sometimes i despair. at the lack of intellectual discourse. you can see it everywhere. but you don't have to look "everywhere". no, you don't have to look at the money/politics nexus to see it, although the right-wingers have turned that into a bleak desert, thanks to the volume of fox news and money from the koch boys. and you don't have to look at any article on any political blog, where the racists and antiabortionists have tilted the machine, hijacking any imaginable topic back to their own hobby-horse. and you don't have to look at the comments on youtube videos, because doing so will make you wonder who raised those kids... no sir, you can look right here on this little old listserve, and see the appalling lack of brainpower behind the talk. i won't say that "no thought goes into most posts here", because the sad truth is that it _appears_ that some of these people are actually _trying_ to use their brains... it's just that it's not really working. they think, and think, and think some more, but things _still_ come out stupid... yesterday's example was keith agreeing with lee that some "revision control system" was needed to digitize our books. oh please. one person, working an hour or two, can take a book from raw o.c.r. to a copy that has less than 1 error on every 10 pages, often as little as 1 error every 25 pages. and you want to stick the text-file from each of those pages -- roughly 1k each -- in a complex revision control system? that idea is totally stupid on its face, absolutely ridiculous. yet we have people coming here, and actually suggesting it. and when i say "that's completely stupid", people accuse me of "being mean". nobody ever calls me "mean" in meatspace. people uniformly call me "a nice guy". (and yes, i'm grateful i have a long-time girlfriend, because i know otherwise that "compliment" might mean i'd be single the rest of my life.) but unless someone has the huevos to say "that is stupid" when something really _is_ stupid, and especially when it's _really_ stupid, we would be resigning ourselves to wallow in the mud of stupidity for the rest of our lives. _forever!_ so i say it, when i have to. but boy, does it ever get tiring. it seems as if it's an endless task. and sometimes i just don't feel like "being mean". so after i've written the post, i close it, without sending it. i did that early this month, with a reply i made to keith. and i did it again last week, with a reply i made to lee. then yesterday keith made another post where i had to slap him down for the sheer stupidity of it. and today, lee has just made a post where i'll have to do the same. sigh. so i've decided i'm gonna retrieve those older posts and send them. in the hope of warding off future stupidity. but i'm not hopeful that it will work. it hasn't worked in the past. why would it work now? and so i despair... -bowerbird