Thursday 15 December 2016

Goodbye

Snapshot corrected moving to unz

 

It’s goodbye to drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk

After 4 years of blogging, and 1,062,720 page views, here is a “change of address” notification. I have decided to transmute into being a columnist, at the kind invitation of Ron Unz, so as to write my psychological comments as a column at:

http://www.unz.com/jthompson

I am happy at the prospect of more visibility, more technical backup, and a more accessible and searchable archive of work. You can search by topic and by date, and I will start adding tags so that all searches become easier and more powerful. I hope to get more readers, given that the site gets 2 million a month, shared between many writers. Whether, in this collective of authors, I will still be able to stare at a page and immediately start writing, without knowing where it is going, as I do now in the apparent wilderness and seclusion of my own blog, is an open question.

Will I experience a crushing writer’s block, the equivalent of entering a sterile business office in order to dream up, to command, a romantic novel, and find that the fluorescent lights and lunchtime canteen deadens my soul? Will I look over my shoulder at what others are writing? Or will I just close my eyes and imagine a single reader in the wilderness, and write for that one person, regardless of all else?

Perhaps I have been over-dramatic, but shifting from my familiar abode causes a certain emotional wrench. It is like walking the empty rooms of a family house while the removal van waits outside. Worse, what if you, dear reader, resolutely refuse to follow me? Will you be set in your ways, a slave to your favourite sites, unwilling to countenance a perturbation in your URLS?

I hope you can shift as I intend to shift, to a new meeting place. The medium is not the message: the medium is what carries the message, and a message only brings you news if the content is hard to guess. We need to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax and Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication. I digress, but only a bit.

http://www.unz.com/jthompson

21 comments:

  1. Unz is the third site I open in the morning, after checking my email and looking at the relatives on Facebook. It may seem like a lonely departure to you, but for many of us it'll be like welcoming another cousin to the family reunion. I'll bet a lot of your readers are waiting for you there.

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  2. Both of the comments above are true.
    I look forward to reading your work there.

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  3. Good luck with it, doc. As you know, decisions have consequences. I hope that on balance they will be happy ones.

    P.S. You, like everyone else at Unz, will presumably have to put up with the anti-semitic fruitcakes. But you can otherwise spare yourself some pain by avoiding any mention of loopy conspiracy theories, especially those involving 9/11. By God those bring forth bile.

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    Replies
    1. a '''respectable''' man, bravo!!

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    2. Yea, right, like that will stop them.

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  4. Oh, and a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.

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  5. You can run, but you can't hide. I've already set my RSS reader to track you down in your new lair.

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  6. Good luck, but are you sure you really want to do this? I read unz.com regularly, and have great respect for some of the bloggers, but some of the people who get published there are real idiots (9/11 truthers, etc.), and like it or not you risk guilt by association.

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  7. I just want to say that its your choice and I hope you made the right decisions. There are still good people who will be there by your side to support your decision. Goodluck!

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  8. thanks for letting us know & thanks for continuing on. see you, sailer, & jayman there (& now we'll see r. khan elsewhere - he just moved)! merry christmas!

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  9. 9/11 isn't as stigmatizing as it was a few years ago. Same with HBD.

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  10. > Goodbye
    just saw this in my RSS feed--not funny!

    See you at Unz's. Assorted fruitcakes and the cream of the crop, why not!

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  11. Congrats on the H/T from Unz, they're good people.

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  12. Congratulations! See you at Unz.

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  13. Dear James,
    I wish you luck. I hope your experience at The Unz Review will be better than mine.

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  14. http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2015/03/coming-home.html

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  15. Why not keep the blog here and mirror at Unz (or vice-versa)? That's what a couple of Indie contributors do (Cockburn and now seemingly Robert Fisk).

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  16. Worked for Sailor, will read you there, but keep this live as a backup just in case.

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