SubscribeIdiot America
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Idiot America
by Charles Pierce - Publisher: Doubleday
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 304
- See the rest of this year's listings
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- №31
Charles Pierce is a frequent guest on NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” though I didn’t know this until after I read this book (go figure).
Despite the inflammatory title, Idiot America isn’t a criticism of the country, but rather a condemnation of the way in which idiocy or nescience has become something to be proud of; it’s a sort of extension of Thomas Frank’s question of authenticity. And it troubles Charles Pierce to no end.
In defense of Snopes
For over a decade now, the home for urban legend debunking on the web has been Snopes.com, a personal website run by Barbara and David Mikkelson.
While much of its initial incarnation focused on debunking the oldest of the old—”escaped serial killer with a hook” kind of stories, for instance—it has evolved, especially in the last 6 or 7 years, to be an invaluable resource for debunking all the nonsense emails that get forwarded around. I know I use it to rebut these sorts of emails all the time, especially during election years when my conservative extended family forwards these sorts of spurious rumors. It was only a matter of time, then, before Snopes itself came to be labeled as liberal.
Sam Vaknin is still an idiot
7 April 2009 • Comments are now closed. Unfortunately, they were devolving into a steady stream of people who didn’t bother to read to narrative thus far and added no value at all.
You’ll pardon my bluntness in the title, but I find it concise and to the point.
My entry “Sam Vaknin’s Self-Love” remains one of my most popular entries, and continues to attract a dialog/argument between refugees from various fora and user groups pertaining to narcissism and NPD. From commenter Derek comes word that Vaknin has seen fit to throw his hat into America’s current political ring by penning an amazingly obtuse and ridiculous article about Barack Obama.
In defense of open models
Andrew Keen has no idea how open models work.
In his latest article, he pontificates that the recent economic downturn is a death knell for community-supported or community-built programs/sites/&c.
So how will today’s brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 “free” economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc., Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism… The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.
There are really two broad fallacies that need addressing here. The first is Keen’s use of the word “open source,” which here is a misnomer. He never mentions Linux, Apache, or other open source programs which always have and will continue to have a dedicated base of programmers, most of whom work on it in their spare time, without any remuneration except personal pride and the esteem of their peers. It need hardly be noted that an economic downtown is likely to increase interest in open-source software, as it likely reduces operating costs for businesses.
Breaking news: China censors
Even when they lied to your face about having clean air and unfettered internet access for journalists, did you really think they were being forthright with you?
The International Olympic Committee failed to press China to allow fully unfettered access to the Internet for the thousands of journalists arriving here to cover the Olympics, despite promising repeatedly that the foreign news media could “report freely” during the Games, Olympic officials acknowledged Wednesday.
Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC’s Chinese-language news, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.
The restrictions, which closely resemble the blocks that China places on the Internet for its citizens, undermine sweeping claims by Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, that China had agreed to provide full Web access for foreign news media during the Games. Mr. Rogge has long argued that one of the main benefits of awarding the Games to Beijing was that the event would make China more open.
Everybody put on your shocked expressions: a country with a well-documented history of human rights abuses and draconian censorship has not ceded those habits at the wishes of the international community. Well, kiss my grits!
Parents Fight Over Which Gang Toddler Should Join
I really wish this was an article from The Onion…. but no, it’s not.
On Saturday, Joseph Manzanares stormed into the Hollywood Video store where his girlfriend worked, threatened to kill her and knocked over several video displays and even a computer, Commerce City police Sgt. Joe Sandoval said.
His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.
That’s so sad I can’t even think of anything funny to say.
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