Joy Connection Revisited

It has been a long time since I posted two articles on the same day, but the stuff is coming in so rapidly that I have to do this just to keep up.

Last year I wrote an entry called "Joy Connection," dated September 1, 2024. That entry is partly political. A commenter named Worley wrote:

But postings that aren't well-aligned with that brand [Tellers of Weird Tales] are going to tend to dilute your brand, and may well reduce readership rather than increase it.

I might be a little prickly, but I took that as an attempt to influence what I write about on my blog. Maybe Worley was just expressing his displeasure about a topic he wasn't interested in. If that was so, I guess I should say that I can't satisfy every reader every day. If you hang in there and keep reading, though, hopefully you'll find something you like.

I don't have anything against Worley or any other commenter. I always invite and welcome comments, even when there is disagreement or criticism. Every writer should hear different opinions from his own and should listen to constructive criticism. I would like to thank Worley and everyone else who reads and leaves comments on what I write here.

Receiving comments of any kind is rewarding, although sometimes I have to deal with some pretty unpleasant things, such as an insinuation that I am a Nazi, one that I think came from a friend, who posted his comment anonymously. (See the comments in "The Conservative vs. the Zombie," October 4, 2015.) To be fair to my accuser in that case, I quoted from and referred to ideas by David French, who is supposed to have been a conservative but appears to be something else now. He seems to have gone off the deep end. (And why has he taken such a resemblance to Boss Tweed?) To be fair, too, I can now say that most people on the left side of the political spectrum probably don't identify with monsters depicted in movies and television but instead identify with the human characters. It's only in real life that their sympathies go towards monsters. Not all of them, jeez, but at least a large number of them. We see that every day, for example, in people in the West who carry their flags of red, green, black, and white and who call for the extermination of a whole people.

Anyway, my readership has not been reduced at all. In fact, it has increased really rapidly in the past several months. I'm beginning to think that I can write about anything at all and still receive hundreds, if not thousands, of visits per day. It took fourteen years and four months to reach 2,000,000 visits to my blog. It has taken less than four months to add another third of a million. I don't know how to explain this except to surmise that a large portion of those visits are from AI.

In short, no reduction.

"Joy Connection" has also proved popular, if the number of visits to a blog posting is a measure of popularity. By my count, only four of my entries from 2024 are more popular in terms of the number of visits.

And now, to touch upon a theme from this week . . .

In "Joy Connection," I wrote:  

British veterans of World War II must be wondering why they did what they did and why they even fought their war. What was the point if we were just going to give up everything to totalitarian regimes anyway? 

Now I learn that a British veteran of World War II said pretty much exactly that. His name is Alec Penstone, and he is 100 years old. In an interview on Good Morning Britain on Friday, November 7, 2025, Mr. Penstone said:

"My message is, I can see in my mind's eye those rows and rows of white stones of our friends and everybody else that gave their lives--for what? Our country today, no I'm sorry, the sacrifice wasn't worth the result that it is now. What we fought for was our freedom, we find now it's a darn sight worse than what it was when I fought for it."

It's heartbreaking to hear things like that, even more heartbreaking to realize that what Mr. Penstone said might be true. I would say in solace, though, that their sacrifice must have been worth it, if only for the sake of moments, the innumerable moments in people's lives from 1944 until today in which they have enjoyed the freedom and security won and defended by the men and women who fought the war. Although it's true that freedom is under threat in Mr. Penstone's home country, the beacon of freedom continues to burn in the place where it was first lit, at least in modern times, and that might be enough, for the future of England and of freedom itself.

I only hope we can wake ourselves up from this nightmare.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley