Sharpen Your Axe Is Three!
An index to the last 52+1 weekly essays
"Three spare axes..." by storebukkebruse is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Sharpen Your Axe is officially three years old! I would like to thank everyone who has subscribed, who reads the essays, who shares them on social media or sends them to friends, as well as those who have provided me with feedback. I appreciate you all!
We managed to publish 53 essays over the course of a year, including the second-anniversary blog, which we ran a week late and a bonus column in November. As usual, I would like to index all the essays for easy navigation in case you missed any and to help new readers find all the material. This page will be pinned to the top of the blog if you need to find anything again.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
First guest column from ChatGPT
“A flame burns too bright” (second guest column from ChatGPT)
Catalan and Spanish politics
What rhymes with Catalonia? (Guest column from Peter Harvey)
The risks of Catalan independence
An curtain-raiser on July 2023 general election
Sánchez and Catalonia (part one)
Sánchez and Catalonia (part two)
Current affairs
Deep issues
The power of negative thinking
Experimental column
Political theory and practice*
Where it the border between left and right?
Social media
The joys of publishing a weekly essay
Volkswagen emblems and Twitter
Thinking critically about conspiracy theories
Reading is better than YouTube
Exponentialists vs intuitionists
The enemies of institutionalism will come bearing conspiracy theories
The peaceful transition of power
On “deep state” conspiracy theories
Cognitive dissonance and OSINT
The comments are open. Which of these essays was your favourite? What would you like to see more of over the next 52 weeks? The first person to provide positive feedback will get my next invitation code to Bluesky, a new invitation-only (for now) social media platform created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
My stats showed that the green liberalism essay got a lot of traction, as did the one calling Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez a populist. Would you like to see more articles on market-friendly and liberal-minded environmentalism? Or more on populism? Or Spanish politics? Or critiques of Catalan independence?
Also, I lost a bunch of subscribers after saying that living in cities is better for the environment than living in the middle of nowhere. Despite this feedback, I refuse to pull my punches even if some of my conclusions generate cognitive dissonance in some readers some of the time. You can say what you like about my blog, but I hope it will always be thought-provoking, with structured arguments and transparency about my methodology and my sources!
Please note that next week’s column will return to being on a Saturday. See you next week!
*Readers can also find plenty of political theory in the section on Catalan and Spanish politics.
Further Reading
The Sharpen Your Axe e-book for Kindle
Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!
If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the second anniversary post. You can also find an ultra-cheap Kindle book here. If you want to read the book on your phone, tablet or computer, you can download the Kindle software for Android, Apple or Windows for free.
Opinions expressed on Substack and Substack Notes, as well as on Bluesky, Mastodon, Post and X (formerly Twitter), are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.
Congrats! And happy anniversary 🎉 I have learned a lot with your blog, even though I'm not always 100% in agreement. I think your project is very worthwhile especially in our troubled times. Keep it up!
I'm living comfortably under a rock here, with limited consumption of advertisements and breathless look-at-this-great-tech advertorials. So I didn't even recognize the name "Bluesky". I could google it, but it's reasonable to predict that their site will be long on superlatives, short on the kind of substantive information which would tell me whether I'd ever be interested in joining it.
So here are some questions for you, who are presumably a user:
- is it specialized in soundbites, like Twitter? I.e. is there a character limit too short for nuance?
- is there an algorithm deciding what users see, that isn't something simple like "whoever they follow, in the order in which they posted"? Can the users override the algorithm, and get something simple, like LiveJournal and derivative systems, rather than whatever the supplier thinks will most boost their "engagement" or similar?
- is there a complete set of privacy and troll-control tools available to users?
- With regard to privacy, is widespread sharing to strangers opt-in or opt-out?