Hold your hats
Yes, that means that I’m going to start blogging about things that piss me off, again.
It’s how I started, many years ago, updating each silly page by hand-coded HTML, on the University of Akron Server. It’s how I inspired Greg Haberman to start Cool People From Akron, and it’s how I ultimately began thinking of a career in social engineering. It’s why I scared some people off from Apollonova. I’m about to get fired up about stuff, because I’m tired of being depressed and boring all the time.
Let’s start here. This is a pretty good summary of how I think about the media:
From Daily Kos :
It is easy to make fun of the media’s obsession with petty trivialities. Really easy. As in, it writes itself. But I suppose at a deeper level we should take it seriously; the most pervasive characteristic of our political discourse, after all, is that it is pervasively stupid. Tthat, certainly, is something to get angry over.
The problem is that it is difficult to truly get angry over, anymore, because it is too predictable; the joke has been played too many times, and increasingly badly with each telling. I can understand why a presidential candidate doing badly at bowling would be a fun, two-minute diversion from weightier matters. And I can understand why a presidential candidate speaking imprecisely about a difficult political issue would become political news. The orange juice thing, where we’re trying to pin an “elitist” label on someone because they asked for orange juice instead of coffee?
No. That was the point where the wires crossed, and shorted. There is a point in which a triviality becomes less than trivial, less than banal, and becomes, to use the most technical term for it, deeply and abrasively stupid. There is no spin possible that turns “asking for orange juice” into an issue of elitism or snobbery: there is, in an infinite sea of alternate realities, not one in which asking for orange juice demonstrates an important negative aspect of character. It is stupid. It is aggressively stupid; it is soul-burrowingly stupid; it is mind-fuckingly stupid. It is the kind of stupid that seeps into the rug so that the entire building stinks of stupid for the next ten years whenever the air conditioning comes on. It is the kind of stupid that wounds all those who come into contact with it. It is a stupid that has been rendered physical: it leaves a scar.
Please pay attention. Thank you.
