Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

I mentioned in a post a few days ago that I wanted to start a Friday tradition here at WLIR: talking for a change not about politics, but about "guilty pleasures." The pleasures part of that phrase is probably obvious -- things I like to do when I'm not working (here on the blog, or for pay).

But "guilty"?

When I started this blog, I expected it would be a single-issue site: politics and nothing but. It didn't take long for me to develop two problems with this expectation:

1. I'm interested in a lot more than politics; and, more importantly,
2. Some of the things I'm interested in fall beyond the pale of what, I thought, a Good Liberal "should" be interested in.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a closet conservative, neo- or otherwise. But as I strolled the aisles of blogtopia (Yes: skippy coined that term!), I frequently felt ashamed that I wasn't a purer liberal. Yes, I watched public television. (And I'd listen to NPR, too, if either my or Mrs. FLJerseyBoy's car radios worked.) But I also liked watching some sitcoms and other forms of junk TV. I read many of the lefty-approved books and magazines, but I also liked some genre fiction and subscribe to Premiere, a glossy magazine which covers the business and the glitz of Hollywood. I really enjoyed foreign films but also had a weakness for B movies. And so on. All of which led me to feel, well, at least a little fraudulent. Many, maybe even most lefty sites seem to blaze with the fires of dedication. Where did I get off, presuming to name a blog "Where Left Is Right"? I couldn't even be 100% right myself!

I've come to believe, though, that it's more important to acknowledge the Dark Side of my nature than to pretend to ideological purity. So this (I hope) regular Friday feature will be self-indulgent, yes. But it also fits right in with the tenor of some of my earliest postings here (like this one). As I said here:

I think we're "centrist" only in the aggregate of issues. Someone who's liberal on, say, health care may be conservative on the death penalty; observers look at that person and announce, "Centrist. Definitely centrist." But that's not true on an issue-by-issue basis, and every issue does not carry equal weight in the given person's psyche and life.

Anyhow, not to drag this out but yeah, my psyche and life are occupied, in part, in the pursuit of entertainments not wholly (or at all) liberal. Hence: guilty pleasures.

The first of them will be up shortly.

Update: It's here.