So the time has finally come. A dozen or so Gentlemen and spouses will be converging upon the City of Sin in the next 24 hours or so. Some of the more intrepid among us are already there.
I’m looking forward to some time off – something I almost never take – and to meeting everybody. It’s long overdue.
Of course, not everyone can make it and certainly not every reader can make it. So now seems as good a time as any to discuss the site itself, how everyone is feeling about the direction the site has taken. In particular, I want to know how everyone feels about the sub-blogs. Are they working? Is there anything we can do to make them better/more useful?
Anyways, consider this an open thread.
Shawn’s first post at “The Safe Depository” is live. He’s been posting occasionally to the front page, and now I’ve finally set him up with his own sub-digs as well. His intro post is here.
I’ve had this sort of nebulous notion that culture itself is a problem. Not any particular culture, mind you, but rather the entire concept of culture. The exclusivity of the group over the individual. A lot of people will hold up individualism against collectivism, but what if that’s just scratching the surface?
Culture is the thread we weave all our isms out of: tribalism, nationalism, and so forth. Identity culture is the nichification of culture writ large. It’s the perpetuation of the need to be aggrieved, oppressed, put-down, whatever.
So I wrote a piece about the whole Alex Knapp vs. The Oatmeal controversy that Ethan touched on earlier. I talk a bit about geek culture and this problem with being forever-aggrieved, forever prickly and defensive. But I’m not picking on the geeks – I am a geek, after all:
Continue reading this post…
Maribou 
James K 
Rose 
Naima Van Swol 
Matthew 
Kyle Cupp 
Tina Wade 
Mike Schilling 
Jaybird 
