Steve Loves the Bombs

My reaction to http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/08/love-the-bombs/

I have been reading Steve's blog for over six years now and I've been interested in watching it develop.  Although high production values have never been Steve's thing, even from the start you could sort of see what he was trying to do from the way it was set up.  The original blog was very austere but it took you to the meat very quickly.  You had no trouble finding the content.  In fact there wasn't much more than content and context sensitive adverts.

It worked pretty well for what Steve was obviously trying to do at the time, i.e., catch your attention with something valuable and give you the chance to generate him a bit of income.  The content was distinctive and interesting, but most of it was along the very popular 'tips and tricks' format.  Later he set out to build a community and we got a forum integrated into the blog with lots of cross links.  This was quite fun and the community he built was, and is, an interesting one.  I am sure none of the contributors would object to being described as non-mainstream.

But having created this community I think Steve is now stepping back from it.  There is still a link to the forum on his blog, but the individual blog posts don't link to the discussion on the forum any more.  The contact form has gone.  Steve contributes very sparingly in his own forum nowadays.

I think he is off in a new direction.  I guess we'll all find out soon enough and speculation isn't particularly productive.  But it is fun, so here I go.  The latest blog post is eccentric even by Steve's highly individual standards.  We should accept inequality and conflict because of the growth opportunities they represent?  Okay Steve gets real time gambling tips from dead people and proposes that the whole universe is a figment of his imagination, so it isn't necessarily the most crazy thing he has written.  But it does seem to be crazy in slightly different direction.  For a start it shows a bit of awareness of the world outside.  This is quite unusual in his writing.  He is normally very, how can I put it, Pavlinacentric in his world view.  Whatever else he has talked about, which includes his diet, his sex life and the nature of reality one thing that has never come up is his politics.

Until reading Love the Bombs I had never really thought about Steve's politics.  It didn't really come up as an issue.  But if I had I would probably have assumed that a West Coast vegan working in IT with a bias towards New Agery and animal rights would probably be a liberal of some kind or other.  But then he comes out with a straight out justification for income inequality and an aggressive foreign policy.  A totally off the wall justification for sure.  But nonetheless, if you quickly translate what this kind of thinking into an actual programme that a government might draw up it does put you in a surprising place on the political spectrum.  It implies very much the kind of libertarian approach that you might associate with say the Cato Institute.  Not mainstream Republican maybe, but definitely on their side of the fence.  It would definitely not find favour with anyone who identifies with the left in any shape or form.

So is Steve going into politics?  On the face of it, it is just about the most unlikely thing for him to do. But he does continually surprise us.  If he was running for office I have a feeling that the last people he would want behind him would be the free thinking types who contribute to his forum.   Is this why he is distancing himself from them?