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<div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">So what we have is a pandemic of village idiots. </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Yes, I remember Septembers and especially the one that never ended. I only learned the name for that event much later.</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">As an opposite to certain charlatans, I will give a shout out for the Salvation Army. They avoid headlines, but they are typically at a major disaster as fast as the Red Cross. In Sunnyvale, they have a place where anyone can get a free loaf of bread and other food items. The only question they ask is, "How many in your household?" If it is a large family they will be even more generous. </div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">I go there to donate things when other places are closed to donations, but I know I am in the minority.</div><div><br></div>
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On Sunday, September 20, 2020, 04:31:15 PM PDT, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:
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<div>Quoting Josef Grosch (<a shape="rect" href="mailto:jgrosch@gmail.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">jgrosch@gmail.com</a>):<br clear="none"><br clear="none">> You have had the advantage of spending large portions of your adult<br clear="none">> life surrounded by sane, rational, thinking people. The magic<br clear="none">> thinking people have always been here its just that in the past the<br clear="none">> only way for these people to spread their madness was a mimeograph<br clear="none">> machine and standing on a street corner. Then came the Intertubes.<br clear="none">> The great thing about the Internet is every man is a publisher, the<br clear="none">> downside to the Internet is every man is a publisher.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">It's what I call the Global Village Idiot Problem.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">Every village always had idiots, and there was always a base level <br clear="none">of background psychosis, but that amounted to small factions of crazy<br clear="none">people and weird little crazy subcultures that were mostly disconnected<br clear="none">from sympatico crazy subcultures. <br clear="none"><br clear="none">In the glory days of Usenet, we had a rising faction of global village<br clear="none">idiots, but going big required effort and competence. Even the<br clear="none">September That Never Ended was fairly manageable. The global village<br clear="none">idiots built nests to reproduce on blogs, and then sprang forth after a<br clear="none">few years to populate instant messaging, Twitter, and AOL^W Facebook.<br clear="none">Et voila.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">> In 1973 my family moved from New York to Norfolk, VA., home of Pat<br clear="none">> Robertson and Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the 700 Club started<br clear="none">> out on a bankrupt low power UHF TV station in Portsmouth, VA. The<br clear="none">> signal barely covered the area. He somehow managed to talk the local<br clear="none">> cable TV company into carry the 700 Club and he became just another<br clear="none">> crazy on local cable access. It was only when one of the big cable<br clear="none">> providers picked up the 700 Club did his influence grow.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">A bunch of my father's family have been (and presumably are) somewhat<br clear="none">dim whack jobs, but, again, them holding forth in genuine frontier<br clear="none">gibberish[1] over the Super Bowl broadcast or the Thanksgiving family<br clear="none">meal was different in kind from them putting out the loon mating call on<br clear="none">AOL^W Facebook and agglutinating.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">[1] <a shape="rect" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNC3OciAF3w" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNC3OciAF3w</a><div class="ydp8205e93byqt5263299587" id="ydp8205e93byqtfd37894"><br clear="none"><br clear="none"><br clear="none">_______________________________________________<br clear="none">conspire mailing list<br clear="none"><a shape="rect" href="mailto:conspire@linuxmafia.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">conspire@linuxmafia.com</a><br clear="none"><a shape="rect" href="http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire</a><br clear="none"></div></div>
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