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Thursday, August 24, 2006

Untitled MWR project

I've been thinking on and off lately that, instead of squandering so much of my writing talent on this blog, I should really write a book about some things that I know a lot about and the average person knows next to nothing about, and most of it wrong. Take comfort though, handful of readers including those who don't miss the bloggish emails I used to inflict on them, that there's likely no way I could avoid squandering my talent on this blog.

One impetus for a book is the strange willingness of many people to form very definite opinions about things that, objectively, they know nothing about. This fascinates me. The casual or even serious reader here is bound to conclude from the voice I adopt that I am very opinionated. Indeed, many people who know me well think of me that way too, although most of them who know me well enough probably understand that I'm really not as opinionated as it appears, at least about things I know next to nothing about. And they know that my opinions are both malleable with the application of well-marshaled arguments and facts, and less adamantly formed than I typically express them for effect. Finally, they know I tend to express my subjective preferences in a way that suggests they came from an application of the categorical imperative.

But that's all just part of my charm. If you disagree, you are an idiot.

It always does stun me when people hew to opinions about things outside their experience that they haven't taken the trouble to learn about. A big challenge in mentally framing this unwritten book whose subject matter you will only learn when and if I write it and it is published, is how much effort I should spend trying to dislodge the deeply-held ignorant views of what is probably a majority of people. (Don't worry, the topic is not race or religion. Far be it from me to write a book suggesting to people around the world that they stop persecuting and slaughtering each other because of the fanciful, wrong and outmoded things they have been raised to believe. That's what the memos in this blog are for.)

So that's one question I need to work through. I don't totally want to be preaching to the choir (no, the subject is not clichés) in this hypothetical volume, but I'm not sure I want to convert the savages either.


posted at 7:44 PM

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