The second primary reason for renaming the blog is primarily motivated by the ongoing presidential primaries. I will make a small political disclosure. I am registered here in New York as Independent, and therefore cannot vote in the primaries. It’s okay because votes tend to count less in polarized states like New York. Still, I get criticized regularly for being a spineless moderate. I’m not a moderate, and I have a spine (yup, I just checked).

I tend to have fairly strong opinions, and I am not ashamed of them. But I cannot align myself with a singular political party or belief system. My Venn diagram just cannot be contained within another Venn diagram. But my Venn diagram does intersect somewhat with other Venn diagrams. There are many ideas in various ideologies that I embrace, but there are often some that I reject. Excuse the cliché, but I will not be defined by any one ideology.

To put it in lexical terms, some of these ideologies apply to me as uncapitalized adjectives (get it?), but not as capitalized nouns. I am libertarian, but I’m not a Libertarian. I am independent, but I’m not an Independent. And so on. (I am almost tempted to use an OOP metaphor that illustrates the benefit of interfaces over class inheritance — the GoF would be proud.) After much contemplation, I think the new title captures my superficial defiance of institutionalized over-categorization.

One last note. I am not generally opposed to the pigeonhole principle.