The Cult of the Amateur

In a post a few weeks ago, I promised some thoughts about Andrew Keen’s polemic against “Web 2.0″ culture, entitled, “The Cult of the Amateur.” Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has only recently become skeptical about the social impact of the Internet, takes as his jumping off point the famous T.H. Huxley image of an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters. Huxley says the monkeys would eventually produce Hamlet. Keen says the Internet as we know it today is putting that claim to the test. But the results, according to Keen, are not encouraging. Far from elevating our culture, we Internet monkeys seem to be telling lies to each other on blogs and posting videos of ourselves in various states of undress on Youtube. No sign of Hamlet yet.

For … Altering Fundamentally the Forms of Our Governments

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902625.html

I have now moved from a state of amazement regarding the current Presidency to a state of fear. Assuming that the facts of this article from yesterday’s Washington Post are correct, the Bush administration in my view has entered a profound state of lawlessness.

Countermajority

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/weekinreview/08greenhouse.html?ref=weekinreview

This is going to be an all too brief post about an issue that could literally take up tomes.  In a sense, that is the purpose of this post, has anybody written the tome looking at countermajoritarianism along these particular lines?

Independence Day

It’s Independence Day, and we happen to be with Reasonable Minds Rob and Wendy Gittings in the Adirondacks of upstate New York. Rob arrived with his copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in hand, having quizzed his kids all the way from Albany on spelling words from the two documents.

Why did Rob have the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with him?

Things That Go Bump in the Night…

Last night the BBC had an interview with two “youngish” Muslim “community leaders” on their ten o’clock news broadcast.  Obviously, the topic of conversation was why disaffected Muslim youth were so marginalized by British society that they felt the need to lash out in acts of unspeakable terrorist violence.  Both “leaders” agreed that at least one source of the trouble was current British foreign policy, ie get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and help the Palestinians and the terrorist attacks in Britain will largely disappear.  They also agreed that more “education” of young Muslims was needed.  They claimed that neither the current Government nor “Muslim leaders” had done enough to educate Muslim youth that the way to change British policy was “the ballot, not the bullet.”

The Thinking Blogger Award

Thank you to Matt Haverkamp over on The Digital Perm for tagging Reasonable Minds with the Thinking Blogger Award. Matt is plugged into the blogging community in a way that I’ll never be, so I’m flattered to know he thinks highly of this blog.

The purpose of the award is to spotlight blogs that inspire readers to think.