Other matters compete for my attention. Top of the season to all of you. I hope to be back on track in the New Year.
Category: Blogging
MavPhil Site Stats as of 9/15/2025
WordPress Statistics for Maverick Philosopher:
- 12, 056 posts
- 920 drafts
- 6, 863, 332 words
- 17, 978 total comments
- 17,978 comments approved
- 660 categories
- 120 tags
- Typepad (October 2008-September 2025)
7, 671, 889 lifetime pageviews1244.83 pageviews/day
Is A.I. Killing the World Wide Web?
From The Economist:
As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different.
[. . .]
“The nature of the internet has completely changed,” says Prashanth Chandrasekar, chief executive of Stack Overflow, best known as an online forum for coders. “AI is basically choking off traffic to most content sites,” he says. With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards. Wikipedia, also powered by enthusiasts, warns that AI-generated summaries without attribution “block pathways for people to access…and contribute to” the site.
This won't affect me. My writing is a labor of love. I don't try to make money from it. I don't need to. I've made mine. You could call me a "made man." I may, however, monetize my Substack. It seems churlish to refuse the pledges that readers have kindly made.
Technical Difficulties
Due to problems with the Typepad comment system, comments will not be accepted or answered until these problems can be resolved. This may take a while. Afflicted as I am with cacoethes scribendi, posting will continue. I thank you for your 'patronage.'
Site Stats at Sweet Sixteen
Although Maverick Philosopher has been on-line for over 20 years now, its third incarnation, this Typepad version, first saw the light of day on Halloween, 2008, 16 years ago. I thank you for reading.
Although the heyday of blogging is long gone, the peak having occurred near the end of the aughts, I bump along at a somewhat respectable level especially given the austerity of my offerings.
Lifetime Pageviews: 7, 497, 427
Pageviews/Day: 1,282.93
Total Posts: 12, 520
Total Comments: 16, 688
I'll be returning to some hard-core philo-content soon, but first things first: every mentally sane and morally decent man Jack and woman Jill of us must do his or her bit to beat back the forces of darkness. No jacking, jilling, or slacking off. Do your part, but with detachment from the outcome. To make a slogan out of it:
Beat back better!
Around the ‘Stackosphere’
I just now coined the word. Who's going to stop me? If there is a blogoshere, then there is a stackosphere.
You send traffic to me, I send traffic to you. Free speech! Open inquiry! Death to DEI! Down with the Dems and all the reprobable forces of anti-civilization! Long live the Republic!
Knowland Knows. Especially recommended for you young guys.
Linkage does not constitute plenary endorsement.
Twenty Years Into It
Today is my 20th 'blogiversary.' Can you say cacoethes scribendi?
I've missed only a few days in these twenty years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.' Blogging for me is like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and playing the guitar and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to. Some of us are just natural-born scribblers. We were always writing, on loose leaf, in notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, in journals
daily kept. Maintaining a weblog is just an electronic extension of all that.
Except that now I conduct my education in public. This has some disadvantages, but they are vastly outweighed by the advantages. I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, locally and in far-away places, some in person. You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't call forth spirits or at least snag some interesting fish. The occasional scum sucker and bottom feeder are no counterargument.
I thank you all for your patronage, sincerely, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me. I have a big fat file of treasured fan mail that more than compensates me for my efforts.
I am proud to have inspired a number of you Internet quill-drivers. Some of you saw my offerings years ago and thought to yourself, "I can do this too, and I can do it better!" And some of you have. I salute you.
I had more to say on an earlier year's anniversary if you care to look.
Blog on!
Sonoran Spring Surge Subsides
It ran for four consecutive days with total page views per diem clocking in at 10,000, 75,000, 150,000, and 40,000. And now back to blessed obscurity. What was that all about?
One hypothesis for which I have some evidence is that I triggered an ugly bunch of Jew haters with a favorable remark about Alan Dershowitz in this Substack entry.
10,000 Page Views Yesterday!
What explains yesterday's traffic surge?
My average is 1200-1300 page views per diem. Recent posts are nothing to get excited about. It is not as if their quality is superior to what I regularly crank out. Have I 'triggered' some woke 'influencer'? Pissed off a powerful pol? Is the NSA rifling through* my vast archives preliminary to my incarceration? But surely I am way too obscure for it to be cost-effective to send me to the gulag.
Is some AI monster grabbing my content to regurgitate or repackage?
I solicit your hypotheses.
___________
*'Riffling through' in British English.
