Matt has a nice essay about the Left of the 1960s and the Left of today. Go contribute. I think about this sort of thing all the time, and I confess I’m not as ambitious as Matt; I’m not sure how I’d construct such a comparison.  Read more 

Crap. Why is it I always find the posts I really want to wax upon with eloquence when it’s late, and I’m bone tired? Lindsay is such a bright and attractive woman. And she gets why this is so important. I like to think I do too.

Bottom line: total, complete bullshit drives much advertising in this country. Based on metrics and numbers from decades ago and cultures dead, ads are bought by companies who believe in well, a lot of crap, and who don’t understand what their ad dollar does and doesn’t buy them. Advertising entities aren’t stupid; it’s not like they’re going to tell GM that their return on their billions is in fact much less than traditional MBA think suggests. Greatly like the political consulting class, advertisers have created an environment in which people continue to pay them despite the lack of profitable results.  Read more 

Going All the Way, or, Why Moderation is Killing America

A comment at this post got me thinking, as well as motivated to leave a reply there, about the discourse and drawbacks of “moderation.” If you’ve ever read any of my writing, you’ll now that the concept and I are not exactly bosom buddies, but I have respect for the various social and cultural ideologies that teach that it is a “good thing.” And yet- two bottles of wine a day, $200 a quarter to the Lieberman campaign, or two dozen widely read voices calling for the execution of half the populous for the “treason” of wanting and end to the war: none of these are “good things.”  Read more 

Whining like this is part of the reason I left the teaching/research side of the Academe:

For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, “could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure.” Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.

On a smaller scale, the same problems afflict the intellectual and moral environments of the blogs. There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers.  Read more