My recent criticism of the lack of value of some of the ‘warblogs’ has raised some mirth in certain quarters. Dr.Frank at Blogs of War and Angela Gunnin USA Today’s weblog both think I was rather silly to question the value of warblogs as (apparently) I produce one myself.
I don’t though do I? While it is impossible to avoid the topic of war at the moment this is a blog mainly about political opinions and not about logging every bit of detail of the military campaign. I still believe the latter is best left to the professionals although I should add that sites such as Command Post do a very good job of collating all the news from the mainstream sources in one easy-to-find place.
I have no experience of military matters and next to no knowledge of war tactics etc – so I don’t write about them, simple as that.
FAREWELL TO COMRADE STEELE
Another matter of confusion has arisen over my pen-name. This is all rather tedious but let me get it out of the way, Harry Steel (without the ‘e’) was the pen-name used by a writer in a very obscure marxist journal back in the 1980’s and I adopted the name as little more than a wind-up on a Trot mailing list about three years ago. It worked, it stuck with me and I thought nothing of it.
However I was recently informed that this obscure journal is still publishing (although I believe with less emphasis on Soviet agricultural production statistics these days) and indeed that there is still a Harry Steel column in it. This is has understandably caused some confusion.
There are also a few people in the real world who are actually called Harry Steele (one of them an apparently successful American industrialist) and so I think that it would be the best bet to change my pen-name.
I gave it some thought on the train the last night while I was reading an excellent book about the history of British pop music, Black Vinyl, White Powder by Simon Napier Bell. I have just finished the chapter on punk rock and while wallowing in nostalgia and listening to the punk compilation cd’s I have settled on a new pen-name – Harry Hatchet.
The name of the Blog remains Harry’s Place but if those bloggers who link to Harry Steele could change their links accordingly it would be appreciated by myself, a US capitalist and an obscure marxist – cheers.
