I think it's time to officially turn out the lights.
Unless there's any demand from whatever remains of the readership - and since we (well, I, since there is effectively no one left here other than me) haven't posted since April my guess is that's not much - to continue I think I'll see if I can delete this blog altogether.
It's painful to see it just drifting here, there's nobody but me writing here, and if you want to hear from me you can stroll over to my personal blog Graphic Firing Table, where I still post about military affairs occasionally.
So.
Time, please.
Drink up, folks. It's...
I prefer blogs to go dormant with a goodbye text over getting deleted. Links to old blog posts go dead when blogs get deleted.
ReplyDeleteOne more reason to not delete; it's easier to revive when needed. There will be some warmongering campaign to launch a war of aggression this decade for sure. MilPub and D&F were the only extant steadfast anti-war of aggression blogs that I know.
I suppose MilPub lost activity when RAW and his gal turned silent around 2011/20112, and the other surviving authors ran out of creative steam or the urge to tell something to the world after 2019. So going dormant is not terribly much of a loss compared to 2021/2022.
Anyway, thanks for what blogging you folks did. Too bad you weren't around in 2002/2003 already.
Why delete the blog?
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of good stuff here that shouldn't be consigned to the ether and the wayback machine. I agree with Sven - having the blog online but dormant is preferable. Turn off commenting to keep the spam out and put a final post announcing the blog is dormant and no longer maintained.
But I agree that it's probably time to retire it since you are now the only barkeep and you've got your own fish to fry. It's unreasonable to expect you to keep the lights on.
BTW, I finally added GFT to my RSS Feed. I had meant to do that long ago, but forgot. I look forwarding to reading your thoughts in 2023.
ReplyDeleteI'm not averse to letting it hang; it seems untidy to my clutter-averse mind, but it's not really a big deal. Since it's Blogger there's no hosting fee, so it's not like I'm paying for it.
ReplyDeleteAnd when it comes to that I might not be ABLE to do anything; I gave up admin rights years ago. mike is the only remaining admin, and he's demobed since last winter without an APO. So I can't get the rights back...
OK, well, I'll chew on that for a bit.
Sven: Over the last couple of years we lost a ton of writers; Jim and Lisa mostly after 2016 when Lisa went Full Trumpkin, PF Khans some time between then and 2018 or so. We'd lost seydlitz back in about 2012-13, I think. Sheerah never did post much, so it was down to me and mike.
ReplyDeleteI might end up writing more - either here or over at GFT - now that I've retired, tho. So we'll see.
The thing that is hard to recall - after all, it's now twenty years (!!!!!) ago - but we WERE around, just not here but over at the old Intel Dump. Now THERE's a loss with those posts vanished. But we were all there - jim, me, Andy, Aviator Al, seydlitz - and a raucous old time was had dunking on the Bush dead-enders like "diogenes" (I think) always banging on about how we just had to wait another six months...
This joint only started because the Dump closed.
The famous Friedman unit.
DeleteI'm happy to not see the old idiots of the 00's active as pundits these days. Maybe the media folks did understand after all that those people were shills.
Regrettably, we have a new generation of idiot pundits and a lot of useful idiots for Putin. I brought a few people off the route to full Putinbot fate by answering facts to their rhetorical questions, but political party majorities going to bed with Putin will create trouble ahead.
I once wrote about how the lying moron and his party check all the boxes of a Fascism checklist. Putin et al do just the same. Either the checklist isn't terribly good or the public doesn't understand what it's facing.
The incoming U.S. House majority is fully in Putin's pocket; I foresee an end to any sort of appropriations for Ukrainian arms as soon as they can get their dickbeaters on it. Hopefully the forces of democracy (i.e. the opposition) is as willing to go under the table as the pre-treasonous GOP was in the Eighties when they sold missiles to Iran to fund their little Central American hit squads.
DeleteBut, yeah...it's frustrating to see the same old lies getting halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on...
Yeah, they heydey of blogging. I really miss it, it was the kind of writing and discussion you can't really have on mind cancer platforms like Twitter.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought of Phil Carter or intel dump in quite a while. His original blogger blog is still up, but the Intel Dump we knew is gone
https://philcarter.blogspot.com/
His wikipedia entry says he's now a corporate lawyer. 20 years is a long time!
I haven't seen nor heard anything of Seydlitz in a very long time, even under his real name.
And I forgot now what happened to Publius, who was a regular on Intel Dump and also posted here.
I miss a lot of the oldtimers; from people like Al and Charles Gittings, lost to time forever, but also those who are surely out there - Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la ("not gone, merely marching far away") - like seydlitz and Publius but who have moved on to other places and other things.
ReplyDeleteIt's a reminder of the weirdly fragile thing our digital friend- and acquaintanceships are. One lost address, one broken laptop and we're as lost to each other as any traveler in the pre-electronic age might have been, simply vanished without a trace. Makes you understand a bit how the friends and families of those 19th Century and earlier voyagers must have felt, knowing that seeing them off at the dock might be not just the last time you'd ever see them but the last thing you'd ever know of them, even down to whether or not they still existed...