tomscud put up an interesting thread the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought which is the sub title of a blog entry over at Christianity Today. It is well worth the read. What I think we need to be thinking about is whether 'blogs' should be forced into the old molds.In like manner, there is the whole problem of sorting out what sort of stuff really belongs in a 'wiki' so that one can engage in larger 'intellectual pursuits'.
I am not at all sure if I am in any position to argue either side of that proposition. But I drop it into the middle of all of this, since my general plan is to move this blog over to a more tedious approach.
I scared one of my friends with the notion that I had written something, and then decided to let it sit over night before I moved it on down the road as an actual blog entry. I was somewhat frightened a few years back when some idiot thought that "de Ja News" was a gooder Idea to work with, since much of the sheer fun and silliness of the process was the somewhat freedom that one wrote it, it went over the transom, and if it worked, it worked, if it did not, that was good to, since it was not like we were worrying about creating some great edifice of intellectualisms.
I have about four books currently in my book back that I am working on. One of them is a lovely 1980's book on Martin Niemöller which i have been meaning to get to and through. It's importance to me personally of course is rising since I live in an era in which I am no longer convinced that the National Weapons Release Authority has a clue about the real reasons one nation should engage in a nuclear weapon exchange. So that part of the problem, married to the irrational american nationalists exhuberance married to an alledged "christian orthodoxy" concern makes the prospects of stepping back and reviewing this material.
The other books are Moral Politics, Crashing The Gates, and "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans - which is an interesting, if somewhat unpleasant book - since he of course does not adopt the central thesis that there was some majik forward trajectory that mandated that Germany had to go the way that it did. What I still find very disconcerting in that book is the reasonably well argued case that the lack of support for a Republic, in the end, was the ultimate unravelling point.
Niemoller of course has an additional complication for some americans, that Ironically, too many of the 'liberal bashers' skip over and avoid. They seem to want to distance themselves from the actual american cultural responses to his travels to Vietnam back in 1965. Just as the leftists have not always thought about what DO they do with a Fromer U-boat Kaptain, who was also a Frie Korp officer.... So you can imagine that this will be a really amusing place to spend some of my time.
Given that I do not expect that the Old School Tie wing of the GOP will be able or willing to restore the notion that the Law is Legal In America. Nor will they be able to get past the cultural problem of life in a country where so many alledged conservatives have never really worked out why they fundamentally hate those of us who served in the military and/or intelligence community, and would really like to see an actual end to all of the Bogosity that has been put in place since Dwight Eisenhower's Speach on the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex, since we are just not at all impressed with the failures of the Cold War to solve that level of Politics, Philosophy And Economics (PPE) any more than the current measures to espouse a Crusade against all monsters has moved forward the current fiasco.
So why worry? Why be upset? Why even be angry about how insane it has all become. That is the way that the americans want it to be. They want to be viewed as the National Tin-Foil Hat Brigade with Nuclear Weapons. So why not write slower? Who knows, it may help some be able to read the bigger issues behind the symbols.