Jeff Jarvis
It’s a pretty safe bet that none of you 8 or 9 regular readers of this blog have ever heard of Jeff Jarvis. Well, now is as good of a time as any, because he has a mess of good posts up. Check out his posts on whether or not “character” is a good metric for deciding who to vote for (personally, I think it’s imperfect at best) and why America isn’t over Vietnam yet:
I watched the start of Meet the Press this morning (before the kids hijacked the TV for Sponge Bob) and not one second was devoted to how to improve the country, only to the mud.
Vietnam has moved on and we haven’t.
Meanwhile, there are issues pressing us today: the war on terrorism and terrorists’ war on us; health insurance; the economy; education; free speech; technology innovation; energy independence; and on and on. And we’re wasting sweat and bile over this. Throw away your WayBack machines, folks.
Vietnam is over. It’s the war we lost and we keep losing it.
He recently linked to some good stuff too, notably this column by Ed Cone, DON’T TALK WHILE I’M INTERRUPTING, a “guide to modern political speech”:
Stop interrupting me while I’m shouting. Feel the crushing weight of my arguments, which are built on logic and constructed from facts that are sturdy and sound. You just whine about how you feel.
Your information is flawed because it came from a source I know to be aligned with the forces of darkness. I am able to parse the media and edit what I see for bias and spin, while you are a gullible sap who believes everything you see on the TV or read in that wholly discredited rag you just quoted.
You speak in cliches, slogans and sound bites. I speak in pithy phrases and time-tested words of wisdom. You call names, I tell it like it is. You are vulgar, I am colorful.