I hope our host will bear with me plugging another blogger’s fundraiser. Ian Welsh is fundraising in order to return to professional political bloggery. Ian and I go back a long time in Internetular terms, back to the early Canadian blogosphere where we spent, um, I think a couple of years writing together at the defunct blog Tilting at Windmills (along with Kevin Brennan, who has since left the whole political blog world entirely), whose Ancient Texts are now lost to the mists of time courtesy of a Russian hacker and general procrastination in trying to recover from it. As you might imagine, I sort of made a ham-fisted attempt at being the comic relief character and self-trolling provocateur. Those were good times, even though we were kind of deep in the Bush era and that sucked.

I wandered off into the wilderness and decided to make political writing a distant nth on my list of priorities, but Ian made a go of getting a career out of it, writing for some of the big successful blogs like Firedoglake, focusing on the “US market” despite being Canadian residing in Canada. Then he moved onto his own blog, and then cut down on the blogging himself for a little bit to focus on offline pursuit. Now Ian wants to return to more regular professional blogging, but will only do so if it doesn’t mean forgoing eating, paying rent, and so on.

Ian takes the very long view in his writing and applies it to present day circumstances and uses his outside perspective well, and I encourage you to peruse his archives. Ian is another of those people who make the world better for having said a thing, even when that thing is not quite right (in my opinion), and when he says something that is right, it shines. Consider that there are a lot of people who say the wrong thing, and make the world worse for it, and even people who say the right thing, but you wish it wasn’t they who said it. Ian is a writer who is, to be stereotypically Canadian, always trying to be where the puck is likely to be in his thinking, rather than where the puck currently is. The viewpoint that sometimes calls itself “progressive” needs more of that, so if you can give a little, pls do.