Blogging

Quote For The Day

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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“Be yourself. Do your work. And they will find you. And serving those readers is all the reward you need.”

– Andrew Sullivan, at the time of his recent retirement from blogging.

 

This blog will continue to provide rigorous, semi-partisan political commentary through the remainder of the 2015 British general election campaign and beyond.

(I will be live-blogging the election results on Thursday night, here).

This blog will never serve as cheerleader for any one political party, but will continue to proudly champion the interconnected causes of personal liberty, economic freedom and national sovereignty – and give credit where credit is due to any party or politician who is willing to pick up the tarnished torch of liberty in an increasingly hostile environment.

Many thanks to all those people who include Semi-Partisan Sam in their daily internet reading – both those who have recently discovered the blog and those few who have been reading since Day 1.

2014 in review

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 15,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

American Businessman and Leading Blogger Shown On Chinese State Television in Mao-Like Confession

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Jonathan Turley writes an excellent expose and analysis of the terrible forced confession and public shaming of Charles Xue, an American businessman and influential blogger. These public shaming rituals are so difficult to watch, not only because of the tremendous pity one feels for the person involved, but because it makes ones blood boil to think of the abuse of state power taking place. Tea Partiers and others who see tyranny and despotism behind every move that President Obama makes would do well to look at this case and remind themselves what true tyranny and absence of the rule of law looks like. If our occasional polemics on blogs, radio and television were directed against the Chinese leadership rather than the American or British political class, many of us would also be sitting in a prison cell. Though it may not help Xue at all, we can at least take some small measure of comfort from the fact that China’s rising middle class, with their ever greater accustomisation to a high standard of living and their increasing exposure to other cultures, will not tolerate the government’s paranoid meddling in their lives indefinitely.

jonathanturley's avatarJONATHAN TURLEY

Charles Xue appears to confess 'involvement in prostitution'130px-Mao_Zedong_portraitChina appears to be returning to the Cultural Revolution with public confessions of dissidents as a warning to all those who would challenge the ruling party. Chinese viewers were exposed to a truly sad and transparent confession of American businessman and leading Chinese blogger, Charles Xue. The Chinese recognize the Internet as the greatest threat to the totalitarian regime. Xue was therefore rolled out to degrade himself before the Chinese people — begging forgiveness for forgetting his place in objecting to such things as contaminated water. He admits to feeling like the “emperor of the Internet” and apologizes for spreading rumors against the ruling party leaders.

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From The Blogging Cave

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Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, fresh from his two week vacation (during which time I had no one to tell me what to think about the humanitarian crisis in Syria and the potential upcoming military action), who publicised an interesting new Tumblr blog, entitled “Where Bloggers Blog“.

From the site’s description:

I pulled this tumblr together so that we can all see the workspaces of our favourite bloggers — the places where all the magic happens.  For the record, this isn’t a decorating blog — this is purely about sharing the diversity of creative spaces of our favourite bloggers, illustrating that blogging magic and inspiration happen in many different awesome, eccentric, spacious, cozy, neat, messy, colourful ways.

Whilst I am waiting for my own contribution to be uploaded to the site, readers can get a sneak peak of my current blogging cave below:

The Semi-Partisan Blogging Cave
The Semi-Partisan Blogging Cave

The American flag went up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington last week, and will be brought back down when I have the inclination to do so. Fox News is playing on the television because (1) it is the only US news channel available in the UK (CNN’s pathetic International Edition does not count), and (2) you have to keep an eye on those crazy guys at Fox News Channel, because you never know what they will get up to if left unsupervised.

Picking Your Battles

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

I remain relatively new to this whole blogging business, and am still very much learning the ropes.

And while I am largely making it up as I go along, what with posting pieces on the culture and politics of two different nations, interspersed with classical music excerpts, architectural musings and the odd cat picture, I do try to stick to a few strictures passed down from others that seem to have served them quite well – post regularly, engage with your readers, link selectively, and so on. This seems to be working fairly well, but there are some occasions when the pieces of advice I have read or received come into conflict with each other. For example:

1. Post something, anything, about every important story that comes up. That way, people will learn to keep coming to your blog out of habit, your readership will go up, etc. etc.

and

2. Focus on quality. Pick your battles, and only weigh in on those stories where you have strong and original opinions. Your posts will be better informed and more enjoyable to read, and your readership will go up, etc. etc.

This is tricky for me. I tend to have opinions about most things, and if I had unlimited hours I could certainly commit a lot more of these thoughts to this blog. But aside from the time constraints, I often feel that by the time I come to a story, others have already dissected and analysed it in a far superior way. There’s no point in parroting the words of someone who got there first, without having anything interesting to contribute. And that leaves the question of what to do with all of the articles that capture my attention and interest, but about which I have few original thoughts to add.

For example, George Miller, writing at adamsmith.org., has an excellent piece reminding us that the recent failures of the private security firm G4S (contracted to provide much of the security at the upcoming London Olympic Games) should not be viewed as an indictment of outsourcing, or of the private sector in general. It is concise, well-written and chimes entirely with my own beliefs, but I have nothing really to add to it.

And therefore in future, rather than constructing a throwaway, waste-of-time blog post about such articles, or ignoring them entirely on my blog, I have decided to offer a kind of “daily summary” at the end of each day, with a few select stories of interest and a line or two from me about why they are worth a read. Hopefully, once this has a chance to bed down and establish itself, it will become a popular feature of this site.

I would be interested to here in the comments section below from any readers who have any other suggestions, insights or advice that they could offer.

In the meantime, I am going to proceed as planned.