HAPPY 2008?

Happy New Year. 2008 has begun. This blog is now officially in its second month – and, technically, second year (!)

Since I first posted on the 5th of December, 2007, this blog has had (at the time of writing) 841 ‘hits’ (see the hit counter at the bottom of this blog), or visitors to the blog, which works out to around 32 hits a day, or around one person visiting the blog every single hour of every single day. There are now fourteen postings - giving this blog an average of a new posting (by yours truly, ‘The Radical’) every 44 hours. I will try and keep the frequency up, but I do need you all to keep stopping by, to read, to comment, to engage, etc, and to spread the word to your friends, relatives, colleagues, etc. (You can also subscribe to RSS feeds, updating you on new postings published on this blog, via the link at the top of the page).

Why did I start writing this blog, and why do I continue? I do so in order to try and break out from the narrow and stultifying parameters of debate imposed by our elected politicians and the mainstream media on the issues that dominate our lives – be they political, economic, social or moral – and in order to try and provoke debate and discussion with radical and different opinions on those key issues.

The global transition from 2007 to 2008 has been pretty bleak. The killing of innocent Palestinian civilians by the IDF continues; so too does the violence and chaos in Iraq; rising levels of malnutrition plague Darfur in Sudan; Kenya seems to be descending into civil war; and violence has returned to the former Yugoslav province of Kosovo.

Thus, 2008 seems set to continue in a similar bloody vein to 2007. Progressives will continue to be depressed. This blog is therefore an attempt to make a (tiny) difference, by expanding our understanding of this horribly unjust, unequal, war-torn, dying planet and, hopefully, encouraging us all to take action to (perhaps naively) try and make this world a better place.

Happy New Year (!)