There is a man holding a megaphone, so he must have been the voice of God

I've heard a lot of grumbling from the academic community over the last few years about how The Internet is taking away professionalism and credibility. Which, in my head, makes for a funny mental image of some white bearded, monacled professor pouting in the corner of his study like a nerd in recess while his scholastic playground gets taken over by the bullying uneducated bloggers of the world, who stand around giving poorly researched speeches. Point being, I guess, is that scholars and doctors who dedicated their lives to being credible on a given subject are a little touchy about the fact that The Internet is making their opinions less necessary. Often, a Harvard professor and a mass group of random normal people discussing their way to a consensus will come up with the same answer to a question, and the only difference between the Harvard man and the mob is that he has a PhD to back up his opinion. Before, he would have been the only source of reference, but now there's no real reason to listen to him specifically, when there're normal people wandering around preaching the same message.

Also, if you don't happen to want to agree with HarvardMan, there are now plenty of other Faux Experts (Fospurts?) on The Internet who I'm sure would be happy to support the viewpoint you do approve of.

While I support the nerds on this one, I also think Academia is a little presumptuous in thinking it's only happening in the world of people with doctorate degrees. The Internet has also allowed for Fospurts to crop up in music, art, auto maintenance, journalism, and probably any other profession. Everyone who knows how to do what they do (as opposed to just having an active interest in it) is "suffering" in the same way.

Most of the problem is that AverageMan actually doesn't recognize a difference between the opinion of HarvardMan and the outcome of the group consensus that matches it. He doesn't recognize that the value of the opinion actually resides completely in the fact that it's HarvardMan saying it, that the years of study he dedicated to the subject gives him a right to speak, and that the group could have saved themselves some time if they shut their mouths long enough to be respectful to those years of knowledge and listen. There's a lot of people running around who either confuse or consciously exchange cultivated knowledge with basic intuition, and basically, they suck.

We can see if this rant changes after I start classes this week and will be forced to follow my own advice, which, frankly, is not the cool way to do things in the 21st Century.

'Cause you're just as far in as you'll ever be out

In the same way that it's really easy to regret things retroactively once you have the hindsight to show you what an idiot you were (unless you're a politician or nationalistic historian and are never ever wrong about anything), it's equally easy to be retroactively relieved and grateful for how things turned out, if you keep an eye out for the opportunity. For example, I learned yesterday that I have a weaker muscle in my left eye than in my right. If I had gotten proper optometric care to detect and treat it when I was little, my awkward protruding teeth and uncomfortable body shape I had during the ages of 8-11 would have been accompanied by an eye patch. Instead, now I have to take less permanent corrective measures in the form of lenses. Personally, I think I'd rather have a pair of relatively cute glasses during my current Well Adjusted Phase than be mentally scarred from the old inevitable playground brand of Bucky the Pirate. In this situation, hindsight only makes me want to give my lackadaisical eye care history a high five.

With the exception of Cathi, who has been attached to me like a benevolent reverse-leech bearing happiness and friendship since the day I was born, practically all my best friends are people I'd have voted as Least Likely to be My Future Close Friends When We First Met. I've noticed the trend before, but considering the time travel theory-esque cycle it would create, I can't really do much about it as far as "psychically trying to figure out who my friends will be" goes.

I've been reading a lot of books, and I guess unsurprisingly, a whole lot of books seem to be centered on a journey to find meaning/self/worth. I guess writers think that the Location of the Self is more important to describe than the Location of the World's Largest Cheese Curd. But most of these books seem to either come to no conclusion or only come to one after a lifetime's worth of arduous searching. As far as I know, a very small part of the population actively does that to the extent that these heroes do, yet I get the impression that most people die relatively satisfied. Now, I'm not going to presume to suggest that all of literature is focusing on the wrong thing, but I suppose it's possible that the cheese curds of subject matter need some love, too.

"The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility... Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."