Xark!

Priceless comment of the week

...And then comes the main point, people. When are you going to start listening to me and others like me (Glen Beck, for example).

This is a left wing reporter working for a left wing publication. This means that everything said and the motive for same is suspect. In this case, it's the common left wing error of not doing one's homework and just jumping on (or trying to create) an emotional bandwagon that ignores FACTS. This is the same mental error EXACTLY that we are seeing in the debate about Gitmo, where the retarded left wingers are finding out that their kindergarten fantasy about magically closing Gitmo has MAJOR LEAGUE problems, to say the least.<

Most of us graduated from Kindergarten a long time ago. Isn't it time to DISMISS all the left wingers who haven't in disgrace from public life and the news media? Isn't it time to IGNORE them and make it such that they simply can not compel our attention and concern?

  --Commenter "postman01" at Postandcourier.com on a column by Ken Burger about what could be done with the ships at Patriot's Point.

I'm not sure which thought is funnier: The notion that The P&C is a "left wing publication" or the idea that someone would voluntarily compare himself to Glenn Beck ... in public!

Keep it up, postman01.

Sincerely,

Liberals Everywhere 

A new form of writing

We all learned to write in more or less the same way: Beginning, middle, end; Subject, predicate, object; Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Beyond consisting of three items, each of these approaches shares another common theme: Inclusion. Everything necessary to understand the point is expressed explicitly on the page.

But when you write for the Web as you'd write for print, you write too long. You waste the reader's time explaining what she already knows.

When we write for the Web, we should use the Web's strengths to our advantage. This begins with thinking a little bit deeper about how information is constructed, because the Web can offer writers the benefit of  both clarity and brevity.

This post is an example: If you already recognized the concepts I used to build my argument, you're almost done reading. If you didn't, you can follow the links and read my explanations. And if you follow each back to its beginning, you'll find some definitive statements. Referencing one definitive statement for any concept or fact is an idea software engineers call "The DRY Principle," and I believe it's important to the future of both journalism and civilization.

Learning to write this way is a bit like playing three-dimensional chess, but it also reminds me of The Glass Bead Game. Sadly, writers today lack the technological tools and display conventions that would fully support and reward the required effort. But I suspect the ideas demonstrated here could lead us toward new ways of thinking and communicating that are far better adapted to the world we now inhabit.

Notes.

Image: This post as a rough semantic outline.Click to see full-size.

Rock stars

This must have been taken last year at the first Charleston International Film Festival, but I just ran across it this morning whilst doing something else. If Farrah and Mitchell don't look like absolute rock stars in this shot, I don't know what a rock star looks like.

Of course, they're both actively trying to be creative people WITHOUT being rock-star celebrities. To me that just makes them rock stars that you don't secretly hate.

The Bikini Frog-March

There's a media game called "The Perp Walk," also known as "The Frog-March," in which a person who has been arrested is paraded in front of the media in shackles. Not everybody has to frog-march: The press doesn't bother with the run-of-the-mill criminals, and the royalty can always pull strings and avoid the humiliation. It's the B-Listers and the Superstars who've had the protection of power removed from them who frog-march.

Which brings me to the sadness of standing in the checkout line today, staring at Valerie Bertinelli's painfully buff 48-year-old celebrity body, displayed in awkward anatomical completeness, like a butterfly pinned to the board of People magazine.

Bertinelli is just two years my senior and played a girl my age on a popular 1970s sitcom. She was almost universally loved by junior-high boys, then went on to marry the quintessential stadium-speed-guitar-god and become the queen of Lifetime movies. Eventually she wound up divorced and overweight and, one supposes, washed up.

CREATE South 2009 -- Donate!

CREATE South -- the do-it-yourself online media conference launched by our friends along the Grand Strand in 2008 -- is steaming toward a much-improved 2009 event on Saturday, April 25.Today is Donation Day, one of the high holy days of the CREATE South year.

