Welcome

I've lurked on blogs and newsgroups across the internet for many years. It started as an addiction to hardwarecentral.com, a techno-geek fixation with the vast increases in computational resources available to consumers. In those days (around 1998), people were anticipating Voodoo3 video cards and the Athlon microprocessor. I progressed from hardwarecentral to OSNews to Slashdot, all technical news sites run by young techno-fans with real jobs. Around 2002 I became increasingly frustrated with slashdot as it descended into the worst of group-think; its popularity pushed out informed opinion by professional engineers and it was inundated with brainless, barking, fifteen-year-old goons whose imaginations, fueled by pop sci-fi from Star Wars to Aliens, toppled all careful reasoning, logical deduction, and balance of real-world engineering constraints. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Slashdot deserves its own post. It needs and gets no link from me.

In 2002 I was reading The Agitator, a big-L libertarian whose roots in Indiana I readily identified with. But the big-L'ness of the big-L Libertarians turned me off. It took some months for me to realize just how insane a person can get when the take a simple idea and stretch it over the universe; markets in everything, the government is evil, all politicians must forever and again be beaten over the head for every semblance of impropriety they've ever simulated. I learned an important lesson from one of my best friends during a casual conversation around that time:

"Perfect is the enemy of good."

It's a jingoist phrase that embodies a strangely common theme among intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and engineers.
This quote has been attributed to Neal Knox, but I've never heard of him or read any of his writing (light research reveals he is a pro-gun activist, but let's not get mixed up in that for the time being).

What I saw on The Agitator was Radley Balko beating up on conservatives (especially members of the Republican Party in Congress) viscerally, with an utter contempt that shocked me. Now I realize that all politicians are duplicitous to some extent, and there are certainly many Republicans who could qualify as hypocritical in certain aspects, but hey, aren't they supposed to be conservatives? Why yes, and in many important ways have delivered on that promise, if not recently, but surely between 1994 and 1998 (tax cuts, welfare reform, free trade, spending cuts). Along with that, there have been decidedly non-conservative abuses of power and extensions of the state, but instead of supporting the big picture of advancing conservatism, hypercritical libertarians were hyperventilating because the world was not becoming perfect as it should be, according to their worldview. Nevermind that the "good" has been, and still is, being advanced. People are more distrustful of big government than ever, "liberal" is almost a dirty word now, welfare reform is real, tax rates are low, deregulation is happening in many important industries, government subsidies and protectionist trade practices are finally being negotiated down, China is emerging as a global player intent on achieving status through fair trade rather than hegemony at the UN or other means, strategic economic, cultural, and educational partnerships with India are never stronger, there is real talk of school vouchers, young workers are extraordinarily distrustful of Social Security, free markets in technology have created vast wealth that even the wildest leftist rhetoric cannot camouflage; but hey, there are bad things too; imperfections, and then we arrive at the point of the quote: Perfect is the enemy of good.

I have to thank Balko for being so "dedicated" as to dazzle me with enough immature whining, ideological hubris, and mean-spirited character assasination to the point where I was quite weary of the big-L Libertarians. He wasn't so much partisan as anti-partisan, hating his own side more than the other. Irrational, stupid, and vastly counter-productive! His conduct in regard to 9/11 (i.e. classic isolationism like a good pre-WWI paleocon) sealed the deal, and I meandered on.

I found littlegreenfootballs around mid-2003 and I'm still around. I have branched out to a few things from there, including Victor Davis Hanson, the National Review Online, and (very recently) One Cosmos.

So that's basically how I got here, if you're wondering. It's a cycle of branching out, being satisfied for a time, seeing hypocrisy, anger, and hatred, and going away in disgust, only to return to the start of the cycle after a few months of boredom.

I hope I'll have some time to keep this up, perhaps it will relieve some of the psychological stress I feel in this wild and crazy world of viscious, barking lunatics.

[Edit: Wow, Radley has thin skin. My fledging voice appears and it must be eviscerated.
Corrections: The Agitator began in April 2002; my phrase "conduct after 9/11" was intended as "conduct in relation to 9/11 (and especially Afghanistan and Iraq)"; perhaps instead of "bigness of the big-L libertarians" I should have written "smallness of the small-L libertarians". And the knee jerk reaction in comments seems to come from people who can grasp nothing but false antipoles--I'm no Republican publicist or partisan hack, I can assure you that.
Radley tries to reverse the quote and bungles it; is he actually suggesting that libertarianism is the "worse" that is the enemy of the good (since that was my intention by relating it to the "perfect" in the original quote)?]