It sounds more impressive in latin:
O tempora! O mores!
I am thinking I have pretty much said everything I want to say. You should all have a good idea of what I think about things, and why, and how. If you have been reading this blog for any length of time you will have formed excellent models of Dr Clam in your heads that you can consult to find out what I would say on any given topic. I must diminish, and they increase...
For I find that I am out of tune with the spirit of the times. I march out of time, to the funny kazoo music playing in my head. I have been beaten and left for dead in a ditch by the Zeitgeist. So I will turn my back on this reality that, tediously enough, is always there, to devote myself to more beautiful and necessary things that better merit my attention.
I really don't believe that Dr Clam and President wossname, you know, that guy, can exist in the same universe. So sometime between now and the inauguration, I plan for all of this to come down. Let me know if there are any bits you particularly want if you are establishing a museum of reactionary thought, or whatever.
Am I a drama queen?
Is this nothing but a childish hissy fit?
Perhaps. Probably. But I know my emotional involvement with this stupid world was beginning to cripple me, and I have selfishly decided to solve my problem by henceforth ignoring the world as much as possible.
8 comments:
I must admit that I will really miss it! I think it would be a travesty if our conversations we thought to place down in writing would be deliberately shredded. I am a believer that blogs should remain an archived record of thoughts and conversation, forever timestamped - at the mercy of the cloud that is the internet, but accessible when one wants to find a snippet of conversation one needs to find again when it comes up again in different contexts. The "You Will Be Assimilated" entry is a case in point. It originated somewhere lost in the comments of one of our blogs and found new life when we had an interested counterparty for conversation. I should really have tried to find that snippet of conversation about "the Economist" when I was referring to it as objective, and you came back with a very funny counterargument demonstrating that objective journalism is a fantasy. I really wanted to use some of that when we were talking to Klause Rohde about the "free" press.
Anyhow, what's wrong with just leaving it where it is and letting it age and decay naturally rather than killing it off or chopping it for spare parts. We won't really know which bits we might want to refer to in the future. We may just want to know what we were doing at a particular point in time, and our conversations we had in blogs are one of our tenuous connections to specific points in time.
Although I think "Information detox" for 40 days or whatever, is probably a positive thing, indefinite emotional disengagement with the world won't solve the potential for bottling up dangerous emotions that just need a semi-public outlet.
Ignoring the world is even less likely to make a difference than getting openly angry at it.
I was actually thinking that when the 40 days were up I could make your blog my only link to the outside world, Marco, so that if you wanted you could manufacture spurious current events to discuss.
Your point about leaving the blog as an intact cultural artifact is a good one- it would be unfair of me to shred your words. I will try to figure some way to do this.
I already find myself testing news for its level of information toxicity. That news that I can garner for myself like, petrol in Townsville under $1 a liter for the first time, exactly two months to the day after my deadline etc. I am sure to pass to you via the odd comment/blog entry. But where would "your" territory lie, where you could control the "front page" of any blog conversation? That is a lot to give up. I am sure a new blog with new premises would do just fine, while this one could just have a tidying up edit and archived in the clouds of the internet.
Taking a holiday from information saturation is never a bad idea, even if I think your premise for doing so is a terrible one*. I've been more cut off from the world lately than I ever have been in the past, but my experience has only been one of mild irritation at the loss of a regular stimulant. Then again, I don't tend to get *that* emotional about most of this stuff.
But Marco is right - don't scourge Dr Clam from all recorded history (apart from anything, it's not actually possible to do so, what with all that spiderbot auto-caching that goes on), but rather let him rest easy.
Must dash - my rest-of-world filter is screaming and probably needs to be placated with yoghurt.
* really, I guess I will never understand your capacity to tolerate the incompetence and blinkered ignorance of the Bush administration. You dislike Prof Laura for many of the same reasons I dislike the last eight years of US government after all.
Quoth Dave:
I guess I will never understand your capacity to tolerate the incompetence and blinkered ignorance of the Bush administration.
Well, (a) my judgment was that by far the greater part of it was nothing but media spin from an establishment that was hostile to his core principles, which overlap to a considerable extent with Clamly core principles. And (b), having striven mightily for some degree of quantitative thought, I had no choice but to tolerate him as being vastly superior to the other lot as far as these same Clamly core principles were concerned.
Furthermore quoth Dave: You dislike Prof Laura for many of the same reasons I dislike the last eight years of US government after all.
Perhaps I have not sketched a sufficiently good portrait of Prof Laura... I dislike Laura and Obama for much the same reason, in that they both use a tremendous personal charisma and command of rhetoric to get people to assent to ideas that are dangerous, stupid, and wrong. Bush never went around getting people to throw logic out the window by being utterly charming.
I dimly recall a little while ago writing something explaining that the caricature of the Bush administration as 'anti-science' (i.e., anti-rational) was another manifestation of negative spin from those hostile to his core principles, but I can't remember where I put it. Perhaps it was a comment in your blog, Marco?
Perhaps this one on Principia Marconomica is the one you're looking for.
Speaking of which, hopefully without appearing partisan, as I don't have any emotional investment at all in US elections, I am predicting a landslide for Sarah Palin in 2012. I have briefly talked to Sandor about the circumstances I believe will lead up to that result, but at the moment I am leaving specifics out of my blogging space.
Just to be clear, I don't want to have the appearance of wishing it to happen, nor of wishing the circumstances that might lead up to it happening. It just is a prediction of rebound/backlash that can happen.
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