why?

As thousands join the blogging community each day, one has to ask oneself what's the need for one more?

Well, none really, except that I want to. As I come to realize that there's no chance that I'll ever have the time to develop all my ideas to complete fruition, I decided that it'd be a good idea to bring them into the public domain on the off chance that others will find them here. The ideal result, of course, being that other people will find ideas or critiques here that will stimulate their own investigations into making some sense of a world with competing views of what's going on out there, what it means to us, and how we can improve on the state of knowledge today.

It sounds pretty idealistic, and well, it is. Being one of a group of millions (of bloggers), why would I expect people to take an interest in my blog? Well, I don't really. In any case, it gives me a chance to develop some ideas in a public forum, regardless of whether people read it or not.

The general content will tend to be things like critiques of recent academic articles (favourable or otherwise), ideas that I think are worthy of further research due to a present inadequacy of quality material relating to those topics (perhaps being a reflection of my own ignorance of present research in a field in some cases), my opinions of the state of present international or national dilemmas, and perhaps even the odd random literary type of stuff ... etc.

And, what do I have to offer that may be unique? Well, it's guided by a variety of international experience, a variety of workplace experience and a variety of academic experience that should allow me to offer genuine and relatively novel insight into all sorts of issues that we face as questioning individuals. In particular, a solid understanding of the sciences, a grounding in political philosophy, an idealistic belief in the ability (and necessity) of people to cooperate towards improvement of individuals' and social outcomes, and a solid grounding in the study of economics (less so in the purely mathematical application), will provide the analytical bases of many of my posts.

I have the notion that a number of things that I write could provide the basis of thesis projects due to the need for further research, could provide insight for those with journalistic interests, and offer unique insights for those who just find it such a cool thing to figure out what the hell is going on in this seemingly chaotic universe. To which end, I emphasize that this is the public domain. In fact, I have a folder of hundreds of ideas shaped by my various experiences that I think could be developed into entire research projects ...whether I get around to cracking into those at all or whether new stuff comes along faster than I can get them out is another matter altogether. As I mentioned, it was the sheer impossibility of tackling all these issues with the finite time we each have, combined with an interest in stoking debate in important issues, that led me to join the ranks of obscurity in the world of blogging.

That's why.