Malcolm Pollack is Back in the Saddle . . .
. . . with a series of outstanding posts. Start with A Higher Duty and scroll down. If I have his story straight, he did not attend college. And it shows.
UPDATE
A correspondent sends the following comment from a post at Powerline that will help you understand the gravity of the situation at the southern border. It underscores the outrageousness of the 5-4 SCOTUS decision upon which Pollack comments in the entry cited above:
Bill Keezer Passes On
Word came last night from Bill's wife Jennifer:
Sadly Bill passed away November 29th. His heart just finally wore out. He spoke of you often and considered you a valued friend.
Bill Keezer was a biologist with lively philosophical, theological, and political interests. We met in the early days of the blogosphere circa 2003 and stayed in touch ever since. And then we met twice in person when he came to visit me in Arizona. A stalwart supporter of MavPhil, he kept me supplied with links and memes. Our last serious topic of conversation was theological fatalism.
I received his last e-mail on 17 October:
Bill,
Just wanted to tell you that one of the more rewarding things I have done recently is sign up for your Substack. The articles are just about right for my level of understanding and reduced attention span. (My mind is slowing down)
Peace,
Bill
A third and much younger blogger buddy of both of us, Kevin Kim, said the following about Bill back in aught-nine in a piece entitled, The Wisdom of Bill Keezer:
I don't want to embarrass Bill Keezer by making a habit of slapping his emails up here on the blog, but I do want to hold up a recent email of his.
Bill has been sending emails regularly since this crisis began, and was already a correspondent even before that. He maintains an excellent blog called Bill's Comments (with lengthier thoughts posted at Bill's Big Stuff). He and I probably fall on different parts of the political spectrum (Bill leans more rightward while I'd call myself a centrist), but we share a non-traditional view of Christianity and a great love of scientific thought. The major difference here is that, while I'm a scientific skeptic by temperament, Bill is more: he's an actual scientist. Along with that, and despite (or because of?) his non-traditional stance toward Christianity, Bill is highly active in his own church. I don't want to reveal too much about his personal project, but he's putting together a book that I'm very eager to read.
I often feel I don't deserve the wisdom that Bill dispenses so freely. But he's an excellent, thoughtful writer, and he seems fine with directing so much of that excellence and thoughtfulness toward my family, despite the fact that we've never met face-to-face. Bill generally sends his emails to my address, but I often share them, when they arrive, with Dad. As I said earlier, I don't want to embarrass Bill by making a habit of slapping his emails up on this blog (would you write private emails to someone who consistently made them public?), but I thought you might appreciate his latest. [You can read the rest here.]
Another blogger friend of ours from the early days is Keith Burgess-Jackson who recently called a halt to a 20-year blogging run, in which he never missed a day. In his final post, dated 5 November 2023, exactly 20 years to the day from said blog's inception, he too has good things to say about Bill Keezer:
Fortunately, I've also met many good and decent people through this blog, from Peg Kaplan to Bill Vallicella to Bill Keezer to Steve Burri to Kevin Stroup to Reed Anderson. At least one of them (John Sullivan) is a friend to whom I speak (usually by texting) on a near-daily basis. Despite having to deal with creeps and crazies such as [Brian] Leiter, including, in 2017, a mob of malicious students who tried (spectacularly unsuccessfully) to get me "canceled" (for committing the unpardonable sin of being a conservative professor!), I have enjoyed every minute of my blogging experience.
All this is by way of saying that . . . I'm calling a permanent halt to posting. I haven't posted much in recent years anyway, but that will stop. I have other and better things to do in my retirement. Looking back, I'm honored to have been present in the heyday of blogging. Alas, in 2023, it is no longer (or not much of) a "thing." Other forms of social media have supplanted it. I can say, proudly, that I never missed a day of blogging. Counting leap years (in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020), I posted at least one item for 7,306 consecutive days. On some days, I posted well over a dozen items, many of them philosophical (i.e., analytic) in nature. On other days, especially recently, I posted only one item, such as the daily feature "Ten Years Ago Today in This Blog." (Speaking of which, here is my post from 10 years ago today, about this blog.)
My blog was never about philosophy only. It was about whatever interested me at the time, and, frankly, almost everything interests me. I wrote about history, law, economics, politics, world affairs, baseball, cycling, running, technology, journalism, academia, language, religion, music, and many other topics.
