rioted and threatened a Danish newspaper for publishing cartoons that were critical of Islam. Even American newspapers feared publishing the cartoons because of fear of a backlash by Muslims. This prompted me to ask the question: Can Mysticism Co-Exist with Reason and Liberty?

I never expected that I would write about such reoccurring themes but I think each post presents a unique angle on some complex issues. Other topics I blogged about were the problem of teacher’s unions, illegal immigration, a free market solution to lower gas prices, introduced 10 Terms and Phrases to be Wary of, analyzed the state of property rights on the one year anniversary of Kelo (and the news isn’t all bad either), responded to some very un-P.C. dating advice, wrote a treatise on treaties, challenged the notion that Christian Conservatives are simply ‘just protecting marriage’, made a personal attack ad against myself, debunked a misleading campaign ad about a supporter of the Fair Tax, found two G.O.P. ads that they were too afraid to run, weighed in on Rush Limbaugh’s comments about the Michael J. Fox political ad and the media reaction that followed, and gave John F’ing Kerry a fisking for his comments about the troops.

Yes, it has been quite an eventful year. I would like to open the comments thread to readers who would like to comment on any of the topics I brought up in the last two years. Sometimes I read an old post on a blog and would like to comment but don’t because the author has long since moved on. Also, I am very curious about what some of your favorite (and least favorite) posts were and why. Even if I have failed to respond to your comments in past posts, please know that I enjoy reading them and appreciate them.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention another blogiversary of one of my all time favorite bloggers- Brad Warbiany. Brad’s blog The Unrepentant Individual is also in its second year (was created exactly one day before my blog!). Brad has adjusted his focus somewhat to college football and brewing homemade beer (entirely too much work for me) but if you are looking for some great writing on liberty, individualism, and other classical liberal themes, be sure to check out the other blog he contributes to: The Liberty Papers.