Prolegomena to Any Future Posts

Please read this post before or after reading this one.

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I haven’t written on this blog in over five years, and I’ve turned most of what I did write private because it’s embarrassing. I want to start writing on it again soon, so I thought it might be good to contextualise it a bit. People tend to assume context if you don’t provide it and I really don’t enjoy being misunderstood.

My name is Dean Buckley, and I’m just some guy. I’m not a pundit or activist or commentator or whatever. I write and edit pop culture criticism for The Sundae, a website I co-created with my friend Ciara, and I co-host and edit our film podcast, The Sundae Presents. I want to write about social, political and philosophical topics on this blog because I enjoy doing that, not because I am trying to convince anyone of anything. I did competitive debating for eight years and studied philosophy in college and one of the things I liked most about both those things was just picking apart logic and rhetoric and arguments and ideas, for what I imagine are the same reasons other people like to tinker with machinery. I’ve noticed a lot of people online seem to think if you write a post about something, you must think it’s a very important topic and that you are making a very urgent intervention into it. They especially think so if you do a blog about it in an era when, frankly, who even fucking blogs anymore? After all, the only reason to post on the Internet is for attention, so if you’re posting you must want attention, which means you must think what you’re posting is attention-worthy.

So, with all that in mind, I want to say: unless I say that what I’m writing about on this blog is important, please presume I merely find it interesting. I know I can’t actually make anyone do that, but if something I post here does get attention for some reason, I thought it would be handy to have this already written.

I think the website and podcast I make with my friend are attention-worthy. I would like people to pay attention to them. I wouldn’t mind if that resulted in paid writing or podcasting work for me. I plan to make things in the future with the intent of developing an audience for them. I am not writing on this blog with the intent of developing an audience for it, and if I do accidentally, I will do my best to ignore them (while directing them to my other website and my podcast and my new projects, obviously).

I find a lot of people online read political writing especially as, like, “official statements” that are all projectiles in the war of ideas meant to persuade people to believe things, whether they’re true or not. Aware of the motive, they read it suspiciously, assuming some level of deceit, whether it’s advancing an argument you don’t believe in to back a cause you do or outright lies. I don’t think this is a bad instinct in itself, but it’s very easy to be so suspicious you never seriously consider people might just be writing honestly in good faith. I also don’t think everything everyone writes should be read like an official statement of beliefs, but I am not diving into the metaphysics of speech on my first day back.

My motive for writing is writing. If other people find it interesting and engage, that’s fine, probably, but I’m writing this shit because I like writing it. I know “I don’t have an agenda” is something a person with an agenda would say but it is equally something a person with no agenda would say. I am not pretending not to have politics, but I’m not trying to “do” politics on this blog. But, for what it’s worth, I think it’s good to be upfront with your politics when you do political writing, so here’s a rought sketch of mine.

I have been some kind of left-wing since I began to care about politics as a teenager. I’ve been more or less this and that kind of left-wing at different points, but since 2016, for whatever reason, I have been a committed socialist. I don’t belong to any particular tendency. I’m a Catholic socialist, so I just want to build a just, decent and fair world, and I think socialism is the way to do it.

I believe every human being has inherent dignity by virtue of simply being a person and that what we owe each other morally is absolute and independent of difference. Saints and sinners alike. I reject all forms of bigotry and oppression. I believe in civil rights and personal freedom and respect for your fellow human. I think prisons are just state-run torture facilities of various scales, I think vast swathes of human behaviour require decriminalisation and I think police reform should tilt at abolition even if it never quite gets there. I believe violence is immoral, murder is evil and war is an atrocity. I don’t think any political end is worth harming anyone, and only defense of life could ever come close to justifying taking life from another person.

I believe people have collective moral duties as well as individual moral duties, and that collective moral duties should find expression in collective institutions. I believe in a strong, vibrant and participative democratic state. I believe in elections. I believe in unions. I think PR-STV is the best voting system, but I’m not gonna fight you about it if you disagree, because the narcissism of small differences is the death of solidarity. I believe the state should serve as a guarantor of human rights and a provisioner of human goods. I believe in universal healthcare and free education and generous welfare. I support public housing and strong regulation and transparent governance.

I believe the wealth of human production is rightfully the commonwealth of all humanity, and wealth should be distributed justly. I support the socialisation of major industries, but I’m not against all private enterprise of any kind. I am also very keen that socialisation be achieved through a mix of methods to avoid investing too much power in a central state. The state should not have a monopoly on journalism, obviously, so I’d much prefer news agencies were worker co-ops, for example. But it’s mainly about the commonwealth. Every day any person goes without what they need to survive, thrive and flourish is a moral failure, and it’s especially preposterous when all it would take to change is moving some money around.

I believe we owe a duty of care to the world we live in and the other creatures who inhabit it. I believe we need to radically change the way the economy is organised this century or we’re gonna have to build a just, decent and fair society on the far side of a genetic bottleneck because we fucked up the environment and it’s really starting to fuck us back. There is no tweak on capitalism that will make it stop fucking up the environment, and the more we fuck up the environment, the more fucked we are.

Or, to paraphrase Michael Moore, Christianity is socialism is democracy. And we shouldn’t burn the fucking house down while we’re at it.

But, again, I’m not trying to achieve any of that by posting. I’m not really trying to achieve any of that in any way except by voting, if I’m honest. Like I said, I’m not an activist, I’m just some guy. I’m not even planning to mainly write about politics anyway, but it’s definitely gonna come up, so there you go. It’s not a comprehensive list of all my beliefs, but it’s a good enough summary of my deal for this post. I haven’t written on this blog in over five years. I want to start writing on it again. I’m doing it for fun, not to convince anyone of anything. If anyone enjoys it, I’m glad, but if no one reads it, I don’t care. I have no plan for what I write except to say what I mean and mean what I say.

Most of all: unless I say that what I’m writing about on this blog is important, please presume I merely find it interesting. I can’t stress that enough.