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KNOW Small Hypocrisy
The latest issue of the newsletter for local anti-war protesters Kalamazoo Non-Violent Opponents shows that the group has no problem speaking out of both sides of its collective mouth. Principles, apparently, are for right wing nutcases.
In its online newsletter, KNOW has suddenly discovered freedom of speech,
Dear friends,
THIS IS AN EMERGENCY CALL! PLEASE HELP! PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO DO THIS!
THE RIGHT TO QUESTION AND DISSENT IS UNDER ASSAULT EVERYWHERE--INCLUDING HERE IN KALAMAZOO.
As most of you know, the Sisters of St. Joseph have cooperated with KNOW and PAX CHRISTI to put the "silhouettes" display on their property, atop the stone wall at the corner of Gull Road and Nazareth Road. The Sunday blessing of the sign and the ceremony--with songs, prayers, petitions, readings from the Bible and the Koran--was attended by about 150 people and was very moving. If you have not been out there to see the sign, take a trip. It's very visible as you come into town on Gull Road, and very visible from Nazareth Road, particularly as you go east.
The aftermath has been unpleasant.
Here's a Tuesday message from Sister Janet:
First of all, let me thank you for your participation in getting the sign up and for being here on Sunday. Second, as expected, we and Borgess are getting all negative phone calls regarding the sign and even a threat to burn it down. We need to change this around.
Obviously a threat to burn down the display is crossing the line and such threats should be prosecuted. Calling to ask the display to be taken down, however, is simply other people expressing their own right to free speech, not some grand conspiracy against dissent.
But what I really find amusing about this episode is KNOW's sudden infatuation with preserving free speech. After all this is the same group that back in October urged people to "do all we can to re-elect Don Cooney" to the city commission. One of Don Cooney's major goals as city commissioner is the shutting down of nude dancing within the city of Kalamazoo because that speech damages families and dehumanizes women.
Of course, KNOW is correct -- free speech is under attack everywhere, including Kalamazoo. And KNOW is part of that attack with its wholehearted support of pro-censorship politicians in Kalamazoo.
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Kalamazoo Non-Violent Opponents to War,
Don Cooney,
Are Other People's Ideas Worth Reading?
Robert Cringely has an meandering essay about blogging which includes the following,
I give credit to Dave Winer of Userland Software for inventing web logging, and I think the idea then was to publish, to share your thoughts with everyone else. But most people's thoughts aren't really worth sharing. Most web logs are little more than lists of annotated bookmarks and the value of those bookmarks can probably be best derived through a web aggregator, in which case people would be writing not to be read but to be counted, which isn't nearly as much fun.
A lot of this comes down to production values, which is a subject those in the web log world tend to ignore because it is to their advantage to do so. There is a lot of bad television, but its packaging is such that we still seem to sit through the shows. Network TV spends perhaps $500,000 on an hour. How much do you spend on each web log entry? No wonder most web logs are so boring.
I disagree with Cringley both about blogging and about television.
I don't know whether or not most people's thoughts are worth reading, because most people frankly are not blogging. Most people still give me strange looks when I mention blogging.
Of the subset of technologically adept people who are blogging, I find most blogs to be pretty darn interesting. In fact the problem with blogging is the same as with television, IMO -- the problem isn't a dearth of quality content but rather so much quality content that it's impossible to read or view even a small percentage of it. Aggregators help with the blog side, but since TV remains real time there will never be enough time to see all of the quality TV ever produced, even if you restrict viewing to pre-recorded network shows.
I imagine, for example, that Jim Roepcke's weblog is the sort that I enjoy but that Cringley would probably find to be boring. Jim posts fairly regularly and mixes in occasional posts about current events, sports, his home rennovation project and his family. Jim and I are on opposite sides of most issues (including hockey which I never watch), but I find his blog and Jim's ideas very interesting and worthwhile to consider.
I end up reading a lot of blogs published by friends, associates, co-workers and occasional enemies. One of the things that I think Cringely is wrong about is in assuming that great ideas only emerge from Great Thinkers (TM). As James Surowiecki notes in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, however, sometimes a group is much smarter than the smartest individual in that group.
I enjoy and tend to learn a lot more from the various and wide ranging opinions of what people write in their blogs than I do from reading elite opinion makers. I don't understand at all Cringely's trumpeting of the high production values of bad television -- that's precisely the problem. I much prefer to read the opinion of some blogger who may have poor grammar but an excellent take on some issue rather than the elite opinion columnist who is a wonderful wordsmith but whose opinion comes from some liberal or conservative template so predictable that I could have probably written the opinion piece for them based on their past views.
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