Listen, the main man is making me post this, he made me post that title, I said I'd only do it if I could have some pudding and I've had my pudding so here it is:
A snippet from an article called "Greetings from idiot America":
The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are teh people who know best what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
What's-his-face calls me up and he's jumping up and down (I assume) yelling about how this is exactly what he's been saying for 3 years now, and I got to post it, and blah blah, and I'm like "is some some political junk?" and he's like "yeah" and I'm like "SNORE!"
Whatever. He pays the bills.
Here's some more from the artle and the hippy blog running it:
Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the result of millions of decisions made and not made. It's the development of a collective Gut at the expense of a collective mind. It's what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and not merely do we abandon the right to punish them for it at the polls, but we also become too timid to punish them with ridicule on a daily basis, because the polls say they're too popular anyway. It's what happens when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing people."You would be surprised at how much email is sent to me telling me to stop being so derisive, that harsh language and ridicule turn people off and repel the very ones we're trying to persuade. My reply is like the one above; by refusing to ridicule the ridiculous, by watering down every criticism into a mannered circumlocution, we have created an environment where idiots thrive unchallenged. We have a twit for a president because so many people made apologies for his ludicrous lack of qualifications—we need more people unabashedly pointing out fools."
Pffft. Whatever, nerd. Oooo crap! Ashlee Simpson tickets are going on sale in 10 minutes. Gotta go!
It's done. The documentary the overlords of this site have been working on, that is.
It's finitoed. If you were one of the three people who gave (wink, wink, you know what I mean - $$) send an email to the email that's o the page that says contact or something. You'll be sent a DVD post-haste. Mostly post, though. We've heard from one guy but two guys still haven't responded so, in case you come here every day checking in, now's the chance to strike!