'()

LJ is such a strange medium. You want to say the right things, and to the right people, but not too much, or to too many, or in too much detail... and it seems like a bad place to discuss Personal Things, which is probably why I don't, generally.

... but Jacquie and I broke up. It's pretty upsetting. And I feel bad for making people hurt, particularly somebody as cool as the Jacqueline...

And it's not that I don't feel these things. But it seemed like it was a while coming. And it'll be better soon. Sometimes you can't give what somebody needs.

(not '())

- Right-o. Things are going to be fine :)

- I mean, like, with me personally. And with Jacquie. Maybe things are not so good with the nation as a whole. Here's an essay about that:

- On Intelligent Design, societal value of Being An Expert About Something, Consensus Truth, and which politicians folks would rather have beers with: Greetings From Idiot America, a lovely essay by Charles Pierce, first run in Esquire.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.