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Everyone else is bloggin all the time. Why not me?

Blog is a horrible word. It's fine for something that a bunch of happy, smart freaks are doing, but the proliferation of blogs is actually distressing in the way that a proliferation of zits or warts or hairy, mangy muts would be distressing.

I'm only writing to have something to do while I wait for someone to visit our open house. Anyone want to buy a house?

What is getting me down, as I waste time online, is that you'd think, if you spend a lot of time using the internet to gather information, that there is no such thing as information, only opinion. You'd think that no one is doing anything anymore but discussing theoretical relationships between ideas, opinions, and assumptions.

One person says one thing. Another person disagrees by tacking a different tack. Any person looks at another angle. . . Except all of it is based on the unsupported assumptions of the authors about how the world works -- and anyone who actually lives in the world knows that probably none of those assumptions are true.

Arguers need to generalize -- even when they have facts, which they don't -- Everyone is arguing, so everyone is generalizing. So ultimately everyone's opinion bares almost no resemblance to the world. They get so far down the line of their reasoning that they come unmoored from earth.

And, the depressing part, its very hard to remember the earth when everyone who is talking, and talking loud, is somewhere in orbit.

This is what I notice most often in conversations and classrooms: i have no idea what people are talking about. They seem to be discussing a world that I've never experienced. They say "People are doing this. . . " and I wonder who the hell they're really talking about. Sure, it sounds reasonable, even possible, but that doesn't make it so. "Everyone knows that. . ." There is very little that I know.

And, there we have it also - we come all the way back around to Socrates. "The only thing I know is that I know nothing." And he got killed for that. There are always blowhards. There are always opinion-makers and bullshit artists and nonsense. The rare thing is when thought and content is valued, and the people who are charged with reporting on the world actually humble themselves before the world.

I can't decide whether its comforting or suicidally depressing to know that everything is always the same in this way.