Tannishblog

This weekend marks a major holiday for our friends of Jewish Faith in America - Passover. During this week the Jewish people celebrate liberation from slavery at the hands of the Pharos, and the intercession by their God that formed the foundation of their religion. Yet the American media is silent. I compare this with the gratuitous greetings of wishing Jews a Happy Channukah during the Christian holy season. By contrast, Channukah is a celebration of a military history, and by the accounts of most of the Jew I know, a minor holiday. Passover is the real thing, yet our Christian culture doesn’t even acknowledge this. We’re still stuck onto the new popery and beating that story to death, although papal succession is something that happens every few decades. Freeing a people from slavery happens quite infrequently. It’s a big deal.

So what are the media talking about today? Popes, Iraq, Elian Gonzales, Star Wars fans… the usual drivel. Our Christian brethren don’t want to validate any other belief system by wishing friends and neighbors a happy holiday. Not publicly. Better they publicly snub the Jews than remember that Jesus was Jewish, remember that their faith and their holiest tome are inescapably Jewish in origin. If it wasn’t for Judaism, perhaps Jesus never would have been, perhaps the Christian concept of God would never have been. Perhaps the fundamentalists would be worshiping the storm gods instead.

Happy Passover to all my Jewish friends!

Fred Wilson at A VC initiates a discussion on a problem that I think will scale to endemic proportions: Rudeness - on the ‘net and at a blog near you. Tris Hussley ponders this and expands with citations of further offences. The question: Why is the blogocube becoming less civil. I find the answer in one of Tris’ examples from a comment section at Red Couch:

If the bloatosphere starts filling up with such uncreative, worthless, idiotic garbage as this “talking moose” blog, I’m leaving the Commodity Internet and moving over to Internet 2.

This is a new low in unimaginative, non-strategic pseudo-blogging.

So much for a company being candid and forming intimate conversations with an audience. Goodbye to Al Ries, Rosser Reeves, David Ogilvy, Seth Godin, Christopher Locke, and common sense.

Hello to insipid ghost blogging and a thick wall of darkeness separating company and customer, in the guise of a “talking moose”.

Next time try a talking butt hole.

A later post by the same author:

Good comment orcmid. You still have some brains. God, the bloatosphere is starting to anger me, it’s turning idiotic overnight.

It figures. Same thing happened to postal mail (junk mail), telephone (telemarketing), television (infomercials, soap operas, most sitcoms), electro-mail (spam)…see why I issue warnings?

These quotes, taken out of context, have no relevance. What emerges is the attitude. The context is a perceived lessening of the blog community, a fact made ironic by the complainer, who is himself guilty of lowering standards by posting with such attitude. What happened to the post, telephones, and the other medium mentioned above is a change in the medium caused by mass acceptance and integration into the mainstream. The net effect of doing such is “letting in the riffraff.” As noted in another post of mine from today:

Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up.

This gem was uttered from an article at Business Week. I cited this as condescension, but it appears there is some truth here. The dolts are getting bloggy, and there’s nothing we can do to tame them or teach them manners. What happened to other medium is happening here: popularity is lowering the threshold, lowering standards of behavior as the “unwashed masses” fill the virtual spaces with their stink.

Bottom line: Americans are rude. They learn this from their TV’s and they learn this from their experiences in consumerism, and - I say this with regret - they learn this from their parents. It’s only to be expected that as the blogocube expands that civility will inevitably recede. Those few of us who have a common respect of the medium we share and respect of other blogsters are being overwhelmed by a mass market culture that doesn’t give a damn about any of that.

This is Democracy in action.