Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3298 Editor's Choice: 7
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Respectful disagreement
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Joe Conason knows Arianna Huffington personally -- I do not -- and he believes her. Paul Rosenberg remembers the details of her conversion -- I do not -- and he believes her.
I have good reason to respect both their opinions, but without further evidence, I'll have to stick with my own judgment about her sincerity.
One thing I will admit, though, is that such a judgment about people, especially when made at a distance, is prone to error. What sets my alarms ringing about Arianna may have nothing to do with her actual convictions; I don't really know what her convictions are. Were she not a public figure, and an influential one, I'd be willing to concede that I haven't been entirely fair to her, and let it go at that. As it is, though, I think I'll keep my eyes open, and one hand on my wallet.
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Gawd!
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Don't get him started on the philias, Holly M. That might be an order of magnitude worse.
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Too right
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Everything you say is true, DCLaw1, but what we still haven't reckoned with is the all-American distaste for delayed gratification. Every one of us wants a statue of himself in the park while he's still alive, his gifts to a grateful nation lifting him to wealth and fame before he's fifty, etc., etc.
As was said once on a fictional Japanese submarine, HorryWOOD! The principle of taking pleasure in what you do, rather than what you gain by doing it, has fallen into disuse. Maybe when we return civics to our high school curricula, we could also return modesty and selflessness to the sermons in our megachurches.
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Between fire and ice isn't a bad place
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Not the time to offer you a kiss, bebop-o? No. And I can't offer to stand downwind, since it's hard to tell, sometimes, which way the wind is blowing. I can wish you greysky's blue skies, though. That I'll do, and rich bottom land for the planting, while I'm at it.
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@ Lisa S
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Off-topic? I don't think so at all. Please excuse a person who spent his career managing huge amounts of recalcitrant data without knowing much about what passed through his hands, but in my view, making sense of what generations of scholars and inspired thinkers have collected for us is the huge task of the coming century -- assuming, of course, that the vengeful gods don't punish in the meantime for the sins of ignorance and cupidity.
To be more specific, I worked in an academic library, and my job was to manage a card catalog consisting of over 10 million cards, and later to supervise its conversion into a computer database, and to guard the integrity of that database when it was passed from system to system as the underlying technology evolved. Frankly, I'm glad to be retired and out of the business, because the hard part is only just beginning.
The cataloging of books, periodicals, etc. was the last great taxonomy of the 19th century, and despite all the hassles, I have to say that I was proud to take part at the end of it, and a little sad that I'd gotten old in its service, and didn't have the training, or in fact the intelligence, to cross over into the new promised land. (Sometimes I genuinely envied those who did -- the Google folks, the W3C folks, et al. For the most part, though, I was satisfied that they'd arrived, and that with them on the scene, the future was in good hands.)
Your comment exposes the other half of our dilemma, i.e., how, once we've got the data and the information in a form flexible enough to be delivered on demand to all comers, we can deliver that to a new generation whose mastery depends on fishing successfully in a much larger ocean. Librarians are by now resigned to their fate as honored ancestors, but educators, it seems to me, are still uncertain about what comes next, and who will put it into place.
You seem to be standing on the mountaintop yourself, and offering us glimpses of the promised land below. For that reason, I was very glad to see your post, O/T though it may have been in the narrow sense. Thank you.
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@ CO and DCLaw1
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Since I was born on Flatbush Avenue, and now, 60+ years later, live in AZ within a half-day's drive of the Grand Canyon, I'd like to think that both are connected, and were a long time before I appeared on the scene.
Folks who find one place intolerable, and the other divinely-inspired don't perceive the connection, or if they do, they misunderstand it. There's no harm in pointing out their mistake, and certainly none in trying to persuade them that it is a mistake.
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The innocence of bloviators
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No one likes to think of himself as the guilty party. Everyone prefers to be taken for what he believes himself to be. Everyone wants his own narrative accepted at face value, and hates being cast as the villain in someone else's play.
Okay, fair enough. So if everything Glenn has to say about these luminaries of the media is false, is either a misperception or a distortion introduced by his own ideological agenda, exactly who is responsible for the gap between what, say, David Broder asserts is the true all-American take on the universe, and what we experience every day? How exactly did the times get so fearfully out of joint? Are we nuts? Are we children, who need help from the Broders and the Edsalls to see how the world actually works?
Nah, I don't believe it for a moment. Too much of reality is sui generis, no matter how much one thing resembles another elsewhere, or elsewhen. Glenn may be wrong about the degree to which this gasbag or the other is culpable for the mess we're in, but he's spot on about the nature of the mess itself. Besides, this mad scramble by his targets to point in some other direction seems to me to be suspect in and of itself.