O/T—

Now, Clay Shirky has said some incredibly idiotic things... Stupidities that could only have been polished to such a gleaming idiocy by a professor at NYU, which he is. He offered consultation to Khaddafy's Libyan government as if telling a tourist how to get to Carnagie Hall. Many of his insights are mundane, and his adoration of the Occupiers was abject.

And indeed, while I adore the passage below, it appears early in its context:

[T]he Internet allows us to see what other people actually think. This has turned out to be a huge disappointment.

People will often come to the venue like this, say something silly, and expect two responses: 1st, that other readers will agree. 2nd, that other readers will applaud the concise crystallization of a delicate thought which no one had found the grace or courage to offer before.

What happens more often is that other readers describe the expression as silly, and sometimes call the person nasty names, too. Thereafter (but ONLY thereafter), the commenter will bemoan 'the sewer of internet discourse', or some such (imaginary) phenomenon.

We can tell that this has happened to professional journalists a lot... Every staffer on Newsweek for the last twenty years must have had this happen a dozen times. Just imagine one of those blowhards on an anonymous internet comment site... Sharing typical, Newsweek-style stupidities, and being corrected (and then ignored) by spot-welders and distracted housewives. We imagine them wanting to say "But I work for Newsweek!" in response, but knowing that it would be a bad career move. Professional journalists truly believe their perspectives are stronger because they've convinced someone to pay for them. It's pathetic, and it makes the collapse of the magazine last week all the more delicious.

But for my own part, it's not been that much of a disappointment to learn that so many people are so wrong about so many things on an individual level... I'd always suspected as much. It's nonetheless underlined a pitiable pattern in human nature: Many move through life in fantasies of isolated grandeur, as if some unnamed force had been smothering their brilliance across a lifetime.

It's sad to know this about them. But seeing their egotistical presumptions so explosively vacated is glorious indeed.

More O/T —

Big Mac is no shrinking violet, has worked in print and thrived on the itnernet, and offers these tweets which glance at the topic above: 1 & 2.

Also, Pedfrisk was funny.

The Molestek 700 is a good unit for moderate-traffic installations, especially with the 700W retrofit for airports with harsh winter weather.

If you can admire just one bitter, sarcastic, somewhat mysogynistic tweet from an underemployed radio vulgarian this year, let this be that tweet.

Crid, at the risk of crystallizing your thought so consisely that it misses the point entirely, I offer:

Narcissists don't want debate. They want validation.