For those of you who frequented this blog, thank you. I hope I entertained and edified. I'm 66 and a half years old now and in great health. (I ride my bike at least 20 miles per day. I rode 349 of 365 days in 2022, racking up 7,500 miles. I'm riding almost as much this year.) I have a Twitter (oops! X) presence and an account on Donald Trump's Truth Social, but I rarely post anything on those sites. I use them to see what others are saying. I also have a Substack account, but haven't posted anything there in several months. That may change.
Finally, let me express my gratitude to a benefactor (and friend). The person most responsible (and therefore most to blame) for getting me into blogging back in 2003 is John J. Ray of Brisbane, Australia, whose main blog is Dissecting Leftism. I learned much from John over the years, including, significantly, the importance of respecting religion and religious people even though one is not oneself religious. John was always ready and willing to help me with the technical aspects of my blog. Thank you, John. You are an inspiration. I wish you and yours the very best.
Onward!
Halloween: 15th Typepad Anniversary
The Typepad incarnation of MavPhil is now 15 years old. It has racked up 6,637,776 page views, which averages out to 1211 page views per day. It boasts 11,838 posts and 14,342 comments. And this despite shadow banning.
I thank you for your patronage. Double your money back if not completely satisfied.
"If you like to think, you'll like my blog; if you don't like to think, you need my blog."
I Ain't Superstitious, leastways no more than Howlin' Wolf, but two twin black tuxedo cats just crossed my path. All dressed up with nowhere to go. Nine lives and dressed to the nines. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Superstition. Guitar solo starts at 3:03. And of course you've heard the story about Niels Bohr and the horseshoe over the door:
A friend was visiting in the home of Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, the famous atom scientist.
As they were talking, the friend kept glancing at a horseshoe hanging over the door. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he demanded:
“Niels, it can’t possibly be that you, a brilliant scientist, believe that foolish horseshoe superstition! ? !”
“Of course not,” replied the scientist. “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.”
Purr-honian Cat:
Thomas Mann on Blogging
Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939 (Abrams, 1982, tr. R & C Winston), p. 194:
I love this process by which each passing day is captured, not only in its impressions, but also, at least by suggestion, its intellectual direction and content as well, less for the purpose of rereading and remembering than for taking stock, reviewing, maintaining awareness, achieving perspective . . . .
I agree, although for me rereading and remembering have as much value as the taking stock, etc. There is the pleasure of writing but also that of rereading and rethinking what one has written.
As for remembering a passage such as one above, its notation allows me to pull the book off the shelf and return to the pleasurable semantic penumbra which is the quotation's context.
Summer Slowdown
"Blogging will be light," as we used to say in the early days of the blogosphere. I have a couple of books I need to finish and some practical business to attend to. But this won't be a total unplug as in earlier years. I plan to blog on both here and at Substack, but at a more leisurely pace.
Enjoy your summer!
How to Write a Good Comment
I offer a comment of mine as an example. It is a brief response to a Substack entry by Elliot Crozat. Here is the comment:
Very nice post, Elliot. Your reconstruction is valid. You say that (2) is "solid." It is, but it is not self-evident. For one epistemically possible view is that the dead are nonexistent objects: they do not exist, but they have being, and have properties. Indeed, they actually have properties; it is not just that they could have properties. So on this view, there is no bar to a dead person's having the property of being communal or standing in the communal relation to other dead persons. This quasi-Meinongian view is skillfully developed by Palle Yourgrau in Death and Nonexistence (Oxford, 2019). It of course has problems of its own.
(5) and (7) are undoubtedly true.
And I agree with you that (1) is reasonably rejected on eternalism which is a plausible alternative to presentism. Surely wholly past individuals are not nothing despite their not being temporally present. They exist, but not at present. Presentists, despite a lot of fancy footwork, have a hard time accounting for this plain fact. This is one reason why eternalism is well-represented among contemporary philosophers. Eternalism allows for a watered-down personal immortality which has been embraced by Einstein, Charles Hartshorne, and most recently by John Leslie. The main difficulty of eternalism is to give a clear account of existence simpliciter. But it appears that the presentist faces the same difficulty assuming that "Only the present exists" is not a miserable tautology that boils down to "Only what exists (present tense) exists (present tense."
As for Aristotle, he is standardly taken to be a presentist (see Feser, e.g.) and thus your invocation of the Stagirite in support of eternalism is questionable.
Time, Death, and Existence
Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited contains many good lines. Here’s one from near the end of the play: “You can’t be one of the dead because what has no existence can have no community.” As I take it, “one of the dead” means “one belonging to a community of dead persons.”