Well, Ol’ Noam now has comments open once again. All you have to do is contribute to his site to be able to comment.
I never thought much of his mental capabilities, but now see I’ve been mistaken. He is a smart capitalist who can get disciples to fund his activities. And a bonus is that people like me who might take issue with what he writes won’t.
I am worn out today. I spent the last five days with #2 son and his lovely wife, and they have far more energy than I do.
My favorite cities in this country are Washington, Lexington, KY, Monterey, CA, Key West, and San Antonio. The kids wanted to go to SA this weekend, and I’m always ready to visit. But my knees can’t deal with the whirlwind tour we took: Alamo, Mercado, River Walk, all at a quick pace in one day. They enjoyed themselves, though, and we had a wonderful meal by the river before returning to Corpus Christi.
San Antonio is the second largest city in Texas (Houston is tops), yet I never feel like I’m in a big city when I’m there. It has lots of green space, and the town isn’t compacted. I always enjoy exploring the downtown areas of cities, and San Antonio has one of the best. You can walk anywhere, and the variety is such that you can buy anything from top quality art work to tourist junk. And the variety of restaurants is great. We had Italian the other day, but one of the best steak houses in the world is on the River Walk, as well as Mexican, German, seafood, and Starbucks.
I’ve stayed at the Menger Hotel, and had a few Shiners at the bar where Teddy Roosevelt signed up men for his excursion to Cuba. I’ve taken the carriage ride around town on a cool night in November when all the lights were glowing in anticipation of Christmas. And I’ve played golf.
For a military retiree, San Antonio offers quality golf courses at Fort Sam Houston (two), Lackland, Randolph, and Kelly Air Force Bases, and a nine-hole course at Brooks. And the city courses are well-maintained. Then there are dozens of resort and daily fee courses.
I always have a good time there. Wallace spent his hormonal college years in San Antonio, so he probably has a completely different view of the city!
Do you yearn to see your words in print, complete with attractive binding and a cover you designed yourself? Here is an entrepreneur who can fix you up!
Ain’t capitalism great?
I ran across What Not to Do When You Blog while searching for information on WordPress:
Pick a real subject or series of subjects and stick to it–if you have to use the word “I” more than once a week, you are doing something very, very wrong.
I just can’t help it. When I write, I tend to write about things in the first person. I also try to be clear that something I write about is my opinion rather than simple fact. I tend to say that I believe something when I cannot, absolutely, be sure that what I‘ve said is an indisputable fact.
I will work on not using I too often.
What a great point of view this is.
For practical purposes it is not possible to express opinions, or to cover stories, that offend a sizable group on the floor of the newsroom. If your editor is female, or the guy at the next desk black, or gay, you find it very hard to write anything that these groups won?t like. After all, you have to come to work every day. More diversity in the newsroom means less diversity in the news.
Thus, in his view, the newspapers are losing readership.
Fred on Everything has an interesting tone, and the items in his store are…different. A reviewer of one of his books calls him a modern Mark Twain. I may have to pick up Nekkid in Austin.
Godwin’s Law evolved from discussions on usenet sites:
As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
For all you blog readers out there, sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? In a long list of comments, someone eventually will compare their antagonist to Hitler or the Nazis. In particular, if you read comments on many left-of-center sites, you’ll see this law at work.
Mike Godwin explains how this Law came to be discerned, and how it is invoked. For all of you who like to use the analogy, you basically end the discussion as the loser. If you insist on using it, I would recommend you at least first read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. No, your history books don’t explain Nazism well enough.
Mike also offers an antidote:
The best way to fight such memes is to craft counter-memes designed to put them in perspective. The time may have come for us to commit ourselves to memetic engineering – crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones.
If only I were smart enough to do that.
In the last few days I’ve been involved or an interested spectator in several contentious discussions on line and in person. I use the word “discussion” because I believe it is the only way any of us learn from someone else.
One I will use as an example is a comment someone made on my site, and I followed their link to see what they had to say. It turns out the site is dedicated to slamming America in general, and Bush in particular. I left an additional comment there, and offered to discuss differing points of view.
Debate is a word often used as a synonym for discussion. The two are very different. Debate is a formal competition where two parties are absolutely convinced of their stance on a particular issue, and view it as their mission to enlighten the non-believers. I am guilty of this, myself. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t bother to maintain this blog.
Discussion is a meeting of minds to share information, often contradictory, in hopes that both parties will walk away with more knowledge than they arrived with. “Conversion” isn’t a necessity, but understanding is. And I don’t mean that with a condescending smirk. Both parties must enter a discussion with the intent to learn, and not merely offer competing ideas.
Anyway, my attempt at the other site garnered only questions posed as fact, bald statistics, and changes of subject. No answers of value, nor answerable questions were offered. I gave up. It was obvious the other party was not interested in hearing anything which might contradict opinions already formed. I have my opinions as well, and believe them just as strongly, but also realize I’m not omniprecient. Often, I’m quite stupid.
Perhaps that’s why I don’t like debate–it might highlight to the world just how stupid I am!
But the issue highlights how we often read and write things. A thought in my mind might take a completely different form in print. And what I read is filtered through what I know and believe. When questioned, I often go back and re-read what someone else wrote, or what I wrote that someone questioned. Believe it or not, in almost every instance I was correct in my initial assessment. Maybe I’m not all that stupid after all. But because I write and don’t edit (except to try and not embarrass myself with bad spelling) I am constantly on watch regarding other people’s reading of what I write. If they think I said something other than what I intended, I give them the benefit of the doubt initially. If it continues, as in my example, I simply stop. It’s going nowhere.
So, If I write “Thank you for playing” after one of your comments, you know that I’ve given up trying to learn anything from the discussion.
So far, I’ve only done that twice.
UPDATE: Thrice.
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