Here's why I think you should care: CREATE South is one of the few remaining FREE conferences dedicated to the cooperative, inclusive, community-minded sharing of knowledge and insight. It's run by volunteers, it values self-motivated creators above rock-star tech-biz celebrities, and it promotes an egalitarian ethic of personal responsibility and empowerment that's so very needed in the world today. It pays for this by raising money from sponsors and individual donors.

I'm cynical about cynicism

Ultimately, the problem with cynicism is that it's not nearly as predictively accurate as cynics believe.

Despite all cynical evidence to the contrary, we do not live in the worst of all possible worlds. And as bad as our circumstances may be, we can take comfort in the fact that the great cynical tradition has always predicted far worse outcomes.

Which is largely why, at this genuinely rotten moment in American history, staring at the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, I'm more optimistic than I have a right to be. It's not that I'm counting on our political leaders to be godlike protectors, or that I think technology or some other deux ex machina will descend from the heavens and pull our sausage out of the skillet at the last possible second.

Rather, I suspect that life is a little like friction in reverse. Logic may command that our corrupt and ugly species is doomed to misery, and indeed when you examine the forces at work, it's easy to agree. But there's just something about people and civilization that quietly, almost magically, wears on that inevitability.

I can't explain it. But it's how we got here.

The cynics really hate that, too.

The important things are hidden

On my recent trip to North Carolina, I got to spend the night at my godfather's house, way back in the woods in Brown's Summit where I grew up. He was often a bachelor in those days, but for almost two decades he's been happily mated to the same wonderful woman. The youngest of their two sons is almost ready for college now, and the four of us spent a few hours around the woodburning stove last week talking about how the world has changed.

At one point, my godfather's wife said that when she was growing up, her mother convinced her that all the important things in the world, like injustice and prejudice, had already been fixed and now only needed to be perfected. My godfather said something along the lines of how he grew up believing that all the important things were just waiting to be fixed with science and logic and reason. 

And without really thinking about it, I replied that I grew up believing that all the really important things were hidden. 

There was a slice of silence that followed, when all four of us seemed to look down at our hands, and the fire hissed in the woodstove, and I wondered if I'd said something inappropriate. It took me a moment to realize that without meaning to, I'd inadvertantly described a thing that has animated my entire life. 

The American Cargo Cult

O how I wish I had written this. It's by Peter Klausler, who wrote it some years ago (2006?) "after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways."

I couldn't agree more. Excerpts below, but go to his site to see the full piece. Hat-tips to Janet, who pointed it out to me, and to Clay Shirky, who promoted it earlier today.

I. Ignorance is innocence

Complicated explanations are suspect

The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.

Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness

Changing one's mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the prior opinion.

Your opinion matters as much as anyone else's

When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.

The herd should be followed

The contemplative lemming gets trampled
Popular beliefs must be true.
No bad idea can survive.
People are generally smart.
Even if a popular belief doesn't pan out, at least you'll be in the same boat as everyone else.

II. Causality is selectable

All interconnection is apparent

Otherwise, complicated explanations would be necessary.

The end supports the explanation of the means

A successful person's explanation of the means of his success is highly credible by the very fact of his success.

You can succeed by emulating the purported behavior of successful people

This is the key to the cargo cult.  To enjoy the success of another, just mimic the rituals he claims to follow.

III. It's not your fault

If it's good for you, it's good

Society is everyone else.

Good intentions suffice

You can always apologize.

There is no long term

Don't miss an opportunity.

You are not the problem

An ugly image means a bad mirror.

IV. Death is unnatural

        You're special

        Bad things shouldn't happen to you.

        Pain is wrong

        Life should not hurt.

        Tragedy is a synonym for calamity

        Bad things are never consequences of one's own action or inaction.

        There will be justice

                Bad people get punished.
                You, however, will be forgiven.

More about stop signs, traffic, etc.

I got this from our friend Bora, here, and even though the professor is on the faculty at Duke, I like his points. It makes an interesting companion piece to our ongoing discussions about bicycles... even though bikes aren't the subject.

Dignity FAIL

Via FAILblog.