Welcome

This is my first post written specifically for the new blog. For the previous entries, I've imported some posts from social sites over the last few years and dated them according to when they were written. I hope many old and new friends will enjoy reading here.

Why the name "Marxa~Cola," especially for a blog written by a non-Marxian? I hope it will serve as a hint to some of the issues that interest me. I hope it's catchy. Most of all, I hope it suggests contradiction. It was chosen because it's problematic. The older I get and the more I learn, the more questions I have and the more difficult it is to apply political labels. I see this as a good thing. In some ways I've gotten more "conservative," in other ways more "liberal." Part of what I'd like to do is challenge others to question the labels they apply to themselves.

I don't mean to say that categories are useless, or that all values are relative. But what seems important to me, before anything else, is to know the nature of the paradigm through which one views the world. Is it fashioned from experience and observation, or was it fabricated for sale and picked up from a shelf like any other item offered for consumption? Do we engage with the ideas that make us who we are, perhaps even participate in fashioning them, or do we merely pay our money and put them on?

Most of all, I'm interested in the unthinkable, the outdated, the yet-to-be-tried, that which is not worthy of consideration. Most problems have unworkable, discarded solutions that are buried in footnotes and warrant no more than a blank stare or perhaps a polite shrug on the rare occasions when they are mentioned at all. It seems to me that the more contentious and confusing our times, the more likely it is that these solutions are the right ones. I hope you'll feel free to challenge my solutions and offer new ones of your own.