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who let their fingers do the talking? You could have fooled me on that, I must admit. There is an informative article "Chaos in the Caucusus" right below this anti-McCain one, strong on antipathy but lacking any authenticated facts on the importance of Googling for a POTUS "in an increasingly technological world". Salon has published a number of aricles in the last few days on the confrontation between Russia and Georgia on the status of South Ossetia but the response, in terms of letters, has been quite scant. The fallacy that using the Internet is the shibboleth of superior intelligence is cruelly exposed when you look at the topics that provoke most response - ones which emphasise emotion rather than logic, second-hand and third-rate views rather than originality, and a lack of interest in the unfamiliar.
The story of the man calling himself Clark Rockefellerlacks any depth on the Net where it's been reduced to a mawkish story of a tug-of-love over a little girl. To get a much fuller picture of brazen connivance in "this increasingly technological world" it's necessary to read something a little more challenging than Huffpo for information on a man who claimed to be an oil dynasty heir and a member of British royalty who, as a German student, entered the US in l978. He was l7 years old but was not daunted from pulling the wool over the eyes of American bureaucracy, even using a social security number of the serial killer "Son of Sam". Even in this "increasingly technological world" this accomplished imposter was doing just fine in the US of A until he abducted his daughter in a supervised custody visit. Well, yes, I'm sure this man finally identified as Christian Karl Gerharts- reiter can Google with the best of them but there's not much point if there's no real mental acuity behind any of it.
So much political debate on an Internet forum consists of little more than muck-spreading, wild accusations, repetitive use of words such as Koolaid, nuance....I could go on but all that would reveal is that I've been looking at the Net far too much, to the detriment of mental equilibrium. The Internet has its uses but only as an ancillary to other sources of information. It has been shown to encourage lazy and inept thinking. Some Australians liked to wear T-shirts claiming that "Australian trouser-snakes make great pets" but in the hullabulloo about John Edwards' trouser-snake much of the reporting and commentary ignored a fundamental question: how much hypocrisy, how much mendacity, how much dishonorable behaviour, how much stupidity and how much mediocrity is now acceptable to the US public in choosing their public representatives. The Net simply as a carousel of gossip is not a very wonderful thing and neither is it tenable that unqualified people can use the Net as a means of "diagnosing" the early stages of Alzheimers Disease. It surprises me that the medical profession or a national Association for Alzheimers Sufferers and Carers has not come out strongly against the mockery of a cruel disease. Creutzfeldt-Jacob (CJD) also attacks the brain and is not age-specific and neither is Alzheimers confined to older people. There is what was once called senility "praecox" which can begin its destruction of the brain in people in their forties. The First Amendment was probably intended as a preventive to the banning of books and pamphlets, a form of social and religious control practised in Europe but those who enacted it did not foresee a world in what had just been gossip told by the village idiot could, in the 2lst century, berserk its way around the world.
