Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
A statement so self-evidently obvious, one feels a bit bashful about taking the time & trouble to jot it down, let alone to communicate it with others: Liberals, today, enjoy a reputation for being more technologically savvy than their counterparts, the conservatives. There is some merit to this. One reads the critiques from six years ago about John McCain’s technological illiteracy, and while one has to admit the advice certainly has not aged well, right after that comes the thought, well, I can see the logic. Electing Obama seemed like a good idea at the time, at least to some people.
But, another statement so obvious one hesitates to take the time to write it down: This perception about liberals and technology, is grounded far less in reality, than it is in the success the liberal movement has had in dominating the media, academia, entertainment, even crony-capitalism — not all of the components to our society, but at least all the ones that have something to do with people telling other people what’s going on, and what to think about it. Isolated anecdotes aside, there isn’t much to support it. How do liberals use technology, really? They use Twitter to win elections. They build databases that monitor my contributions (and lack thereof) against the latest “fund raising deadline,” and they harass me if I haven’t “signed” Barack Obama’s birthday card. Does the list end there? Perhaps there’s more, but not much that’s altogether different from that: Doing things that may very well require some level of expertise, but have been done before, and are not new. That’s not technology. That’s the opposite. In short: They “succeed” at technology the same way they succeed at everything else, including “reform” of our country’s health care system — by seizing unilateral control over the bar that separates adequate performance from the unsatisfactory, and then pushing it down.
Often, when my experience produces perceptions starkly different from the common, I have to look at definitions of the words being used and perhaps that is where the discrepancy originates here. I work in technology, and have been doing so for a very long time now, certainly long enough to make my experiences unique. I sometimes frustrate others, I’ve noticed, especially those who also have been working with technology for as long as I have. This seems to happen most when “technology” has something to do with “doing things the same way some other guy would be doing them” — which, over on Planet Morgan, is outside of the definition. As I wrote above, that’s actually the opposite. If you’re not coming up with a brand new way of doing something, whatever you’re doing doesn’t fit the word. And this is a truth that I notice eludes a lot of people, including many among my peers in the industry. They do something the established way, using something that was invented 1 or 2 years ago instead of 10 or 20 years ago, and are convinced they’re doing “technology.” As is the case with voting for Barack Obama because John McCain doesn’t use e-mail: I can see the logic. It’s still wrong, and it leads to a lot of problems. Like many other evil things, it’s tempting.
I’m HTML-encoding this into a WordPress installation I put on my blog eight years ago. Is that “doing technology”? It’s got bells and whistles, it even involves coding! But, no. The processes and procedures are all established, it’s all been tested. Technology involves discovery. That’s the key difference; that’s where the tighter perimeter is drawn.
There needs to be some genuine wonder about what will happen, followed by some tests, real tests that are fully capable of turning out one way or the other. The boy with a towel around his neck jumping off the roof, wondering if he can fly, does a better job of practicing what I call “technology” than most of the people who seriously use that word. It involves not-yet-knowing. Which means, like the science upon which it is based, it involves an admission of ignorance. It relies on humility.
That’s just the first ingredient. The second is even more demanding in terms of delayed gratification: The “bleeding edge.” If you’re finding new ways of doing something, ways that haven’t been tried before, but the result of all of it is the production of something that’s already being produced, and your way doesn’t produce superior results or manage to get it done more economically, then what you have practiced could be called “creativity.” But, not technology. Yeah, that’s a bitter truth; a lot of it results in A For Effort. Frustration abounds. That’s why this distinction is so important. It isn’t just because of disagreement over the political objectives, that I exclude these boiler-room trolls sending me their mass-mailings about Obama’s birthday card from the pursuit of “technology.”
Point is, once that exclusion is done; and, I think I did a more than satisfactory job up there defining a purpose for it — it emerges liberals don’t do very much with real “technology” at all. They poke around with some things that weren’t available to us fifteen years ago, and in so doing they win elections. But when you get right down to it, that’s just using a new communications medium. They criticize their opposition, as I noted at the beginning with some legitimacy, for failing to match their agility as real-technology opens up new pipelines. But they aren’t the ones doing this. They don’t think the way you need to think, to do things like this. They’re not ready to run tests. They know too much, at the beginning, about how it’s all going to go up to the end. Whether it really does work out that way or not. “…October 1, 2013, a date which will live in infamy. The go-live date of the monstrosity; the take-off date of the albatross.” That is when we learned what happens, when liberals really try to do “technology.” Their open-ended tests aren’t sufficient, if they’re there at all, because the requisite humility is not there. They don’t believe in actual technology; they don’t see the need, and they don’t see the point.
What’s really missing is their concern about results. We’ve seen it with President Obama over and over again. Dismal results do not compel toward a different objective or an altered design; they are merely occasions to give yet one more greatest-speech-in-all-of-human-history, and then get back to the golf course.
Liberals do make use of technology provided by others, though. They use it to win elections, and, they use it as a scapegoat for their politically-motivated bitching so they can win elections. I’d put up on the Hello Kitty of Blogging a link to this article, by way of Instapundit, and one of my friends pointed out,
Here’s an idea – if they’d stop taxing and regulating the hell out of technology and engineering, they’d hire so many people with degrees that low skilled jobs would have to pay much higher than minimum wage to fill the demand.
Nahh, not enough opportunities to rabble rouse the base to suit limousine liberals.
It’s really just like everything else at the intersection of the economic and the political: Liberals promise their constituencies and end to, or at least a reduction in, economic discomfort. It follows that there has to be some economic discomfort for this message to find resonance, to generate momentum. Technology, as I have defined it, tightly, above, relies on recognizing such discomfort and then engaging a plan that will ultimately alleviate it. And, there will be a test, a real one, because there will have to be one. If that test at the end is failed, then what was done may be “technology” in effort but in effort alone, not in achievement.
So, liberals very rarely use technology, and when they do, it’s to help their movement and not to help people. And they never actually “do” technology, at least, not as liberals. It really isn’t hard to find examples of them opposing technology, nor should we be surprised when such examples emerge. Modern liberalism and real technology are mutually exclusive things.
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So your saying that when I told the teacher “My dog ate it…” concerning homework, it was just as high technology as when CERTAIN gub’mint experts say “Computer error” to ‘splain missing communications, and expenditure recipts, required by law to be preserved?
- CaptDMO | 09/07/2014 @ 15:18Oh yeah, blah blah, blah, etc., etc. for one year at Woodbury.
- CaptDMO | 09/10/2014 @ 07:57